Surface, Hamartia

When phones had buttons
the obvious mediation of the machine,
a tool of man,
began conversations with touch and voice
as in a darkened room.

A glossy design
now keeps the conversation
between man and machine
at the surface.

Your fingers skim over messages.
Instant data yield information
without action, without give-and-take.

No wonder online comments are misunderstood
or construed for the maximum feedback --
more comments, shares and likes
without a breath exchanged or
the look in someone's eyes when they tell you
they love you or hate you.

Would the androids who dream of electric sheep
believe that you dream
of being electric, and of always
pushing buttons you cannot feel?

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 6

6.

     He told me how to bounce there, which was really how to bounce anywhere, which is a large part of finding lost things. I would get into the mathematics of it, but unicorns use a few imaginary terms I am not certain could translate into any of the human languages.
     Upon my bounce into Miamono Tower, Floor Thirty-Seven, Room 3706 I knocked over a table stacked with cupcakes.
    “Watch where you’re going, Tiberius.” Larry happened to glance up from the brightly lit table next to the one I’d plowed into. “Oh, it’s you. Mikey’s mad.”
     “He implied that you didn’t teach me much.”
     He scoffed. “Well, yeah, it takes time to do it properly and stuff.”
     He said it way too fast, which made me ask, “How much sugar have you had today?”

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 5

5.

     Somehow I escaped the pandemonium of the clearing and ended up in St. Petersburg. That happened to be a good thing for a little boy who had lost his mother in a crowd. He cried that he wanted his mommy, and I took him straight across the square. Unicorn magic is wonderful for finding lost things. Did I tell you about how I found a bride’s wedding cake? Never mind.
     I could not find anyone else in that latitude who needed a ride, so I bounced on over to Italy and ran the tilted streets of Torino for a while. I ended up taking a sunburned tourist to the hotel lobby he had just vacated. He said he’d vacated; as it turns out he was trying to get into the suite of an ex-girlfriend. I watched her fist make contact with the underside of his jaw.
      Believe me, I bounced out of there, quick.

So Serious Saturday #14

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Informational/Opinion

Recommended Books for Young Adults

This week I was approached by a woman seeking to inspire ninth grade students, particularly boys, with fun and appropriate reads for a co-curricular book club.

I was actually recruited because I was the only one in that aisle of the bookstore who had read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, a wonderful young adult novel about a girl with two scientist parents who must rescue one of them from the far reaches of darkness and the universe with the aid of three mysterious women, her very gifted brother, and their new friend. After I had explained the basic plot of this timeless story, the woman informed me what she was searching for; the fact that I happened to have an English degree was a bonus.

Darrowwood Part Eleven

    11.

That could not be right.  Monica had never heard of a prep school preview lasting that long, and it did not feel as though it had been two weeks.  Just yesterday – or the day before, whichever – they had eaten the most delicious orange chicken she had ever tasted.

            “I mean, it’s not possible, right?” Monica asked Jenny sometime later.  They sat on the dock, twisting rope together,their assigned task today.

            “I don’t know,” Jenny replied.  She dangled her bare toes in the small lake behind the cafeteria.  Alendro had been generous enough to allow her to wear her flip-flops with her school uniform, the same pairs that were lying behind them on the fragrant pine planks.  Her big toe was still wrapped up in a bandage. Jenny wriggled all of her toes in the water and laughed.

            “What’s so funny?” Monica asked.

            “The water – it’s lapping against my feet.  It wants to play.”

A Gentle Reminder

Too late my heart gives thanks to Thee
and savors the daily blessing
when I believe my days are free
for old pleasures and carousing.

Before the day begins I should
bow down my knees to pray
that Thy strong and guiding hand would
direct my walk in Thy good way.

Each hour sends Thy gift of life,
a succession of small moments
to test how man can wait in strife
for the joy in unfolding contents.

Thy justice equals thy good grace
to broken spirits far and near
less lost than missing a strong base
on which to hold faith against fear.

Almost Craft Wednesday

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.   

Indecision

     The author is having some philosophical difficulties. Please return next week when she will have resolved what, exactly, she wants to say about tone, voice, or point-of-view.

     In the meantime, enjoy a selection of works listed under the Serials tab at the top of the blog.

