Blast from the Past

I'm kind of too sick to concentrate and write. (Hell, I've been watching movies all day because reading books was too difficult.)

In the spirit of illness, I bring for your reading pleasure a poem from my past.

---
A Winter Sonnet


In wintertime we stay inside and drink
our herbal teas in hopes that we might not
succumb to colds and flus. We make a stink
when illness first appears as drippy snot.

We blow our noses ‘til they’re raw and red--
The trash can soon overflows with tissues.
The store brand cough drops cannot clear our heads.
We try to put aside these trifling issues.

We go to work and spread this horrid plague.
While sniffling in our shirtsleeves we’re mumbling
“Everything is fine.” But fine is too vague
a word for such a coughing, grumbling

disease that takes up all our strength and time.
Until we‘ve kicked it, all we do is whine.

----

I wrote that a while ago, but I still think it's pretty good. As I recall I spent a while making it appear to rhyme while phrasing it so that the end rhymes were downplayed in an out-loud reading. (I'm hoping this is my final version, and not a partway edited one full of embarassing errors...)

Here's to drinking herbal tea and using a million tissues!

~Later

Ethel Fantasizes

This is a quickie. I may come back to it later.

----
Ethel had a crush on the weatherman. That is to say, she was enamored of his sharply handsome looks and the way he cheerfully reeled off more information on cloud formations and low pressure systems and general temperature and dew point fluctuations than the average news watching person could ever use. There had also been a special report one time, in which the weatherman had been coaxed into a kilt. That sealed the deal.

She had never met the weatherman, and really she had no intention of doing so. But she liked the figure he cut in his suit as he strode across the stage and gestured at the maps. You see, Ethel spent a lot of her time in front of the television. She was getting older, and she couldn’t get around as well as she used to. She needed more time between bouts of activity, and the couch in front of the television was both comfortable and easy to get out of when she was rested.

Ethel lived alone and she liked the noise the television made in her small apartment. She liked to pretend that she knew the people on the television, that any minute now they’d be ringing the doorbell and coming to dinner. It was lamentable that this would never happen, but such is life. Ethel knew where the line was between reality and fantasy, but it was nice to imagine.

And then the weatherman moved in across the street.

----

I can't make up my mind how pervy Ethel will be. I do think that she's going to dance around trying her best to avoid the weatherman so as not to let reality intrude on her fantasy. Also, I'm not really clear on how old she really is. Maybe she has chronic health problems that are making her aging more difficult. I think she's just this side of housebound, though she's not precisely frail, just has mobility issues.

I must away! I'm pretty impressed I wrote anything, truth be told. I do not feel well.

~Later

I have no attention span.

Someday, this might turn into song lyrics.

---


It was a long time ago, best of friends
Playing make-believe and believing
Nothing would ever end. But you moved away
to a different place and I couldn’t follow you.

High school, still in our small town
Playgrounds long gone, leaves fallen on the ground.
On to college, the memory of you surrounding me
Adrift in the air, I think of summers when we played.

Your fragrance haunts me, years after you’d gone
And I had moved away and moved on.
Walking in my new city, my heart stops at the crosswalk.
It’s turning the corner, your hair, your face.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.

I follow you, for a while, to be sure
High heeled shoes lead my heart to your door.
You go inside and turn on the light, staring out
Before drawing the blinds against the world.

It’s you and the doorbell is right over there
I’d push the button if I thought you’d care.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.


And don’t I still love you?
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know
And you don’t even know I’m there.
Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
Goodbye, good night, girl I no longer know.

----

This was much choppier than I had wanted. I got distracted after (almost) every line I pounded out. It was also a challenge to not have a specific incident as reference for the subject matter; I kind of picked and chose and formed a composite. Some of it is patently untrue. I don't know why, but I was thinking about how strange it is to bump into people, especially when you are somewhere you would not expect that person to be. I like to think I saved the narrator from an awkward and disappointing confrontation here.

I'm hesitant to call these song lyrics. Maybe they're in some sort of hybrid state? I haven't really jumped into full-on lyrics, but I like to think that I've started to shape the poem around the conventional bones of verses and chorus and funky bridge/ending-chorus-that-isn't-quite-the-same. It's hard to do lyrics with no music in mind! Can you tell I was listening to Coldplay as as I puttered? I was going to parody them, but I'm a not-so-secret sucker for their songs. Also, I imagine it would be difficult to make a parody that was more serious than what I might normally do. It would be more of an homage than a pastiche, really. (Frankly, I'd rather do something completely original and serious than a serious take on someone else's stuff.)

And now, a short list.

Possibilities for parodies:
1. Exerciser (Womanizer by the infamous Britney Spears): a song about gyms and fitness and women who engage in these activities.

2. Eighteen Gays (18 Days by Saving Abel): ...doesn't the title cover it all? Possibly about eighteen men the narrator has dated, possibly a song about how he has eighteen gay friends and therefore cannot possibly hate gay people.

3. Something to the tune of Hit Me With Your Best Shot (ala Pat Benatar)

That's all I've got right now.

~Later

Fairy Tales

I may have to come back to this.

----
The Crown Prince of Halidon was searching for a bride, and all the eligible princesses in the land came to call upon the Halidon royal family. The prince was very handsome; he had hair as dark and shining as the wings of a raven, and lively, bright grey eyes, and dimples that showed whenever he flashed his dazzling smile. He was fair-skinned, tall, and strong and the crown sat perfectly upon his brow. In addition to his good looks, he was blessed with a keen intellect, which helped him run the country smoothly even while his father was still king, and he possessed a wonderful sense of humor. His laughter made women--in particular his mother’s ladies-- swoon. In short, Halidon’s Crown Prince was the catch. And all the princesses knew it.

Now, the crown prince’s mother was not such a nice person. She was, at heart, a bit of a schemer, and so she schemed to find the best princess for her only, beloved son. While the prince held court and hunted and did other princely things, she was going over the princesses’ pedigrees. She decided, after weeks of scrutiny, that, lovely as they may be, none of the princesses of their kingdom would do. They were all too common, and therefore a foreign match must be brokered. So the call went out; the king reluctantly dispatched messengers and sent them to all corners of the world.

Meanwhile, the prince had fallen in love. She was the second daughter of a baker and about as far from a comely, elegant, meek princess as it came. She was very strong from kneading and rolling dough--he’d seen her engage the blacksmith in a friendly contest of arm-wrestling. Though she had lost, the prince was convinced it was because she was not yet a full-grown woman: The baker’s second daughter was only sixteen, but she‘d nearly made the blacksmith lose the match in an apoplectic fit.

She had no pedigree to speak of: daughter of a baker who was a son of a baker who was the son of the baker before that, and so on down the line. As to her looks, well, her face was well enough when it wasn’t covered in flour, and she was tall. Her hair was a fiery red and her eyes were kind. But she was soft and round like a dumpling, unlike his willowy suitors. The prince was entranced. When he dared himself to sneak close enough to smell her, she exuded the smell of apple pie and he longed to be close to her every day and feel her strong, plump hand in his.

Unfortunately for the prince, she didn’t know he existed, because the Crown Prince was too chicken to approach her. He spent much of his time around her trying to talk himself into asserting his princely rights, which would allow him to sweep her off her feet and bring her to the castle forever and ever amen. But…he hesitated, and not just on account of her strength. He wanted her to like him, even though he knew plenty of happy couples who hadn’t met before the wedding. The prince needed to be assured of her love for him. After all, the Halidonian people were long-lived and he didn’t want an angry wife for the century or two it might take for her to calm down.

