I.
“Dear Lord Jesus – please take care of my mom. Please welcome my papa into heaven, Lord. He was a good man and you’ll see that when you talk to him. Everyone knows it. My mom’s good, too, so please watch over her. She says she doesn’t believe in you – but I do – and I know that she does in her heart. She knows how much you love all of your children and I don’t want to die. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”
The fight starts in the kitchen between a couple of chefs, which means it could be about any number of things (drugs, booze, girls, hours, pay), but because Terry and Sean are a pair of obnoxious, stupid assholes, it’s about some soup. Terry thinks the bisque could use some paprika, but Sean fucking hates paprika.
That’s it. That’s all it takes to set them off.
I read this week that the average Britain would eat ½ tonne of breakfast cereal in their lifetime. You may think that’s excessive but when you realise what a drug problem we have and how your average chemically dependant person can only really digest cereal, it all begins to make sense. But to be fair, with what they spend on cereal, they save on toilet paper as smack bungs them up. If you can overlook the blood-spray on the walls, you normally find that an addicts toilet is surprisingly clean!
We once were a hardy nation who started the day with porridge, we now have a heroin nation who starts the day with Coco-Pops.
Continue reading “Week 132 – Coco-Pops, Stationers And Challenges”
It was after the toilet scrubber was delivered that she saw them. It was dark, save for the security lights, and Paula rarely went out at night to collect her online shopping deliveries. But she’d been trying to find space for the cat tree, the Christmas ornaments, the sea salt, and the egg beaters. And the attempted organization of her innumerable Internet purchases had left her so exhausted that she’d simply collapsed and fallen asleep for hours. She’d considered waiting until the next day to open the front door and grab the package, but she’d seen a TV special on no-gooders who stole deliveries right from doorsteps, and she did not want to risk that the scrubber wouldn’t be there in the morning.
With a beard the color of November clouds, the man came in most mornings at seven o’clock sharp when the gas station’s convenience store opened. The electric door chime sounded and he shuffled through in his tufty shoes, schlepping his plastic bag bounteous with empty bottles. The smells of earth, sweat and cypress clung to him.
I’m deep in the blues, down in the Bottom, bottom of the Bucket of Blood, the bottoms of beer bottles, consumed by rotgut, roiled by raw, ripping, crosscut blues.
A heavy left-handed boogie on the piano.
Hi folks, here we are at Week 131.
In the words of the legend that is Ed O’Neill as ‘Al Bundy’, ‘I just wish the world would curl up and die!!’
I have had a shit few days! My pride took a dent this week and that got me thinking.
Many Scottish people really do only have pride in being proud and it serves no purpose except to be very destructive when something chips away at it.
What I don’t understand is why I worry about pride when as a writer, my pride gets decimated with every refusal. I suppose when I think on it, it’s different. Once you have went through the first few rejections you need to realise that this is part of it, it is a process and nothing else.
Continue reading “Week 131 – Pride, Cathedrals And 100 % Proof Gin.”
Richard looked at his half-grown mustache, and couldn’t decide whether to shave or not. He was about fifty with receding brown hair, and a John Doe face, and brown eyes. He wore khaki pants, white shirts, and canvas shoes, and lived in a small apartment over the hardware store. He was married to Martha up until about a year ago when he came across Robert and Martha, and Robert’s pants were around his ankles. Martha felt bad she hurt him, but Robert gave her pleasure the way Richard couldn’t. Richard saw how Robert had a mustache which gave him the idea. It took him almost a year to talk himself into it. He had a job at the liquor store which had been for quite awhile now. He went to work, and opened cases of vodka and gin, and put them on the shelf. Monday was his hardest day, you know, because of the weekend. After he lost his marriage, his liquor store job kept him going. There were two things he didn’t like about Robert, the first being that he had sex with his wife, and the second was he drank whisky. That meant he had to see Robert when he came in to buy his Jack Daniels. It was all right if he was behind the shelves, and could ignore Robert, but when he was on the register, they had to pretend to be friendly which drove him nuts. The last time Robert came to Richard’s register as he picked up his bag; he pointed to Richard’s mustache, and said,
“Hey, another year or so; you might have something.”
Richard gave a wicked fake laugh. He glanced out the window and saw Martha waiting in the car.
-1-
My God, it’s a library, Thommy thought on her way out of an anthology of dreams and into the early morning light. She lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, contemplating dreams that really weren’t dreams as much as they had been the opening of files, which had been uploaded into her mind by Keeper yesterday at New Town Cemetery. Emma’s right, I do remember everything.
“You’re a big gasbag, Jersey,” the tallest one of the lot said with loud emphasis and staring at the smallest of his pals with that old in-charge look, “nothing but a big gasbag, I swear. You’re always bragging about your brothers and what they did in the service and you weren’t even in the Boy Scouts, for cryin’ out loud. How’s it make you such a storyteller all the time? And you never let go! Like you’re itching to tell us a story we already heard a half dozen times and then some.”
literally stories 