Friday February 21st, 2014

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about: tension.

Coming into this morning's game, Team USA had scored a whole lot of goals so far this Olympics. Team Canada, on the other hand, outside of a 6-0 thumping of Team Austria, had not. But they'd given up even less, which is how they'd won all their games so far.

The trend continued today, as Canada won 1-0 and are off to the gold medal game to meet Team Sweden on Sunday.

Here on the west coast, that game begins at four in the frickin' morning.

Unless Max has an especially terrible sleep Saturday night, I won't be catching the start of that one. Maybe I'll be awake for the end of it though.

Mine:

With such a narrow margin of error, every moment is heavy with import, weighed down by portent. All eyes in the room study each movement; every decision is second guessed by those blessedly free of responsibility for their outcomes.

I must forget about all that, all of them.

I have a job to do.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Have you told Max that he needs to wake you up at 3:50am and refuse to be soothed unless there's ice hockey on the tv? I'm guessing you also don't have a TiVo equivalent either then -- a set-top box with a hard drive that allows you to record programs for later viewing?
Nice tension there in just four lines! The layout of the text also contributes, which is clever :)

Tension
"You have tension," said Doctor Freud, dropping his prescription pad on the floor.
"I can get drugs for that, right?" asked Kitty, sitting up in fright.
"No," said Doctor Freud. "That would be for hypertension; for tension I can prescribe you a massage by the janitor who cleans my office."

Marc said...

Greg - hah, that would be one way for me to have watched the game. The problems would have started afterward, however, when I'd want to go back to sleep and he'd want to practice climbing and walking on the couch...

We don't actually have a TV, we just watch whatever shows we care to see online on the laptop. So, yeah, no way to record it.

Hmm, I'm not sure I'd sign up for that massage...