And then the worst thing so far happened. The baker’s second daughter got a cat, and the prince quickly discovered he was allergic. If he were any less manly, he would have lay down and wept. As it was, he spent a lot of time brooding at the edge of the castle moat and sighing at his reflection. If only there were some way he could get closer to his beloved apple dumpling without sneezing up a storm!

------

I realize it is extremely unfinished. I also realize that no one has a name yet. I didn't want to get distracted by a lengthy name-hunt while trying to write the actual narrative. I could look up name meanings for hours before finding ones that are right. Also, I was going to make the girl younger (like 14 tot he prince's approximate not-quite-thirty)...but I realize it'd probably creep people out, however accurate it may be for the quasi medieval setting.

My thoughts on aging in this fantasy world are this: I imagine the people of Halidon visibly age until somewhere around thirty, and then age less noticeably for a few more decades and so on, so it's really a more gradual process on the adult end of things (as opposed to an aging process where a person is a baby/child/teen for a prolonged period of time before being considered an adult.)

I vow to make there be lots more purple prose should I work on this more.

~Later

Book Review the First

Boy, it's been a while since I've done this. Forgive the choppiness, please. I'm still fairly scattered from the holiday extravaganza this past week.

This week's book is “Follow my Leader” by James B. Garfield.



Follow my Leader is the tale of young Jimmy Carter--not to be confused with the former US president--who is a rather ordinary eleven-year-old. He enjoys a good game of baseball played among friends and, in fact, it is on the baseball diamond that Jimmy’s world changes forever. For, you see, the boys are playing on the fifth of July, and one of them finds an unexploded firecracker left over from the previous day’s festivities. The boy lights the firecracker, panics, and throws it in Jimmy’s face, where it explodes, roughly four pages into the narrative. Jimmy is completely, permanently blinded and spends the rest of the book (183 pages) learning to live without his eyesight.

He grows accustomed to moving about in perpetual darkness, graduates to the use of a white cane, learns Braille, and, finally, gets a seeing eye dog. Then, at the end of the book, he and his dog, dubbed “Leader” go on a Boy Scout trip and save some of the boys from being lost in the woods. This brings Jimmy full circle, from his popularity on the baseball team to his low points of isolation and blindness, back up to the status of hero and good man all around, despite the terrible accident’s lasting effects.

This children’s book hails from 1957, the era of “Golly!” and “Gee whiz!” The following conversation is typical for the book.

“‘Are you going to the school for the blind?’ [The woman] asked.
‘Heck, no. I’m going to the guide-dog school. I’m going to get a dog,’ Jimmy said proudly.
The lady turned to a passenger across the aisle. “This young man is going to a guide-dog school and is traveling all by himself. Isn’t that wonderful?’”

Yes, apparently Jimmy’s harrowing story touches the hearts of all the passengers on the bus, as later they all try to buy his lunch for him.

The themes of American perseverance and patriarchal masculinity are almost overpowering throughout the book. Jimmy, who is, just to remind you, eleven, cries about his blindness only twice before shouldering his burden and pushing forward. He tries his best to carry on as if nothing has changed, though he must learn new ways to read, write, and move about in the world. He appears to be more concerned with no longer being able to captain the baseball team and go on Boy Scout trips than anything else. Except, of course, his pride in not asking his sister for help. He is more than willing to walk down the street holding hands with one of his male friends helping to guide him, but goodness forbid his sister do anything more than bring him cookies and lemonade.

I found this book to be so sentimental and cheesy that it was hard to read. Also, the book was full of randomly placed exposition about various blindness-related topics, which really broke up the narrative. That being said, this was an excellent children’s version of a pulp fiction novel. The kitsch value is almost immeasurable. Notice on the cover the stylish button-down and sweater-vest combo our hero is wearing. And, if he weren’t blind, those glasses wouldn’t be out of place on a greaser. (Seriously, just imagine Jimmy wearing a black leather jacket.)

I didn’t really care for this book, though my mother claims it was her favorite as a child. Being such a product of its times, it is difficult for a person not from that era to read. The values and mores and norms of society had made such radical changes that reading this book was a bit like digging through the contents of a time capsule. (Plus, you know, it’s always a pet peeve of mine when the female characters are second fiddles. Jimmy is the main character, I know, but there’s no female lead character to balance it out.)


Overall ranking: C. For all its faults, it was entertaining to watch Jimmy going along until achieved his ultimate goal of getting a guide dog. The scout trip at the end was kind of ridiculous and over the top.

Groundhogs!

...I'm not sure where this came from. It's kind of insane.

---
They say the town of Kilcastle--current population 2301--was saved by a pair of groundhogs in the days of its founding. The story goes like this:

Back when the settlers were sweeping west in a grand motion to conquer all they saw, they moved into a nice, grassy valley with a river, called the Little Grass Snake, running on its western edge. There was plenty of game to hunt, and fish practically leapt into the boats. There was more than enough timber to go around , and so the settlers built themselves a little town comfortably close to the edge of the river.

The valley was also home to a lot of groundhogs. All the construction and increasing hubbub of human habitation drove most of them out of the town proper, but two stubborn groundhogs refused to be scared off. They maintained a series of tunnels beneath Maddock Barrow’s general store. And, though he tried with poison and shotguns and all manner of clever traps, he could not get rid of them. Why, sometimes this pair of groundhogs had the nerve to enter and exit the building through the main entrance intended for human customers! Eventually, Barrow gritted his teeth and admitted that the groundhogs did his stock no harm and he put up with them.

In fact, the groundhogs became a bit of an attraction. All the children came to see the “tame” gophers and, generally speaking, those with a bit of pocket money might purchase a small candy upon which they feasted while waiting for the gophers to appear. In time, the children named the gophers Mariachi and Pip.

Pip was the female--or at least, the one they presumed was female, given groundhogs tend to look alike. And she was named Pip because she would “pip” her head around the corners of the long display cases before venturing forth across the open floor of the store. Mariachi received his name for the unusually shaped patch of fur on his side; if you squinted, it looked like the sombreros the children had seen on a traveling band of musicians. None of those musicians had spoken a word of English, but Mariachi had cocked his little head at their speech, and so Mariachi was christened.

As the little town grew and prospered, Pip and Mariachi enjoyed a celebrity status among the newcomers. Of course, there were some who did not like the gophers being in the general store. These dissenters soon discovered that the store could do without their patronage, but that they could not do without the store’s wares.

During one spring, the rains were unusually hard. But the river did not overflow its banks. The land could still be farmed. It was dreary with so much rain, and the well-traveled paths had mud deep enough to suck the boots right off a grown man, but nothing truly awful was happening from all the water. So the inhabitants of Kilcastle shrugged it off as best they could and carried on.

But then, one night at the end of spring, Maddock Barrow, proprietor of Barrow’s General Store, was wakened in his bed on the second floor above the store by an unearthly screeching. He ran down the stairs, nightgown flapping, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. He rubbed his eyes when he saw the pair of groundhogs whistling ear-piercing notes and scurrying away from the stairs that led to the storage cellar. Hr had never seen them behave like this before. What was going on?

“Now Mariachi, Pip,” he said. “I’m going to take a look downstairs, see what you’re making a fuss over.”

And he peered down into the cellar and was shocked. The whole place was flooding! Barrow’s first thought was for his stock down there, but then he thought of his neighbors. Were they flooded too? He dashed outside to try and figure it out.

