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I’m also picturing one of those pet-toys where the big, battery-driven head rolls erratically over the floor with the little, empty skin of a body flipping and flapping around, following along behind it.
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I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.
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All our accents derive from Britain.
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Growing up, Ovid was a sometimes competitor in high school athletics. In retrospect it makes me think of extremely pregnant birds and may explain my distinct indifference toward Latin narrative poetry.
Repost of a Post Past
Going down the rabbit-hole of Cece’s post. Great rememberies here, following “flockers.”
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I bet if we had a Promethean category we’d use the fuck out of it.
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I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
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I think Paula Deen has Dianetics.
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Best Pickup Line Ever.
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Amanda Mae, I’m going to tape your thoughtful comment to the back of my clenched fist for a while, and see if I can slowly release.
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People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.
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My brother was four years older but still I fought with him, physically, like an idiot. I took quite a bit of punishment before I learned to fight dirty and run, climb a tree where he couldn’t follow, barricade myself somewhere. Sometimes I had to wait for a while but I didn’t care. He knew I would die of thirst, starve to death, if I had to. So he would give up and go away.
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Also, I learned a very important lesson: no beard jokes at web conferences. It’s like prodding at a shibboleth.
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We are all mise en abyme.
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There was a lemon cologne I used when I was a teenage clerk behind the cosmetics counter of a fancy department store. I can’t remember the name. We had dozens of high-end perfume samples available to use. But I spritzed myself with lemon brightness every single time.
I also had a tendency to borrow a sultry red wig from the wig department. But that’s another story.
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Whenever I squeeze lemon or lime onto/into some food/beverage, I dab behind my ears with my citrus-y fingers.
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I’d like to open a couple of bars: one nautically-themed and called “The Octopus,” the other would be a sleazy 70s place called “The Magic Titty.” Both would feature aquariums, small framed images of Demi Moore’s bush, and bootlegs of Deron’s techno joints.
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Listen, who the fuck are you to say whether or not that can do that. I’ve worked with things you cannot comprehend for over 85 years and four lives (one was exceedingly short) and I tell you today as certain as I stand here today that that can most certainly do that.
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A ground crewman who worked on my father’s WWII plane told me their B-26 Marauder was known as the “whore of the skies.” I feel like I can’t say the rest of his quote on this family wire. It crashed a lot. So use your imagination. This was about 15 years ago, during a ceremony for a large marker with the names of the men associated with Flak Bait when it was displayed at Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. This old fella said this to me right in front of Miss Nell, who smiled politely and said, “Okay, well now…” and took my arm and hustled ME off.
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If I can catch all of this fishes, and then put them in a barrel, I already have the fish, before I put in a barrel, I do not need to shoot them, they are already here, in my bag, in my big bag of plastic.
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Carole Corlew quoting Royal Brightbill:
The Pig
A reporter invited to a roast pig dinner on a hog farm was amazed to see the main course had three wooden legs. He asked the farmer about it.
“Oh, that was the best pig I ever had,” the farmer said. “A few years back, my house caught fire while I slept. He ran through the flames to wake me.”
“Is that how he lost his legs?”
“And just a couple of months ago, I fell in an alligator-filled bayou. He jumped in and pulled me out.”
“But what about the legs?”
“My friend, a pig that valuable you just don’t eat all at once.”
Somewhere on Wall Street a dog was barking.
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This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.
Here’s a favorite opening sentence:
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Did I ever tell you about the time I blew up our own mailbox with fireworks? I was a lousy prankster.
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At times I have been the elephant.
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In truth, everything should be wrapped in bacon.