Dry on the Cinco del Mayo

For my father

Weeds shove through cracked slabs

of the driveway, where I stand and watch

you walking up the concrete slant

and the lawn gone dry some weeks now

taking the air of firework and formaldehyde fumes

into cells withered by heat and restriction,

the new policy enforced only after

those of your time did not know moderation.

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 4

4.

     We stopped off in Juneau and the North Pole before ending up on a rooftop in downtown Tokyo.        Tokyo carries crazy connotations, for a unicorn. It is our Las Vegas. It is kind of like Vegas, too, in that we take a gamble walking on ground level, what with all the cars that cannot see us and the millions who are too busy fiddling with their technology to notice a sparkling equine trying to get by without goring anyone. I mean, it’s bad enough being this short without having a horn thing between your eyes that you can’t even see half the time, if you can imagine that.
     Anyway, the guy named Ned puked all over the polishing tile of a rooftop Tokyo betting hall. Larry was going to let him down into it and all, but I angled my head so that my horn caught his armpit and only pulled his Converse through the mess.
     “Larry, buddy, can I have that rider when you’re done with him?” One of the unicorns standing in a buffet line strutted up to where Larry was polishing his hoofs against the tile.  He was one of those type who probably think they’re hot stuff, with all that mane-shaking and tail-twitching.

So Serious Saturday #13

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

This is a rule-bending SSS, as the words are fictionalized, but the conflict was not.

Type: Discussion

The Nature of Art

      Early morning on Mother’s Day the residents of a certain household found themselves awake. They stood between the kitchen and the living area and chatted about this or that, in the manner of philosophical parliaments held at two in the morning.
     Someone brought up the subject of art, using either a painting or another painted medium as an example object. “That’s ugly,” one of the residents said.
     “Well, what do you think art is?” a conversational partner said. “Art is made by people who don’t know what they are doing. It’s totally random.”
     A third conversationalist chimed in. “Then what about all the masters of art? Picasso. Da Vinci. Pollack –”
     “Yes, and look at those soup cans.” The second speaker laughed. “They’re ugly.”
     “He meant for them to be like that,” said the first.
     “It was made on purpose,” the third said. “So is art intentional or unintentional ugliness?” 

Okay

empty word for an empty question
about how I am doing --

how do you think,
being away from everyone
and everything that mattered
to my late adolescent soul

I give the answer as some people fling words:
carelessly, frequently, hopelessly.

a question needs an answer, after all,
unless the asker isn't thinking
but making sound to fill the air and the
gap between my ears used for
collecting electric impulses and dust

if you are very still you can smell something burning

the ash floats apart and condenses in alternating patterns
mimicking the past and foretelling what future remains

Darrowwood Part Ten

10.

     “Isn’t it great?” Jenny asked Monica at dinner in the cafeteria.  From the smell, dimensions, and general décor, it was reasonable to suppose the building was a converted barn. It even smelled like animals had been inside. “We can go wherever we want, whenever we want.  We don’t even have to go to class.”

     “This is only a preview,” Monica said, shoveling away a thick slice of chocolate cake.  She had to admit, they did know how to cook here. “There won’t actually be classes.”

     There were classes – they began Wednesday evening with Astronomy classes taught by some weedy old man, who gradually impressed with his passion. In general English, the girls had the best discussion of Dante’s Inferno they had ever had.  Chemistry was fascinating.  Trigonometry opened up possibilities. The teachers were funny, charming, and they certainly knew their subjects.
     Jenny adored the look, feel, and sound of the music auditorium, where she spent most of her time these days. Monica did not hear her talk about Ancient History at all. She would have asked, but there hardly seemed to be ten free minutes between classwork and sleep.

Craft Wednesday #12 Losing Anticipation of the End

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.   

Losing Anticipation of the End

          A book with physical dimension lets the reader know how many more pages are left by touch and sight. Sometimes a thin right half and a thick left one leads to excited anticipation of the end – or climax – or it warns the reader of the impending conclusion of their favorite series.

         On a logical level, e-books let the reader know how many pages are in the book, but what about the emotional experience of holding the remaining pages and feeling how light they are? A reader trades this upper-dimension awareness – which is almost like precognition – for the convenience of a smartphone or tablet, a device many people carry anyway. The turning of a page is deliberation, while the scrolling of a mouse is speed and efficiency. Gravitas becomes something holding back progress.