A huge wash of water filled the street. Maddock Barrow put on his gum boots and followed the water up the street toward the river and there, he saw that several huge trees had come down from upriver and were diverting the flow of the water right into their little town! Barrow ran door to door, pounding and yelling. Soon the whole population was roused. The women and children gathered a few belongings as quickly as they could and headed for higher ground. The men worked hard; one group worked at digging ditches to help direct the water away from the homes, and another group worked together to try and move the blockage. They also sent their fastest horses and the best riders among the young boys to the neighboring towns for help and as warning.

Three days later, the crisis was over. The trees had been moved, as many homes as possible had been saved, and everyone was safe and dry with roofs over their heads and food to eat. The townsfolk tried to hail Barrow as their savior, but he was modest. Mariachi and Pip were the ones to thank. They were the ones who had saved the town. And so the gophers were treated like kings for the rest of the days of their lives, and no one ever again complained about gophers in the general store.

Over time, the townspeople erected a statue, and groundhogs became incorporated into many store signs. The town of Kilcastle has held a celebration in honor of the valiant groundhogs ach year on the anniversary of the eve of the flood. They even have a play, “Mariachi and Pip Save Kilcastle,” put on annually. But, though this is the official name of the dramatic work, every child of Kilcastle knows that it is, really, truly called“Mariachi and Pip Save the World.”

-----

I know it was kind of rushed but, frankly, I want to go to bed. At least I got the idea out there, right? I suppose it shows that I've been reading several books that take place in the days of the Wild West lately. But also, it's kind of cool to think about all the weird things that crop up in the histories of towns.

~Later

Don't panic! (It's just a parody.)

I wish I could rightfully blame this on drunkenness, but the truth is I've been mulling this one over for a while. Rated L for a bit of language...but mostly it's just kind of funny.

---
"Freeballin'" (to the tune of "Free Falling" by Tom Petty.)



It’s a hard life, living on my own,
Doing all the chores momma used to do.
Maybe someday I’ll be good at cleaning,
But ‘til then I may be screwed.

I did laundry ‘bout three weeks ago.
Do the dishes only when they gather ants.
Bedroom floor is covered in beer cans.
And today I don’t have no underpants

And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!

I’m rushing, trying to get to work:
Can’t believe it’s already half past eight.
I can’t find any boxers or briefs.
I’ll have to go commando or be late!

And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!

Been a long day, in my cubicle at work,
Eight hours (plus lunch) in khakis that chafe.
Feels so good to get home and strip down,
I’ll never make that same mistake!

And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!

Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!

Free-ballin’!
I’m free, free-ballin’!
----

...I can't believe I did that. Well, no, I can. It was slightly more challenging to do than I had anticipated, but certainly not as difficult as most structured forms of poetry I've tried.

I love that I have the right to parody and not go to jail for it.

~Later

Food as sex?

Ugh. This is what I get for reading fanfics and being hungry at the same time.

----
The reverse of the skin caught on her tongue, rough as it slid down her throat. The fragrance in her nose was delicate and floral and warm and sweet. Juice dripped down her chin and she chased it with a finger. The flesh was tender, falling apart in mellow slickness as soon as she touched her teeth to it. She worked her lips around it and sucked it into her mouth: the fruit slid off the core. She licked her fingers and swallowed the mouthfuls of juice, then closed her eyes and exhaled through open lips and a dropped jaw. Pear scented air circulated through her throat and mouth and up into her nose. It was ecstatic. She chewed the pear down to the soft fibers of its core, no more than a few strands holding the stem to the remainders of the blossom. She licked the leftovers and her fingers once more before rising to wash her hands and face.
---

Here I am, sitting around and fantasizing about how the skin of a pear feels when you eat it. I don't know if I'm the only person who exhales through the mouth in order to better taste a food, but let me tell you, it's kind of a strange habit to try and articulate on paper. I seem to remember a Carver story where a couple uses the eating of food as a substitute for sex. I suppose this snippet is along those lines, except...the eating of food is pleasurable in itself? I mean that the actual physical sensations and actions involved in eating are pleasurable, I guess.

Heh. I think I just made some food porn. Not particularly demanding, but I did have trouble varying the length of my sentences. I notice a tendency to get stuck writing heaps of medium-length ones, and then when I go through them I groan because they all read like clunkers.

~Later

Storytime!

The fruits of my labors!

---
While bending over to heft a ten pound bag of sugar into her grocery cart, Sarah had a wardrobe malfunction. Her beautiful, wonderful, perfect right breast squeezed out of her bra and out of the top of her shirt. She dropped the sugar and it exploded over the floor.

“Oh shit,” she said.

She blushed terribly as she tried, frantically, to stuff herself back into her shirt before anyone saw. Goddamn sugar for goddamn holiday cookies for the goddamn holidays. Why the hell was it on the bottom shelf, anyway?

“Hello there.”

Goddamnit. Sarah yanked the edges of her neckline together. Sugar ground into the skin of her hands and into the cashmere. Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit. She looked up, briefly. She froze.

Whoever he was, he was cute.

“You look like you need a hand,” he said.

Sarah stared at him. Whoever he was, he was cute, a twist on the tall, dark and handsome. He had bright green eyes, dark hair, and a seasonal sweater, very Fair Isles.

“Aww crap, that came out wrong. Sorry,” he said.

His mouth twisted into a smile. He had dimples, she noted. Dimples in his square, classically handsome face. This was so bad.

“Can I offer you my coat and a walk to the restroom?”

He held up the coat in question. It was long and large and probably and excellent cover for her mishap.
Sarah nodded and tried to force the lump in her throat back with a smile of her own. It didn’t go so well, judging from the concern suddenly visible on his face. She concentrated on not crying. He draped the coat over her shoulders and she sniffled. When he placed his basket into her cart and then made to steer the cart, Sarah’s eyes watered.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Let’s get you to the restroom, yeah?”

And suddenly, everything was simultaneously so much worse and better than it had been. Sarah and Dimples crunched through the sugar in formation. She stuck it out as everyone within eyesight stared at them, no doubt due to her cart being the loudest, squeakiest cart in the entire store. She put up with it, still red with embarrassment. Dimples was the nicest man on the planet. He was superhumanly nice…and he’d seen her beautiful, beautiful goddamn breast in the baking aisle. Sarah wanted to kill whoever had made her scoop-neck sweater. She vowed never to wear it again as they approached the customer service desk.

“I’ll wait here for you,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after your cart.”

Sarah fled to the bathroom. She locked herself into a stall and slid, reluctantly, out of his coat. His cologne made her mouth water and the rest of her feel warm. She fixed her bra and sweater and, all too late, realized she was feeling warmth that had nothing to do with either the burning of embarrassment or the scent of his cologne. She unlocked the stall and looked in the mirror. And then she looked down at the coat in her hands.

“No, no, no,” she said. “This can’t be happening.”

She wetted down a paper towel and wiped ineffectually at the hives raising on her skin. The cool water felt nice, but it wasn’t doing a damn thing to bring down the swellings. She was allergic to wool and that coat that Dimples had offered was a hundred percent boiled wool. At least it wasn’t going to kill her…but it was really the icing on the cake.

“Well hell,” she said, and began to cry. Sarah bawled and drew great heaving breaths that shuddered into more sobs. Her face got all red and her nose dripped and she felt horrible. She bit the inside of her cheek and, slowly, calmed down. She washed her face with cold water and patted dry with more paper towels. She blew her nose.

Sarah steeled herself and left the bathroom at a forced march. She pasted a smile onto her face and greeted Dimples.

“Thank you for the coat,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

She handed the coat back and noted that her palms were getting itchy now too.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Are you all right? You looked…different before.”

