It's usually a good idea to pander to your strengths in whatever you do. And I feel that, as a writer AND an editor, I have some pretty cogent things to say about how to get things done with writing. I see the same kinds of mistakes all the time.

Like ya, know. Whatever.

So I made this:

Of course, if I'm trying to help out with site traffic, who's this for: other writers, the very people to whom I already have a surfeit of access. Go on my twitter account and they're always there, yelling at me to take their free books and then never read them so they can feel good about meaningless numbers on their Amazon pages.

Still. I like it. And because I'm like a four year old who always wants to show you what he's made, even if it's a mud pie that he wants you to eat, here it is: I made this.

Take my mud pie, internet. Take my filthy mud pie and you like it.

Picture this if you will. A chilling scenario which reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book:

You're seated at a fire with as many as eight or nine other people. You're scared, you're restless, you're tired. At your feet, and within easy reach, each of you has a weapon: sticks with crudely-hafted stone blades, or sharp hand-axes with serrated edges.

Behind you, beyond the furthest reaches of the light, monsters slide through the darkness. Picture fangs the length of your fingers,  claws like knives; they're as quick as regret and as quiet as cold. Only the fire keeps them from dashing in and snatching you away at will. You try to forget they're there and enjoy yourself, but sometimes you catch brief glimpses of oval eyes glittering in the light.

To find out your fate, turn 600,000 pages to the future.

The people in this scenario didn't really have much of a choice, because this isn't fiction, this is history. This is the beginning of culture, the beginning of what makes us human. This is page one, the beginning of you.

Our ancestors gathered around campfires like these nightly, while real monsters watched. Back then, claws and fangs didn't fear us like they do today. We were soft and slow and blind at night. So why should they?

The other day I was asked to give a quick blurb about stories. Stories: what are they? Having degrees in English and Anthropology, I'm always like that guy who only has a hammer: to him, everything looks like a nail -- ask me a question and all my answers come back 'caveman.'

(Okay, not 'cave man,' that's an outdated and always-has-been inaccurate term, but you know what I mean.)

Because, hey, the answers for most questions do involve cavemen if you wish to be properly thorough. So what if 600,000 years have passed since the campfire. Inside we're still the same. Except now we have more stuff. 

We have our scenario. Campfire. Monsters. Weapons. Now add: Stories.

While we were making all our great stuff, concurrently we were sculpting ourselves through our stories, and this process began in the safety and comfort of the flickering firelight, the birthplace of all culture.

Because any of the people sitting there in the light who didn't physically have the propensity for storytelling, or for  listening to stories, probably wouldn't be your neighbor, or anyone's neighbor, much longer.

Scenario within the scenario: Bob the Caveman was out that day and ran into a spot of trouble. In fact Bob was attacked by a gyro-slug, the huge imaginary prehistoric slug the size of a bear. Ferocious, were gyro-slugs, famous for having two spinning antennae atop their heads which they would use to commit acts of unparalleled aerial predation upon poor bipedalists stuck to the ground by their feet.

Page one is a strange and scary place.

Normally, meeting a gyro-slug would mean certain death for poor Bob, but this day Bob evades its first assault, the slug crashes to the ground, and quite by sheer dumb luck, lands near the salt lick which Bob had been quarrying, and melts with many unpleasant raspberry noises into a pile of gyro-slug mush.

Bob is ecstatic, and fortunately for everybody around the fire, Bob is a good storyteller. He arranges his thoughts about the incident in an orderly and rational fashion, using compelling details about the event, and is skillful at providing emotional cues about how he felt at the time to which his audience can relate. Finally, he brings the tale to a satisfying crescendo. Everybody sighs. Denouement. Good ol' Bob. What would we do without him. For a few moments, the monsters sliding through the darkness are forgotten.

Here's where I need another graphic: WHERE I ACTUALLY REALLY, REALLY COME TO A POINT.

REALLY. FOR TRUE.

Half the people around the campfire don't have the physical propensity for storytelling, or for the rational organization of information that Bob possesses. But just for the sake of simplifying a ridiculous scenario, let's say that one of them is very, very poor at it, even while being wonderfully bright in every other respect. From Bob's story he fails to take away -- with any serious retention -- the location of where Bob was attacked, where Bob found salt, or how he evaded certain death. The rest of the group begins carrying salt with them wherever they go. When attacked by gyro-slugs in the future, suddenly they are the victors, until the terrible squishy predators learn to fear humans.

But not before they fall upon our hapless outlier -- saltless -- and lacking the genetic predisposition for storytelling, removing him from the gene pool.

This example is a bit extreme, of course -- Gyro Slugs were only two-thirds the size of what I've described -- but, in essence, the propensity for storytelling allows for the greater diffusion and retention of facts and ideas. Those with the best ideas and communication skills were the best suited to survive and pass on their life-saving storytelling acuity to successive generations.

Especially since what our unlucky outlier lacked most from that fireside meeting was the sense of growing closeness and comaraderie with the rest of the band, the buddings of cultural identity, without which, we could hardly call ourselves human.

And if you question in your mind whether unconscious keys like this really could have been passed down through the ages, ask yourself why people have an intrinsic fear of the dark, or why so many find fire so immediately comforting.

A mere 600,000 pages later, we still crave stories that involve danger, triumph, and reward, even though we no longer have to face these things on a daily basis. Now we crave them because we love them.

So, tonight, as I Lord of the Rings myself to sleep, I'll take a moment to remember page one and my predecessors who listened.

And I'll remember to bring a small bit of salt in my pockets tomorrow when I go to the store.

Just in case.

But hey, I have another day or so until I'm finished my next blog post, and so have a gaping huge white space here on my blog. A torture, the blank pages. They mock me and hide in my closet at night. No matter how many shows of Doctor Who I watch, they're still there. I guess I'll have to take care of it by myself, Tardis-less.

Now where did I put my sonic pencil?

So anyway, here's an interview I did for We Write Worlds last year. I'll add some pictures shortly, perhaps scandalous ones.

