... as Tonight is to Free-Writing

I wrote a second paper in response to my first, but I won't post that here.
I wrote a third paper as a journal, but I won't post that here, at least not in its entirety.  Here's a few excerpts:

Virginia's Pies

    Passing by the apartment of old Misses Virginia, which sat below and offset from my own, was a staple of my day when I was a hundred pounds lighter and twenty years younger. I used to race up those old metal and tile stairs, skinny knees pumping spindly legs up up up two steps at a time. She used to leave her newspaper out front of her door in the dark mornings, leaning against her door frame, like a secret signal that only Virginia, my mom, and I knew: pick me up on the way to school, she's done reading me.

    She used to bake us pumpkin pies and apple pies, but I don't remember why, only that I was happy to gallop down to her door with a five-dollar bill in hand. My mom told me she supplemented her income with baking those pies, explaining to me that living on a fixed income meant you had to bake pies or you couldn't afford to live here. I didn't want to get old like Virginia. Now and then the ambulance would come to save her when she fell down and broke something.

    She's long-dead now, but I'll always remember her accent that both scared and comforted me. “Kaahl,” she would pronounce my name Kyle like she was from a funny movie, “Tell ya mothah that I have a packidge fo' huh.” As years have since passed, I can only guess if her words in my head sound anything like the real Virginia. But time has not diminished my connection of fresh pie to Virginia's twangy voice.

And also:

New Years

Bright lights, a tiny wish of a parade, and a steady amount of drinking and punk rock helped to drown my failed-relationship disappointments with half-naked girls on trampolines and the smell of strangers' bodies pressed against my own. “The music's so loud, you can hear the sound/ Reachin' for the sky, and churnin' up the ground,” lyrics from Rock & Roll Fantasy by Bad Company could have capped my night there, but instead I pressed on. I pulled up to the house of someone I didn't even know. Armed with rockets, snap-n-pops, and an almost-sober head, I couldn't compete with the playful dog, classic record player, pungent smoke, and the multiple 30-racks in the kitchen. Somehow, there was even rave music. 

Lastly, a response to a piece about Hoover Dam:

  -At the Dam

    All I want to mention about this piece (which I really liked) concerns a single perfect sentence, “I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace.” I don't even know what the words “vertiginously” or “tailrace” mean, and I haven't even looked them up, nor do I want to. I've seen these power lines once before, and the bewildered awe they struck in me then is mimicked in the strange words of that single sentence. They leaned way over the precipice in a way that only demons should know how to do, supported by something that only H. P. Lovecraft could have designed. Those two words, they must have concrete definitions, but for now, I am content to let them be a mystery.