         Knowing a book will soon end is a more involved experience than only knowing about the page number of the book. The physical journey through a book unties a mystical connection between audience and book when the book is set as data inside of a screen, as words abstracted from the physical world.

        As the five senses dwindle down to one that counts – sight – readers may see with their eyes, but not truly feel the weight of the work and the effort that went into it.

Darrowwood Part Nine

9.

     “Welcome, welcome,” said a short man in the center of the crowd.  “Just sign your name and take a chair around the room here.”  Warehouse lighting shone on his dark hair, the only visible part of him.

     Monica approached the podium and its old leather book.  Her finger throbbed as she took the fountain pen, glanced over her shoulder, and then signed her name in red ink.  It glistened briefly on the page.

     “Come, come, we don’t have all day” The short man stepped on a boxy stage, his dark curls bouncing.  Monica took a seat on one of several high-backed chairs in front of a standing row of uniformed students, seats which seemed to be reserved, for the time being, for prospective students like her.  “My name is Alendro Sinclair, and I am the Headmaster and Founder of Darrowwood Preparatory.  I am pleased to see your lovely faces looking back at me at last.”

     Monica glanced around at the other students.  The blonde boy on her left appeared just slightly interested in the founder’s introduction.  On the right the girl with the piggy nose and a nose stud chatted animatedly with a friend.

     “We have many opportunities to expand your talents at Darrowwood,” Alendro said, “but first I should like to go over some rules.”

The Next Chapter of Postmodern Existence

Small innocence --
too slow for hard labor
-- dried up in the recession.

Onto a hansom cab we drive
worm-rotted and age-eaten facts,
a million points of view
echoing on frigid masonry.

One fact brings them together:
Strangle the ad man, they say,
with words not his. Do it
alone. Behold the shaft of light
stinging life with winter's breath,
the expansion of the ages.

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 3

3.

      Now a thing about bouncing – it is a highly technical process when you actually try to do the calculations. Some of the factors involve the interaction of real and imaginary numbers. It is the kind of math that unicorns were born to do.
      I followed his instructions and ended up standing next to Larry on the roof. The humans on the street only continued standing pointing at the spot I had been before my cross-continental adventure.
     “Nice job, kid,” Larry said. He speared a fat pink cake with his horn and tossed his head towards me. I opened my mouth to catch it and the whole thing went straight down my throat, no joke.
      I busied myself with scraping the sugar crystals left behind in my cheeks and teeth for a while. When I finished everything I looked down again and saw the crowd still staring at the spot I had been and talking loudly. I asked Larry why they there.
     “You turned invisible.” When he saw my wide eyes he said, “Hey, relax, it means you’re growing your horn.”
      I asked him what horn. He told me to look in the mirror sometime.

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 2

2.

One day Larry woke me early. I asked him if we were going to the observatory on the hill. 

“It’s closed today,” he said. “Come on.”

He took me to a bakery where he snatched the cakes out of a display case, while I stood on the sidewalk and looked pretty. Humans on the street thought I was a miniature horse, some sort of gimmick to draw customers to the bakery; I was small and sweet and hornless, despite already getting that silver glisten in my coat. Parents sat their toddlers on my back, while teenagers snickered and waited their turn. I tried my best not to bolt as one of the bigger kids pushed past the younger ones and jumped onto my back. 

“Giddyup,” she cried. She kicked my flanks with her combat boots.

Craft Wednesday #11 Stories as Summaries

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.   

Stories as Summaries: Facts Pressed Down

     Last week I voiced the opinion that a story is a collection of highlights which show the best, brightest, and most beautiful moments of a course of events and changes.

     An equally valid view is seeing a story as a summary of necessary and interesting events.

Day One

boxes mark unopened lives
along the carpeted rooms and short hallway
stack three high under blinded windows

I am sent to bring an instrument for saving
labor for the worker bees, who dance
in and out of the towers shading our paths,

the margin for error so smll
even my hips bump the sides
and I have to pass through sideways

I consider moving the china
service out of my way and into someone else's
even though we have nowhere else to turn,

but I recall the secret ways
through this city like childhood:

under and over, and over again, until
we find our own fragile space

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 1

1.