Here's a suggestion: Turn the interview into a drinking game. When I sound pompous, that's one shot. When I plug my own books, you chug a beer. If you end up thinking, Oy, I wanna smack this little sock-puppet right in the chops ... well, perhaps it's time to stop reading it as a drinking game and go for a nice lie-down while I surreptitiously sneak out the back.

Mind you, that impulse would verify that you were reading closely.

Allons-y!

As early as seven, I said I would be a writer when I grew up. I wrote a lot during junior high. I wrote every day in high school. Of course in high school I wanted to be a poet, and I have many old notebooks still sitting in my old room at my parent’s house that I need to burn someday.

For a while I let myself be convinced that writing was not a viable career path (That may, unfortunately, yet prove to be true). I studied English in university until I dropped out after two years. Then I got a science degree in Anthropology, studying Osteology and Archaeology, until I realized I would, at best, be a mediocre archaeologist, and that simply wasn’t good enough.

One day I decided I would write, and that was that.

At the time I was living in a bush camp a hundred miles from civilization in the north of British Columbia. I still remember the exact moment when, in the middle of the forest, I stood up, looked around, decided I wasn’t going to go back to do an archaeological thesis – I would write instead – and I was happy.

At the end of the summer, I returned home and wrote a terrible novel.

2: How many books have you written?

I have completed three books. I have two in states of undress.

My first novel remains untitled, best left buried in my bookshelf. It was a compilation of true hitchhiking stories to a fictional place, tales that I had either experienced myself, or compiled from the experiences of people I knew.

My second novel was A String of Momentary Silences, which is the only novel-length piece I currently have available through Amazon and Smashwords, about a man who decided to step off the hamster wheel of his dreary life. He stutters rather badly and hates his existence, and decides he’d be better off never speaking to anybody ever again. After he does that, life is easier for him, and he explores his world as an unspeaking individual. He meets a fellow who runs the puppet show at the local market, a man who also doesn’t speak, and the two become friends. Meanwhile he meets a woman online, and struggles with wanting to tell her that he can talk to her as he feels terrible lying to her with his silence. A String of Momentary Silences is not a long novel, but I always have trouble describing it.

My third is unfinished Twice Against the Same Stone, about a woman nearing her golden years, but who’s lived a bit of a criminal life, and she’s trying to make amends for her many mistakes.

My fourth is Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a man exiled to the leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in the late 1800s. There, the one healthy man among the sick, he becomes the leper among the lepers.

My fifth, and current work in progress, is where I relinquish my grip on five-word titles.  Systematic Rube, my first non-fiction book, is a rough outline of the silviculture industry as it represents rite of passage in Canada. I received a grant from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council to work on Systematic Rube in the spring of 2011.

3. What inspired you to write your (latest) book?

My latest book is Systematic Rube, exploring tree planting as rite of passage in Canada. It was not born from inspiration; rather it is a child of exasperation.

I spent thirteen months, working every day, writing Raw Flesh in the Rising. Then I spent sixteen months editing , every day, seven hours a day. I didn’t work for those two years; I wrote. Six months into editing I needed a break. I wanted to write – firstly – something new, and – secondly – something fun.

I had learned so much from writing Raw Flesh in the Rising. I wondered what my first person writing would look like. One day I sat down and began to write, cataloguing my favorite stories from my years working in the forests of British Columbia. At the time, thematically, it was very free-flowing. Having since gained purpose, it has become regimented and directed, though I still love working on it as I can do anything I want as long as I stay within the boundaries I’ve set for myself.

4. What is your favorite genre to read?

I read roughly equal amounts of literary fiction and science fiction, and then a smattering of fantasy, history, and science writing. If it’s well written, engaging, and/or introduces me to new ideas and concepts, I’m game to read it.

5. Is your writing style at all influenced by those of your favorite authors?

My style is influenced in different ways by different authors. Firstly, stylistically, I love writers with a flair for language, such as Jack Kerouac, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe, and others. I first fell in love with Kerouac when I was sixteen. I read On the Road, decided it was over-hyped, and set it aside. Back then, however, I would read every book twice; only by reading it twice, I had decided, could I truly get a good grasp on the flavor of the book.

I finished On the Road for the second time two days later, and already I was in love. The man was a genius with language. To think that everything he wrote is a first draft still blows my mind.

Steinbeck is my favorite conventional author. His stories capture straightforward characters doing everyday things – and they are stories told simply as well – yet they add up to an amazing thematic complexity which I love. Very powerful.

I won’t say I’ve been influenced by either. More like inspired and admired. In the end, they are benchmarks.

6. Which is your favorite book that you’ve written?

My favorite book, to this point, has to be Raw Flesh in the Rising. I spent two years writing and editing the novel to my satisfaction, crafting everything the way I wanted. Then, when I was finished, I cut 50,000 words out of it. To say that any other novel was my favorite would be a harsh pill to swallow at the moment.

Luckily, it’s paid off. In 2011, I won the Percy Janes First Novel Award for Best Unpublished Novel in the NL Arts and Letter’s competition. I’m currently shopping the book to publishers.

I should probably flash this around more often while I still hold the award:

http://www.tcr.gov.nl.ca/tcr/artsculture/artsandletters/2011/lee_burton.pdf

7. What is your opinion of the art of writing?

Writing is an art like any other. One can be an artist who understands every facet of the history of his art and how his own work relates to all the other work which has come before him, or one can simply be an artist for fun and enjoyment. There’s value in both, and the best writing, in my opinion, combines the two.

8. What advice would you give someone who is just beginning their own novel?

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Don’t rely too much on writing guides or you’ll just end up writing like everybody else who’s read them.

Remember the lessons of your high school teachers when it comes to making jot notes and outlines. They work.

Walk sometimes instead of driving. And without headphones.

Listen to critics, but don’t write their words in your heart.

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation, are supremely important. A writer not using the tools of his trade properly would be akin to a carpenter trying to build a house by hammering screws with a wrench.

