Notes from the underground arcade...

Great title, eh? It's the name of a short story I wrote for Creative Writing class in high school. For some reason I'm thinking of it now. Perhaps its because I saw a great movie last Friday with friends and my wife in celebration of our birthdays. I'm telling you now, drop what you are doing and go see Little Miss Sunshine. It's always a pleasure to see a movie that is not only entertaining, but also well written. And that got me to thinking about some of the C-rap that I've written over the near 32 years of my existence. This particular tale, Notes From the Underground Arcade (the title should be a tip-off to its juvenile pretension, especially since I wasn't smart enough to do a riff on The Gambler, which my story was based), was the sordid tale of a young lad who was addicted to playing arcade games at Bally's in the mall. He tried to win enough tickets to get one of those silly plush animal toys to give to his true love, who of course would not love him back. The reason? She no longer existed. She was dead, killed on a trip to the amusement park with her church youth group. In typical high school fashion this isn't revealed until the very end when he goes to the cemetery to give her tombstone a doll he had to steal from the stupid arcade. Oh, and the police are chasing after him. And he has to sell pot to get the money to play the video games to win the prize. And I think I tried to suggest that if he made it to the final level of one of the games, then she would, in his mind, magically appear.

Only now the story no longer exists. Well, it does, but it resides at the Butler County dump, begging to be discovered by a down-on-his-luck sanitation worker looking to get out of the confines of his small town. He could write the screenplay and direct the movie with say, Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead and, I don't know, Julia Stiles as the dead woman, and have it shown at Sundance and blam-o, it's a hit. Or maybe not.