Capture it before it goes, the wind, his thoughts, his smile, the moment, the memory, the last time she ever spoke your name, the way she kissed you and held your face, capture it before it’s gone, before you say goodbye.
is it just me, or does everybody get blobs of comments emailed to them all together in one thread regardless of that upon which they comment, lending yet a further layer of obfuscation to our endeavors?
There’s nothing so frustrating as a necessary sentence that refuses to commit to any paragraph.
Although Keith was very proficient with most fruits and vegetables, he was surprised to be baffled by the coconut.
If I made the rules, microwave popcorn would be punishable by life imprisonment.
beer whistle blowing, beer whistle blowing, all bound for beery town, many miles away…
Right this moment Chaos is kicking Order’s butt in an epic battle that began when Order brazenly (and likely foolishly) declared her intention to conquer Chaos and ride away victorious on Saturday morning.
You know it’s been a day of extremes when your boss comes out, stands by your desk and just starts laughing at you.
I know it hasn’t been long since I talked about Alice’s Restaurant (I’m still looking for a copy for you Keith), but this morning I found myself humming it again as I unloaded my thrift shop donations in the early morning light next to the sign which reads, “Absolutely no drop-offs after hours - these premises monitored 24-hours by security cameras” and I thought, this is pretty much how the modern, updated version would begin, with a Dodge Caravan, a thrift shop and a security camera.
Keith can be all philosophical and stuff, because he’s a good person, but I, I do not have to, so I’m going to (Cue Sound)scream and curse these fates and my powerlessness to make the world a better place where Keith would not have to make this journey. (More sound)
Look, it’s not a screw-up, it’s just a way of keeping the sickly pedantic amused.
This afternoon a small sparrow landed at my feet and pecked me on the toe, mistaking it, I think, for better days.
After strapping their Pez dispensers to their backs and consulting the Magic 8 Ball once more for luck, the Care Bear and the wind-up Tigger journeyed to the edge of the desk; holding the keyboard shelf for purchase, they lowered themselves gingerly onto one of the many Garfield magnets that decorated the drawer face, and picked their cautious way down to the carpeted floor.
I don’t think the rest of this country has grokked yet to the fact that we are experiencing casualties of 9/11 proportions, if not greater.
I think I’m done worshipping the pagan gods of Bad Karma.
Though the worship must have paid off.
Because I’ve had my fair share of ‘rewards’.
yesterday, when I was put on two weeks’ assigned leave so they wouldn’t have to pay me money that they would have owed me at the end of my contract in December that I’d planned to use to carry me another month beyond that if need be, I thought instead I might use the time now to volunteer to meet more present needs in New Orleans; it seems, however, that either there’s nowhere left to go or, at best, it will be weeks before there is any point in going there and I sit, staring at the streaming screen, at the streaming water and at the still water, which is worse.
I am so sick of emigrant angst I could puke hot blood from my eyeballs.
but true; probably the best media is streaming from Mobile (link on TBO.com line to Live Stream)—little infomation still but much video coming in now and Kind-Hearted Bakerina, who was concerned for us, was assured yesterday as I assure you all now that Goliard and I are NOT effected, it’s on the other side of the gulf and god help them.
“Honey, you have the perfect body for sitting on a log.”
Once again, the fates prove they’re watching out for me in the most twisted of ways—just after I attach the last segment of my new gutter, and I’m standing there spraying with a hose onto the roof to make sure I got the flow right, the weather changes and not half an hour later there is a DELUGE—the first rain in Seattle in a month.
I know that good fences make good neighbors, but I’m not quite sure what good gutters make.
I walked towards the lab, John Doe bobbing gently in his jar.
Apparently you aren’t supposed to talk about what an atom bomb looks like from space when there is a stripper in front of you.
It’s behind you right now.
Watching the sky
turn pink,
starless,
in my city
where you slept once
while I cried beside you
silent.
when you wake up and discover that your kids have been eating Fruity Pebbles out of a salsa dish with a fork…it’s probably time to do some dishes.
Watching the sky turn pink,
starless,
above keyboards
where they code rebellions
and I signed love
more than once
nervous
you’d reply politely.
