Tuesday, December 16,
2025
Time: 9:08 AM
Song: Better Off
Without You
Artist: The Clarks
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on the way home from Write On meeting
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/3z3mNxkc5he3Ug576z0DEw?si=8a8bc9d7116347ae
Tonight, we had our
Writing Workout at Write On. We completed the prompt below:
Finding inspiration
Inspiration can come from anywhere. It can come from
overhearing a conversation. It can come from a smell that reminds you of a
childhood experience. Maybe you get inspired by the way a shadow hits your
friend’s face while having lunch at a local restaurant.
Today, let’s look for inspiration in random words, ideas,
and images.
Pick a random magazine and then a random page. Using only
the images, ideas, and words on the page, write something – a poem, a diary
entry, a fictional story, whatever comes to mind. If you finish one, and want
to try another, pick another magazine and another page.
Let’s write for 40 minutes and then share what came up with.
I used a picture of
an older lady dressed in cowboy garb with a guitar to create the below scene.
Here’s what I came up with:
Legend has it, Grandad named me. This rings true, seeing how
Momma refused to even look at me and Daddy remains no more than a moniker for
some male in the world who impregnated Momma. Unless, that is, I’m immaculate,
which Grandad would call blasphemous, but since he don’t know who my Daddy is
and Momma ain’t around to tell me, it is just as possible as some random Gus or
Randy or Bill.
I like the idear that God got fed up about sixty years ago
with only ever having a son, so he whistled a little tune for a daughter that
drifted around until it landed in the form of me in my Momma’s belly. Makes me
feel designed, you know. Anticipated like the burst of that first firework on
the Fourth of July. Makes me hunker down and strum this dusty old six string to
write that next great plains ballad, one that echoes like the coyotes after
sunset. Hell of a thought, Grandad would say, for he’d never vulgarize the
whole ordeal. Never say, now Annie, your Momma went to the drive-in with Jesse
Brewster or Porter Hodge or maybe both for a double feature and nine months
later the show finally ended with a baby wailin’ away.
About the name, like I said, Momma didn’t want nothin’ to do
with me from the start, probably even before the start. I reckon she was clued
in on how things worked, but maybe she was confused by the particulars. The
little I know about Momma, which is all hearsay and second-hand knowledge for
she took her Dodge and three hundred dollars and left the county, the state,
and the country for all I know three weeks after I was born, is that while she
grasped the general mechanics of how the world worked, she didn’t tend to focus
much on the details.
So, that left me with Grandad, a bow-legged ranch hand, who
called himself a Texan even though he’d lived the last fifty years in Kansas,
and his wife, Patty. Now, Patty wasn’t my blood Grandmother. My actual
Grandmother was long buried by the time I came around. She was kicked in the
head by a rabid goat, as the tall tale goes. The boring version is some form of
lady cancer ate her up like locusts did the crops in the Bible. Patty was
Grandad’s second wife. She was ten years his senior and crazier than a bull on
ice skates.
Patty couldn’t have named me because if she had I would have
been christened “Mud” or “Ragweed” or “Roadkill.” For those were the sort of names
she called me every day of my life until she died when I was twelve. I never
learned why she called me such things, but the more I let on it bothered me,
the nastier the name the crazy old coot came up with.
This legend than has to be the truth, because I doubt some
stuck up doctor or kind-hearted nurse, would have jotted the name Annie Oakley
Wilson on my birth certificate without being prompted. No, that fits Grandad to
a ‘T.’ He loved them old west stories of Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday and
Butch Cassidy. You ask him, they all come from Texas, casting big shadows with
even bigger guns. Grandad wore a white hat on Sundays, and then spent the rest
of the week wearing black. I guess he thought if he done good on Sundays it
might erase any bad he done the rest of the week.
Not that there was a lot of bad, but there was some. Grandad
had what he called the Old-World temper, whatever the hell that meant. What I
found it to mean is that most of the time Grandad was harmless, but if you
caught him on the wrong day, he was liable to do just about anything.
For instance, when I was seven, I tagged along to a card
game at the VA, and when Sunny Ganders showed four aces, Grandad pulled his
six-shooter straight from his holster, put the barrel against Sunny’s forehead,
and cocked the hammer before old Sunny had time to gather one chip. I always
tell myself if I hadn’t been there to tug on his other hand, old Grandad would
have put Sunny six-feet under that afternoon, and Grandad would have been
hangin’ from the gallows in a week’s time.
Nah, that’s a stretch. Maybe a hundert years ago, they’d a
hung someone that quick. Stuff like that don’t happen these days, not even in
Kansas. Grandad would have been hauled to the pokey and died an old man and
been rotted in the ground for a decade or two before the government thought it
alright to hang him for killin’ Sunny Ganders for cheatin’ at poker at the VA.
So anyhow, that’s why I’m Annie Oakley Wilson. Yes, I can
shoot. Not great or nothing, but if you’re lookin’ to trouble me, I can put one
in your chest and one in your balls, and have time to decide which order I want
to do that in.
But shootin’ ain’t what brings me to the rodeo. No, leave
that to the real Annie Oakley. I prefer pluckin’ strings of my Martin guitar
and singing one of the old standards by Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, or Lefty
Frizell.
