"...a leather dog collar, a chain about three-and-a-half feet long, a half empty box of condoms, and a floor full of Polaroids!"

He laughs too loud and everyone else at the table chuckles as if they have been there before.

"Fortunately, my brain has learned to tell when I'm about to black out, so that hasn't happened to me in a while."

I know he's lying and I imagine what would happen if his fiction overlapped the frayed edges of his reality. Suppose a tattooed electrician shackled him in the basement and painted him up like a mime and sold videos of him on the Internet. What would happen to his smug confessions then?

I'm sitting two tables away in the back booth of this bar halfway between the film school and the J.G. Wentworth office. It's where the students come to peddle their fabricated personas, and baby shysters hunt cougar on hot nights.

Portishead's "Strangers" staggers out of the old jukebox near the toilets. My notebook, splayed open on the table, soaking up spilled beer and ink, sucks the ideas from my head...even the bad ones. It's so hungry for words that I can feel the empty white sheets glare at me at night when I try to sleep. I feed the paper with my pen, hoping that I can fill it, cover the last blank corner with letters and finally close the cover.

It gets worse.

Nothing stays on the pages.

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Author guidance for This story

This started as one of those stories that doesn't have any place to go, so I thought I'd try it as a collaborative, but no one wanted to invest in it, and I ended up with some pretty crappy ratings on top of it all, so here's what I have so far.

I'm not looking for ratings on this piece, just what ideas it stirs up. I know it's incomplete and deeply flawed, so please don't slap a 2 on it.

There has been a little bit of interest in collaboration, so I've opened the story back up to see where it will go if someone else has a turn at the helm.

If you'd rather not write a whole chapter, you can just leave your ideas in the comments.

updated Jun 21 '10 by BDrewCollier