100!

Today is my 100th post! Thanks to everybody who has been reading, and supporting me in my efforts. I wrote a story, to commemorate the occasion:

Milestone

Curt Jimenez woke up early that morning, as he usually did, determined to treat this day just the same as he’d treated the hundred or so that had immediately preceded it. It was different though, and he knew it. It was warm outside, perhaps 50 degrees or higher, and the snow that had crippled his little town just a couple weeks before had now been reduced to a few scattered piles that were strikingly more black than white. He delivered the local newspaper for a living, and that was his first order of business on this special day.

While walking a section of his route, he encountered a beautiful girl out jogging, taking advantage of the change in weather. She was the kind of girl whose beauty you felt from a hundred yards off, young and striking in every respect. A work of art. Curt, 50 years old, single, paunchy, mustachioed, focused all his energy into a smile that was as pleasant and as neutral as he could muster as she gracefully ran past. He felt only a cold forced acknowledgement in return, and he felt reduced. He felt abandoned by his own smile, like the face that he was putting forward wasn’t his own.

When he got home, he practiced in front of the mirror. A nice smile. A pleasant smile. An inoffensive smile. He needed one of those. He was not a rapist. He had killed somebody once, but he wasn’t like that anymore. He appreciated beauty, but not in an unhealthy way. He was a good, simple man, who only wanted desperately to be liked. Show teeth? Tilt the head? How does a man get his eyes to twinkle?

As he gazed at the mirror, Curt became painfully aware of his own body, and that it was the only one he would ever have. “That’s you, Curt,” he thought. He wasn’t upset though, or disappointed. Maybe he was beginning to understand his place in the world.

That day was the day of Curt’s 100^th blog post on his blog, The Better Butter Blog. Curt loved butter, and he loved writing, and he’d started a blog on which he’d written something just about every day since December of the previous year. It wasn’t the greatest blog, maybe it got a little too personal at times, but it was Curt’s and Curt’s alone, and it was the greatest accomplishment of his life. A man who didn’t understand where he came from might laugh at this, but that doesn’t really matter. Curt should be proud, and he is.