Avoidance! Diversions! Escapism! As a service to our occasional customers, we’ve brought back this possibly unpopular feature. If we cared more about you, you’d have real content once in a while, sure. So go pay somebody already – even lousy CNN now has a paywall for some of its content. But not us, not here, …
So, nothing to see here. I am badly broken up about it, sure. So many other people are as well. The sky feels weighted with sadness, with the horizon foretelling a storm of despotism and blunt stupidity, which is all just as wretched as hell, but … Look, squirrel! Avoidance. Diversions. Escapism. What say we …
Jersey always left the side door open so I just walked on in. He was there on the couch, slumped back and ugly as he was every time you saw him, just butt ugly, with a long face full of bad teeth and hair that sprouted everywhere from him, like bristly weeds. He smelled like …
<Thanks, Joe, for the post title.> Late yesterday afternoon, I hoofed it the couple of miles through our eastern North Carolina version of bitter cold, gloved hands and big coat, double socks and damn me for failing to wear a hat, to the local post office, a pre-stamped packet in hand. In my back pocket, a …
False starts. Water under life’s bridge. So then, a little more dipping into my personal archaeology. My very soggy personal archaeology. I do dig the bit about the old guy and the wandering eye and the pine cones, though. Circa 2004, maybe. Medlum Come Home The faded red Pinto sputtered to a halt in the dry worn tracks …
So, you find things. And you know you should be doing other than looking, like seeking gainful employment or curing a major disease using only an assortment of stray household items. You know that, sure. But instead … instead you go bumbling around your haphazard past, turning over this stone or that, forgetting to watch for hibernating …
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 …
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 …
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 …