Don’t emulate the best in your genre, but the best writers in general.

Read a lot; and again, read the best.

Write a lot. Make sure you love your writing for what you’ve written, not because it’s you who’s written it.

       
9. Do you have any funny and / or interesting stories about how you’ve come up with plots or characters?

In my novelette, Do Unto Others, which I’ve published to Amazon, the mayor and priest of my fictional town of Scanlon are based on the real historical characters, Bernard and Pierre Clergue, the local bailiff  and parish priest of the town of Montaillou, France, in the 13th century. Pierre was a womanizer who used the priesthood to seduce women, and Bernard a bit of a brute who used his authoritative position to become wealthy.

Also, and I’m still not sure if I consider this funny or not, but I began writing Raw Flesh in the Rising on a whim. It was supposed to be about forty pages and take me a month. It consumed the next two years of my life.

Today I was directed to a Tumblir site making fun of Bad Book Covers. Or, as it says, lousy book covers. Trolling through them however, I thought a few of them simply didn't belong. To me they seemed homages to the science fiction book covers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Which, in my opinion, are great.

Make no mistake, I'm well acquainted with those. On many occasions I've come across books -- often wonderful critiques of society as a whole, great anthropological fiction, or early thought-experiments on how technological society is changing us all -- that I've simply been too embarrassed to buy because of their covers.

I couldn't bring myself to hand the book to the clerk and say, "Yes, I am interested in purchasing this. Here is real money."

Heinlein's Friday comes to mind immediately. Many times, while delving deep into second-hand shelves in tiny bookstores in small towns in northern places, I came across this book, and always considered buying it.

But nope. Never did. Probably never will.

Heinlein is famous for his space floozies, as I'll try to demonstrate below. Some of his books should have come in brown paper bags.

I have a number of examples of interesting old book covers, but science fiction covers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, seem to epitomize a certain way of thinking. 

Essentially, the way I see it, many science fiction publishers didn't take their own genre seriously. When it came time to produce covers for what often became classic works of the genre, this is basically how I imagine their line of thinking went:

QUESTION:   Who reads science fiction?
ANSWER:   Adolescent boys.
        QUESTION:   What do adolescent boys like?
         ANSWER:   Spaceships. And girls.

Mind you, the male 'hero' in the Ellison cover above is also wearing short-shorts over a pink unitard, and what appears to be a motorcycle helmet on his head. All too often, I think science fiction covers of this era were a reflection of what could be achieved at the time by television and film special effects.

Heinlein received a lot of credit with me for Starship Troopers, which slowly dwindled away as I read more of his catalogue. The last of that expired halfway through I Will Fear No Evil, which has the plot complexity of low budget pornography. I put it down mid-paragraph and I've never looked back. Since then, even telepathic nazi Doogie Hauser and the cast of Saved by the Bell in Space versus the alien bugs has been regarded leerily.

I don't recall much about the plot of The Heaven Makers, but I remember enough to know that the cover hardly relates to the book at all. The damsel on this one is rather small, but of course wearing some lovely low-cut evening wear. I always thought the fellow with the cool curvy sword meant to defend her from what appears to be Sesame Street's the Count's close family, but upon closer inspection it looks more like she's running towards the nearest of their captors, and he's getting ready to cut her down.

Just another day at Gringotts.

Of the next two, the Asimov cover is my favorite example of flying space ladies. The publisher just couldn't resist playing up the word 'naked' in the title. As you can see from the Wikipedia entry below, just like all of Asimov's titles -- especially his annoted version of the bible -- the book is a filthy, perverted space romp:

Asimov, being brilliant, predicted World of Warcraft by fifty years.

The other side of that equation, of course, is the space ships. These days, this popular sort of future-ism is sort of a -- ironically -- nostalgic art form. Here's a great page of spaceship conceptual art.

Many old book covers from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, are fine examples of the art that spawned the genre.

I'm not quite sure what's happening in the covers below, but it sure is 'spacey.' I've noticed that Niven's name tends to get a little heavy around the middle.

John Berkey's work is generally considered classic these days. With a little digging, I've learned he designed the I, Robot cover above.

Chris Foss is the designer for the Foundation cover, which is also a good early example of orange-blue constrast.


Older John Wyndham's books usually have classic examples of space ships and sciency stuff as well:

Some of his more recent editions, however, disappoint in that they attempt to portray what the reader could expect from THE ACTUAL BOOK.  I guess that's the Penguin influence.

Now there' s a heading that demands attention.

I've always loved Jack Kerouac. Cliche, I know. I don't care. I love his writing. That everything he published, with the exception of The Town and the City, is a first draft still blows my mind.

Don't try this at home, kids.

When he exploded on the scene back in the 1950s, it was a turnaround for established literary circles. Sure, he wrote like jazz, like closing your eyes and seeing colors, but he wrote about youth and adventure, often in a free-spirited, devil-may-care manner. It was a mainstream embracing of counter-culture.

The first edition of On the Road is a rather severe, classy, black cover, a cover that goes to church on Sunday and hardly ever says swears. These paperbacks, however, seems to be pushing another angle altogether. I only have three old Kerouac paperbacks, and I have five nekkid ladies.

Ladies and gentlemen of the 1960s, buy these steamy paperbacks to find out what your kids are doing: posing nekkid with strange floating houseplants. Mind you, come to think of it, the cover for The Subterraneans was probably pretty risque for the time (1966).


By 1962, John Steinbeck, another of my favorite writerly gentlemen, had a Nobel prize. Win that kind of recognition and your covers begin to take on a friendly, earthy atmosphere, lit with a soft glow.

Of course, every once in a while, even Nobel prize winners get the nekkid lady treatment.

From these next three, I take the lesson that if your work survives long enough to be recognized by pretty much everyone, your publisher may actually read the book and okay a cogent cover.

... well, we can't help you there.

LARRY NIVEN WANTS TO PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE WITH HIS TITLES!

