"The train tracks are less than a mile from my backdoor;
and very late at night when everything's still, I can hear
the train whistle. It sounds so mournful sometimes, like
it's crying. Sometimes, though, it sounds like it's calling
out to some distant beacon to say, `I'm coming. Wait for
me.' I love listening to the train go by..."
It gets worse.
The old BBS classic of "the running story" has made it to the web. Why this
form of prose ever survived beyond the 14-year-old autistic set is beyond me.
The basic idea: Get a group of people, each one of them writes a bit of the
story, one after the other, until you get enough pages to read. Maybe fun for a
few friends who can laugh at each other's clever in-jokes, but inflicting this
crap on the rest of humanity is a violation of the Geneva Convention. (You can
find "running stories" listed right in between "chemical warfare" and "human
medical experiments" as something too foul and evil to be inflicted on enemy
troops.)
There's something oddly schizophrenic and haunting as the writing jumps
helter-skelter from one point of view to the next, from a mind of an author who
can write to the mad typing someone crashing the party, characters who act like
art snobs in one paragraph become homicidal maniacs in the next. It's bizarre,
twisted, not quite funny, and not quite readable. It sucks you in, chews you
up, and spits you back up on the carpet like dog food gone rotten.
Something tells me we'll be seeing more of the same.
