Status Quo

Hey friends. Guest writer today! Here's a piece Aaron did for a writing exercise that explored the dramatic structure.

This is the beginning, the status quo, how it all begins. This was a big deal because a rich status quo, with lots of possible story threads on which to pull, makes for the best stories, the best dramatic structure an development. The assignment was to create a status quo and then send it to the next person who pulled out an inciting incident, then that went to the next person who wrot a collision factor and well, the whole class finished with a (hopefully) interesting tale!

It ended up going in a wayyy different direction that Aaron or I imagined it would, but in any case the Status Quo was indeed rich and layered and filled with wonderous, delicious possibilities for a writer to grab hold of and run with!

So please enjoy: STATUS QUO

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I like to think that I’m a decent person. By the time I’ve finished my story you may or my not agree; it depends on how you define “decent”. I’ve never cheated or stolen, never lied, nothing big anyway, I don’t smoke, I rarely drink, I vote, I file my taxes in January, and I give to charity when I can. Hell, I’ve never even called in sick. And that’s not for lack of temptation.

You see, I work in a zoo--not like “Geez my office is a real zoo sometimes”; no I work in a literal zoo, animals, cages, gift shops filled with over-priced plastic critters and custom printed doodads, the whole bit.

Now, you might be thinking a zoo doesn’t sound that bad; maybe I get to play with the animals or maybe I work in one of the pleasantly air conditioned gift shops. Nope. I clean. I’m a custodian. I don’t clean the cages--excuse me--enclosures, I don’t go near the animals, no nearer to them than the visitors do anyway. In fact being a custodian in a zoo is pretty much like being a custodian anywhere else except for a couple key differences.

The first difference is that, unlike your average grocery store or office janitor, I’m constantly surrounded by the insipid flirting between the animal handlers. The animal handlers have the fun jobs, they’re the ones who feed the animals and play with them and all that. But really they are a bunch of oversensitive twenty-something bleeding-hearts living out some altruistic dream of saving the natural world by putting little pieces of it into cages--sorry--enclosures. When they’re not praising each other, and by proxy, themselves, these self-righteous do-gooders are fulfilling the secondary ambition of all self-praising good Samaritans: chasing tail. I’m surrounded, on a daily basis, by more cheesy hormone-driven banter than a speed-dating host.

The second major difference is that I spend most of my time outside, year round, rain, sleet, or snow. In the summer I remove hornets nests from the snack stands and gift shops (a task at which I’ve become increasingly an expert) and in the winter I shovel snow. The zoo is closed in the winter, which on the one hand is nice because I don’t have to pick up after a bunch of yuppies, but on the other hands the sidewalks and pathways I shovel go mostly untraversed, which gives me a feeling of pointlessness.

Thirdly, there’s my boss. He acts like some kind of hardass, but he wears hemp sandals to work and he drives a Prius. He’s a vegan and his skin is this sallow kind of orangey color. Worst of all he seems to innately distrust me. He makes no secret of his distrust, he’s always creeping around when I’m working, giving me the stink-eye and sometimes going so far as to outright inform me that he’s keeping an eye on me.

Anyway, my point is that I have plenty of reasons to simply not show up, or to call in sick, but I show up everyday without fail. I show up, despite the temptation not to. I guess that’s were I’m going with all this, what I’m trying to say is that everyone experiences the temptation to do bad things; it’s the successful resistance of that temptation that makes us good people, decent. Where though is that line? The line where the thing is so awful, so contemptuous, that the very temptation, the simple urge to commit the sin--whatever it may me--makes you a degenerate beyond reproach; a thing so undeniably treacherous that despite your resistance to it, you are still an irredeemable monster. Maybe my story can help to answer that question, or maybe not.

It’s nearly spring now and school fieldtrip season will start in a couple weeks. I hate spring.