Sarah flushed as he looked her over. No doubt the hives were looking worse. Oh crap. Before for him was sugar-bag before. Crap crap crappity crap crap crap.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’d like my cart back now, please, so I can pretend none of this ever happened.”

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean…it’s just…”

Dimples looked uncomfortable. Good. Sarah was so beyond uncomfortable right now. She took the handle of the cart and tried to pull it away, but he was still holding onto it.

He stuck out his hand. Sarah stared at it like it was roadkill.

“My name is Scott,” he said. “Scott Garland.”

“Seriously?” she said. “Garland?”

Sarah’s brain felt like it was going to explode and she itched at her hives without thinking. Scott dropped his hand to his side.

“Yeah,” he said. A little wrinkle formed between his eyebrows.

“It’s so…festive,” Sarah said.

“You mean awful,” he said. “Or unfortunate?”

“That too,” said Sarah. “Well, uh, I’m Sarah.”

She held out her hand, which was currently red and itchy as all get out. Scott blinked at her and the corners of his mouth lifted.

“Sarah,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

He shook her hand.

“I’m allergic to wool,” she blurted. “But really it was so nice of you and I didn’t notice at first.”

Comprehension took over his expression. And then he threw back his head and laughed.
“I am so, so sorry,” he said. “I really was trying to help.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said.

And, suddenly, it was, despite the itchiness and mortal embarrassment and the sugar that crunched in the tread of her shoes.

“This whole thing, it’s just been unbelievable,” she said.

Scott nodded.

“Not how I imagined my grocery shopping would go,” he said.

Sarah snorted.

“Me either.”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s not every day I find a damsel in distress in with the flour.”

And then he froze and looked at her before feigning nonchalance. Sarah blushed again, but it wasn’t so bad.

“Believe me, I’d rather have skipped that part and gone straight to introducing myself,” she said. “Or maybe I would have just given you the eye if we happened to bump into each other.”

Scott laughed again, and Sarah fell a little bit in love with his nice, white, even teeth and the way his neck came out of the collar of his sweater.

“Well, I’ve got to get going,” she said. “Cookies to bake and all that. But thank you again.”

Scott let go of the cart.

“Take care,” he said.

“You too.”

And with that, Sarah wheeled away from the nicest guy in the world, hoping she would never see him again, even if he was handsome and funny to boot.

---

I thought this was both funny and slightly painful...but mostly funny. I know there's probably no man on earth this considerate, but that's the good part about fiction. I swear I was going to write more and have even more stuff go wrong for Sarah, but I'm just too darn tired.

~Later

Excerpts

I'm not putting the whole free-write up here. Suffice it to say that I'm feeling down again.

---
I’m pretending she doesn’t exist
even though everything I do reminds me.
Missing people leave
Ragged holes in the fabric of our space and time
Seen only at night when between the stars grows
Wider and darker than we remember.

The abrupt leavings that tear through us
Leave our united fronts asunder.
I hated her and she didn’t care.
I loved her and it wasn’t enough.
I want to save her
When she is gone, gone, gone.

Pick pick pick pick at the unseen wound
Turn it over and over, unable to decipher its shape
I am heartbroken.
Rejected: it wasn’t me
She chose to leave and not say goodbye.

If I could I’d excise this love
Weigh it, measure it
Box it up and throw it out.
She doesn’t deserve it, wouldn’t keep it
And I have no one else to take it.
---

Ugh. I wish I could sleep all this crap away, but I even dream about her.

~Later

Further Arctic Adventures...now with less Arctic!

...this whole thing makes me think. Maybe I'll try for a different story tomorrow?

---
Eventually, the unicorn was placed in a laboratory, where an international group of scientists puzzled over it. They marveled over its perfect preservation and were shocked to find that, despite its being frozen for untold eons, no cellular decay had occurred: its cells were neither blemished by time nor burst from the freezing temperatures. And so they took the unicorn off the mortuary table and lowered it into a vat of restorative liquid. They hooked it up to a ventilator and a machine that mimicked the function of its heart. The scientists studied it.

The scientists took scrapings of its horn and hooves. They took hairs from the tail and mane, swabbed the mouth for remnants of saliva. They drew blood samples and, with a very fine hypodermic needle, took a portion of the contents of its tear ducts.

The tests on all these materials were contradictory and inconclusive. Depending on who looked under the microscope, they were either something unlike any other earthly result, or they pointed to an exceptionally average horse. The blood samples were poison one day and an effective cure for every disease the scientists had on hand the next. The hoof scrapings were pure silver and lighter than air; they were heavier and duller than lead, giving off no reflection at all. The horn…well, four scientists in a row quit after handling it. Of those four, one became a monk and devoted his life to God. Another was soon arrested for a series of brutal murders. The other two were never heard from again, though it was rumored that they had both ended up in asylums. Shortly after, the scientists were forbidden direct contact with the samples. But the experiments continued.

After the fourth scientist had quit, Stephen St. Gradie started having strange dreams. He dreamed of the arctic, of the glacier where he’d found the unicorn. Even in his dream he knew, logically, that the entire area had been excavated and nothing else had been found. But, whenever he closed his eyes, he saw it as it had been. But everything was wrong and twisted, as was the wont of dreams. The sun shone hot, hotter, blistering until the ice melted into strange shapes. The ice fields, as far as he could see, bloomed with strange flowers and plants made of ice. His tent transformed into a pile of stones and the unicorn came bursting out of it, its steps shattering the rocks into spalls of ice. St Gradie was afraid, and he ran, he always ran from it. He ran until he tripped and fell, and, just as the unicorn bore down on him and would have crushed him with its hooves, he forced himself awake.

Stephen St. Gradie dreamt the same sort of dream over and over. Always the unicorn pursued him, and always he ran, waking just before it could harm him. His sleep became so poor that he visited a physician. The doctor prescribed a mild sedative to help him sleep, and for a time it worked. But then, it happened.

He was sprinting across the strange, glittering fields of flowers, and the sun was hot on him, and he could feel the unicorn’s breath on his back. A vine reared up in front of him, too fast, and he tripped and fell. St Gradie scrabbled on the ground, trying to get up, to get away, to get out, to wake from this nightmare. The unicorn stood over him, pawed at his legs with its shining hooves. It lowered its horn, snorted, and pressed forward. Stephen was trapped against a wall of ice. He couldn’t move; the ice-vines held him fast. He gasped for breath, sweat rolling down his face. The unicorn’s horn was directly in front of his face, and the hot breath from its nostrils washed over him. The tip of the horn pressed against St Gradie’s eye, and he did not move for fear of losing the eye.

And then, a voice.

“I’m sorry.”

And the strange logic of the dream told him it was the unicorn speaking.

“Sorry?” said Stephen. “For what?”

“For this,” said the unicorn. And it pressed forward with its horn and St Gradie was blinded in the blink of an excruciatingly slow eye.

He woke screaming and clawing at his face. The maid came running and, when she saw the state he was in, sent for the doctor. The doctor sedated St Gradie and had the maid lay him back into bed. The doctor bandaged the furrows Stephen had dug into his flesh.

St Gradie dropped back into the field of ice, pierced by that horn and seared by the pain. But, though it hurt terribly and he could not see, he came to a realization. The unicorn was feeding itself through its horn and his eye into somewhere beyond. But it didn’t make any sense, even in the dream. Why would the unicorn need to go somewhere? Why him? Where was it going? And then it was gone.

He opened his eyes and the field of icy flowers was gone. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen and his eye was once again whole. The tent was just as it had been, the ice with its slightly pocked surface stretching for miles in front of him. St Gradie peered into the tent. His two assistants were asleep, and the kerosene stove glowed with warmth. His bedroll waited for him, laid out in the heat cast by the stove, and he was suddenly unbearably sleepy. So he lay down, parka, boots, and all, and slept.

