Another Move

My much-neglected ‘other’ bl*g has also recently moved. Naked Blathering is now up, and while on life-support, the prognosis is good. NB will contain my great passable hopeful literary pursuits. Sadly, the One Word site seems to have gone AWOL. Evidently “Hay” has been the One Word for about a month. But, I was pointed to Sixminutestory.com, and I think it’s pretty neat. It’s relatively new, so we’ll see how it goes for a bit.

I’m going to try to post frequently on NB as well. I’d like to get my book going. I’ve got many thoughts floating around in my head, and need to get them down before I lose them.

Into the Lion’s Mouth

A portion of this has been previously posted, and I’ve reworked this piece a bit too.

*****

When I was very young, about 4, my mom, sister and I lived in a two-bedroom condo. My grandparents lived just around the corner from us. We saw them nearly every day. My grandfather is a bit odd; to me, vacillating between a complete nut and a total genius. I was his first grandchild and we’ve always had a connection of sorts in some strange way.

One of our favorite things to do was to take long evening walks in our neighborhood. As we walked, we would ‘philosophize’ about various things. Though now I don’t remember any of the things that we would talk about.

The one thing I do remember were the trees down one street that we frequented. I don’t know what kind of trees they were, but they had huge, full, leafy canopies that touched over the middle of the street. They could have been pecan trees. My grandparents had one of these behind their condo that would drop mounds of nuts onto their patio. My sister and I would gather them up, and my grandparents would shell and eat them and use them in recepies.

But, on our walks, especially when there was no moon, and the streetlights were casting strange shadows, I would imagine that the trees made up a giant lion’s mouth. As we approached, we would stop and stare around, while I slowly gathered the courage to step into the gaping hole and the shadows. When I was ready, I would tightly grasp my grandfather’s hand and take a deep breath before we would both start together into the darkness. Sometimes we would walk quietly and slowly through, so as not to wake the lion and be eaten alive. Other times I would be in a bit of a panic and we would hurry down the street to get out of the lion’s mouth as soon as we could.

If the wind was blowing, I could swear I could hear the lion roaring and rumbling, stirring from his sleep. Some nights I couldn’t muster the courage to enter into the shadows at all, and we would walk a different route. And as we walked away, I would look over my shoulder, wondering if I would be able to walk through the next time.

Reworking

When I met Nick, he regularly attended a Thursday night writing group. Nick writes great poetry in a kind of observational, beatnik style. He’s read me some things that have really blown my socks off. But evidently, since he met me, rather than becoming his muse, I’ve become like a bottle stopper. He doesn’t write much anymore. He’s posted some of his writing here. I wish he would post more. Especially some of his older work. He has a great voice and a great talent. I’ve let him take a break, but now I’m going to give him a kick in the pants and tell him to get writing. Momma wants a new car. Yes, I have purely selfish reasons.

And I too have been sitting on an idea for a book. Really a collection of snippets. Like if each day of your life was a piece of paper folded up in a jar, and someone was reaching in and pulling out a day, the day would be one part the story. You don’t get the whole story, just random days. I got the idea from one of Bone’s posts, asking If you could step back in time and re-experience a moment in your life what would that experience be. You can’t change it, just experience it. Why did you choose that moment? My response was the post One Moment. This will be a story in my book. But I reworked it for the Thursday night writing group, and I read this last night. I have a little more tweaking to do to it, but the meat of it will stay.

Tales from the Office, Series #82048

She was sitting at her desk, reading email and browsing bone-dry project documentation. Nearby sat two, plain, white Styrofoam cups. Standard corporate-issue, Recyclable #6. In one cup, coffee. In the other, granola. For the last hour, she’d been sipping coffee and pouring granola in her hand, then popping it in her mouth, quelling the munchies that had overtaken her while waiting for the lunch hour to arrive. One cup sat to her right on the cool, grey industrial desk. The other cup sat to her left, in front of papers waiting to be filed away. It was a seemingly normal workday scene.

Suddenly, tragedy struck. She absent-mindedly reached for the granola cup, keeping her eyes fixed on the LCD screen, reading the latest important dispatch from HQ. Her slender, tanned fingers wrapped themselves around the polystyrene cylinder, lifted the vessel, and tilted it toward her cupped palm. But, instead of the coarse, dry oats and honey mixture she expected in her hand, she felt lukewarm, sticky liquid pouring over her appendages. The caffeinated nectar ran off her hand, slowly spreading across her desk, and onto her laptop. She jumped quickly, muttering reproachful words to herself. Yanking open the cold, metal desk drawer that contained pens, paperclips and other miscellaneous items, including napkins from lunchtimes gone by, she pulled out the absorbent paper, formerly known as trees, to staunch the spread of the creamy brown coffee.

Only the very edge of the laptop base had received a dousing of the creamy brown liquid. She lifted the base, mounded napkin after napkin, and watched as they sucked up the bane of electronic devices everywhere. She silently prayed that none of the beverage had run into the protective plastic casing. After the last drip had dried, she proceeded to test the machine to make sure that normal functions were still present. As she typed, the words came out sdrawkcab. With mounting dread in her heart, she crossed her fingers and rebooted the system. As the familiar black screen with the wavering four-color flag appeared in front of her, she waited for and received the blue blinking screen, followed by the login dialog prompt. She typed in her password, pressed ‘Login’, and was rewarded for her patience and prayers with a functioning desktop.

Blog-block

I can’t think of anything to write about today. I’m still sorting through pictures and stuff from Colorado, and the write-up is nowhere near ready. 😦 Sigh. And, the official photos are still being uploaded by the picture-taking-people. I’ve looked, but don’t see any of me. 😦 This is actually probably a good thing. Just to give you a taste:

I’m all smiles before the run.      But at the end, I thought I was going to die.
                          

I was runnin’ ugly, breathing hard, it was HOT, and for some reason my right leg was completely numb at this point, and had been for about two miles. Yep, this was my low point of the race. Good news is, it was all fantastic after that!