“It was meant not to convince but to confound.” –Rex Stout
The new druggist needs
His two atenolol w/juice
Roger settled w/Vic
In his goodbye letter
Clay is illegally sane
Earth’s oddness its gift
A few weeks ago my friend Robbie created a flash fiction group in Facebook and invited me to join it. I did, but have made only one contribution so far. This will be my second. It may help to know that Sydney Greenstreet was the actor in THE MALTESE FALCON that Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart’s character, referred to as “Fat Man,” and that John F. Long was a builder of affordable homes in the Valley of the Sun, and was at least partially responsible for the Valley’s explosive growth.
b. longstreet vs. the evil whisper
once upon never b. for bee longstreet, the hermaphroditic child of sidney greenstreet and john f. long via whimsical genetic misadventure, found his&herself on cave creek road, on that long long stretch with the commodious sidewalk.
the evil whisper “you can do nothing” bounced around in that gender-blended head. “that’s not true,” b. kept answering it. “i can walk, i can walk, i can walk. and i shall ouija walk.” (b. called walks where b. allowed herhis feet to go where they will “ouija walks” because it was as if b. were the pointer of a ouija board seeking through the subether vorticular places/events.)
82 minutes of ouijawalking led b. to a storefront window of a pet grooming parlor, behind which was a laundry-lint-gray kitten with an expression of perpetual mild confusion. “that is a nice-looking thing,” said the evil whisper. “but you can do nothing.”
“that’s not true,” b. replied. “i note the address. i shall pet the kitten to-morrow.” b. then bade herforthemoment’s feet continue. in another nine minutes b. stood before a burning automobile, with no one inside and no one around.
“life is random, and so are you,” rasped the evil whisper. “NOT SO,” replied himthen immediately. “i may be misbegotten, but i was deliberately made. and as a creature brought to be, i have the power of…” b. was stuck. this is what its whole life had led to. the right word of power would work; the wrong one would betoken doom and failure.
as in a ouija message, the correct word burst forth with spontaneous combustion:
“DELIBERATION!!!”
and with that perfect word, the evil whisper vanished, never to be heard again, and B. Longstreet, Representative At Large for Humanity, was freed.
Here’s one from my very early art-journaling days, more than seven years ago. I was using a Sharpie Ultrafine (or was it Microfine?) on a notebook my sweet daughter Kate gave me for Christmas. Note the smiley-face shield in the middle.
Here are the words to the single acrostic:
The ship and crew were viking
A stiff wind stretched the sail
The weather to their liking
The gleam of shield and mail.
Eyes squinting, tearing, blinking red,
Rows blister hands, moans tell of dread,
Still gladly wayward, and not dead.
I just love Index Cards, so much so that I think of them as friends, as benevolent messengers, as the Type O Blood of information conveyance. They go in pockets, on refrigerators, in those nifty little metal boxes with the cute dividers. They are big enough to contain the hugest ideas. Write small enough and you can put a decent-sized short story on one. They’re great for five-minute portraiture, ten-minute dream capture, fifteen-minute landscapes, sixty-minute meeting minutes. For reminders, Valentines, plot outlines, and affirmations they are hard to beat. So here’s to ’em:
It’s RED WHITE & BLUE on one side–the other blanc
N is for NOTES or NOTIONS or NOSTALGIA
Dreams need not fade if this & a pencil serve as recorder
Edifying, talking points, & love may be conveyed
Xylophone music written & drawn with gravitic graphitic pyrotechnics
Special thanks and manifold gratitude to my Sweetheart, Denise, for not only introducing me to the Index Card Project but also for giving me a pack of 100 cards, one of which I used for this post. Sweetheart, special as they are, the entire pack of cards could not thoroughly describe your wonderfulness!
it begins to fade so let’s hurry: a classroom for adult continuing education
a stern teacher perhaps mrs. holmberg from 6th grade
a door to the bright-sunshined outside opens and it is you
and you have wigs with you some brunette some redhead
and i realize: it’s a class in social dynamics
you are a guest lecturer
there are some minutes before class begins
there is an empty seat two from me and you sit in it
the guy between you and me is a friend of mine but opportunistic
he begins to chat you up and i interrupt and ask him to stand
he does and i do and i ask him to sit where i had been sitting
i sat where he had been say “that’s ever so much nicer” for now i’m sitting next to you
i’m sitting next to you for the first time
what a smile you have
i ask you how old you were when you gave your first lecture and you say “three”
i ask if it were in church and the strolling teacher looks at me sternly and i wake up
At last there’s a payoff on the hours I have spent drawing and filling in checkerboard grids. A golf club and a spider’s legs require straight or near-straight lines in the drawing, and I now can draw them quickly and easily, up to a certain length.
