Category: Writing

Cat Links Creative, Writing

Falling Away

Posted on Andrew Attebery

I never would have guessed he was forty-two; maybe fifty-two, or sixty-two, but certainly not any younger than that. He passed me an old canteen that’d been roughly handled and beaten for what must have been decades, and told me to take a swig. I obliged and took a pull–and immediately regretted it. He smiled wide, a big, mostly toothless grin, and his laugh crawled forward from his lungs, the sound not unlike sandpaper scratching over an old log, along with the sound of his heaving exhalation that was rasp and nearly hoarse from years of cigarettes and weed. “JESUS CHRIST.” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath from the liquid fire I’d just ingested. “Moonshine.” He said as he winked and then nudged me with his elbow, looking for me to pass the deviled drink back to him. I did, having no interest in taking another swig. I already felt drunk from the modest amount I’d had. The scenery flew by at a decent speed, and I surmised that we’d left Cleveland some distance behind us. If you’ve never ridden on a train in the middle of the night, I wholeheartedly suggest you try it at least once. And

Continue readingFalling Away

Cat Links Creative, Writing

Elvis

Posted on Andrew Attebery

She wasn’t anything to look at, and I assumed that that was why she’d stopped to pick me up. It’s an unspoken but commonly held misconception that a hitchhiker will fuck for a ride, but I wasn’t in the habit or the mood, least of all with such an unattractive woman. I spilled into the passenger seat out of the rain and thanked her for stopping. Without replying, she threw the car in gear and pulled the old Buick into traffic at brusque and alarming speed. I grabbed a hold of the colloquially named “Oh Shit” handle on the ceiling and braced for the rest of the ride as she weaved in and out of traffic like an addict on an ether binge. “Where you headed?” She asked in a Southern drawl so thick that it could strip paint. I shrugged. I had no idea. I didn’t even know the name of the nearest town. I was just going, just trying to keep moving. The destination didn’t matter. “My place then?” She jokingly asked, and then cackled like a witch from an old Disney movie filled with magic and fairy tale endings that never exist in real life. Her voice

Continue readingElvis

Cat Links Journal, Writing

The employers go marching in two by two, hurrah, hurrah

Posted on Andrew Attebery

I have a tendency to monitor the IP addresses that hit this site. An employer that I’m extremely excited and hopeful to work for has visited this site shortly after two phone interviews I had with them. I’m scheduled to go visit their office and meet their team next Wednesday, and I hope that this blog hasn’t scared them off (Hi guys!). When I was a teenager, I kept a journal. Nothing huge or dramatic, just a collection of my thoughts. I usually wrote in it once or twice a week–mostly as an outlet for my frustration. Going back now and reading through it, it seems like I was angry and depressed all the time–it was crazy!–but not true at all. Since I was only writing at the times that something or someone had bothered me, a person could easily have come to believe that my entire teenage existence was filled with angst and super-mega-depression. I’m saying that because, well, this blog is filled with a lot of the same types of things. Angst. Sadness. Childhood stories. Teenage stories. Stories about hitchhiking. Mayhem. Craziness. Anarchy! MORE MAYHEM! But if I sat down and wrote about all the boring stuff I’d done, my

Continue readingThe employers go marching in two by two, hurrah, hurrah

Cat Links Creative, Writing

And I am just like an acrobat tumbling down from the wire, and I’m fragile but happily broken for what I desire

Posted on Andrew Attebery

I took their money, but it wasn’t about the food or the booze or the drugs; it wasn’t about being able to afford one more luxury or one more item to survive one more night. I played my guitar while leaning against the cracked and brittle building–a wall of brown and brick and heat in the rippling sun. Guitar case open and eyes cast downward in a hundred mile stare, patrons wandered about uninterested in me–they didn’t see a man or a poet or a musician. They saw garbage–a pile of shit that deserved neither their respect or their pity. They didn’t hear the music that I’d crafted and carefully worked during the long days and miserly nights that I’d been travelling alone and in the weather–they heard only the songs of a beggar and a fool. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t just helplessly sitting there with a sign, and it didn’t matter that I was trying to do something to stay alive–I was still just an otherwise inconsequential bump in the road. Occasionally, a good Samaritan would throw a couple quarters or a dollar into my guitar case. I would raise my head, meet their gaze, and smile in the

Continue readingAnd I am just like an acrobat tumbling down from the wire, and I’m fragile but happily broken for what I desire

Cat Links Journal

I’m standing on a pier, smiling from ear to ear, I shout but you don’t hear me at all…

Posted on Andrew Attebery

Sunday morning I awoke to find a swelling sadness gnarling and mewling at the corner of my heart. I don’t know where it came from, but I know it has been there for a while now. It’s a beast. A beast that I wrestle and defeat and am defeated by. One that I bruise and batter and scream at and yet, it never seems to shy away for long. It’s stubbornness is comparable to my own, and like two exhausted boxers we pull from our respective corners and fight it out again and again and again; a stalemate with no referee. The beast is always there. A cold reminder that I’ll never quite be normal or completely happy. I can hear him banging and burning against my brain, trying desperately to wiggle and squirm his way inside and all I can do is resist and hope that one day he’ll give up. I can feel him. He feels like the frost laden mornings in October. The time of year when the cold hangs just a bit longer in the morning, and settles in just a little earlier in the evening. The beast is the feeling of impending winter, when the

