daylight savings time:

The clock has dust on it; I notice this as I take it down to change the time. One hour lost. Who dusts their clocks? I don’t have time to dust my bathroom of all its toilet tissue fluff. I’m lucky if I have time to clean the toilet at all. The bathroom mirror is speckled with dried water from toothbrushes and face washes. The counter top is wiped; at least there’s that. The round vanity light bulbs are mismatched, two compact fluorescent and two (standard) ones. Time moves forward without stopping. Before you know it, you can’t even remember what old-fashioned light bulbs were called.

So begins a new 52 weeks project! (Just a few weeks late… how did it become March already!?)

This year’s project is much simpler than the last. No finding story excerpts to set up. Just a few simple minutes of my time, once a week, one “interesting” spot, and noticing things. (Note that “interesting” will be subjective, obviously – whatever is interesting to me at the time. I’ll try to adventure a little further than my messy bathroom next time, lol!) (more…)

A book title poem, for Annie.

This was much, much fun! Everyone should try it!

Bad Behavior

Jane sexes it up.
Bad behavior
for
broken angels.
Normal people don’t live like this.

The life before her eyes
was
the odyssey,
and
then we came to the end.

Black tickets
on
the road
to
where the wild things are.

I love this quote from Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer”:

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”

No, no context, I just like it

progress report:

I finished my short story this week – beginning, middle, end, and done. I’ll probably be nagging people to read it for me some time this week.

Last weekend, I wrote a bunch of stuff for my novel, and it’s currently sitting at a homely but endearing 21,000 words.

I wrote this, which might be a poem, but is probably not… (this is not a poem, I see scrawled in my memory, across my attempts from old college workshops).

I blame it on Courtney, because she wrote a poem this week. Hers is a real, actual poem.

Inexistence

It doesn’t exist. You might think it does. You remember it,
this thing you fashioned with your own mind and hands –
it’s a story, it’s a photograph, it’s an organic hot dog,
nested carefully in its bun and sliced into perfect half moons.

It wasn’t reality, where you placed it, in another
dimension, another consciousness, another lifetime.
Maybe you accidentally left it in that place
with all the lost socks, that damn wine cork,
and the TV remote.

That’s why you’re the only one who can see it.
Because you can see it. Because it is there,
but at the same time, if no one else sees it,
it’s kind of not.