Here's the beginning of my new story. Started with the idea of writing something about the runaway bride, but this one isn't that runaway bride. I have no idea why my narrator is a 9 year old boy. I guess he flew into my bedroom one night while I was sleeping.

My Life with the Runaway Bride

Just because I'm 9 doesn't mean I'm not living with the runaway bride. Happened shortly after Daddy walked out the back door into a hurricane mud hole 'cause he couldn't take the heat, couldn't take Mama's nagging. So I could grasp that bride couldn't take any idiot groom and I can't take being 9 'cause nobody takes me seriously. I don't mind the bad press over the bride 'cause I don't mind the press, don't believe a word of it. So you can say anything, like the press said the groom said she cast a spell on him and took off with his Rolex. I don't believe. I say, as Spinoza recognized: “Be not astonished at new ideas; it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.” And then, of course, God is dead, spake Zarathustra.

They from this corner of this county say, always they, ya know eenie miney moo joe and mo, all the same they say: you're a loopy Lew; loose in the head from a gaggle of grits. Hardy har har. They jump up and down, think if they think at all, well all collective like one big brainless smirky scarecrow in the middle of a pile of manure, anal they're to be sure watching out for birds, they with their rifles. This is my land , they all say, not mine but theirs of course and they say you can't own anything cause you're only 9, you lackadaisy looney as a titmouse without a tail. But at least born in the USA. so they go lackaday lackaday, hardy heart har, you loser there aint no alien runaway brides or even stick in the kettle girls for the likes of you they say, specially as how you keep flunking New Math. Nyeah nyeah, whinge Freddy the Fart and Whiskey Amos and their volunteer firemen daddies in their Order of the Moose and Rotary ties and helmuts like those Bobbies and Brandons who do kitchens and bathrooms so well you could weep with joy. Well, some could and do.

So nyeah nyeah I'm 9 stuck in second grade forever and the boys think I'm real weird quoting dead philosophers and writers to myself, but as Kant remarked: "If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on." So I make myself a tyrannosaurus rex with feet that could trample the entire county if I cared to bother. There is nothing outside of the imagination, someone probably said. If not, I just said it.