When Stephen St. Gradie woke from his sleep, the maid leapt out of her chair and ran from the room. He yawned. He felt remarkably refreshed, like he’d slept for years. Then a knock came on his bedroom door.

“Yes?” he said. “Come in.”

It was the doctor. He came in and sat in the chair at the side of the bed.

“How are you feeling?” said the doctor. “You gave us a nasty scare last night.”

“Ah yes, well,” said St Gradie. “Had a terrible nightmare you know. Just awful.”

The doctor hmmed into his beard.

“Well, anyway, I’ve fixed up your face where it got scratched,” said the doctor. “I recommend you get some more rest. We’ll talk more in a few days, how’s that sound?”

He stood again.

“All right,” said St. Gradie. “Sorry to be such a bother. I’m afraid my maid can be a bit flighty.”

“Nothing to worry about,” said the doctor. “Better safe than sorry, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

The doctor left the room. Stephen St. Gradie laid his head back against the pillows. Later. He’d rest and think about the dreams later. For now, though, he was ready to tackle the bathtub. He rang for the maid. It was going to be a good day. He could feel it.

----

Can you tell I don't approve of testing on animals?

More seriously, I tried my best to tone down the 'science is evil' mood that kept cropping up when I was thinking it over. I'm also considering the possibility of zombie unicorns. As to the weirdness of the samples' test results, I suppose I did a bad job of conveying the thought that maybe, just maybe, something can be all encompassing and nothing at the same time. (No, the unicorn isn't God. I'm not pulling an Aslan, I promise. I just think this unicorn is an extraordinary sort of creature.)

In other news, I'm in the process of selecting a book for the book review. I'm kind of busy with holiday preparations right now, so I haven't felt together enough to do a lot of reading beyond fluffy "romance" novels. I do love me some purple prose! But...is it worthy of reviewing?

~Later

Arctic Adventures part one?

Apologies! I was out of town for a couple days and was somewhere with no computer/internet access. But I have a little freewrite for today, so that's something. I may do more on this same topic...

---
On the last day of Stephen St. Gradie’s fifth Arctic expedition, his findings vaulted him from obscurity to worldwide fame. Had he found nothing on his dig, he would have retired and gone down as an eccentric has-been. As it was, however, he suddenly found himself the toast of the natural history and zoological science societies. For you see, Stephen St. Gradie had found something quite unexpected, and it all started with something small.

St. Gradie had been a solid (if unexciting) explorer in his day, looking for, largely, whatever hadn’t yet been seen and documented. The problem was that there were a lot of other, better explorers already ahead of him. He found himself constantly in second place. On the upside, he had become an excellent cartographer and many remote regions of jungles and mountains were mapped under his exacting eye. But really, what Stephen wanted, what any explorer wanted, was to discover something for himself.

In the last decade of his public career, St. Gradie became convinced that the two parts of the world that had not been explored to death were the bottom of the sea and the treacherous frozen polar caps. Since he was, at heart, a man devoted to the land (and since he had no feasible way to carry air down to the sea floor) he decided the poles were his destiny. He spent years preparing for the expedition: finding men to go with him, gear and supplies that would hold up to the extreme temperatures, a ship that would take them as far as they could go on the route he mapped.

The first expedition ended nearly before it started; their ship could not maneuver between the ice floes, and they spent so long getting the ship free that they had to turn back before they starved to death. As it was, St. Gradie spent months recovering, and the sensation in his hands and feet never fully returned. He was lucky, though, considering most of his crew lost fingers and toes to the cold.

The second expedition took even longer to organize. Stephen had lost a lot of credibility with the disastrous first attempt, and he had to make certain financial adjustments when one of his sponsors backed out. Still, there were many who did believe in him and did believe that he would find something of value in that frozen wasteland. St. Gradie’s second expedition turned up nothing. There had been massive storms, one after another, and they had been quite unable to leave their base camp for any length of time that might facilitate great discoveries. Still, on one of the very few clear days, St. Gradie did learn something valuable: there was another, wider break in the ice that went much further north.

The third expedition cost him all but one of his sponsors. It too, turned up nothing but ice and snow and frostbitten extremities, despite using the new route successfully. He didn’t see so much as a tree branch in the month he spent camped atop the ice.

St. Gradie’s fourth expedition was much smaller and was completely funded through his own money. By this time, the public eye held him as an ice-mad lunatic. Still, no one made to stop him when he pushed off and was gone for, all told, six months. He came back and, almost immediately, began to arrange his fifth and final journey.

On the fifth expedition, he found something amazing frozen in the ice. He and his two assistants had made camp some eight miles east from the ship‘s landing. They had been camped in the same spot for three weeks. When the weather was clear, in the beginning, they had ventured forth to explore the glaciers and crevasses and ice fields. Then, unseasonable storms rolled in, and they were forced to spend their time inside the large base-camp tent, making use of its kerosene heater, or otherwise they would freeze to death. The tent began to settle into the ground, in a combination of increased foot traffic of its floor, and the heat of the living space slowly melting the ice underneath it.

One day, St. Gradie noticed a lump in the ground next to the stove. He thought almost nothing of it; the icy ground was never even. This protrusion simply was in a spot that made each of his assistants stub their toes and trip while tending the fire. It was when he himself tripped over it that he took exception to it. He ordered that, as soon as the weather broke, they were to move the tent to more desirable ground.

Eventually, the weather cleared. But, as his luck was wont to run to the bad, it broke the afternoon before they were scheduled to start back to the ship. There was no sense in moving the tent for one more night.

The fateful morning dawned clear and cold. The assistants hurried to pack everything up again. They crated the stove and other essentials and moved all the luggage out of the tent. Then, they took down the tent as St. Gradie supervised. And then, while folding the ground cloth, one of the assistants tripped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Must be a rock.”

The assistant made to get up.

But St. Gradie’s keen sense of orientation told him something important: it was the same spot where the stove had been, the same spot that had been the cause of so many bruises and stubbed toes and barked shins.

“Don’t move a muscle,” he said to the assistants.

And, ever so carefully, he peeled the cloth off the ice. The assistant on the ground shifted his hands when asked, and eventually he was walked backward off the tent. St. Gradie knelt and examined the rock.

“It’s not a rock,” he said. “Is the teakettle still warm?”

He shoved the second assistant, who fetched the kettle. St. Gradie painstakingly poured the warm water over the ice while the assistants hovered.

The assistant who had fallen snorted.

“It’s just a narwhal,” he said.

St. Gradie got as close as he could to the tiny bit of horn and he studied it for long minutes. Then, finally, he stood. He brushed the ice off his knees.

“You,” he said. He pointed to the second assistant. “Get out my tools and heat some more water, quickly!”

“And you,” he said to the first. “You go to the ship as fast as you can and tell them to bring a sledge.”

“But it’s just a narwhal!”

“It most certainly is not,” said St. Gradie. “And I’ll thank you not to scoff at this major discovery! Now run!”

St. Gradie spent nearly a week extra in the arctic. He and his people had nearly starved to death; they lost two crew members to exhaustion. But it was worth it, in the end. St. Gradie returned home with a unicorn. It was frozen in a block of ice, but it was perfectly, exquisitely preserved. And it was most definitely a unicorn. The only question was: what would become of it?
----

Unicorns are awesome. Sometimes I find it interesting to think about what it might have been like at certain times in history, and the days of ship voyage and discovering new lands and things is definitely one of the most interesting ones, I think! There's also plenty of room for me to kind of pick and choose and go in a steampunk sort of direction. I'm really taken with the potential for weird details. I mean, come on. A frozen unicorn plonked down into a land of sci-fi Victorian technologies? It could be very cool.

