Solitude taught Billy to see his words as art. In silence he saw sentences graduate into paragraphs, all of them masterpieces and simply unutterable. But as he found himself with more and more time on his hands Billy began experimenting with his work fresh out of the fire. Not even allowing them time to cool, he rolled the words around in his mouth, trying desperately not to burn his tongue.  Some were small and went down without any fight, but every once in a while Billy came across some ungainly word, something that caught in his throat, stuck on its way through his system.  He never supposed that some of his creations would set forth such a reaction; this gag reflex that must have immediately sidelined said words to the realm of esoterica and academia. And yet, there they were, thorns and all, floating around in his head.

Slowly, Billy started to partake in a few more of his creations every day.  Today it was spineless, flutter and sponge. Perhaps tomorrow some words would jump into his mouth unbidden. You see, Billy found his creations waiting for him in an endless queue, backed up into each other, some patiently waiting and others forcefully pushing their way to the front of the line. The more he ate, the more he grew, blossoming into a talkative lad.

His friends certainly noticed the change. In fact, they started to invite him to their after-work gatherings, their weekend hangouts and their day-off retreats.  Billy was no longer the sad, sullen, seemingly unemployed, silent sack of a man.  He was quite a well-versed poet.  And who knew Billy could hold his own against and even outwit the snarkiest of the bunch?  He was learning to use his words.  Billy found he could bruise and batter his opponents into submission with the club-like words he so crudely swung in their direction.  Clubs that in time would be sharpened into pikes and daggers as Billy discovered the ability to draw blood with a perfectly placed attack.  These slashes demanded a precision unnecessary with the aforementioned clubs, forcing Billy to take up verbal fencing, pricking here and there, stabbing altogether too often.  He had, unknowingly, forged the most splendid array of weaponry and took great pleasure in cutting great swaths of rivals down with every word.

As the body count grew, so too did Billy’s shame. He was still, at heart, a quiet boy, fearful of where this new hobby might lead. So he sheathed the swords, scimitars and spears, cast them into a river, and wandered the streets in search of a new cohort, one that would not lead him to a life of slaughter.

Unfortunately, Billy ran across a gang of disaffected youth. You know the type, all bluster and denim; greasy fashion and unkempt hair. Their speech was utterly unintelligible, mumbling to each other in a stream of verbal refuse. Surely not blade amongst the bunch, their meaningless words forming a moat to separate them from society. The shame Billy felt at having cut down so many of his previous peers slumped his spine and cast down his eyes. Which, serendipitously, were the only two requirements for joining this new club of outsiders.

To these disillusioned young men and women language was not a gift, it was a burden under which they felt great pressure to escape. And so, with as little passion as possible they threw words away. Billy was shocked (and knew better than to express himself). This clan took his works of art, the sculptures he spent hours perfecting, and melted them into a muddy river of speech. His words were unimportant to these people. They had figured out how to speak entirely in mumbles. Billy watched them make a great pile of sibilant trash and was heartpressed.

This was not a step in the right direction.

Fortunately for Billy, his reputation as a fencer had already spread to a higher class. A certain echelon was looking for the swordsman and when they found him mired in the clogged drain of distopia, they plucked him out of the muck and buffed the boy back to his former glory. A sharpened wit, ready to strike for heart once again.

But wait! These friends wanted nothing of his old inky stabs. This society developed breadth, not just depth in Billy’s work. They wanted to teach him to paint.

Read Chapter 1…

I wrote a story. And I drew some pictures. They go together. Read it?

Lovage,
Dan

Wordsmith

Chapter 1

Billy Oscar (né: William Aldritch Oscar) was a wordsmith. Pounding over an iron anvil, he forged letters and sounds into white-hot words and hung them gently on hooks as they cooled.

I have to stop writing Billy thought. And although he genuinely wanted to, even as the idea flitted across his mind, Billy had already hammered two sentences worth of new words. Metal scrap lay at his feet- impeachable evidence of the hasty and impassioned sense of creation with which Billy was forced to live. Billy inherited this job from his father. It was the sort of job that traveled with a bloodline, not a post-collegiate internship-turned-career.

