tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51360112012-02-16T07:21:55.691-08:00Prose for Nigerian Scammers<br>...bettering their lives thru fiction</br>TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comBlogger201100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-84761398263281591582008-08-15T13:21:00.001-07:002008-08-15T13:40:17.724-07:00Cube JazzWhen last we left, Cube Warrior had been led from the free range of a spacious office to a cubical reservation. There he was to grow corn, perfect his whine-making ability, and pacifically chew cud while saying deep things, occasionally getting a star turn on television - like producing a tear at the sight of litter thrown next to his cube wall.Cube Warrior and his band all went TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-39406104215306233472007-11-17T20:48:00.000-08:002007-11-17T20:50:24.946-08:00The OfficeIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the time I'd just gotten used to my office, it was the time I was losing my office. Mornings I would huddle over my black mother's milk and cry: "Employer loves me, this I know,because this officetells me so!" An office meant one thing: a door, which implied a hinge, which implied closure, which implied privacy. It inspired me TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-59857808043462687832007-06-28T11:23:00.001-07:002007-06-28T11:32:14.654-07:00The Illusions of ChildrenWomen are like cruise ships with unpredictable itineraries. Moody, they take you where you do not want to go and dress you as you would not dress. One minute you're on your way to Burma, the next Siberia. Guided by moonbeams, it's Scylla by Tuesday and Charybdis by Friday. But it is for our own benefit. Men without women are ignoble savages.My father had a mistress was TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-67053851359551715342007-06-28T11:21:00.000-07:002007-06-28T11:22:21.254-07:00Work and its DiscontentsTragically, I’ve experienced large periods of chronic full employment. Corporate re-structurings, mergers, reorganizations, downsizings and rightsizings all left my job intact lo these many years, back from the time I left the collegiate womb at the tender age of 21. (It was an emergency C-section; I didn’t want to come out.) Indeed, we emerge from our mother’s womb TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-62927375529137770652007-06-28T11:20:00.003-07:002007-06-28T11:25:12.176-07:00Choosing ZeffirelliThe moon that Mardi Gras was gauzed by clouds, as if trying to costume itself in the spirit of the occasion. Was it trying to hide in order to observe, or fit in so that it may join the revelers? No one knew for sure but that it had the wide-eyed innocence of a young Olivia Hussey. One of the revelers was a young man with a mathematical background. The certainty in the life of TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-74236517485509658342007-06-28T11:20:00.001-07:002007-06-28T11:25:46.185-07:00The Silent AlarmThere were no shades of gray in the world of Alan Sharpley, aged 20. Blaguards, they were, soulless collegians who bragged of their weekend conquests at Tuesday's fraternity meetings. It shocked him when one "raised the bloody flag", bragging of having had a menustrating woman leave evidence on his bedsheets, the ultimate affront for which she would pay, he said, and the crowd TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-37642625683613600042007-06-28T11:19:00.001-07:002007-06-28T11:19:45.484-07:00And the poets down here don't write nothin' at allThey just stand back and let it all beAnd in the quick of the night they reach for their momentAnd try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even deadTonight in JunglelandThe words come back as if in a dream or at least the shadowy staging area between chimera and reality in the time before we understood. There in early King TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-62160908770324918312007-06-28T11:12:00.000-07:002007-06-28T11:17:40.538-07:00Fictional Friday: The Vinny CodeFrontipiece:While this is a work of fiction, everything presented within is true and factual; there is a Greek word for scribes, and there is a Priory of Peoria.Chapter 1Having a case of blogger's block, a non-fatal cousin to the more famous writer's block, I recalled admonitions to "write what you know" and thought fondly back to those halcyon days when I hung TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1108787880654116012005-02-18T20:36:00.000-08:002007-06-28T11:09:32.513-07:00There was a hint of rain that late March day in nineteen hundred and seventy-three. I was fishing with my grandfather, who had the patience of Job, and the orange bobber which hung over glass waters hardly moved. If this was a game they’d have called it on account of nothing happening. I was hoping for rain so we’d call it a day. But Grandma was waiting at home to skin a few bluegills for TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1108401555937870492005-02-14T09:18:00.000-08:002007-06-28T11:12:47.166-07:00Discombobulated. That’s how I felt, a word whose physicality mirrors its meaning. She wrote to say that she can’t write anymore, that the Soviets had gotten around to banning electronic epistles to any but party members and my official status was dissident. That the news should come as a dull surprise was itself a surprise since the banning of personal correspondence seemed, in retrospect, moreTShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1107273554641508652005-02-01T07:59:00.000-08:002005-02-01T07:59:14.640-08:00The corporation had the soul of a Russian novelist: there was always the trust that if they just got the name right everything else would follow. The long grey line of CEOs must've longed for something meaty like "Alexandrovna Yegorushka", something around which you could write a narrative.