I remember this book I read a long time ago-- "The Winter of the White Seal" or something similar. Anyway, it's about this ship full of whalers or sealers headed towards one of the poles, and they get blown off course and everyone dies except one man. He lives alone on a terrible little beach backed by a glacier for a really long time. His only companion is a seal that he half-tames...and then tries to kill when he gets really desperate. So then eventually the man takes himself out onto the glacier to die, and he falls through a crevasse/tunnel in the ice, and ends up on a much more habitable beach and, I believe, he eventually gets rescued.

That was a serious digression. Sorry. My point is that adventuring and stuff is very cool, provided you can suspend your disbelief enough to not focus on the lack of technologies at the time. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't seem like a big deal now (like, say, the Oregon trail) but it was a huge thing to do back in the day.

Consider this adventure story a two-parter. I've not yet written enough of the story to lay down my original inspirational scenes. This prologue, if you will, is just catch-up so I won't be scratching my head later trying to figure out how I got to where I'm going.

Also, I am not satisfied with the adventurer's name. I may have to re-spell it or something.

~Later

The Apocalypse?

...This quickie comes from me being really, really tired and dragging all day.

---

At first, Deliah was sure it was her imagination. The days were all the same; that’s how a person could tell time, because time did not change and days were the same length each time, twenty-four hours in a day and all that.

But then things got a little strange. Deliah passed it off as a dying battery when her watch’s second hand seemed to hitch every few seconds. She got the battery changed and didn’t think of it again until she noticed the clock in her office. It didn’t hitch so much as it paused as it ticked off the seconds. It ran on electricity. Deliah made a complaint to the office manager and the clock was replaced. The replacement did the same thing.

Next, the strangeness affected the timers that ran the cable television stations. A half-hour program would end and then, for a minute or two, blank tapes ran before the next program came on. But, as each day passed, the blank spaces grew longer and longer. Battery and electric clocks continued to slow down.

And then the atomic clocks went bad. The government tried to keep it quiet, tried to say it was merely an unforeseen quirk of the clock’s prolonged exposure to radioactive subatomic particles. So they built new clocks, and set them up in a grand televised special, broadcast live over every channel during one of the now-half-hour long gaps. The new clocks didn’t work right either. It was then that the nation decided to panic. Deliah sat on her couch in shock. Then, she picked up the remote and clicked through until she finally found one station that was, blissfully, clock-free. She sat in the darkness with the blank screen.

The scientists, after weeks and months of study, determined that time was, in fact, slowing down. World leaders all advised their people to try to keep going as normally as possible. Deliah found it impossible to ignore that a day, once twenty-four hours, was now taking up thirty-six. She found it interminable that she now spent twelve hours in the office each day. Her shower took forty-five minutes to complete each morning. Her commute warped from a ten minute walk to fifteen. She supposed there was an upside: sleeping and coffee breaks and really good movies all lasted longer now.

To cope with this, businesses switched from an hourly pay rate to a “pay for the day” scale: Deliah’s paycheck covered eight Old Hours’ worth of money, despite each ‘hour’ now being half again as lengthy. It was bullcrap, but if they kept going by Old Hours, they’d all go broke and everyone would be unemployed.

The only people with real job security were the scientists working on a solution to the problem. For months, they labored on it. Periodic news coverage showed the state of things to be grim, but there was always a new theory to test, new equations to solve.

Finally, after nearly a year--and Deliah was no longer sure exactly how long that year had been--the world leaders again appeared on television during one of the blank spots. It was time, they said, to face facts. The days were getting longer and longer, and they would never stop growing. There would come a time, not too far in the future, where the day would literally never end. At least, not for humans. At this time, the scientists explained, the day would stretch out so long that, by the time it ended, all the humans would be dead. The Last Day, it was cleverly coined. And they expected that Last Day to come…well…next Thursday.

Rioting broke out across the globe. Desperate, the humans tried to start a wave of babies to stretch out further than this strange ripple of slow time. But it didn’t work, because, no matter how strange it was, it was less than a week until Thursday, and babies take nine months. It simply wasn’t possible. Time was relentless and inexorable. Things calmed down in the interim and humans tried their best to go about like normal.

And then, the Last Day came. Deliah got dressed for work as always. A thought occurred to her. she stopped herself at the door. She took off her business suit and stepped out of her shoes. She put her pajamas back on and crawled into bed. And then, for the first time in her life, Deliah called in sick.


----

Wouldn't calling in sick really be the best way to deal with it? I know this was hasty and rushed (irony factor!) but I think I kind of got the concept across. I'm too sleepy to do any more with it tonight, at least.

~Later

I've been busy today. I almost forgot to A. do a freewrite and B. post it. I'm very, very tired now.


----

Magwyn climbed the stairs. The treads cracked like gunshots each time she put a foot down, wood and ice and cold all under the frozen sky. It was a stupid idea, whoever had decided that the middle of January was the best time to dismantle the tower’s indoor staircase. These outside ones were steep and dangerous in the middle of the summer, let alone when they were covered in sheer ice. If she were lucky, there would be enough bare tread, protected by the bulk of the tower, for her to put down the toe of her boot.

She reached the landing that marked the halfway point. Magwyn kept a hand anchored to the railing as she caught her breath. The land spread white and sparkling and soft before her. It was beautiful but deeply, deeply frozen. If it had been anywhere near the freezing point, all the snow and ice would have melted into shapelessness by now. As it was, the steady winter winds had carved fantastic sculptures through snow banks and bushes. Even the great waterfall, visible to the west, was solid, a vast, twisted hulk of ice dominating the landscape.

Shaking herself, Magwyn forced her legs to bend again and continue to the top. Soon she was scraping her feet against the bottom of the doorframe. She knocked twice on the door and let herself in. She unlaced her boots and left them beside the door. Magwyn fitted her feet into a pair of slippers. She draped her coat and mittens on the back of a nearby chair.

“Uncle Irving?” she said.

Magwyn looked around the room. A fireplace radiated heat to her right and a tiny kitchen to her left gave way to a living space cum workshop, taking up nearly the entire circumference of the tower. A drafting table overflowed with papers. A basket of smooth river rocks shared quarters with several dismembered umbrellas. Pieces of his prized fungus collection had fallen off the walls and were currently being batted about by a large white cat, who stepped neatly around what appeared to be about a half a bushel of walnuts. Clean, though wrinkled, laundry hung from the railings that lead to the inner stairs. Magwyn shook her head. She crossed the room and started pulling it down. She stubbed her toe on a large ump of ore that had been holding the laundry in place, and so she kicked it again out of pique.

“Uncle Irving, I’m not your maid,” she said. “Come on! You promised you’d have time today!”

A metallic clanging from above had Magwyn ducking out of instinct. A ladder with brass fittings descended from the ceiling, stiffly unfolding. The feet of the ladder slid into two grooves in the floor. Down came Irving, looking as rumpled as ever.

“My dear Magwyn,” he said. “Of course I have time for you!”

He pulled her into a hug, laundry and all.

“Put that down,” he said. “And come up to the loft with me. I have something interesting to show you.”

“It’s not something on the telescope, is it?” said Magwyn. “You had me looking in it all night, the last time I was here, and I couldn’t see right for a week!”

Nonetheless, she let Uncle Irving lead her up the ladder.