Continue readingI’m standing on a pier, smiling from ear to ear, I shout but you don’t hear me at all…

Cat Links Journal, Writing

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper

Posted on Andrew Attebery

Death comes for us all. One could say that, in many ways, it’s chasing us our entire lives; an ethereal reminder that our time is limited and that we need to appreciate and seize every moment, hold nothing back, and leave nothing in reserve. Absolutely nothing. That’s an interesting consideration: Hold nothing back. How often do we refrain from saying something, either because of our perceived effect on someone else, or because we feel it’s unimportant? How often do we miss an opportunity because we think we can get around to it tomorrow or the next day? How many things does an average person put off and never actually get around to? What have you been putting off? This morning I learned that my great-grandmother had died. It wasn’t entirely unexpected given her age and general health, but I was surprised at how deeply it affected me. I was shocked that I felt sad for someone I’d barely even known; someone who had spent her life manipulating and hurting so many people around her, someone who beat her children and was rude and boorish for so much of her life. I felt sad.I’m still sad. The last time I saw

Continue readingThis is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper

Cat Links Journal

A reason to be sinful

Posted on Andrew Attebery

I often wonder what kind of religion birds have developed to explain the strange behavior of humans, specifically when we’re driving our vehicles. The next time you’re heading on down the highway, pay attention to the ravens, crows, and other little birds that stay just to the side of the road as they peck and forage for their next meal. You’ll notice that, without fail, most of them will jump just to the other side of the white line as a car is coming. They won’t go any further because, as far as they’re concerned, the white line is a sacred boundary that the evil cars are unable to cross. It doesn’t even matter if a car is driving outside the white line and would hit a bird standing just on the other side of it. The birds seem to expect that they’ll be protected by that strip of paint, regardless if it’s true or not. I’m curious if they have some sort of savior, a bird that once died for them so that they may have that white line. Maybe it’s big bird from Sesame street, or maybe they’ve attached some kind of cosmic significance to hawks and their

Continue readingA reason to be sinful

Cat Links Journal, Writing

They go from kindergarten to killing sprees, They go from heartache to inner peace

Posted on Andrew Attebery

Some of the most common arrivals to my website come from people who are searching for answers to unanswerable questions. A small cursory view through the statistics for this site, and I can see the hundreds of users who have arrived by loading up google, typing a depressing and equally relevant query such as “Why does god hate me?” or “Why must I take a beating?”, and they send their question our into the ether that is the Internet. And my site is what comes back. For those that come seeking greater truths, I’m not entirely sure what to tell you on those ideological and lifelong thoughts. I don’t know why life is so hard and, most importantly, I don’t know why it seems to get even harder when it doesn’t seem possible. It just happens. Einstein had a wonderful and somewhat charismatic view about God and the universe. He didn’t believe in the idea of an intergalactic super nanny that lived in the sky looking down on us. He saw that the universe was a place of chaos and disorder, and that the only thing that seemingly held it all together were the laws that explained the beautiful and

Continue readingThey go from kindergarten to killing sprees, They go from heartache to inner peace

Cat Links Journal

From the swinging of the axe to swaying of the hips

Posted on Andrew Attebery

“Sorry man, we’re all just poor musicians.” Sean-Michael said, gesturing to the other band members standing around him. “Oh, is that right?” The homeless man asked, glancing down at the clothes that we were wearing. He wasn’t upset; he’d just heard excuses a thousand different times from a thousand different people. We were no different, even though I wanted to be. “Well, have a good night.” He said as he stood there. His skin was blistered from exposure, sunburned and cracked from his forehead all the way down to his neck. On his back was a familiar sight: a duffel bag stuffed with miscellaneous clothes, trinkets, and the tiny little items that most people would have thrown away without a second thought; but not him. To him, these were not trinkets. They were memories of a life long gone, but never forgotten. They were lifelines to sanity. He gave a last look at the six of us, and wandered aimlessly back in to the heat and shelter of his small camp beneath the freeway overpass. We continued gathering up photo equipment, all of us wearing suits that easily cost several hundred dollars a piece. In my wallet I had a

Continue readingFrom the swinging of the axe to swaying of the hips

Cat Links Journal

He’s bolting doors and getting stoned, locked and loaded and losing hope

Posted on Andrew Attebery

In response to the blog entry that I wrote below, I wanted to share my absolute favorite piece of writing ever done by Carl Sagan. It’s pretty well known, but this video does it a decent amount of justice. Here’s the transcript, minus a part of the introduction: That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a

Continue readingHe’s bolting doors and getting stoned, locked and loaded and losing hope

Scroll Up