Blunder Years

Creative Writing Class Assignment #2 - Light a candle and describe it.



Reading through the other submissions, I think the teacher was looking for some flowery prose about how the flickering flame dances over the wax with the soft rhythm of a belly dancer, but my mental playground has always been a few streets over from the swing sets.

In the summer of 1997 during a trip to Northland mall in Columbus Ohio, specifically to pick up the newly released, and now all-time-classic album "The Great Milenko", I purchased my first piece of home decor that wasn't Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or black light related. (I don't think when you asked for descriptive details, you imagined me talking about the tube sock that hung out from being poorly tucked under my futon mattress, that glowed snowy white when we flipped on the black light, but I think it's a cornerstone for setting the scene of my high school bedroom.) Strolling through Lazarus, passing by Foot Locker on the way to Sam Goody, Spencer Gifts called my name. If that store had a program similar to 'Marlboro miles' I surely would've qualified for a free 12" Plasma Light Ball every month. My 6', 135lb frame carried massively over sized 36 waist/36 length Paco jeans that drug across the floor and left little piles of dust every time I stopped, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption emptying pockets full of concrete wall a handful at a time in the rec yard. I knew within seconds of entering the store, and seeing it on display that I had to have the 5 inch by 6 inch wax candle sculpture of a meditating, shirtless Buddha. Future inspiration for every computer screen name from '97-'05ish, including the 'aspiring hacker-esque' "Inlyghtened1". Almost 20 years later, after surviving moves to 8 different houses and apartments, outlasting 4 live-in girlfriends, and spending the last few years safely tucked in a shoe box alongside broken Christmas ornaments, I knew tonight was the special moment I had saved the candle for all these years. Well, actually it was the only one I had in my apartment with any life left. Even though my shelves are littered with the remnants of Vanilla dollar store scented candles, most of them have burnt down to wick-less decorations, which I'm jotting down as a working title for my first Bukowski inspired romance novel, "Wick-less: The flame may have burnt out, but it still looks pretty on a shelf, until you find out it was mixing wax with one of the candles at work, so now you can't even look it in the face, but you have so much time invested in burning it that you can't just throw it away". Like I said, it's a working title. So as I sit here in the dark at 2 am, reliving that summer of '97, it seems a fitting symbolism of those times watching the maroon head of the Buddha puddle into a small murder scene after knocking over the lit candle on the plate it was sitting on, while reaching to move my cell phone away from the condensation of my hours old, large fountain pop. I am a well contained mess.