The moon’s on its way to November, sailing a sullen sky. I think the whole world breathed a sigh of relief tonight, when the major told us to find shelter, get some shut eye before tomorrow. We’re too close to the enemy for camp fire, all of us hiding behind trees, and under bushes, keeping as quiet as smoke, settling into the dirt and leaves like animals on the prowl.
Before I begin, I would like to welcome Nik back from his holiday. He was in Wales doing all things Welsh. As is my understanding he would be eating really, really, roasting, hot loaves, taming a roaming dragon, drinking Merlyn, seeking out a Max Boyce CD and trying to win a chair. They are a mystical race the Welsh.
It is great to have you back my friend!!
Continue reading “Week 133 – Principle, Discipline And Lactic Acid”
Your first kiss wants to play make-believe. You be the wife and I’ll be the husband, he says during recess. You’re in 3rd grade and love make-believe. He kisses you on the cheek and asks what’s for dinner. You will be whoever he wants you to be.
Those who say the truth will set you free have probably never been polygraphed. I had the experience in my early thirties during a campaign of self-renewal, leading inevitably to the West Coast. After spending a decade as a counselor at the Indiana Penal Farm, a provincial Midwest prison, I felt like a bastard at a family reunion. Was it because I built on my education instead of boozing with good ol’ boy guards? I had attended a nearby state university under a blind assumption: the patented belief that a master’s degree would open the door to promotions. Sadly, the reverse proved true. Organizations will stigmatize overachievers as surely as they flag the fuckups. (If you doubt this, watch any season of Survivor.) And so I was deemed overqualified when I faced the promotion boards. One of the inmates summed it up well when I told him I was leaving. “Sounds like a plan,” he said. “Do it soon. You don’t need to be hanging around Podunk, Indiana.”
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.
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.”
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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.”
When the new patient was installed in the next bed, Frankel didn’t pay much attention. Friendships in his ward were apt to be short lived. As in the army during the war, you were not sure if it paid to get acquainted. Still, Frankel didn’t feel like reading. It was too much of an effort lately. His eyes would tire easily, or he would get headaches. Speaking was less tiring.
Thommy Lemolo parks her car in Newtown Cemetery’s small lot shortly before 8:00 A.M. on a Tuesday. It’s a fine July morning, not yet sixty degrees, nary a cloud in the deep azure sky. For two weeks the weather had been uncharacteristically stagnant in the Pacific Northwest; jungle muggy, slick and greasy. But yesterday afternoon a series of wild thunderstorms had blown in from the Puget Sound and gave the region the equivalent of an atmospheric enema. Several lightning strikes had been reported in the vicinity of Torqwamni Hill—especially at Newtown Cemetery. One bolt was said to have hit the ancient oak tree inside the cemetery, yet it hadn’t left as much as a scar. Thommy’s “colleagues” at The Torqwamni Sun didn’t believe it; the pushcart bozos (not one checked up on the claim, mind you) believed that the three independent witnesses had been mistaken. Although Thommy had kept her thoughts on the subject to herself, she is confident that an A-bomb could detonate in the oak and not dislodge as much as an acorn.
Continue reading “A Most Confidential Source by JC Freeman (Leila Allison)”
literally stories 