The End!

I'm a little undecided about what to write about this week. English seems to be the furthest away from my mind right now, even though I have 100ish pages to read before class tomorrow in The Stand and I'm behind in Crime and Punishment. Mostly I've been thinking about the end of...everything and "where to now?" Seniors jumped through the senior sign at our game on Friday, our last home game. It made me feel like it was all over, even though this is only the halfway point.

So, back to English and still speaking about endings. I'm coming to the end of The Stand. By this point, I'm pretty certain that all the characters are present and all I'm waiting for is the big shebang. We have good vs evil and who will when? Most importantly what characters will switch sides? Even though I feel certain that good will win (doesn't good always win?), how it will win is a question I can't/won't even guess on. I only wish I knew.

This seems to be the time for endings. Like any good ending, we never know what may happen.

www.creativewritingprompts.com

Let's see,

In first period I watch as a friend is brought down
In second period I learn to how to shade with dots
In third period I drown
In fourth period I want to scream a lot.

In fifth period I try to get ahead
In sixth period I'm the only one who works
In seventh period I'm ready for bed
In eighth period I usually get hurt.

It's usually the same
routine every day
I wish high school wasn't lame
wouldn't that be the day?

I wish someone told me
But would it have made a difference to know
that high school was not all it's cracked up to be
Instead I have homework, like a waterfall flows,
pouring out of my eyeballs and creating an inch of scorn on my bedroom floor every night when I arrive home then laying eggs all over the floor so that the load grows. *

This bucket of distaste
is what feeds me everyday
It is such a waste
to live for a GPA

I deserve a break
but here we go again
drinking our cups of restraint
and living for the beginning of the end.



---By the way, I hate poetry but occasionally it's fun to rhyme (it makes me feel like a kid again). Also, www.creativewritingprompts.com has some really fun ideas (some are used in this blog), so try it some time.!!!---

                                                                 ---Sara

*Yup, I know it doesn't rhyme!

Good vs. Evil. Is it that simple?

"Leo?"
"What."
"This is very important to me. Because I like [him]...and don't like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?"
"I only feel one way about him."
"How?"
"Scared." (The Stand, page 682)

Leo, a young boy who only recently replaced grunts and yells with words, knew exactly how he felt about this other character. While Larry, a 20-something-year-old man, was still confused and conflicted about how he thought about this same character. Is the ideas of good vs evil over-complicated by older people? Leo got a gut feeling about this certain situation and acted on it, while Larry didn't want to make any fast assumptions.

The Stand is full of characters who are constantly having to make that super important decision between the good and the evil. However, very few of them are able to see the evil in their own ranks. Evil people linger with the good people and not many see how evil they can potentially be, even though they see the obvious difference between good and evil. They may not like the evil people but they still don't recognize their pure evilness.

Is this a good quality? Forgiveness, turning the other check, the idea of not judging and only seeing the good in people. Those are all good qualities, right? When present in The Stand, they don't seem that great. All of the sudden, the bad guys seem worse and the good guys aren't standing up for themselves enough.

This, to me, is where the good and evil become tangled. How do we protect our innocence without turning evil. To turn a person, who is seemingly evil, out of their good society, they would be doing an evil act. But the longer the evil person stays, the more people affected and maybe turned evil.

Leo may see the evilness in a person before others but does that make the distinction between good and evil simpler? Or does it just prove that even though we may know good vs. evil we can't successfully do anything about it?

Another installment from Stephen King

"The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of burn tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll." (Page 563, The Stand)

Every character created and introduced by Stephen King makes me second guess all my orignal assumptions. I think that maybe the characters are just gonna die or the normal will happen but then Mr. King switches things up on me. Occasionally he puts in a couple of creepers. Some are obvious creepers like Trashcan Man (dude mentioned above) and some are completly unobvious until the creepy moment. I'm really loving these books that have a lot of thought put into them.

I really want to say a whole lot more about this man but I don't want to give away any part of the book (for those of you that might actually read it). So yeah, he is creepy and I really want to know what will happen with him.

"...But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed..."
- Paul Simon

"As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee." page 338

I'm currently on page 339 of a 1,141 page book, The Stand. I have so many questions like, "Who is this man with 'lunatic glee'?", "Are all this characters going to eventually meet?" and "Why is it called The Stand?". 

However, I have a extreme respect for an author who can write a novel with more than a thousand pages and way to many characters for me to keep up with and still make it interesting. I never found that "dry part" everybody talked about which seemed to have no purpose. Instead, I see every character, every chapter as an important part of the plot and if I pay close attention maybe, just maybe, I'll actually get what's going on. I fear I'll read all 1,141 pages and still be confused and clueless. Even if I still am, I feel I will have read a really interesting and long book and therefore be accomplished.

Until that point, I'll continue to flip back to past chapters to revisit an old character and remember what happened to them. Then I'll try to figure out why Stephen King put this character in the paragraph next to the last character I read about and I'll attempt to connect the extremely scattered dots which make up his plot. Then at the end of the day, I'll tape a piece of notebook paper over the picture of Mr. Creepy King himself on the back cover, calculate the next 27 pages that I have to read for the next day and cough with fear of the "superflu".

"Outside the street's on fire
In a real death waltz
Between what's flesh and fantasy
And the poets down here
Don't write nothin at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night
They reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded
Not even dead
Tonight in Jungle Land"
-Bruce Springsteen

Maybe that's why its called The Stand?