Bob approached the gates of Heaven, trying to decide which line in would move faster - Brave Fools or Fools Who Died Bravely.
Watching the sky turn
pink,
starless,
in my city;
the hot breeze
turns leaves in trees spinning,
hope is winning
over arson
and bullets,
but you just push this
away.
“There are probably only a dozen people in the State of California who are deeply concerned about this type of fraud,” said the author to the public servants gathered around the conference table, “and we eight, are eight of them.”
Miss Jane looked at the cloud-broken, streaming, orange-hazed sunrise and thought to herself “if it weren’t for all these damn clouds, it’d be an alright view”.
looking at the new header image at Word Shadows, it occurs to me that not long ago, cutting a friend out of your life required ignoring their phone calls…but here in the “world of tomorrow”, all it takes is a little image editing skill.
(original photo linked here for your convenience: Keith and Other Keith)
i once considered installing a retractable shelf in the toilet alcove of my house, so that I would have a good place to rest my laptop, and thus combine two of the most necessary acts in life: surfing, and…well, you know the other one.
I’m wondering if police still draw chalk outlines around dead people on the street, and if Pacman happened to get killed, say in a knife fight outside a neighborhood bar after closing in some small, nondescript midwestern town, if the police there would they draw a big yellow circle on the ground?
it seemed like skype would be the way to go and so i downloaded that and i sound fine, but my one friend on skype can’t hear me now; as with most things, this thing is more complex than it lets on.
Have you ever had a day so full of bad things, mean people and stressful ugliness that you wish you could forget it ever happened; flush it away like a smelly turd, so that you would never have to think again about how nasty and unpleasant it was…
Nobody ever died because they didn’t get their lipstick cartons on time.
A mellow and friendly walk through Spanish Harlem, a fresh skillet of cornbread topped with yGreek yogurt and corn salsa, and a bottle of Leinenkugel’s Red Lager that a friend thoughtfully brought you back from her travels in the wilds of central Pennsylvania: a Friday night does not get much nicer…
I have taken an additional part time job, in hopes of making better use of at least a part of my time.
First, there’s the helplessness and the feeling of violation, then you’ve got to wait around worring yourself half to death until the results come back and you find out if things are going to be okay—to the seller of a home the experience of “home inspection” is nothing but unpleasant.
Whenever Bob’s wife asked him why he avoided her, he always gave the mountain climbing answer, which he thought summed the situation up nicely: “Because you’re there,” he’d say, then dash off, pretending he was searching for a new, secret base camp to ride out some upcoming storm, which in reality, wasn’t far from the truth.
they say, causes asthma attacks and asthma attacks cause me to inhale steroids, which eventually cause steroid jitters that i counteract with 1/2 an anxiety pill; my name is judy and I have a problem.
*tap, tap* … is this thing on.. ah.. **cough** … it’s official ladies, gents and hermaphrodites, in OzLand it’s kick-off time for BEER O’CLOCK
(this advice brought to you by boot, at the behest of Keith)
Everyone should have theirr own grotto, with perhaps one or two mad pirates for company.
Have you ever had a day so full of good things, caring people and beauty that you wish you could preserve it somehow; press it like dried rose petals, so that you could open the book and look it again and remember exactly how amazing it was…
two with bellies skyward, and my own is twisting around slowly towards the end of the year; now that Jo is no more, I sure hope the Hypothetical Porch will still be available and not moved to martha’s vineyard or some such with its new owner?
Beancounter’s Corollary: Good news is never delivered during mandatory training sessions put on by the Equal Employment Opportunity panel, no matter how many butterflies and happy-face flowers dance about in their Powerpoint presentations.
After 15 years of research, ‘Mouse’s First Law of Office Life is irrefutably proven and ready for publication: Good news does not arrive by fax.
3:46 p.m. and the fax is going out on the project with a 4:00 fax-filing deadling—hell, that’s not even cutting it close.
There’s got to be some way to type while driving; I’ve always done my best thinking on New England highways, curling and cresting through scenes so picturesque you’d be forgiven for assuming them fake.
