a room of one's own?

i need to write a story. if i want to take creative writing next year, i've got to submit a piece by february 14. but i'm just having so much trouble. i have no fucking clue what to write about. so, my project for the weekend is to read lots and smoke weed and think of something clever. but subtle. and, oh, god knows what all good things that i like about good writing that i force myself to try and do. as a sad result, my 'creative' writing is always weirdly stilted, at least when i read it. it's like.. fuck, so many parts of this are good, but they don't fit together cos you're trying too damn hard. in any case. i was going over some stuff that i wrote for creative writing in grade eleven (fuck, that was a long time ago now!), and i came up with a piece that i thought i'd post in the hopes of gathering some comments.

i didn't edit it or do anything to it from what it was... if i ever do write something decent, this will be my juvenilia. i'm sure it'd be worth something on eBay. in any case, it's lame, and trite, and doesn't flow as well as i'd like it to, but i dunno. i wrote it in class the first day, i think, and it's got kind of a pureness that i sort of like. maybe just cos i was less of a dick back then. ha!

so, tell me what you think.

peace (a hymn to the nirvana of those who have lost all they have to lose)

The tall sad spires of red clay that scratch the Arizona sky stand quiet, unmoved by the ravages of time, ever changing, never quite the same, but always rooted deep within the land from which they were carved. At the foot of one such spire rests a small wooden cabin, dangling from the heavens by a plume of white smoke, sheltering the land's one companion, a dark solemn Navajo. The wounds of time, spears, and unshed tears carve canyons in his face and in his soul deeper than those which dot the desert's crimson landscape. Warming his calloused hands by the flickering scraps of flame in his stone hearth, he rests his weakening body, his only possession, upon a log worn grey with the patina of four thousand years of culture.

He recalls the ways of his elders, their unquestioning devotion to the spirit world. He recalls the ways of those who would be his elders had they not been born half a world away, and he cannot help but recall their unquestioning devotion to their own spirit world. More than anything else, he recalls the sad, explosive collision of the fundamentally identical. In the depths of the flame, he recognizes the faces of his brothers and the faces of those who would be his brothers but for the bitter shades of brown that drove them to hatred. And in the pool of blood beneath the jackrabbit that hangs in his window, he sees the strange pigment that would eventually blot out those shades of brown that inspired such rage.

As he steps out the door to feel the dusty ground of his homeland for the last time, he thinks to the supposed truths that have been forced upon him across the span of his years. For the first time, he is at peace with all of them, yet he accepts none of them. His mind, ever deemed weak by the standards of a cruel society, is at last comfortable with contradiction. The jagged chasms that scar his soul run deep and calm with rivers of love that should long ago have been boiled dry by the fires of hatred. The wounds across his face flow with a hundred years' worth of joyous tears. One final sigh flows from lips that have taught far too little, into a world that needs teaching far too much. The spirit of the desert breathes its own sigh and again finds itself alone.