This image is entirely faked. Nor golfer nor spider posed for me, and I didn’t do my usual internet image search to remind me of what what I want to draw looks like. I’m sure I’ve made egregious errors in both arachnoidal and human-golfer anatomy, but a) the dymanics of the drawing depend less on anatomical accuracy and more on pattern interplay, and b) the next time I see a spider, or a golfer, I’ll notice what I did wrong this time, and my future drawings of either or both will benefit.
The text on the image is very difficult to read. Here is a transcription:
Solitary critters, both, and two you daren’t bug
Pester either, you may turn a Nancy to a Sluggo
Irritation makes detractors wish they were unlawful
Destiny gave one a web and one a hat to doff
Expertise is gained with practice. Dancers at a barre
Rarely work as hard as they to bring things up to par
Yesterday all was Sleepless Despair. Today promises to be Restful Serenity, and I will try to help it along with this affirmative page.
Here are the words:
Ruffled dispositions need a welcome cooling breeze
Energizing Solitude may calm that choppy sea
Savored armchair plush & drink & gently rustling trees
Take a soul from rough-milled grit to smooth tranquility
Friends, it is now 21 May, the Year of Our Lord 2014, 5:10 PM Mountain Standard Time. I am sleep-deprived, owing some to attendance at three scheduled-when-I’m-normally-asleep meetings in four days, owing some to disorganization, owing some to inability to sleep at will. With the sleeplessness is a creeping despair, exemplified by the fact that the original working title of this post was “The Future Futility of Human Existence.”
Usually the moral of the story comes at the end, but here it is now: “Get good sleep, or you will be sorry.”
The above image is a great mashup of The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat. A still life of plate, chair, spoon, table and floor provides the background. The spine of a triple acrostic is at upper right; of a septuple acrostic, from top midleft to bottom right; of a quintuple acrostic, from bottom left to bottom midright. The crucial middle words of the septuple and the quintuple have been determined, and I know from experience that that’s the hardest part. I know that sooner or later, with patience and some research, I’ll eventually have the poems that will complete the acrostics, and I will have done something that represents the utmost in what I can do in this peculiar genre I’ve plumbed for more than seven years.
But I also “know” even if I expend that effort to the tune of hundreds of hours, draw better than I ever have before for the final incarnation of the image, and dress it in the perfect frame–that it will have been a waste of time.
I put “know” in quotation marks because I suspect that that’s the sleep-deprivation talking.
It’s now 5:27 PM, MST. Time to wrap this up and get as much sleep as I can before clocking in at 11.
Sleep well yourselves, Friends…
Friends, here is an image that is at most at 5% of its potential. I hereby relinquish all copyright to it. Anyone who wants can claim it for their own and finish it. But–can you?
Today’s post will be a riddle’s question, followed by an image titled “Inference Pattern” and containing partial text from whose pattern it may be inferred forms “Inference Pattern” (the image also contains checkerboards and other patterns of horizontal and vertical, and a wicked-looking earwiggy caterpillar, or caterpillary earwig, if you prefer), followed by the riddle’s answer. As far as I know the riddle was invented by me some hours ago. The sufficiently smart and/or patient will be able to infer the answer to the riddle prior to seeing it.
Q: What is an orange’s favorite type of furniture?
Inference Pattern
A: An orange’s favorite type of furniture is…
…
…
Sectional, of course. [dodges thrown oranges]
PS–The phrase “Inference Pattern” was deliberately modeled after the phrase “Interference Pattern.” An Internet search on “Double-Slit Experiment” will yield extensive discussions on the intereference pattern abtained via this experiment. It is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Universe and the interaction of the observer. Infer from that what you will, my friends!
One with Clay, Image and Text 