The cover designer for these bad boys had heavy metal in his soul. These are covers that head-bang to Black Sabbath, that have Slash on speed dial. In truth, Lucifer's Hammer probably shouldn't be included in this list as it's a little too new. Yes, it was first published in the 1970s, but this edition was published in1993.

Essentially, I'm pointing out that this sort of thing has been going on for quite a while now. And it needs to stop.

Also, it's a really good example of how book design gets recycled.

I think for any other author, these two covers would be laughably cheezy, but for Lovecraft they're absolutely perfect.

On my shelf I discovered these great 1960's paperbacks of The Aeneid and The Iliad that I never knew I had. Any designer these days, with current trends in book covers in mind, will tell you that the Iliad cover is too busy, potentially has too many colors, and not enough empty space to draw the eye to where you want it to be. I think that's unfortunate. Because this cover is fantastic. I'd hang that on my wall.

And with that, I'm out of my best examples of fun old book covers.

Not exactly an anthropological study, but a fun visit through the furthest antipodes of my bookshelves. Sad to say, but with e-readers gaining more and more widespread adoption, it won't be much longer before nostalgic digs such as this one become virtually impossible.

Okay, now I have armloads of books stacked on my desk that I need to reshelve. Hope you enjoyed.

My fellow citizens, we ask your patience.

We at the PWYFC,  the support group for People Who Yell From Cars, feel it is time to foster understanding and acceptance of our members.

The PWYFC realizes that the time for yelling at people indiscriminately has passed in this country. Times change, and we must change with them. Yet we wish to remind you that yelling at people from cars, until recent times, was an acceptable and upstanding pastime.

Yelling at people while mobile has been around a very long time. Some would say it’s the second-oldest profession, second only to yelling at people while standing still. As soon as somebody created a moving platform to yell from, it was quickly utilized. The advantage of height was quickly apparent; the marvel of mobility must have seemed the next logical step.

History has a fine tradition of people yelling from horses, camels, elephants, litters, buggies, wagons.... The Ancient Egyptians may have been the first PWYFCs. Technically, they were People Who Yelled From Chariots. If a slave was slack, the Egyptian would drive by and let him know, usually with the lash of his whip.

Siegfried Marcus invented the first gas-powered automobile in 1870. History notes that the first thing Marcus did afterwards was take a spin around the block and yell at a lady for wearing pantaloons which weren’t puffy enough.

We wish to remind you that it was the celebrated Henry Ford who revolutionized modern yelling at people. With successful means of mass production, people could be yelled at from the convenience of one’s own personal transport. Zoom past, yell in perfect anonymity, and still get home in time to rebuff one’s butler for having an air above his station.

As agreeable as apple pie, yelling at people from cars, going on nearly a century now.

It is our belief that people who yell from cars are merely misunderstood. Traditions, and the old ways, are being forgotten. Just recently a man I once counted amongst my friends pulled his car over to the side of the road and told me to stop yelling at people from the safety and comfort of his backseat, even going so far to compare me to a yappy little dog.

He, and his ilk – as indeed they are, ilk – have forgotten the unwritten social service that people who yell from cars provide. People who yell from cars are the purveyors of social fluidity. I can’t stress how important that is. These days, people have no overriding commitment to a larger cohesion. Everybody feels they need to find their own way in the world – which, frankly, is balderdash – as if everybody could be special. They forget that they are merely one cell in a larger social organism.

It has long been the role of people who yell from cars to remind society of our commonalities. If a person has parted ways with the center strata of acceptable dress and decorum, it is people who yell from cars who gently give them a pat back into place. I agree absolutely that sometimes the individual sentiments may sting a little, but a tangled mess of hair sometimes needs a going-over with a rough brush, and we are that brush. We’re the eveners, the straighteners. Without us, society would get even more tangled than it already is.

My father was a yeller. His father was a yeller before him. My grandfather began yelling at ‘ducks’ ass’ haircuts and Davy Crockett hats on grown men, and carried on through beatniks, hippies, and long-haired freaks. When the day came that he could no longer fasten the wayward pips and nibs of society back together again, he passed the torch – and the keys to his Studebaker – to my father, who then yelled at disco hopheads, yuppies, and break dancers from the family seat.

My father, in turn, was one of the first people from our province to attend the PWYFC convention in San Francisco. Back then, in the mid-80’s, the convention was but a small collaboration of nine or ten attendees. Very grassroots. They rented a van, rolled the windows down, and happily drove the hills all day yelling at aging hippies still hanging around their old haunts wearing patchouli and sandals. All in good fun.

My father took me to my first convention when I was ten. By then, the event had grown. People came from all over the world to yell in Dutch, French, German – excellent yellers, the Germans. We rented the top floor of a hotel. The people below looked like ants. I’ll never forget my first afternoon driving around in a double-decker bus with my father, hanging over the side and yelling together.

But times have changed. Last year’s convention was cancelled.

No hotels would rent to us. Somehow, every bus was booked when we called, no matter how loudly we yelled at them.

In retrospect, we probably could have handled that differently.

In a way, the boycott has proved beneficial. It’s forced me to get to know local yellers in my area better. Once a month we get together, have a few beers, play cards, and yell at each other. We play games: who can think of the most yells in under a minute, most creative yell of the night, and so on.

Sad, I know. But it’s who we are.

So, dear people, what I'm trying to say is this: we’re not the monsters you make us out to be. Surely, we're as loveable as kittens when compared to smokers, or bronies, or people who wear crocs. Just ordinary folk trying to get along in the world, the same as you,  trying to help out the only way we know how.

We realize we have to change to suit the times, to adapt to the new social order. And I compose this letter to spread awareness and foster mutual respect.

In the meantime, if members of the public so please, there are ways they can aid us in our cause. 

For instance, you can stop wearing silly hats with Teddy Bears on them, actual Teddy Bears. Or not slouch as you stroll – look up at the world and be happy. And stop wearing such strange boots and fancy jackets. And don’t wear brightly colored clothes, or clothes that are too dark. Stop having big noses, short hair, no hats, funny walks. Please, people, stop being so pedestrian.