“But those meteor showers were extraordinary,” he said. “And besides, it’s daytime. Very hard to see the stars when our sun is in the way.”

They got to the top of the ladder into a second, smaller workspace. Baskets full of pieces of metal filled most of the space: gears, rods, plates, tubes, and wires all crowded around a desk. Something lumpy, covered by a piece of cloth, lay on the worktable. The sun, by way of a narrow skylight, sliced into the clutter and highlighted all the dust. Magwyn sneezed.

“Close you eyes and hold out your hands,” said Irving.
She rolled her eyes.

“Is all this necessary?” she said. “Can’t we just play a game of chess or something?”

Magwyn loathed chess.

“Just do it,” said her uncle. “I promise you’ll like it!”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

Something remarkably heavy landed in her hands, and she nearly dropped it. He could have warned her it was heavy, but no. Just like that time when she was six and he hadn’t warned her about the etching acids. Or when she was nine and he’d enlisted her help in finding and carrying a long-dead deer home. She’d smelled for a week.

“Tada,” he said. “Just wind the key in the back.”

Magwyn opened her eyes and sucked in a breath of air. It was a cat. A very real looking cat. She wound the key and, to her amazement, it opened its eyes and uncurled itself from its sitting position. She set it down on the floor and it began to walk around. He’d fashioned a clockwork cat. She could see into its gears as it walked around and waved its tail, then took off after a lone housefly. Copper and silver and brass and other metals she didn’t know all gleamed in its every movement.

“How did you do it?” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I had to make special alloys. But it’s not perfect. It needs to be wound every couple days. And it needs to stay warm.”

“Warm?” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been better to make it in the summer, then?”


----

Vaguely middle-ages, yes. Magical, possibly. It's interesting to think about a mechanical cat, isn't it? Yes, there are simulated cats out there today, but that's all made possible with computer chips. It boggles my mind to think about non-computerized mechanical things. Ugh. All my sentences are becoming the same boring length.

~Later

Warning: May Contain Lesbians Invisible to the Naked Eye

Sometimes I cannot adequately convey my frustrations. Also, this poem is in rough shape. It may not be done. I can't rightly tell yet.

---
Invisible lesbians
Come from invisible isles
Have invisible names
Forgettable haircuts, paper coffee cups
Sedate sedans and understated smiles.

They’re there at the corner of your eye:
If you look for them in the street.
But face them straight on and they disappear
Away on shoes with quiet heels:
Unremarkable size eight feet.

The books about them are elusive:
In libraries they move from shelf to shelf
In stores they cower behind the books of
Dead white men. Those stories bore me, passing over
All the things a woman might have said or felt.

The world needs more lesbians: not invisible
Not hidden out of sight and out of mind
Not written out of fiction, not blotted out of scripts
But there and real. High budget. No nonsense, just
Human and woman and easy to find.
---

This poem really stems from three things: one, I am in a mood for lesbians. I want to read books and watch movies and look at comics that are all about women being together (and apart.) Two: I could not find a good film to watch tonight. Three: general frustration at the continued domination and exclusion of women's writing. (I'm thinking specifically of some short story collections that were completely composed of either Dead White Men's work or just plain men's stories, all on topics which women frequently, successfully, and eloquently write.)

I suppose it's my twisty sense of feminism speaking out. It's bothersome to want things to be available that are so (apparently) elusive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of lesbian material for me to consume, but I can't find it. And my point is kind of that it shouldn't be this hard to find in the first place. Accurate or not, I get the feeling that what I'm looking for is a fringe element of a subculture, which would make it an even smaller pool of availability than if I were just looking for some man-on-man stuff.

Ugh. Cultural stuff is weird. There's so much of it that I just don't understand, only so much of it that is accessible to me. This is why I shall become a hermit and live in a shack in the woods and commune with squirrels.

~Later

Assumptions

What with shoveling all the snow yesterday dumped on my stairs, I was worried I would be too tired to do a free-write. I should have known better.

-----
Fifty pound dog kibble sack: empty.
Army surplus backpack: full of this and that.
Bud Light can: forty but now twenty after a long sit down

In the downtown Laundromat,
waiting for clean clothes in out of the cold.
Two feet of snow dropped yesterday and the roads
Aren’t easy walking between the water and the cars.

Slumped in a chair
Back to the windows, wet boots stuck out
under the hot air vent, it’s the best sort of wind that blows.

It’s a hard day’s walking ahead, he knows,
slipping through drifts and over-the-boot-tops slush, unplowed
Sidewalks stretching ahead and behind.

Wind whips the powerlines so much the poles move
As the washer washes and the dryers tumble: twenty four hours
open no matter the weather. It’s always safe and dry.

Doing the load of laundry and hoping the sun will get a little warmer
By the time the laundry dries he’ll finish drinking and fold.
And back the clothing goes, not fifty pounds of puppy chow but
Something to weight the shoulder and carry on to home.

----

Because, of course, the laundromat is a secret hiding spot for inspiration. I don't know whether the man I saw was homeless or not, but he was definitely wandering around town drinking beer and carrying a dog food bag full of laundry.

I may come back to this poem later and work out some more of the clunkers. I realize I wasn't very consistent with the punctuation and capitalization, either. Oh well. It's something to save for a rainy day, I suppose.

~Later

Scene from a Dream

This was, more or less, a dream I had last night. I wrote it down this morning, fleshing it out and doing things like naming the characters from it and cleaning up some of the nonsensical weirdness. I have no idea how much sense it makes to an outside reader, but it's a pretty clear scene to me.

----
Joan was sitting in the second row of the classroom. Unfortunately, this gave her the perfect view of the first row. Athletes to a man, they were currently mooning the classroom and tittering to themselves. This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because being in the second row meant that she was very close to the professor’s desk and the blackboard, and bad because she had absolutely no interest in the dozen or so pale and hairy butts in front of her.

Joan took a quick survey of the room. She was the only woman in sight, in a classroom auditorium that probably fit a hundred students. There were a few discomfited faces in the crowd, but many of the boys--really, anyone who would participate in this was not yet a man--had the giggles. Or, worse, they were whispering and pointing at her. Joan bit down on her tongue before raising her hand.

The professor, from the looks an ex-military good old boys type, waited a minute before acknowledging her.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sir,” she said. “This is inappropriate.”

There were rules about sexual harassment, and they made a nice neat fence between her and the first row. Joan felt secure for all of two seconds.

The professor rose from his desk and approached her. Up close, he was no less intimidating than before.

“And how, miss, is it inappropriate?”

His eyes pierced hers when they met, but he showed no signs of concern for the dozens of policies he was allowing to be broken. Joan fought down her temper and the urge to squirm in her seat. The boys behind her grew less rowdy, seeming to settle into their seats. The whispering back and forth swelled like a wave.

“It’s harassment,” she said. “Sexual harassment.”

The whispered wave broke in a froth of snickers.

“What makes it harassment for you?” said the professor.

The professor was calm. Very, very calm as if this were a sort of situation he’d experienced before. Joan’s temper flared. How dare he first ignore the situation and then, then! To be asked for an accounting of why being mooned by a dozen jocks was insulting! Joan pushed back from her seat and stood. She looked into the professor’s eyes and counted to three.

“Because I don’t want to see their stupid asses,” she said.

Joan bit the inside of her cheek, still furious. At the same time, a sort of shock set in. She’d sworn at the professor. He was going to boot her from the classroom. She sat again and swept her pencils and notebooks into her bag. Joan was scrambling to think of a way to make a quiet exit. She was sure everyone was staring at her. She was pinned to the spot.

