When my mother asks me three times what’s going on with the internets (as if by me not posting, the internets are somehow broken), I know there’s a problem. I was going to roll out this excuse about how I have been writing in my Moleskine (which I have, kind of), but I haven’t been transcribing it to the computer (which is true to some extent), but the real truth is that after I set myself up to write the Evil Studies story, I’ve hit a wall devoid of inspiration. Part of my problem, I know, is too many video games. I tried to pull the plug again, and this is my second day without them. Doolies promised that we can play only after I write something, which means I’m back on the wagon as soon as I finish this abbreviated musing. I know that video games are an important part of the rot that’s been devouring my brain, but that knowledge by itself doesn’t much help me give it up. It’s almost blender time. I can see that from here.

A more profound block (at least to my own psyche) has been the pressure I’ve been putting myself under to tell this stupid story. When I first wrote the half page about the evil professor, I thought it was rather clever. My energy ran out (I think it was more that distractions of some form took over) before I got very far, but I thought about where I would have taken the story (if the energy lasted or the distractions stayed away), and found myself a decent story. I even wrote a few synopses about it over the last couple of days. Here are the basics:

It (was) a short story told from two points of view: the first, Darlene, a graduate student of the evil professor who has a terrible crush on him. She volunteers and he chooses her as his graduate assistant for the class. The evil professor, by the way, looks like the partially blind man I described in a paragraph about the man with one dark eyeglass. The evil professor lowers Darlene toward the lard while they discuss his methodology of evil. She begins having second thoughts before touching the lard, realizing that he does intend to boil her alive. She pleads with him not to kill her, and admits that she’s not good enough to be with him. (The evil professor, besides looking like the half-blind man, is a very charming and intelligent man—not the bald and ridiculed character I sketched in the first pseudo-draft.) The evil professor releases the hook and Darlene falls into the lard.

The second character takes over the narration (the character narration is in the third-person perspective present—I forget the technical name). He (I didn’t name him because I didn’t write much about him) is Darlene’s boyfriend, who initially let her infatuation with the professor go unchecked. He was comfortable with their relationship and didn’t feel that she had much of a chance with the evil professor. He watches the scene with the rest of the glass through one-way glass overlooking the vat. He has the advantage of a temperature gauge on the lard, and knows (and the reader first finds out) that the lard is at a comfortable, hot-tub-type temperature. When the evil professor explains that instead of dropping her into boiling lard, he’s going to raise the temperature slowly, as is done to stop lobsters from screaming when boiled, the boyfriend begins to have second thoughts about this experiment and eventually breaks down the mirrored glass to try to save Darlene.

In the end, Darlene is cooked by the lard, and the evil professor comments, “What did you think the ‘Evil’ in Evil Studies meant?”

That was the unrealized plan. I got tied up in the first part of the scene, attempting, much to Chuck’s chagrin, to be clever. I’m going to put this story to rest, like so many of my half-formed ideas and see if I can start writing again. Now that I’ve synopsized it and shared it with you, I don’t feel the need to write it anymore. I did have an opening and closing paragraph, it was the rest of the filler that I couldn’t concentrate more than five minutes to write. Yeah, I’m pathetic.