And I know we’ll get along just fine.

Thank you for your time. I mean, THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

(you funny-looking wieners)

Sincerely,

Ted, c/o The PWYFC.

Originally, I had intended this post to go in a different direction, but once underway, it essentially ran on a parallel track to my previous entries about leaving the house and having large and melodious thoughts descend upon me.

I guess it's all the trees around here.

All week I've been editing and writing, writing and editing. After a few days, the mental body is bled white of attention and needs repose, inaction.

So, as usual, I concocted an excuse and hopped in the car. It was more about driving on a sunny Saturday afternoon listening to the Pixies loudly than about shopping.

See HERE for the excuse -- holy horsepills.  I'm keeping them as noseplugs.

Hopefully the same company doesn't manufacture suppositories.

My town is small, and it didn't take me long to get where I was going. Never even got to Monkey Gone to Heaven.

At the bookstore, after having been browsing for only a few minutes, I looked up and thought, What the 'colourful colloquialism' am I doing?

At home, I edit books all week. Then, when I have the time, I write for myself. After that I flirt with twitter and bat my eyelashes at people in writing forums, visit Goodreads, write emails.... Words and books. Books and words. Editing and writing. Writing and editing. Paper dolls of ideas hooked together page to page.

Then when I need to get away from it all, I go to the expletive bookstore....

Up one rabbit hole and down another.

So I got out of there and went to another bookstore.

I went to the grocery store.  A woman pulled up by the entrance and, without getting out of her big truck, asked me if I knew what time the store closed.  I walked over and checked the time on the door for her. Had she been waiting for someone to come along so she could drive up?

The avacados in the grocery store were actually not rotten unlike the store downtown where fruit flies flitter nonchalantly around the bin. My people are not known for their great love of strange fruits and vegetables. But roll a potato through a crowded room and watch as fights break out.

Strolling near the frozen meats, I decided that I was now old.  I had a new benchmark for comparison.

With school having started, there's many young people around, and I can no longer distinguish between kids of college age and kids in junior high. Sometimes when I go out for gentlemanly libations and get dragged to sports bars and dance clubs, I think the young folk I see with their beers and umbrella drinks would look more appropriate holding Pokemons and Barbies.

I passed a blonde girl of perhaps eighteen, shopping with her cell phone to her ear. I thought, Typical.

Bear with me. I'm building to some semblance of a point.

In line for the express cashier, the line wasn't moving, very expressly not moving. A kerfuffle was afoot about the price of an item. Calls were being made for the secret knowledge of special grocery sages, the cashier's face a tapestry of ignorance and apology.

I drifted back and forth to find an express-er cashier, and finding none, floated back to the line I'd left to find two young gentlemen had supplanted my place in line. Fine. That's fine. I left. All is fair.

I couldn't tell how old those guys were either, but for one of them, at least, I could tell his future.

In five years time, young man, you shall become bloated with beer, sodas, and bad eating habits. To hide your baby face -- like the baby head from Toy Story with the crab legs and cyborg eye -- atop your man's body -- and really he did look like he'd attached the Gerber Baby's head to a grown man's body, I can't emphasize that enough -- you will grow a goatee, and wear a silver chain around your neck as a sign of your ascension into manhood. You will then wear your shirt-neck open so everybody may gaze upon it and marvel.

So it is written....

Then an employee was ahead of me in line, apparently taking her break, and joking with our cashier, lingering for laughter. 

Then the same girl who had been talking on her cell phone five minutes earlier got in line behind me, still talking on her cell phone. And I thought, Typical.

I found I was a little mad at the cashiers and their fraternizing, and at the girl behind me talking on her phone. Why can't you take that thing away from your head for five minutes?

And then, for the second time, I thought, What the 'colourful colloquialism' am I doing?

Firstly, I was vexing towards this girl on her cell phone. Meanwhile, the entire day I'd been slicing snapshots out of life, mentally saving them, sifting and sorting them, and adding clever captioning and dialogue, meaning to feed them to twitter or blogs or forums -- or merely to the moving scrapbook that is any piece of literature.

In fact, I couldn't go twelve seconds -- to choose an arbitrary number -- without picking up people by their lapels, shaking them to see if any interesting words would fall out, and placing them gently into my artistic picnic basket for later.

For you tech geeks, think of that as my rudimentary meatspace sandbox. Human 1.0.

Though I was not physically connected to my vices and devices, I nonetheless was carrying them with me. My proclivities had become as much as part of the functionality of the software as the actual written code.

Annoying girl with the cell phone, you and I are one.

Secondly, I had ire for the people ahead of me in line, as if they didn't have enough problems with having to wear beige uniforms all day.

I guess, almost as a bi-product of my first point: with technology, we're used to being able to control our worlds -- or at least the perception of our worlds -- in ways we were never able before. This applies doubly for those heavily invested in social media.

If I want to be amused, if I want to be maudlin, if I want ... anything -- or if I want the things that bother me -- politicians, rocks stars, advertisements -- if I want them to cease, I can make them stop existing in my immediate cone of attention.

Going out in the world, this no longer applies, and frustration is the response that gets triggered when immediacy is not allowed. One has to actually put up with what is happening in the functional, physical world of interacting people made of squishy bits, teeth, bones, and toenails.

Take a deep breath there.

Often, I think brains need enemas, or at least an accessible and safe RESET button.

I let the cell phone girl continue her so-very-important conversation. I laughed along with the socially apt cashier. This new-model monkey then went home to dinner.

A bit of a continuation for Doesn’t Get Out Much ...

... born of brief reliefs from the heat as the fan panders by, energy spurts of teeth-rotting tea in dark-roomed afternoons, of lots of eye rhyme and incandescent slurs against the neighbor children doing their devil-worship beneath my window.

I believe I am jealous of the technical prowess of the latest writer I’ve discovered, slapping back the only way I know how -- by eating chocolate and typing.

That'll learn 'em.