Because narrative was really the unstated corporate mission. Everybody needed a "story". CEOs needed TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1105762994662300372005-01-14T20:23:00.000-08:002005-01-17T04:42:36.683-08:00Fictional Friday
It was the summer of ’82 and Jim Malone was protecting an innocence growing increasingly theoretical. He was dating Agape when Eros walked by and afterwards none were ever the same.
Eros had agate blue eyes and Times New Roman hair which lay against the back of a tight red t-shirt. She pile-drived body and brain.
Jim never cared for Eros because she’d never cared for him. HeTShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1104346512065355132004-12-29T10:54:00.000-08:002004-12-29T10:55:16.786-08:00Good Type
John Spoerl's favorite part of books – the part he went to like gamblers go for the sports pages – was “About the Type”. He read the reviews rapturously, marveling at the ubiquitous excellence. There was apparently never a bad type, never a font that wasn’t readable or agreeably aged or without a euphonious name. Just once he longed to read: “The type is 'Sandusky', developed in 1953 TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1102104020851080432004-12-03T11:58:00.000-08:002004-12-08T12:16:20.360-08:00Renewed a correspondence today with an old friend by the name of "Dute". He founded our company's unofficial "Disturbed Loner's Chat Room", which consisted of a Lotus Notes address group of ten of us serving as an outlet, a forum for injecting creativity and color into all things corporate. The emails were as jejune as they were politically incorrect. Dute, though, is one heckuva writer, as TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1100095498260367082004-11-10T06:03:00.000-08:002004-12-29T10:56:03.600-08:00Dr. Joe was allergic to clichés. He was a Midwestern chap, middle-aged, of average looks, of average talent and lived in an average town. The one thing he had was an above average vocabulary. Yet, as a General Practitioner he was forced by circumstances to have to say the same thing many times --- the dreaded "open up and say 'ahhhh'".
He said it without a problem the first couple times. TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1083418854970909262004-05-01T06:40:00.000-07:002004-11-16T08:20:37.696-08:00Irish Fathers
Another morning made stale by
work’s dissipation;
he made sluggish use
of a dull razor
and from his face
did Guinness bleed.
He dabbed at it
tasted his ancestor’s elixir
and laughed at the mad poets
and the drunk Foggy Dews
and drove to work
to bask in the flourescence.
Returning home his children cried,
“Tell us again, Daddy,
about the Children of Lir!”
And he said:
“You are TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1082172319686217372004-04-16T20:25:00.000-07:002004-04-16T20:29:13.373-07:00I’d always been attracted to the notion of profligate waste, the more profligate the better. Waste appealed not only because of my naturally parsimonious ways but because it mirrored the profligacy of the natural world. A million fireflys and butterflys die on arrival, long-lasting as fireworks.
Eccentric characters and underachievers held my affection. I saved newspaper and magazine clippingsTShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1082172291319309332004-04-16T20:24:00.000-07:002004-10-28T07:03:27.743-07:00Belloc’s sweet prose stiches somulence over me. I can't read him without falling asleep because he has charms to soothe the savage breast. I fall into the rhthym of the sentences and it satisfies what I didn’t know needed satisfying. He inspires me to try.
I am a mad scientist longing to string words together in new and strange and potentially explosive situations. I want to know where the TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-1076731877888879802004-02-13T20:11:00.000-08:002004-04-16T20:29:43.733-07:00Mary Slaney blamed it all on “Torn Between Two Lovers”. Her dissipation that is. MacGregor’s hit song came at a time when Mary was distrusting the old verities and here was another sweet-warbling Mary with a voice so pure that she sympathetically thought, “torn between two lovers…that can happen.”
Pop songs made love beyond the borders of marriage okay. There were no shortage of TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5136011.post-902743892003-03-06T18:08:00.000-08:002004-01-05T07:19:20.090-08:00Gunner Kearney walked each morning to Kate Kearney’s Cottage and drank a single shot of Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey before computer programming under the fluorescent lights of a large multi-national. The walk to Kate’s was metaphorical, only in his mind, a pre-work ritual to briefly color his world ethnic. The morning coffee would suffice for entertainment, the liquid of the damned. Caffeine was TShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118362963139092279noreply@blogger.com