If dog years go by at a rate of seven to one, why are dog days long and slow—and, more important, what’s it called when you have to live through seven days worth of crap each and every day?
First she told me that she already knew the room was moldy and the light bulbs blown, then she tried to tell me no one had ever complained before.
It has all begun to fade -the smell of her perfume, the telltale imprint of her lipstick left behind on my cheek, even the image of her in my mind, with her coy, seductive smile and her finger slowly beckoning, drawing me in - and I’m left wondering, as I have been many times before, who is this creature that calls herself Economic Recovery, haunting me from around every corner of every dream?
Distinctive in their severe black Old Navy garb, the Suburban Amish keep to themselves as they quietly gather foodstuffs at the local Whole Foods Market, raising their heads only to smile shyly at the checkout clerks and proffer Martha Stewart canvas tote bags for renewable grocery handling.
Every half hour or so, like clockwork, I feel a rush of gratefulness for Keith’s website, followed by a shame spiral of my unworthiness, quickly capped off by a sort of primitive egotism in which I puff my chest out and lower my voice, all of which has made my family believe that I have fallen completely off the deep end, at last.
I got married yesterday.
One dream of a beautiful red head + 1 15-oz. block of red henna (dry weight, about 35 billion pounds when hydrated) + 3 yards of plastic wrap + 20 minutes of cleaning the bathroom + 90 minutes of sitting around + 30 minutes of chopping vegetables for ratatouille + 15…
I am not opposed to memes, just slow to fulfill anything resembling a responsibility.
When the gasoline crisis inevitably came, suburbanites adapted to the lifestyle of their ancestors with surprising ease; across the land, horse-drawn SUVs carried children to soccer games, where mothers set up quilting bees on the sidelines, while the menfolk met to hold carport-raising parties.
It is Friday, and it is our solemn responsibility to shake our booties!
If I had been hoping for coursework that featured esoteric and arcane literature, I definitely picked the wrong major.
I am offering a reward to anyone who can adequately explain how the hell it got to be 8/19/2005; 8/19/1999 I can accept, but not 2005.
I shut the doors once more; the eyes were making me feel more than a little disconcerted.
Funny, thought Bob, that the more banks they built in his small town, the less money he seemed to have.
Boing, boing, boing went the kettle. Swish, flish, plish went the scrine.
It’s Friday afternoon, folks, and it’s either time to get silly or go home.
Possibly both.
I would have asked Keith what other goals he has riding-wise, stressing that a man’s gotta have goals, and politely putting my comment where it belongs, however, since Scrine won’t let me use the comments field, I’m just going to post my help-ticket right here in front of god and everybody—presumably the closed comments feature on a same-named entry has raised its ghostly head again.
Bob stood in the snack aisle, trying to choose between Cheetos and spicy pork rinds, wondering if the choice could be seen as a reflection of larger things—Mexico versus the United States, natural verus chemical, etc.—or if it was really nothing more than a choice between two crappy snacks, either of which would fail to alleviate his depression for even a moment and which would, regardless of his his choice, soon enough leave him feeling slightly ill.
Sitting in a train, looking out the window, watching another train go by…. it’s easy to imagine parallel universes and ponder the reality and dimensions of your own existence.
Goliard, could you roll a joint and pass it around, I’d really like a Puff. [link removed]
So far in this life, I’ve ridden a horse, a cow, a pig, a donkey, a giant tortoise, an elephant, and of course, several people.
Hey, check out the commenting scores; does ‘mouse get a prize?
Visualize with me: the quiet calm of the redwood trees, the muffled stomp of your own feet on the spongy needles, the musty woody smell of all those old trees.
Nothing gets your attention quite like having the latch on your convertible top fail, causing the top to fall back with a loud THWACK, thereby making you jump out of your skin while driving 80 mph.
Jo got me thinking, and since I’m too lazy to try to figure out the survey/voting tool that lurks around here somewhere, I’m taking it straight to scrine: a) What’s your gender and b) in your links, favorites or frequently read list (you decide which is appropriate), what’s the ratio (or raw number) of female bloggers to male bloggers?