A bit of background and then thoughts on the clichés of writing, maybe art. Though there are many, I’ll stick to the applicable -- with many asides, as much meat stocked on the perimeter of the plate as the middle.

As stated in my previous Doesn’t Get Out Much, I work from home. People give me their apple slices of life; I chew them over and regurgitate. We call that freelance copy-editing.

When I’m done editing for the day, I meander to the edge of the white space at the bottom of this page -- and every page like it -- and hang from the last loops and whorls of the a's and q's, the rare bottom bars of the z's, stretching them down as far as I can.

I’ve been remarkably successful at this of late, discovering how much easier it is to unroll a regular story of woes than a literary work with themes. It goes quickly.

I work as much as I can. Forget the sunlight, I have my monitor's pale glow; scritching on paper for the wind in the trees; a nice earth-tone beige colour, my desk. At heart, it makes me happy.

Yet I know it’s not healthy. It's more a life for a pupa than a person. 

... being an all-encompassed creature inside your artistic cocoon is almost what a writer has to be these days. One cannot just write. It’s not as simple as that. One has to make content, writing’s slut cousin.

Flirt with twitter. Sidle up to forum users and slip them my room card. Share contacts, measurements -- you show me yours I’ll show you mine. Play footsy with my emails. Freshen up in Photoshop. Try to smell nice for Google Analytics.

Content.

This is the puzzling cycle of pablum prescribed to fledgling writers these days. More-experienced writers, perhaps as a joke, slip them a piece of paper with instructions: ‘How to be a writer: Step One: make content. Step Two: Rejoice in the success of your content.'

Unfortunately, the majority of content makers misconstrue these instructions as Outdo even the most vexing spambots in the proliferation of your content! Really belt it out there! Loud and proud!

Usually, the recipients of a content-maker’s devotions to his promotions are other content-makers, which then leads to reciprocation, and escalation, until it’s all stirring together in a whirligig of droning voices and canned laughter, like the soundtrack to an old Hitchcock movie.

Any reader who accidentally gets sucked into the maelstrom swears never to go anywhere near it ever again….

Back to the cliché of the created world seeming more real than the real world.

Actually, I’m going to go with the ungrammatical word, ‘realer,’ here. Because it’s not my supposition that the real world seems irreal to the artist. It’s that the created world seems real-er.

Walking back from the store, not allowing myself to accept the cliché that a construct of my mind could seem realer than what I was actually seeing, perhaps I laughed a little too quickly. Often, I aim for the median course when the sacrifice of aiming high without a safety net (Being in the arts, actually doing art) gets to feel costly on a relatable level (No money, aging without palpable success).

Because, not long after, I had a very interesting moment.

It was but a pip, a tenth of a second. Crossing the road, I looked down the street. The row houses were colourful and interesting, every postcard of Newfoundland that’s not a whale or a puffin exemplified.  I saw them lined up like drunken friends leaning against one another, and I recreated them.

None of this will I ever do with the real houses.

In that moment, the houses I had created with my snapshot were realer for me than the houses that existed in the world.

I don’t know who lives in the real houses, but if I want a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses to live in my created snapshot house, until I actually go and ring the doorbell for myself and the real-life tenants answer the door to become a part of my external reality, that’s who lives there.

Similarly, the landscapes I've created recently with my shut-in literary splurging -- and which consume most of my mental idling -- have this sort of invaded property about them. I can concoct histories for every stone, consecrate closets and cupboards with meaning, switch the semblance of rooms in an instant.

The people that inhabit them, I can crawl inside their ears if I want, or tell you what they had for breakfast.

When they were nine.

I have no external wireframe for the reality houses, but possess a solid blueprint of the fantasy down to a cellular level. The created is realer than the blank.


Most clichés are true to some extent. Applicable to real life. Many of them, we reject only because past popular movements have denounced them. That doesn’t make them false.

The irony is, I'm denying my own perceptions because I’m adhering to a structure of behavior that our current culture says is preferable ...

... when, as people, we make the constructs of our heads realer to us than what we see in the world all the time.

Ask any daydreamer. Any political idealist. Any naïve mother. Ask any racist.

I’m just making a home inside mine, and inviting people over for popcorn.

Rather than give this post a title like “The Write Way,” or “The Write of Way,” or “The Write Stuff,” as if being a quirky shut-in was some sort of professional by-product – even to be elevated as a symptom of the creative mind – I figured I’d be honest about it.

I’ve heard it said that running is great for writing, it allows time for contemplation, planning.

I disagree.

Running reminds me that I am a robot made of meat and slime. If I have neglected my slime, it hates me.

Five hundred meters from the edge of the lake is a small harbour onto the Atlantic Ocean. Also known as the Quidi Vidi Battery. Head on down to see graffiti on authentic cannons. Feel safe knowing that if the French ever attack by sea again, no problem, we got you covered.

But don’t worry, it's been at least ten years since they last attacked, and then they only sent one chain-smoker with a ferocious scowl. Frenchie, we called him. He was a ferocious one, Frenchie. The battle was mightily fought.

A girl of about fourteen was sitting one of the benches facing the lake, her feet drawn up, her head tucked down into her hoody. I was a Tortured Soul™ when I was a teenager, and didn’t really think much of it.

I won’t say much about the run itself other than it was satisfying and heroic. In my head I picture myself as a tanned Adonis holding his head high. In reality ... ever watch a Bassett Hound running towards you at full gallop?

Speaking of dogs, I’ve learned that when approaching a person with a dog, you can always look at the dog instead of the person to avoid awkwardness. Maybe even smile at the dog. That’s a tip for the other quirky shut-ins out there. The first one’s free.

Get out of my way ... damn slow people.

That great moment came when I reached the point where I knew I couldn’t fail. Arms raised like Rocky.

In my head.

Twenty minutes after I’d struck out, I flapped past the statue of The Rower again. I even ran on an extra twenty or thirty feet for good measure. My slime was satisfied.

It’s true what they say, the eye of the tiger is the thrill of the fight.

I scattered the lake’s ducks and pigeons and seagulls before me near the boat launch.

