Old Decathlon Olympics Journal

Writing Decathlon May 1 entry

Today is the first day of May. It is also the first day of this Writing Olympic Decathlon that I have entered into on Writing.Com. The Daily Writing Challenge and the relationship with the Writing Olympic Decathlon confuse me. According to the mail in my Writing.Com mailbox I am entered into both the Olympic Decathlon and the Daily Writing Challenge Group. So, for today’s first entry into the Olympic Decathlon it is my understanding that I need to write 500 words a day. The 500 words are actually what are required of the Daily Writing Challenge referred to as “Limbo 2”.

I am beginning to believe that this is much more than a daily writing challenge. It appears to me to be an exercise in following rules. Or more specifically, in my particular case, an exercise in deciphering and interpreting rules. So you can have a better understanding of why the rules present such a challenge, let me explain:

I don’t normally follow rules. I have been told repeatedly throughout my life that I must live by an unwritten and unspoken code whereby I think that rules are just a personal invitation for me to see how many times and in how many ways I can break them. My objective, or my intentions in joining the Olympic Decathlon, and my subsequent accidental joining of the Daily Writing Challenge is not to break the rules. I am actually trying to understand, apply, and abide by the rules.

Do I think I have a chance at succeeding in this rule challenge? I have absolutely no clue. I can write 500 words a day. I am even willing to pad my daily decathlon entries with a few extra words just for sake of having a word count safety net. At this point I am having some very serious concerns about the rule writers of the Olympic Decathlon and the Daily Writing Challenge, especially when they join together as a group, and present challenges such as this to entice innocent, unsuspecting victims, such as myself, to dare try to navigate a path through this narrowly defined, and trap riddled equation that they have presented as a type of personal fun writing contest. How deceitful and underhanded.

They have even managed to bring math into a writing challenge. I have discovered that usually and typically the people who are good at English are not very good at math, and vice versa. So, what I have stumbled across here is something straight out of one of my worse old college day’s nightmares: An English writing assignment with mathematical rules.

As this journal for the Olympic Decathlon progresses I may resort to poetic spells to cast upon the rule makers of the world, especially those responsible for providing the bait that lured me into this month of May hell that I am embarking on with an enormous sense of trepidation. I may venture into an occasional short story to relieve the anguish created by my tormenters. You know, the rule makers of this challenge; the rule makers that I now view as my very own personal nemesis.

They have names and identities that I deliberately will not mention here so as not to have you fall prey to the same troublesome fate to which I have bound myself to for this month of May. Surely I have been cursed for pursuing the life of a writer’s lust.

A Writer’s Lust
A writer’s eternal lust for words
On a page once written
Is liken to being thrice bitten
An ever lonely, isolated pursuit
Conquest unrequited
Without a Publisher’s contract
Just found stacks of pages
Thrown aside by family and friends
Who, yet to read the draw of words
In the writer’s own blood, like ink from a pen
The multitude of keystrokes then append
A writer’s eternal lust, yet to comprehend
As if by a cancer possessed, eaten alive from inside
Evidenced by the pages begging to be read
Before the author is found dead