I WILL NOT CHANGE THIS SHRED ROOM'S TITLE

It was a dark and stormy night…

Abel stopped writing. He glared at the scrap of paper he had just written on, and scratched out the seven words. “Too damn cliché,” he muttered to himself.

The night was dark and stormy…

Abel stopped again. He slapped his palm against his face and sighed. He had no inspiration. He decided to surrender himself to the mercy of the train’s ceaseless babble against the tracks, immersing himself in the ambient nonsense of the mechanical laughter. He had no other source of income, pride, or self-esteem but his writing. And he had never written anything but a few scant sentences in his feeble career as a professional writer. He looked out to the dour landscape of the Romanian mountains he was riding through. He laughed. He was in Transylvania. A dark castle loomed miles away. “What a cliché landscape,” he muttered.

He took out the local Gazzardian Newspaper. All rubbish, really. Abel took out his cell phone. “Searching for Service,” he retorted. “Typical.” He picked up his ballpoint again and began to squeeze words from his brain.

The truth is what all people strive for. But too often the truth ricochets off the topographic broadway of our mind. It’s when we encounter this event that we must become the Marco Polo in all of us and travel to a distant land to find the truth we all strive to know. In that hidden archive we progress our very understanding of the person we are inside. Whether we find that we are a human wombat, burrowing into our memories not willing to escape, or a true opportunist who finds the true color of money, we can all benefit from this forbidden knowledge, like the ethereal notes of a harmonium helps us find our way in a wild composition. These truths, in plain view, will help us enjoy the natural science of life.

Abel stopped again. He couldn’t believe himself. He wrote something that felt almost genuine! He felt like William James, his favorite philosopher, whose verbose writings helped him along in his tiresome life filled with jobless squander and homeless strife. His heart, beating faster than the cars of JJ Lehto, was already leaping from his chest with the excitement of the prospect of publishing, fame, and glory.

But then he stopped and looked down at his paper. He was not on the brink of choosing a suit of any colour he liked. The paragraph he had just scribbled down was the waste of a teenage intellectual, priding himself on false dreams and cliché concepts, all salty nonesense. He proceeded to shred the paper. He was no kid, striving for the progress of literature. He was a man. Taking James’ philosophy to heart, he began to plan for his life after the endless European train stopped. He would ignore the criticism of others. He would breach the horizons of science, math, and the humanities. This newfound knowledge, precise and correct, as the Greeks would have said: “Epignosis.” He would find his place in the wheel of time.

Abel was able. 

Dedicated to the ProgArchives Shred room 38