        If you ever want me to give you a ride, you’ve got to seem incredibly pure. At least as simple and undeceptive as a human child to get more than a snort and a tossing of the mane before I bolt away.
That’s probably where all those rumors came from about only maidens able to tame an individual of my kind – the Middle Ages, a time when men dressed in kitchen cookware and tried to leap onto our backs. I am aware the men did not want to get hurt from our hooves, horns, or teeth, but our kind is usually gentle. We just do not enjoy something that thinks it is smarter than us digging into our flanks with metal exoskeletons and roaring into our ears every five minutes. If humans wanted to do that, they should have gotten themselves a pony.
I really shouldn’t be telling you all this, but my kind have become incredibly lax in which standards we choose to uphold. I am one of the few old souls trying to keep to the traditions as much as possible. However, being helpless or by yourself might help you get a ride. Flattery also helps, as a feature common to all unicorns is that we are incredibly vain. Any little girl who cries, “Oh, you’re mane’s so pretty!” will immediately turn the head of every unicorn within a kilometer.
      And if you give us sugar, even the processed kind, we will take you to the moon. It has happened before that a small boy got lost in a crater and his ride at the time, a unicorn by the name of J.R. Sussisparkles (embarrassing, but it was a family name) spent over an hour calling, “Jimmy! Come out of the moonlings’ dining rooms! You have to be invited first.” He told me that himself. But that is a different story.
      But you wanted to know about me. Well, there is not much to tell. I grew up without brothers or sisters. My mother ran off with a centaur when I was a foal. I am still in the process of looking for my father. I am supposed to be named after him: Octavian Silverhorn, the Second. Have you heard of that name? Of course you haven’t.
      Yes, I was an orphaned unicorn. Not the best situation, but I made the best of it. Mostly I wandered around Griffith Park. I had not yet learned to be invisible yet, so a couple of times I was almost detained by animal control.
     That’s kind of how I met Larry.
     Oh, Larry’s another unicorn.
     It’s just Larry. I don’t believe he has any other name.
     He leaped off the observatory and kicked some humans as they threw a net over me. They were in the bushes when he did a sort of jig with his hooves to make them forget us entirely. My kind can do that: we make humans forget the last few minutes, or hours, or days. Otherwise every human who has ever ridden a unicorn would tell their friends. The collective magic of our species is weakened by such things.
     I had seen the strange dance done before, but I only knew a few basic things I was too young to use at the time. Anyway, the humans got in their car and drove away afterward. Like I said, unicorns are usually gentle.
     Larry said, “Hey kid, where’s your parents?” And I said I did not have any. He told me that was fine and that I should run with him for a while, if I wasn’t busy.
     A young foal like me did not have any plans. Larry took me down the hill to Pasadena. My kind is built for distances, so it was not that far. The only things that gave us any trouble were the bumper-to-bumper cars pumping exhaust into our nostrils.
     We passed a couple of days at his apartment eating his sweets supply bare. In between binges we explored the observatory. Sometimes kids left food hanging around the exhibits. Larry got his candy that way.
     Or so I thought.

Read the Second Part

So Serious Saturday #12

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Journal/Encouragement/Theology

Hung Up

Derek Hough was injured on "Dancing With the Stars". When I heard the news I wondered if it was his back, or something else that had already given him problems.

It happens quite frequently that an athlete reinjures the same body part, even years after the initial injury. I know a guy who has to be careful with his knee because of an old catcher injury.

Similar recurring pitfalls can catch us, too. Mothers fall back into addiction to pills or alcohol. Young men are drawn back into gambling away their futures. You trust the wrong person, again.

None Alone Five

5.

Cameron entered my tent. "Are you in there?"

"Present," I said. I stuck my hand out of my place behind the folding screen.

I heard her footsteps, her voice, closer. "You're still shaking." She touched my hand. I withdrew. "Is there something you want to talk about?"

"No, I'm fine. Or I'm going to be."

Cameron rapped on the wooden frame. "Okay, well, this regiment's got an assignment."

The last one was about a month ago. Between there's minor assignments for each of us. But they're all important.

 I emerged from the dressing area. "Already?" Cameron looked as baffled as I felt - I was still in sleeping garments. Still, I couldn't let that bother me. "Where? When?"

"He said it wasn't far. You should get dressed now. He's waiting."

"Like, now?"