In Search of Medusa
archaeology
I was digging around in my older text files, the ones that have been converted from WordPerfect 3 to WordPerfect 5.1 to MS-Word. Among them I found all kinds of things that made me cringe. I can never say I don't understand why so many great authors burn their early works.
Luckily, I'm not a great author.
This is from 1995, I believe. I had a truly annoying classmate in my 9th grade English class, one who'd latch onto a chance remark or meme and beat it, over the course of several days, into meringue. As I was often guilty of speaking in class, Danny frequently goaded me with distortions of my own memes. In this instance, I had mentioned the gorgon Medusa and he had started claiming that I wouldn't know Medusa, even if various conditions were met.
I was getting pretty annoyed, so after quietly ignoring him I went home and wrote a little essay in response to his new strain of snaps. The next day, when Danny started talking about Medusa again, I opened my binder and matter-of-factly handed him the essay. He was somewhat impressed and did not mention Medusa again, although I overheard him telling a friend in the hall that "that girl's creepy."
High school. The astute reader will notice that at no point do Medusa's supernatural aspects come into play. I think the "bag of platinum" came from some textbased computer game I was playing at the time. Spam is in there because all teens know that Spam is automatically funny, like Weird Al, farting, cheese
Actually, that last one is a story for another time.
By
Anna Truwe
You wouldn't know Medusa even if you were wrongly accused of holding up a 7-11 during its annual "Medusa Day" sale while wearing a Medusa mask, killing two Medusa-lookalike clerks, and she was at your trial, the star witness for the defense, and your alibi was that you were, at the time of the crime, escorting her to the premiere of her latest movie, Medusa Strikes Back, and you had spent the entire time handing out pins that said:
and then, to celebrate, after the show you spent three hours having her face tattooed, twice life size, on your chest, with the words "Medusa for Me" under it.
If she took the stand and told the jury what an outrage it was to have her boyfriend falsely accused, the day after her gigantic stone face, the newest addition to Mt. Rushmore, was finally completed, and she was named "Gorgon of the Year," and her picture was on the cover of Time, Life, Newsweek, and Cat Fancy, and you would be sitting there, in a bright orange jumpsuit, saying,
"Medusa's here? Where? Who's that witness?"
Then, if you were given two consecutive life sentences and spent ten years making a life-sized Medusa out of toilet paper and mashed potatoes, coloring it with dye from "Medusa's Choice Special Edition M & M's brand chocolate candy" because they wouldn't let you have paint in prison, and one day the guard came in and said,
"President Medusa just gave you a presidential pardon, a bag of platinum, an 8x10 color glossy photograph with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back that shows you didn't do it, and some Spam,"
Even then, you still would not know Medusa.