“All right then,” said the professor.

He strode to the front of the classroom in dead silence.

“Pull up those pants boys!”

What? Joan looked to the professor.

“I said pull up those pants and sit down!” he said. “No one wants to see your stupid asses unless it’s on the field, whooping the other team!”

Joan sat, dumbstruck. The professor pulled down a whiteboard, covered in what appeared to be test questions. The front-row boys hitched up their pants, one by one, and seated themselves. Nobody said a word.

“My name is Harmon,” said the professor. “You may call me Professor Harmon or Sir. If you want to talk to me, raise your hand. If, and I say if, I call on you, you will stand while you speak. When I am done talking to you, you will sit.”

His eyes swept the classroom. He turned toward the board and waved at its contents.

“This,” Harmon said, “is your first test. Answer it to the best of your abilities as quickly as you can. Calculators are allowed. Get to it!”

Professor Harmon left the front of the classroom and went to sit at his desk. He pulled out a stack of papers and ignored the class. Joan was stunned. She slumped in her chair.

She looked at the board and felt like crying because none of the equations looked familiar, except maybe the first one. She dug into her backpack. She dug a little more and frowned. She rooted frantically in her bag. Joan pulled out a notebook of blank paper and a couple pencils. No calculator. She needed a calculator. She couldn’t solve the equations without a calculator. All around her, the other students were frowning and pushing buttons and scribbling down answers and solving processes.

Joan despaired. She sat, frozen, watching the time tick away from her. Ten questions stood between her and success. Ten miserable math problems lined the path to her academic failure. She snuck glances at Professor Harmon. He had his head down, pen working furiously over the papers in front of him. The clock ticked mercilessly as she stared at the board.

Half an hour went by as Joan’s eyes skittered all over the board, seeing no way out. Then, something miraculous happened: Joan noticed that question four was something she understood…sort of. She took a deep breath and put pencil to paper. She wrote, carefully, “4.” at the left margin line. She cringed to be skipping ahead, leaving vast blank spots for questions one through three on the page. Teeth gritted, she copied the problem off the board and started to break it down into manageable pieces. Joan almost jumped out of her skin when someone coughed beside her.

She looked up. The professor was standing there.

“Took you long enough,” Harmon said. “I thought I was going to have to kick you out.”

“What?” Joan said.

“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet in my classroom,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

Joan looked down at her paper, embarrassed.

“I’m not very good at math,” she said.

Harmon raised an eyebrow at her.

“Oh really,” he said. “Then why are you here?”

Joan couldn’t tell what he wanted her to say.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class,” she said. “It’s been…”

Joan counted on her fingers, thinking hard. She chewed her eraser.

“It’s been since sophomore year of high school. That was ten years ago, give me a break here!”

Professor Harmon stared at her. His jaw worked up and down a moment.

“Why don’t you just go home to your father, let him pick out a nice husband for you?”

That chauvinistic bastard. Joan was going to kill him.

“Because,” Joan snapped. “He’s dead and he can’t, and I’m here with you to learn!”

The professor smiled at her and Joan’s anger was overlaid with confusion.

“That’s what I’m looking for, here,” he said. “No excuses, no layer of politeness for the sake of being polite, no political correctness. Just straight-up honest answers.”

Harmon laid a polite hand on her shoulder and clarified himself.

“I’m going to break down the walls between you and me and get to the real you, because right now, the way you are, you’ll never learn a damn thing,” he said. His face was even more serious than before.

“But,” Joan said. “But…”

Joan didn’t like the idea that she was some sort of project for this man.

“Oh, you’ll nod and smile and agree, but you won’t learn anything.”

He was quiet, calm. He gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Good luck with the test, miss,” Harmon said.

He turned to go back to his desk.

“It’s Joan,” she said. “Not miss. Joan.”

Harmon’s laugh was sharp and loud in the classroom. Half the front row jumped in their chairs.

“I like you, Miss Joan,” he said. “We’re going to have fun together.”

Harmon sat at his desk again, shuffled his papers, and noticed that the class was staring at him.

“What the hell are you all looking at? Get back to work before I fail everyone in here!”

Joan bent to the task at hand and tuned out the rest of the room. She could do this. She knew she could.

----

I swear, it's always math classes that haunt my sleep. I remember that the first question of the test had something to do with the quadratic formula, except it was all jumbled and weird, as such things usually are in dreams. (And yes, I really did dream that the entire front row was mooning me. It wasn't a standing-up mooning, though. They were bent at the waist and bracing themselves with their elbows on the desks. Their butts were distinctly jiggly.)

~Later

Perhaps a poem?

I admit it's a bit word-vomit-y, but that's kind of the point of free-writes. I half-heartedly apologize for the following abuse of the semicolon. I was tempted to go get a sweater when I wrote this.

----
Snowflakes spitting down from a grey-crowded sky; the sun is blotted out moment to moment, here light there dark; and the icicles feed and grow slowly then faster as the sun disappears; a finger of ice pointing in accusation toward the ground; grown large grown fat grown indolent a handspan, a hand, a wrist, a man’s arm sculpted drop by drop and filled with poisons washing off roofs, even as the downward point trembles in the air; not yet formed and wavering on the cusp.

A break in the clouds, the snowfall broken for a breath or two; the window fogs as I stare out, too close to the glass and I remember; the dream I had last night took place a week ago, when I might have still had hope; but now I am tired, bowled over in the coldness, blown forward over the freezing rivers and tangled in the bare crowns of trees.
-----

Should I do any sort of revising, the semis will disappear. They're just very convenient, very visible separation markers...especially if I decide to arrange this into a poem of some kind. I was kind of thinking that each phrase separated thusly might become an individual line. (But that's no guarantee I'd keep them all.)I realize, as it stands, that it's hard to read and a bit clunky.

And yes, I did mean "crowded" and not "clouded."

~Later

Apologies and Salutations

It's been a while since I've posted on here, hasn't it? I can't believe it's been nearly six weeks! I'm trying not to feel that I've been neglectful or derelict. While it is true I haven't done much work on Entropy, I have been starting other projects. I haven't put anything up here because I have nothing to share yet. I haven't made much headway into anything, and I certainly don't have anything polished enough to go on here.

I haven't been feeling up to much lately, either. Winter (and I find 'winter' tends to encompass November as well) is a hard time of year around here. I've been pushing myself very hard in some areas--too hard, really--and not enough in others. I haven't done enough writing to suit me, so I am making two different efforts to help change that, and I shall be posting them here.

One: I am going to attempt a weekly book review. Believe it or not, one of the best things a writer can do is to read a lot. I have been reading many books lately, and I want to continue to read. Sometimes I go through periods where I don't read a book for weeks, and I really don't like that. I hope that doing the reviews will encourage me to finally get around to reading all those books I've been intending to read.

Two: A daily free-write. Instead of a timed free-write, though, I'm going for writing as long as it takes me to get to a natural stopping point. (I guess that would mean I'd be writing a scene's worth of material or so.) Maybe it's better to say that I'd be working in miniature? It drives me nuts that I have all sorts of ideas for really long stories that I never finish. I'm trying to look at this free-write exercise as permission to go ahead and do something really short that will never become part of a larger story. I hope that, in accruing this body of disconnected scenes, I will be then inspired to work more on something else, maybe something that is long and needing a lot more attention than I've paid it before. Maybe I'll just end up with a pile of great ideas.

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what time I'd be posting these scribblings, but I am kind of fond of posting shortly before I go to bed. It makes me feel accomplished, somehow. Still, it's something to look forward to in these rather dark and chilly times.

~Later