What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.
Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.
Author: Moriah
In defense of ugly jackets
(Or, if I were Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter.)
What do you think it retails for? $5,000? $7,000? That’s what Donald Trump pays for his designer suits. [beat] [audience boos]
$10,000? No. It retails for $12,495.00. [beat] [audience boos]
But I paid $12.50 for it. Why? Because it’s ugly. I went to Goodwill and I had so much to choose from, an abundance of jackets, but I chose this one. Why? Because it was the most attractive one there. [beat] [audience laughs]
Would you wear this jacket outside the house? No. Nobody with good taste would. It’s warm, I’ll give you that. And roomy. Look how roomy it is. It’s well made. It is an Armani, after all. But it’s ugly. Not only wouldn’t you wear this outside the house, you wouldn’t wear it to a job interview.
Yet that’s what most of you, our working women today, have to choose from: ugly, uglier, and ugliest. [beat] [audience laughs]
The perfect bookstore v.3
Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!
I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.
Come with me, will you?
—into a deep, dark well of pain, obsession, and love; corruption and murder; lawyers, guns, and money; politics, sex, and lies.
There are no monsters here but flawed and wicked humans. There is no magic here but dark love and aching desire. There is no alternate universe here but an imaginary county in a very real city operating under its own rules.
There are no helpless, hapless ingenues here, but beautiful, mature, brilliant women who kick ass. There are no alpha male billionaires— Oh, wait. Yes, there are. My bad. They’re bad, too. Dominating, one might say. If one were saying.
Come with me, will you?
—into a world you may love or you may hate.
Hopefully both.
What is it about this game
… that compels people to reflect and grants epiphanies like a fairy godmother?
Thirty years ago, I was at the KC Royals parade after they won the World Series. You know, George Brett. Bret Saberhagen. Those guys.
I didn’t care about baseball much before or after that, not that I was ever anything but a fan-in-name-only because I didn’t understand the game. A childhood watching Little League and trying to figure out radio announcers’ jargon tends to blunt one’s enthusiasm.
And then there was college and life and the strikes and the juicing and the Congressional hearings and who wants to get into baseball when they threw a big temper tantrum for a game that’s all fake anyway? You want more money for your steroid injections? Fuck you.
The value of knowledge
Bas relief
Yesterday I threw out karate belts I earned between the ages of 18 and 20. They were musty. Hidden away, like all the stuff I haven’t found places to display yet. I like space. I value space. Open, empty space and shelves that say, “We don’t need to be filled to feel important.” What they need to be filled with is essentials for survival, but that’s another story.
A friend on Facebook asked me how I could bear to throw them away because I earned them. I see her point; they are a trophy and I did earn them. All these years I have not wanted to throw them out (if I thought about it), but something’s been changing in me for a while now, about carrying baggage and grudges.
Of malcontents, futility, and funny prostitutes
But the truth is that I am just really tired. Perhaps the vacuum in affect attested to by the accumulation of emoticons and emojis has little to do with the flattening effect of digital communication. Maybe feelings are simply exhausted.
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 3
Well, Dude and my mother liked it. I can’t stand pineapple, so I was having none of it. Neither was XY TD, who ate about two cans of green beans by himself. XX TD had some but she’d been noshing all day and wasn’t hungry (also, she ate all the pineapple I carved out of the middle).
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 2
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 1
I don’t know where I ran across the “Swineapple” recipe, but it got posted to Reddit not too long ago and immediately went semi-viral.
Raspberry
She wasn’t the worst cat I ever had, but the worst one was the one I hand-raised, and apparently human hand-raised cats are psychopaths.
Razzy peed everywhere. She sprayed me once. Maybe twice. On purpose, looking at us, she’d squat and pee on the carpet if she knew we couldn’t catch her.
Anyway, I knew something was wrong with her. Read more
Dude Review – Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love
Title: APOCALYPTIC MONTESSA AND NUCLEAR LULU: A TALE OF ATOMIC LOVE
Mercedes M. Yardley
Published by Ragnarok Publications
Genre: Horror
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 175
Format(s) Available: ebook, paperback, audiobook
Amazon Kindle ASIN: B00HWMK298
Reviewed by miztrniceguy aka Dude1
Originally posted on Amazon
burn baby, burn!