Wordsmithing is exquisitely dangerous. When was the last time you took it upon yourself to invent a word? Likely, you’ve never met a wordsmith, nor known their post existed. Billy spent his days locked in the shop, tripping over new contractions and stumbling into slang. It was his responsibility- nay, his duty to keep the fires stoked and the material pliable. Should he stop for an instant, should the heat dissipate in his heart for a moment, the metal would seize upon itself and we’d wake into a world completely decided; a life in which we have no freedom to see things as we like, only as they are known. Existence would have but one meaning; a rose smelling nothing like itself by any other name. An unbending world of definition and description. Banishment for interpretation.

Perhaps you sense the pressure with which Billy lived. It was this pressure that drove him forward. Forward, and inevitably, mad.

Holding such a secret position, Billy was considered by his friends to be jobless. Utterly and tragically unemployed. They knew he “worked from home” (their condescension, not mine), but having never seen his office, his forge, assumed him to be draining life in front of his computer. Asking him to lunch was an exercise in frustration. I can’t, I’ve got loads to do today, Billy was always busy. They assumed he was too proud to admit his desperation. They thought Billy was a waste.

And if they found themselves vexed by Billy’s refusal to take lunch breaks, it was nothing compared to the aggravation and sheer madness Billy felt when trying to explain his work to these people. What could he say? He usually led with I’m a writer, but that begged more questions about publication and style. He abstracted for a while and just claimed the mantle of Artist, something that drew even more scoffs. No one was a capital A-r-t-i-s-t. Art was a hobby. Billy was not an artist. He tried Linguist, Inventor, Architect, and Sculptor, only to be met with mouths full of laughter.

Once he yelled I’m a Wordsmith in the middle of a boozy party, but someone just removed the red plastic cup of gin from his hand and escorted him out the front door. “This is how people end up homeless and living on the streets,” his friends said.

As it was, Billy found himself with ample time alone. Solitude, while not necessary for his job, was all the better for results. The more time spent alone in his forge, the more daring his creations. Besides, Billy hardly ever spoke. Even when he dared out among friends Billy was usually forgotten at some bar or pub, relegated to a corner next to a long defunct juke box while the rest of the crowd mingled with the ease of a thousand newly greased cogs clicking away in a gigantic unseen clock. And so, despite his familial role in the creation of language as we know it, Billy was uniformly unfamiliar with its every day use. Billy was quiet.

Hey Friends-

I’ve been doing some video work for a wonderful organization called Get Equal. They’re fighting for equality for LGBT citizens and doing a damn good job of it. Last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech to the U.N. on LGBT rights across the world. It was a magnificent speech calling all nations to step up and recognize their people as full citizens. I’d love to say that our country is leading the way in LGBT civil rights, but we aren’t. Check out the video above to hear the story of one couple struggling to find a way to live in the states.

Rock on,

DK

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• 3 pounds Shelled Walnuts
• 3 Egg Whites
• 2 tablespoons Coconut Oil (or Rice Bran, Safflower, Sunflower, etc…)
• 1 teaspoon Molasses
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• ¾ cup Palm Sugar
• 1 tablespoon Ground Ginger
• 1 tablespoon Cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon Salt
• ¼ teaspoon Ground Nutmeg
• ⅛ teaspoon Ground Cloves
• 1 cup Dried Cherries

Get Busy

1. Spread the raw walnuts over two cookie sheets. Place them in the oven while you preheat it to 300 degrees. When they are slightly fragrant and toasted, remove them and drop the heat to 250 degrees.
2. In a large bowl whisk together everything (leaving out the cherries) until frothy and blended. Don’t worry about getting peaks of any kind out of the egg whites, just make them bubbly.
3. Pour the roasted walnuts and dried cherries into the wet mixture and stir to coat everything.
4. Spread the nuts back over the cookie sheets and bake at 250 degrees for one hour, or until the nuts are dry (third obligatory nut joke).
5. Remove from the oven, try not to nibble until they’ve cooled. You will not win.