That One Guy

Enjoy my published submission here, about two-thirds the way down the page.

To be honest, I was more nervous about submitting this piece than any of the others. It seemed the most personal, the most idiosyncratic. Maybe I am the only one who ever gets uncomfortable passing people I barely know. Maybe everyone else is just that much more friendly and genuine than I am. Apparently I was wrong in that assumption. More than a few of the published stories have the same theme and tone as "That One Guy." They use snippets of dialogue or conversation forms that we are all familiar with in some style to demonstrate how banal our basic interactions with other people can be. Our talk proceeds right along and does not deviate from well-dug trenches of speech conventions. Now that we know these failures, however, I guess the challenge is to break free from them.

Personal favorites on the first page include Maria Pringle's "Pronoun Cycle," Matthew Netzley's "The Falling Man" and Ross Carper's "When I Was Hit By a Car." On the second page, I enjoyed Chris Dreyer's "Beer Run" and "The Napkin" by Matthew Netzley, again. On the third and final page, my favorites were Diane Gordon's "Labor of Love," Ross Carper's "Categorized," and Jessalynn Uchacz's "I Shouldn't Have Said What I Did"