It is Thursday, and packs of wild dogs are not roaming the streets of my neighborhood this morning, inciting terror and mayhem. On reflection, there were no such packs of dangerous curs yesterday either, nor the day before that, nor even the one one more before. I am recognizing a very positive pattern here. <Post …
Very rough draft of first few short sections of what I hope will end up being a finished new short story in the coming months. The Bucket Brigade Sunset, Key West, FloridaI figured it was about as good as anything to start with. I live outside Ft. Myers, the north side. Just across the river, where …
You are visited, often, in those final twitching moments of the day, by the inklings of an idea plainly woven through with gold. Streaked at times, even, with the diaphanous brilliance of beatific wings illumined in the streaming bright of heaven’s heady spotlight. Abloom, now and again, maybe, with the trumpeted bunched sunburst of daffodils …
SO IT’S LIKE this: Preparing to turn my stalwart four-paws companion of 12 years, my cat, Bug, my pal, the biggest fan of my singing, my eyeball, into a furry glow lamp to fry part of his bedeviling thyroid gland is frying every one of my own nerves as well. I joke like I think …
Lifted from the middle of a thing that’s mostly just beginning and end, and that will, at this latening hour, likely never be enough in-between to either stand on its own, or fall such that its ultimate unannounced demise is ever noticed. So the text to follow just sits here, bluntly excised, and unexplained, in …
I am not a believer in ghosts. Not. Just not. And this has created some unexpected problems for me, since my life is haunted pretty much up one side and right down the other. I should explain that the phantoms that plague me are most often entirely my own, holdovers of myself from different flashpoints, …
So much of my life has become defined for me by what I shouldn’t have been doing when I should have been sleeping. Sometimes, the emphasis is on the activity itself, but more often than not, it’s about the fallout. The repercussions. The aftermath. Which could be major, surely, especially when I was a good …
So this Siddhartha Gautama fella, propped there beneath the midnight bodhi tree, feet fitted together like pretzel arms, the light bulb of his consciousness glowing with the pure unbroken filament of now. And in no religious statues or silly garden art, or any other caricatured renditions of the Buddha for that matter, is dude ever wearing …
Of all the difficult relationships I’ve maintained in my life, the one I poorly keep with sleep has been the most maddening, because I never seem to learn from it. Sleep and I have real enough affection for one another, to be sure, yet we consistently fail to spend nearly enough quality time together. And …
Taken in our entireties, we’re each of us a bit lacking in places. A tad weak here, maybe a touch too much there. But in excerpt? We can all add up to something to recommend us in excerpt. Witness: this opening segment from a 2004 Mountain Xpress story about a karaoke world championship south of …