Category: Editor Picks

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Week 446: Influences; Site Influencers and Under the Influence

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Influence

When in a certain mood my mother could kill a good vibe with a comment more quickly than the Andromeda strain can wipe out a small town in the desert. There would be a get together of family and friends, and everyone would be chatting and having a nice time and she would inevitably have to say something like:

“It’s sad to think we will all be as dead as people in old movies someday.” Then she’d cast an innocent glance around the room (which included children) then add “Ever wonder who’ll kick first?”

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Week 440: Cherophobia; Another Sane Summer Week; Actual Site News and More Rejected Questions

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Liquifying Cherophobia

Cherophobia is the fear of happiness. Fortunately, it is a treatable if not curable phobia. I guess I have the condition, but I view it as more of an aversion to buying into happiness than the fear of it. Sort of like counting a Gift Horse’s teeth, certain that your free Pony has a set similar to those of a Great White Shark, and that they will be dripping blood–and not Horse blood, either. Cherophobics suspect good news and are constantly listening for the other Horse shoe to drop.

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436: Farewell Neighborhood Dive; Another Week That Was; and the Debut of International, Interstellar, Interdimensional Cloven Hoof Shaking Day

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Taking the Dive

Recently, after nearly forty years of business, the nearby Social Club Tavern has closed for good. There’s a special sadness when the wild things in life die.

Still, it’s strange to feel sentimentality for something that was one hell of a long way from sentimental during its existence. The Social Club was rough and tumble. I saw some guy punch the window out of the front door after a fight with his girlfriend. A piece of plywood replaced the window for about a year. I usually like to glance through the window of a bar to get a feel for the situation. Since the Social didn’t have any other windows except the one on the front door, entering blind was a roll of the dice. Only hell knew who or what waited inside.

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Editor Picks, General Fiction, Latest News, Short Fiction

WEEK 435: Crows; Brilliance and a Fourth of July Salute to the UK

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And the Brain Dead Shall Lead Them

If it weren’t for slogans and bumper-sticker philosophies, management would have very little to say at work meetings. Just the other day, at a meeting, I heard the slogan “Write What You Know” “shared” by a member of the “team” (as anyone who has worked at least one day in life, the preponderance of facetious quotation marks soon becomes obvious). I work in a government warehouse that delivers supplies procured from the “civilian sector” to various locations on base. Cases of toilet paper and flats of bottled water, that sort of stuff. There ain’t a whole lot of writing what I know in that field, yet it got said because it has taken its place among managerial verbal dingleberries such as “Wow, let me look into that and get back to you”–which, translated from management-speak, means “I do not care, and hell will grow petunias before I get back to you.”

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WEEK 433: Feral Advice; It’s A Big World Afterall; A to Z of the Kitchen

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Feral Advice

Come spring, Feral Tomcats, nature’s charming blighters, seek the bliss of temporary domesticity. Such is happening in my courtyard; or at least the attempt is being made. Both my Feral Tomcat friends, Andy and Alfie are doing well. But Alfie has been smacked with lovesickness.

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Week 428: Spring Cleaning; the Week That Is; Ten Names For the Inhabitants in the Box Behind the Stairs

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In Just Spring

The American Pacific Northwest is similar in climate to the UK. Both are just about as north as the other and both are close to an ocean. My home in the Puget Sound region is typical of the kind of weather found in such latitudes. We get twenty, sometimes thirty spring days spread over the course of four months. Seldom more than two in a row.

When it does come, everything gets all warm and cheery. People appear ready to spontaneously break out in song, smiles are unforced, and birds often garnish people with necklaces made from wildflowers, just like Snow White.

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425: Plotting, The Week in Love and Derivative Devices

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The Plot is in the Mail

The concept of plotting a story is alien to me. I’m as able to plot as I am able to dunk a basketball. Personally speaking, I, at best, have only the fuzziest idea of how something I work on ends. Nine times out of ten it doesn’t end that way, but is an ending directed by wherever the flow of the thing takes me.

The problem I have with plotting is it appears to be a blueprint for creativity, not far from the formula romance writers follow. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back and they both live nakedly ever after. Inaccurately, or otherwise, I see a difference between story and plot. I see stories unfolding in a natural manner with interesting things and interesting people meeting up–all left open for happy surprises that the author was unaware of until the composition began. And plotting as something on par with paint by numbers.

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Week 424 – Post-it’s, 100 Fucking Million (Watch this space) And Let’s Give Mr Kluger A Nod To One Over The Forty Nine!

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I decided to clear out my desk today. There is a problem as I have so many notes scribbled down for whatever reasons. At the time of writing them, I thought that they were the beginnings of some of the greatest ideas in the world, now that I look at them I think, ‘What the fuck was I on?’ I will type out the shite that I’m looking at:

‘Tuna and seaweed (All eaten)’ – I haven’t a fucking clue what was going on there!!!

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The Awful Truth and What’s on Your Playlist

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The Awful Truth has a way of sneaking up on you. I once had a body type like Popeye’s Olive Oyl. Yet around age thirty, my clothes began to get mysteriously tighter. I went into denial. I even tried telling myself “they must be making my size smaller.” But there was no denying the Awful Truth.

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Week 414: UserTube; Another Milestone in Scotland; the Remains of the Week and YouTube Fascinations

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UserTube

I don’t like TikTok much because it encourages the further curtailment of an already alarmingly short public attention span. I sometimes think that maybe we are being steadily prepped for a future in which chips will be planted in our brains at birth. In the year 3000 “slow” will describe someone who actually takes a second to think something over. No, not much for TikTok, but I do like YouTube, well, to a point, yet there is something happening on it that makes me howl with rage.

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