Honors Theses
Date of Award
2008
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Ann Fisher-Wirth
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
These stories are all too delineated the voice from story to story. I tried to written during a frustrating, disappointing period of my life when I was afraid I’d died unwittingly and was in purgatory until I remembered I’m Baptist and I don’t believe in It seemed like everyone I knew was spending half the time watching the same in them. I used to have this that mess. television and the other half pretending to be larger audience, and I thought my subject matter might be could latch onto. Now I don’t know—I haven’t seen a Real programs on stupid dream of writing for a something folks my age World/Road Rules Challenge addressing anything of the sort. dead to the world, when When you live inside your own head, when you’re cool as it sounds. nothing matters, you’re invincible. It’s nowhere near as Waiting for life to begin, looking for the Grand Design, you autopilot from stupor , twenty-two once, that there to stupor, realize you’ll only be nineteen, twenty, twenty one aren’t any do-overs. You’re smart enough to regret missing out on you by. but powerless to engage in what’s left-you regret missing future events in what’s already passed been told, and then you get to start count. The sky will advance. Get a job, get a wife, get some kids, you’ve keeping score. But a sneaking suspicion lingers: Nothing can ever never open up to reveal a flaming golden message like THIS WAS IMPORTANT! or GREAT JOB! Therefore, it isn’t possible for anything to matter. Snowflakes are all the same and eternity is a terrible lie. Serious, supposedly meaningful days come and go - getting the game-winning hit in little league, your first clumsy embarrassment in the sack, high school graduation, moving out of your parents’ house—you don’t feel any different afterward. It’s not dissimilar from crossing state lines. This is Mississippi? It feels a whole lot like Alabama or Wyoming. Maybe an angel of the Lord will appear to you in a dream and send you on your way, tell you what you’re supposed to be doing, fill the hole. It’s happened to people you know. It could happen to you. Wait, no it couldn’t. Your only chance is to somehow step outside yourself, to see things fi-om different angles, remember your real, live friends who swapped books and CDs with you and made you realize you owe nearly everything to Dr. Hunters. Thompson and Radiohead and Flannery O’Connor. That counted. That changed your life forever—and you did the same for them. I don’t think it premature to say writing these stories has been a seminal a writer, attorney. Coke man, T-shirt printer, and adult be careful of what I write. No telling who might read experience in my development as human being. I’ve been advised to it or what it might thwart. Some of these stories are vulgar, out there, and, worse, stupid. in a future bid for the Governor’s but if writing them somehow comes back to haunt me in mansion, I regret nothing. Writing them hasn’t been particularly enjoyable, but they’ done. Maybe I wasn’t so smart to regret missing everything. Maybe I never had the right. Maybe I’ve been living, breathing, sweating, bleeding all the time. An adolescence spent chasing cows with my brother and father—I was pissed off every second—but maybe it did mean something. We built something out there that nobody can explain or replace. We know one another better than we know anyone else. I still dread going home to Lucedale to feed cows and ve given me more perspective than anything I ve ever build fence, I finally get it. When I came home from Kindergarten with an earache and my dad made me help him dig post holes, when he tossed me over the fence to get me out of the path of a charging mama cow and we both walked home covered in his blood, when he started building a new fence with a month left in my senior year of high school and made me help him every afternoon, we communicated things to each other more eloquently than he or I could ever say. I really, really hated him for keeping me busy all the time, but out there he taught me more than there is to know about work and life and love. I might never have noticed if I hadn’t started writing. I needed this more than any of you—all three of you who will read this—could ever imagine. The way I perceive the world has changed—it’s as if I’ve dropped acid for been blasted by a terrific light on the road to Damascus. I have fruly hurt another person. I have truly made someone feel good. It all counted. I am not alone. I am not invincible. Catharsis!
Recommended Citation
Rutherford, Russell Joseph, "Short Stories" (2008). Honors Theses. 2414.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2414
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