I had the guts, I got the glory, I went the distance, I didn’t wanna stop.

Just a man and his will to survive.

The girl was still there on the bench, her head tucked into an arm, peeking out when people passed, or lingered. Right about here is where I began to be beleaguered by my brain soaking up the landscape like a dry sponge. Sorry, but almost everything to this point has been opening credits and popcorn.

Right next to the lake sits a grocery store, a fancy one too, with escalators for the shopping carts and butlers for the potatoes. The week before I had gone in while still sweating like a pack mule and had left a stink-trail around the apples and avocados which hastened their ripening sharply. I didn’t want to do that again. It's hard to maintain a three foot barrier between yourself and everybody else in public while not looking like a maniac. 

I lingered by the ducks, and walked a ways around the pond, hanging over the rail of the bridge where the shallow rivermouth feeds brown water out into the deep. In the cold of the spring, my girlfriend and I would stand there whenever we brought bread. The ducks would come very close. She loved watching them, and I loved watching her be happy. I decided that I should come back soon with the heels of the loaves I had tucked away in my cupboards.

At heart, another excuse to get out of the house.

That’s when I realized, I really need to get back to my girlfriend.

I’m only thirty-four, and was already contemplating living like an old widower. All my life I’ve been secretly watching old men wandering through towns in afternoons, seemingly very interested in the dust of the gutters or the tacky frames of doorways. I’ve always thought them the saddest people in the land, sure that nobody but me was watching them.

Suddenly, I was contemplating early emulation, and realized how easy it is to fall into routines and escapism. Tired of seeing the inside of their homes, the feeble companionship of their TVs and radios, the old codgers went out into the world to feed themselves with different thoughts before they returned to their little kingdoms of boredom, happy to have seen the little flapping feet of the ducklings, the wary side-eyed glances from the mother-ducks. 

There used to be a lot more of them right after the fishery collapsed.

Either way, Boy, I can’t wait to see the missus again.

I didn’t want to think about the old men, and wandered closer to the shore. Another mother duck had ducklings held close, all of them with their heads tucked beneath their downy wings. She, too, eyed me warily, before nuzzling her head back beneath her wing. I stood there for five minutes, feeling the cool breeze sucking the moisture out of my armpits. My cotton shirt was damp and droopy. Sexy, very sexy.

Then a small cadre of juvenile ducks, probably the same guys as here in this four-month-old photograph, with no fear charged out of the water and right up near my feet, all of them watching me while trying not to look like they were watching me. Very cagey and cool, ducks. Comes from having their eyes near the sides of their heads. Popcorn kernels had been left on the park bench next to me, and I flicked them off onto the ground. The ducklings pounced on them quickly. Deciding, then, that I was a bust, they charged helter-skelter over to a nice lesbian couple twenty feet away. At the sight of twelve ducklings charging at them like paparazzi, I heard them say, Oh my god, how cute.

I’m not even going to try to describe the sound that twelve ducklings make when they charge down a walkway in unison. I don’t get out enough for that.

Right about here is where I realized I was a terrible person.

I looked across the way to see that the fourteen year old girl was still there with her head tucked down into her jacket. I also saw – though I rarely notice them, intent as I usually am on the lake – that she was sitting directly by the property boundary between the big Catholic graveyard and the walls of the provincial prison. I tagged that as interesting in a thematic sort of way.

Quick on the heels of that revelation, I had to contemplate the idea that I had passed that girl – not once – but twice, and it had never occurred to me to ask her if she was okay.

We don’t have much homelessness in our city, so that’s not a frontline thought, but for all I knew, she was hurt, or simply unhappy, and a hello might have helped. Hell, even if she were a Tortured Soul™, and was fishing for somebody to do just that, to inquire about her soul, there’d have been no harm in it.

That’s when I wished my girlfriend was around again. She’s unafraid to approach strangers and be kind.

Men around my age simply do not approach teenage girls. To do so is a breach of some kind of quiet code.

Then I thought, Well, fuck what other people think, I should be doing the right thing. I think we’re too careless and uncaring to people these days, and I try to generally spread common sense and kind words wherever I go, at the very least checking my own hostile tongues whenever they rise. To do so online in an anonymous fashion while shying away from it in the real world seems a fine line of hypocrisy.

But then I swung back the other way again. Nope. Grown men my age don’t approach young girls in public. That’s a fine line that’s drawn in our minds. If I were to walk up to her and inquire about the blackness of her soul, or to see if she had been in a fight or something – even if nobody else in the area saw – it’s likely that she herself would have thought I was a creep. No credit for not being a monster there.

We have a fear of lone men these days. We can’t be cowboys or saviours anymore, only dark menaces with dank basements in our souls. Even an act that, on the outside, appears to be as benevolent as flowers on a sunny day, is perceived as actually hiding a bubbling cauldron of base desires.

Women were allowed to approach her, I decided. Older women, especially. Older men were allowed, but would still merit being watched closely in case the basement door looked like opening.

I watched from afar, at least a hundred meters away across the lake. Anybody seeing me probably assumed I was leering at her. I wondered how many people, like me, would pass her by, and, in fact, I felt better when a lady leaned over her after only twenty or thirty seconds.  

Proud of my victorious stink, if not my own humanity, I went to the store feeling that not all was lost with humanity in general, or at least the specific humanity in my neighborhood.

Cheeze was on sale, and I decided to experience what it would be like to buy two.

(Spoiler: It was awesome.)

I don't have a snappy ending, so  I'll deliberately ruin my walk away into the sunset.

Oh man, did you see what I did there with the ducklings, their heads tucked under their wings, and then the girl doing the same thing too? 

Totally a writer.

Absolutely related.

Today, I came across what's being called the best, shortest, horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in
a room. There was a knock at the door.

                                            - Frederic Brown

I really like that story. Currently, I'm struggling to get through a rather verbose Brothers Karamazov, long and twisted, and so, to cope, I  went in search of a few more very short, short stories in order to keep the Brothers at bay a while. 