There ought to be a law limiting the amount of bad shit that any one person has to deal with in one 24-hour period.
As ‘Mouse watched 800,000 pounds of engineering and aluminum and highly processed fossil fuel lumber down the runway and take off in defiance of gravity and common sense, he thought, if Bhuddists ruled the world none of this would exist.
I once read somewhere that pigeons are the winged version of rats. Whilst I’d agree with some elements of that, I’d have to say that it’s a real insult to the intelligence level of rats.
Okay, I get the part about breathing and relaxing and losing one’s attachments to striving and worldy things and getting all peaceful and unstressed and shit, but if I do all that, how the hell am I supposed to get anything DONE?
“Is that like ‘Cher’, only for cheap Canadian set design?”
Kiwi jelly is a piece of toast’s best friend.
You obviously haven’t read any of my student’s final research papers.
The earth will not end in a nuclear exposion, it will just be sucked dry of all creativity and slowly return to amoebas and dust.
Poor, dear, sweet Abraham Jones, the only girl in the fourth grade named after her father’s favorite president.
it’s a morning, it’s a saturday, nothing hurts and I’m off to knit socks; they will be pink!
’Mouse sat there, staring at his computer, wondering if there was a better way to tell his story so the audience at Scrine would perfectly understand his feelings—which he placed somewhere on the continuum between amusement, anger and deep sadness at the patheticness of the Fates who apparently had nothing better to do today than set up the impossible interaction of traffic signals, hunger and the playlist on the local lite-muzak schlock station so that during the tiny window of less than five minutes that ‘Mouse took to duck into the store (taking him away from his usual radio haunts) he would hear none other than “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Sportsfans, let’s turn our attention to the eighth, ninth and tenth spots where there’s a fierce battle for position heating up amongst three of our finest feathered friends.
You will
At 5 p.m., as smarter people all around her bolted from their desks and raced to their subways and buses and commuter trains, Jen wondered if it was a bad sign that she was just too tired to go home.
You need a biscuit.
The quickest way to turn invisible in an instant is to tell a covey of catholic soccer moms that you are writing a book about “Feminist Stay-at-Home Mothers.”
I’ve always liked bobbers more then fishing, the same way I like mornings more then the day.
I will put the corn on the cob in the fridge, I will put the tomatoes and the new boule of mozzarella on the kitchen table, I will start the water running in the bath, I will say hello to my young man, I will return to the bath, I will…
i’m certain that if business is not yet booming, it will be.
“Sir Mick is three years older than Mr Bush, but the younger man’s fast-living antics in the 1970s reputedly rivalled the rock star’s own…(Mick) is also six months older than the high priest of the neo con movement, Paul Wolfowitz, a former deputy secretary of defence and now head of the World Bank.”
I’ll let John Prine explain it to ya as he did so well so many wars ago. [Link removed]
I’m usually here till closing time, at which point I take a look around, bleary eyed, at my fellow bleary eyed patrons, and, overcome by the sense that we have become a community tonight, I stand up on a desk and say, just as last call comes over the loudspeakers, “C’mon, everybody, one more book, it’s on me!” to riotous applause.
Bob had been having second thoughts about the mail-order French bride he’d ordered the month before, so he was greatly relieved when the postman finally arrived and left at his door not a wife, but a lovely 2 kilogram wheel of brie.
You will soon have your faith tested and score a 72.
There are phone calls you really want to pick up, but that one won’t be one of them.
When this month is over, I’m not getting out of bed for a week.
is it just me, or does everybody get blobs of comments emailed to them all together in one thread regardless of that upon which they comment, lending yet a further layer of obfuscation to our endeavors?
Duck!
I was on the verge of tears last night watching Seed of Chucky because I thought, “Christ even supernaturally possessed serial killing ugly dolls are able to form a loving relationship.”
Destiny and Faith will knock on your door; you will be overcome with surprise; they will hand you a pamphlet.
You will discover that the artificial sweetener in your diet soda causes far worse depression than is caused by occasional sugar-induced mood swings and carrying a few extra pounds.
