Naked Baby Pictures... A Writer's Worst Nightmare

My parents are having a yard sale. This is a big deal. Everyone in the family is required to come over in the weeks prior to the event to go through the boxes, bags, stacks, and piles to either claim what use to be theirs, or take anything else they want. Mom wants it gone as soon as possible. What's left gets priced at bargain-basement prices, some even as high as a quarter.

I was going through one of my boxes (high school certificates, senior class trip pictures of D.C., old dishes) when I found something that made me giggle and blush at the same time: one of my first short stories. It had been printed on that accordion paper with the holes in the side you can rip off. The print: pixelated dot-matrix. WOW! I thought all of them had been lost when the 5 1/4" drive died. (Yes, I am that old.)

Then I read the first line and burst out laughing. Oh. Oh my. Oh HOW AWFUL! I mean, this wasn't just bad;

it was teenage angst, idealistic, full-of-myself, HORRIFIC. In a terribly funny way. At least to me now. I knew nothing yet I was preaching to the world that I had the solution to the world's ills. BWAHAHA! Innocent, blind little baby.

So I found my writer's "naked baby pictures" and I remember now what I looked like back then. Will I ever let someone else read them? Maybe my very close friends. Maybe. But my point is, it's good to see where's you've come from and how much you've grown.

As for the poetry I found? That's going directly into the firebin. No one's going to be blinded by that waste of pen and ink. I'll leave poetry to real poets. :-)