Category Archives: shards

January 27, 2017 · 5:40 pm

how to live life in a fast-changing world

How to Live Life in a Fast-changing World

Keep a tight rein on confusion. Jam your conclusions behind a smiley face. Assimilate.

Drop the bomb, let the ax fall, raise hell like a nest of scorpions. What’s life without mayhem and loss?

Give peace of mind a piece of your mind, but not too much, just a sliver to improve your chances coming down the home stretch.

Pretend you were raised this way, don’t let on that you lived in a world without smart phones.

Tell dirty jokes, juggle monkey skulls.

Chop suspicion off at the knees, right thru the caps, cause as much pain as possible. Then move on – up the ladder, down the block, around the corner, into darkness.

If you keep at it long and hard, there’s a cape and a trophy waiting for you, a mascot and a diploma. Pet the dog, sign the document, latch the cape around your neck and wave the trophy over your head.

The crowd will roar and throw roses.

If it doesn’t, go back and start over.

Do it until you get it right.

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January 26, 2017 · 8:53 am

deciding what to write

Deciding What to Write

I think I’ll write another book, an eye catcher and a crowd pleaser about a boy made of wood with a long nose who gets eaten alive by termites and how what’s left of him is swept into a dustpan and dumped out a second story window and blown by the wind across the ocean to a land where everything is made of balsa wood and his dust settles on the balsa wood and turns it into black onyx which has the effect on the populace of turning them black too and causing the men to grow seven feet tall with strong bodies and perfect pitch and the women to commence giving birth to babies after only a two-week gestation period so that in short order the population of The Land of Balsa increases twenty-fold and everyone begins building war ships. Soon an armada sets sail for the land of the wooden boy, hits the beaches and lays waste to everything.

That’s just the first chapter. From there on out astonishing things begin to happen, like the warriors begin having sex with the native women who give birth to wooden babies.

It’s hard to know where to go from there.

Maybe I’ll make it a short story instead of a novel, send it off to The New Yorker, then cross my fingers.

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January 25, 2017 · 3:17 pm

everything I’ve been told

Everything I’ve Been Told

I’ve said this before, written it before, but here it is again: anything worth writing is worth writing over and over until someone understands, more than understands, realizes. Understanding is a weak function of the rational mind; realization is a violent explosion that sends waves vibrating past boundaries to the molten core.

So there I am at the age of ten speeding across Texas in the back seat of a 1938 Hudson with my brother and up front are my father (driving) and my mother (worrying her hands in her lap). On the radio it’s country music until this preacher breaks in and starts admonishing listeners to surrender to Jesus or else. Or else wind up like these wretches, and what comes over the air waves is the sound of chains dragging as ten prisoners from a nearby prison are brought into the sound studio and sat down in a row of metal folding chairs. The preacher commences to tell the listening audience that these men are serving life sentences for crimes agains man and God, but they are at peace because thanks to him they’ve found Jesus, and to prove it he asks them: “Have you found Jesus?” They mumble that yes indeed they have, which is not enough for the preacher who in a thunderous voice asks again, “Have you found Jesus?!” And they cry out in unison, “Yes! We have! We’ve found Jesus!”

“Bless you my sons!” booms the preacher. “Bless you all!”

And then someone in the background says in a flat undertone, “Okay, on your feet,” and my head fills with the sound of chains dragging and feet shuffling as the prisoners are ushered out of the sound studio.

My father turns the dial and finds more music. What’s playing is “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, and everyone in the car except me sings along.

My heart is not in Texas, it’s frozen in a deep realization triggered by the sound of chains, a realization of the oppression that the ten men serving life sentences must have suffered all their lives, and a realization of how they must have been coerced into declaring that they’d found Jesus — it was either that or a month in solitary.

The vibrations of that realization ripped through my young mind, and I realized further that almost everything I’d been told was a lie.

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January 23, 2017 · 4:26 pm

jingles writer

Jingles Writer

I entered a jingle-writing contest when I was twelve and won a catcher’s mitt. But they put me out in center field with it, and I couldn’t catch squat. And at bat I struck out repeatedly so that before long they yanked me out of the line up and made me the water boy.

I ran back and forth from the water cooler to the dugout with paper cups full of water, and the players, the boys who could catch and hit the ball, spat chew on my shoes.

I know, such a thing would be frowned upon today, especially since they were twelve years old, but these boys were going places. They already had pubic hair.

My father was determined to turn things around. He took me out after supper every night and fired fast balls into the mitt. He could pitch, he’d been an all-star in college, but he didn’t make the pros. He’d snarl each time he fired the ball into my mitt, bitter with memories.

When baseball season was over I put the mitt in the bottom of my toy box under the dregs of my early childhood–a stuffed giraffe with no eyes; a music box that played The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music; a stack of Marvel comic books; a glass jar filled with marbles.

When spring came around again, I pretended I’d forgot all about my catcher’s mitt, but one night after super my father came into my room tossing a baseball from one hand to the other. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll make a ball player out of you yet.”

I entered another jingle-writing contest and won a pellet gun. It turned out I was a dead shot. I could hit the bull’s eye on the target every time, and then I began shooting birds and squirrels out of trees.

I joined the army when I was seventeen and they made me a sniper. I got a lot of medals and was a sergeant in no time.

My father said he was proud of me, but he couldn’t look me in the eye.

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January 20, 2017 · 9:41 am

coming to power

Coming To Power

Crown the king with thorns.

Drape the queen in clear plastic, parade her into the courtyard.

Give the jester new cue cards, hoosier-stick the sad page.

Call an emergency meeting of war lords, put the green knight in the saddle.

Give fair warning to the infidel, then slash burn and plunder.

Keep the cross polished and your sword sharp.

In such ways great men come to power.

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January 15, 2017 · 7:14 pm

cleopatra

Cleopatra

She dreamed she was Cleopatra. She got herself a rowboat and rowed around the shore of her daddy’s private lake. She stayed out of deep water but was still in over her head. Already, at age of six. She ate chocolate non-stop and kept hoping Antony would arrive from Rome and save her. She grew fat and graduated from grade school.

In high school she took a drink and woke up no longer a virgin. She repeated the process enhanced by cocaine right into her senior year. By that time the boys had grown bored with her and even daddy stopped tucking her in at night. She graduated.

She turned street legal and cashed in her inheritance. Took speed, trimmed down, flew to Egypt. Rented a cruise ship and sailed the Nile draped in gold and silver, emeralds and turquoise. Then the money ran out.

Back home she rode Greyhound from city to city and became a truck-stop mama. Six treatment centers, nine county jails, three shrinks and a handful of counselors later, she hit bottom.

She went back to school. Got her own shrink credentials and settled down in a plush L.A. office, tapping the eraser-end of a #2 pencil on her desktop, waiting for her first paying customer to step thru the door.

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