You will determine that comments on Wordshadows are not worth the pixels they’re printed on and you will shut them off beginning at, say, 7:23 pm 8/9/2005.
You know that time when you were the most happy you had ever been, and you were content, and everything was perfect, you were with friends and the light was just so and the meal was excellent and you looked forward to another week of the same? 5 10 14 36 45
You win!
why, when I remember to check out my hit counter at the bottom of my page, does it tell me things like you scrine referred to my page 57 times in the last 24 hours when i know that’s not true—after all, it also tells me i linked to myself 359 times…
now let’s see…..which one, which one…..apparently everything is
too tall or to wide or just too big in general……there must be
somthing…
Let’s all run down to the Hundred Acre Wood and listen to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band tell us about The House at Pooh Corner [link expired to keep Keith out of jail] while we give Keith a standing ovation for perseverance, intelligence and his general good looks!
You will submit your stunningly perfect, prize-winning “fortune” entry just in time to beat Keith’s August 9 deadline.
You’re lucky, there’s nothing wrong with you today that can’t be cured by a strong cup of coffee and an attitude adjustment.
You will dream poorly, again.
No fortunes will be in your cookies.
Your life will involve a lot more running and a great deal less jumping from here on out.
Should I assume that I’m doomed, since there was no fortune in my cookie during my Chinese lunch today?
Children learn to understand circles by spinning until they vomit; they plummet from barn rafters to get a tangible grip on height.
That guy across from you is not worth the effort.
404 Not Found - the requested fortune was not found in this cookie
…listening to the same music I listened to 20 years ago…is it comfort I feel as the impulses fall into the same old well-worn synaptic paths…or is it numbness as the paths are dug ever deeper, while the surrounding gray matter becomes overgrown with weeds and discarded beer cans?
Your waiter is not as he appears.
You are an artist; you will starve, but there will always be grouper.
You will be forced forever to explicate your own name to those you wish to know you and nothing ever will be simple.
n’est pas?—which difficulty (along with the one of folks actually remembering it) I avoid frequently by signing myself “e,” but which does sometimes come up in unusual circmstances and so, to alleviate any reluctance fellow scriners may have should the occasion arise to actually greet me, please allow me to introduce myself: My name is EE-lee-thee-ah (but you can call me e.)
Your afternoon will be mostly sucky with occasional glimmers of false hope.
No, there’s no harm in a captain telling a good lie now and again, especially if he’s recently been bested by a fool cabin monkey.
You will smell something extremely vile, very soon.
This house was once owned by gnomes with a hate on for all things professional.
Everything changed for Jolene that spring morning when she sat down in her cubicle, opened up her email account, found 372 new emails, calmly poured her coffee into the computer, walked out, took a cab directly to the airport and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand.
Sometimes what looks like a rising star is only a streetlight igniting, hovering all night a few feet from the ground before fading away in the morning.
’mouse wanted to shout out to the whole world about his guest-dj gig on the front-page of Wordshadows, but then he bit his lip and kept quiet, not wanting to appear gauche.
Boredom will always be the most influential force shaping your life.
Now would be a good time to ask.
Organizational skills beyond your wildest dreams await you.
All your base will be belong to us.
All municipal bus drivers are crackheads.
“Well,” she said after hearing the description of my first date with a 28 year old just getting out of a ten year relationship and sleeping on his mother’s couch, “at least you know you could do worse; You already did.”
The greatest mistake of your life will seem like a good idea at the time.
No, property isn’t theft; theft is theft; now relinquish the pleather.
Enjoy jealous love while it lasts, because it won’t.
You will wear love like a Mona Lisa smile.
Some days form your life, while others lead you through it.
Fortunately, you have all your parts.
You can count youself lucky if today is no worse than yesterday.
Minimalist Jones would stare straight ahead, when talking to people, and when lying in bed.
Hobgoblins and handmaidens conspire against you.
Your tired feet don’t necessarily mean the journey is over.
You will suffer immense pleasure.
Finishing your broccoli will bring you great serenity.
“I’ll just take one teeny, tiny little bit of this praline, and then I’ll go pick up some lunch.”
Please do not snore during the conference call.