Writing About Nothing

Below is a writing exercise in which I was instructed to write about nothing for 20 minutes.

The music is pretty, but the dog was zooming through space so fast you could have heard a pin drop on a field of blazing tumbleweed. The dog landed and the aliens were so glad to see him they shooed him away. With music coloring the black universe the aliens zoomed past the dog as he left them in the dust. They couldn’t keep up with his relentless stationary position.

On earth no one knew about this except for those in the know, and no one let his or her eyes breath a word about it. Birds chirped in the morning stillness where the sound of rustling leaves in the wind added flavor to the landscape. Chickens strutted up and across, across and up until they ran smack into the thick wire fence that didn’t surround their imaginary pen that really did exist in the backyard of farmer Jones. Only the pen was in the side yard, precisely in front of her house.

Pollution steamed from cars and factories in the big city, but that really isn’t happening. Businessmen, politicians, and lobbyist said so. The climate changes, but it’s changed before so who are we to say which is better? Perhaps it’s not changing at all, since it’s just staying the same by changing all of the time. And who said there’s a climate anyway? It’s all just weather, weathering away the earth and it doesn’t matter whether or not we like it. Weather changes just like our climate, which probably doesn’t exist.

A truck rumbles down main street, the marvel of man’s ingenious idiocy: a smoke-belching carrier of goods releasing what is bad and carrying goods only half the time, which means it really does little good, but in a world without morals or boundaries we really can’t say what is good or bad and so perhaps the truck doesn’t even exist anyway, just the thing to make the politicians and lobbyist happy.

Newspapers spin off the press, words lining every page, but never leaving an impression. Ink is spilled like the blood of thousands who die from war, crime, and famine, only to be tossed in the trash and forgotten. The papers say all and tell all, but nothing has been said or told. Secrets lie all over town behind drawn curtains and everyone knows. There’s no point in hiding what everyone can find out, but no one will remember so long as it can be forgotten. Words drip on the pages of magazines, shoppers, and books trying to wear out our stony eyes, but reading means nothing because the words taste bad. It all falls apart in the end even if we’ll be put back together some day.

Numbers spin in cash registers, an alphabet of their own that cannot be counted. Cash jumps from hand to hand, meaning everything, holding all value, but never truly worth more than a scrap of newspaper. Money is the one god we part with readily even if we’ve given our lives for it. People rush by grabbing for green, picking up air, and sliding away into everything.