This story is very dark and twisted, but at the same time it’s a sweet love story. I was surprised at the tenderness between Lulu and Montessa. I was hoping for a different ending and was surprised by it.
This is my first book I have read by Mercedes Murdock Yardley, but won’t be the last.
______________________________
1. miztrniceguy aka Dude is the guy Moriah sleeps with. He reads a lot of books, but has only lately gotten into the reviewing game because he started hanging out with Moriah’s writerly type friends who aren’t quite as storied as Stephen King.
Stranger danger
I am sitting at a table in my local public library, my laptop, a bottle of water, and my Galaxy Note in front of me. I have headphones on and I am listening to nature sounds because the not-very-socially-graced woman behind me (she and I have a history) is muttering to herself loudly enough that it’s clear she wants someone to ask her what she’s working on and her laptop is making funky bubble-popping sounds loudly. Read more
Rules, broken
“Any halfway decent artist can outline,” she sneered.
You can’t sneer a statement.
She raised her eyes to his.
What’d she do, pick them up off the floor? Read more
The Proviso rebooted
You know how when you’re in a discussion and it’s really animated and you have things to say but you don’t get to because the discussion’s going by too fast and then you forget until you go home and you’re cracking wise to yourself because you really are that witty, but your timing’s shit and you go to bed annoyed because you didn’t think of it when it really mattered?
And you know how you laugh at a joke you don’t understand because everyone is laughing and you don’t want to look stupid, but you forget about it until, like, seven years later you come across the joke and you’ve lived a little between then and now, and now you get it and it’s hilarious?
And you know how you said something really stupid back in second grade and you can still see and hear that moment like it was yesterday, and your face turns red and your sphincter clenches even though it’s forty years later and you wish you could have a do-over on that moment (or any of the thousands in between, all of which you remember)?
Yeah, me too.
Hence, The Proviso, 2nd Edition.
Hopefully some time in October 2015, to pay homage to the one I published seven years ago.
Seven.
The little things that do not show
“All day I did the little things, the little things that do not show; I brought the kindling for the fire, I put the candles in a row, I filled a bowl with marigolds, the shallow bowl you love the best—and made the house a pleasant place where weariness might take its rest.”
—Blanche Bane Kuder
“The Blue Bowl”
Decluttering my mind
1. Vomit blue ink all over the agenda book with how cluttered and chaotic the mind is until clarity ensues. It may or may not take 14 pages, front and back.
2. Take the Female Tax Deduction to her art class. Walk through the park barefoot in the grass (for the first time in years) to get to the art gallery. Think about taking a yoga class. Finish a cross stitch. When XX TD is finished with her art class, solve a glass labyrinth with her. Walk (in the grass) (barefoot) (this is crucial) up the terraces to the gallery. Traverse the glass labyrinth. Talk to tourists and answer questions about the new exhibit (the Green Man-ish sculptures) and good barbecue. Stroll through the art gallery after having responded to nature’s call. Sit and let XX TD sketch a medieval knight on a horse.
3. Share pictures that don’t even come close to capturing the magic that was yesterday.
Things to carry. No shoes today.
Just sitting here cross stitching.
I do my best work at the Nelson.
SHUTTLECOCKS
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen
1994
aluminum, fiberglass
At the entry of the glass labyrinth by Robert Morris, installed 2013. The sign didn’t lie. It was hot in there.
GLASS LABYRINTH
Robert Morris
2013
FERMENT
Roxy Paine
2011,
stainless steel
SHEEP PIECE
Henry Moore
1971-1972
bronze
RECLINING FIGURE, HAND
Henry Moore
1979
bronze
THE FOUR SEASONS
Philip Haas
THE FOUR SEASONS
Philip Haas
THE FOUR SEASONS
Philip Haas
Maps were made by people who went first
“ … maps were made by people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work.”
God’s Debris, Scott Adams, p 32
The only thing more powerful than fear
“The only thing more powerful than fear is routine.”
Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Maberry, p 190