I had a similar such evening about a year ago. Probably the first time I tried reading The Brothers Karamazov. I solicited three-word stories from my facebook pals. Reading through them again, here's a few of my favorites:

Nunnery application? Exorcised.

Sinking? Later, captain.

I successfully shapeshifted.

Unexplored planet. Tentacles!

Invention traps woman.

Interstellar travel. Extinction.

Marathon. Bloody socks.

Unsolicited sadomasochism: rude.

Gorgeous! Want penis?

Groggy. Missing kidneys.

In my head, I sorta think the last two go together pretty well.

Another short, short story which tends to pop up from time to time comes from Ernest Hemingway. I've seen it before heralded as the shortest sad story:

"Classifieds: Baby goods. For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

Snopes.com, the internet's greatest resource for calling bullshit on just about any and every urban legend, cannot verify that Hemingway wrote the story over dinner as a bet the way the myth claims. Snopes does, however, snidely remark that the story does sound familiar to another story about a short, short story, that of the teacher's assignment to his class. When given the criteria that the essay had to be concise and contain elements of   1: Religion   2: Royalty   3: Sex   and 4: Mystery ... the winning student essay read:

"My God," said the Queen. "I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it!"

Snopes remarks that this story is probably bunk as well.

But by far, the best short, short stories I've come across while idly fleeing Russian loquaciousness comes from an issue of Wired magazine.  They asked many popular writers from diverse genres to write their own Hemingway-esque short, short stories, and got a lot of replies back. I think it's great how the personality and style of the authors really shines through in some of them even though they were limited to six words. Here's a few of my favorites:

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
- Stan Lee

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.
- Gregory Maguire

Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu -
no carrier.
- Charles Stross

Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please.
- Steven Meretzky

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
- Richard Powers

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

We went solar; sun went nova.
- Ken MacLeod

Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin

Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it.
- Brian Herbert

Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.
- Cory Doctorow

Heaven falls. Details at eleven.
- Robert Jordan

whorl. Help! I'm caught in a time
- Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel

God to Earth: “Cry more, noobs!”
- Marc Laidlaw

Help! Trapped in a text adventure!
- Marc Laidlaw

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Bang postponed. Not Big enough. Reboot.
- David Brin

Temporal recursion. I'm dad and mom?
- David Brin

Commas, see, add, like, nada, okay?
- Gregory Maguire

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

Will this do (lazy writer asked)?
- Ken MacLeod

Those were my favorites of the bunch. The rest may be found at Wired:  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

I hope you've enjoyed these short, short stories. Back to Dostoyevsky I go.

Tonight I was digging through the *junk drawer* in my room, actually a rubbermaid container still loaded down with the outlier pieces of my last move and whatever bric a brac resisted my attempts to place it fittingly around the room at any given time. In the bottom, amidst the accumulated dust, the precious lost paper clips which could have proved useful so many times, and many escaped batteries, potentially dead, I found the guitar pick pictured below. Across the top, in perfect typewriter talk, it says 'Guilty steak ...' and below that: 'pearls in the sand.'

I plucked it out of the dust, blew it off,  and pocketed it as personal archaeology. It stems from a period a couple years back when I was editing my novel, Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a sailor wrongfully exiled to the infamous leper colony on the Hawaiian Kalaupapa peninsula.  I don't recall why I was printing those particular pages - perhaps so I could expunge the sentence at hand in a fiery ritual - I only recall that the page came out of my old Canon with a pick-shaped hole in the text. When I dug around, there it was, the proverbial monkeywrench in the works. I like to think that it was trying to tell me something, seeing that the paragraph stamped on the pick is perhaps the worst I wrote in the entire book.


Judge for yourself:

Makes me flinch to read it. Portraying dreams in entertainment should be outlawed.

In my defense, the piece underwent a good flaying for defying good sense, order, and taste, and in the final tally was convinced to read like this:

At first I thought it was unlucky that the pick had been tattooed with one of the worst lines of my piece. I thought perhaps a sequel to the previous fiery ritual was in order. In the end, however, I erred on the side of good ol' fashioned hands-in-pockets deterrence. I figured I'd let it serve as a reminder that not everything shoots out of my fingertips as gems. Usually, it takes time, perseverence, and polishing.

Of course, the next time I get in a literary huff, into the fire it goes.

I'm ravenously hungry. I've been writing a query letter for six hours. Finally the roar of my brain stops and my stomach is raving mad, shaking its fist at me. It's piss-pouring rain. I have no food in the house.

I go downstairs and cut off a hunk of stale beer bread with cheeze so I won't deflate into a shrunken nothingness and fall into the gutter on my way to the grocery store. I'd hate for someone to find me lying there the next day dirty and wet like one of those discarded gloves that seem to grow from roadside gravel.

There's rain, there's splashing cars and wet pant’s cuffs, but hey, I get there and perogies are on sale 2 for 1 so it's all worth it. Mmmm perogies.

It's often said that you should never shop for groceries when you're hungry. Normally the old adage rings true. But there's another adage that says Man cannot live on bread alone, and a bit of bread was all I was running on. I was in no danger of buying too many groceries. Even if I could fit them all into my shared fridge (that's another story), my hunger had rendered me desperate far and beyond the point of caring about what old wives say. I got what groceries I needed and geared up to get out.

Everybody has a mundane superpower. Mine is the ability to get drinks quick at any bar regardless of how crowded the bar is. For me the gaps in the gabbering girls and guys in tight shirts open like magic (that sounds spurious but I'm sticking with it. The magic works at concerts too). At the time I realized this I was giddy with power. It was only slowly that I came to also realize that every superpower, even the mundane ones, comes with a price.

If with great power comes great responsibility, then with minor power comes, well, minor annoyances. I'm superman at the bar. Give me all your liquor money, citizen, and stand back. But never, ever, pick the same line as me at the supermarket.

I go to the line with only one man with one basket. He's wearing a cap and a grubby jacket, grubby jeans. He's a grubby guy. When I moved downtown I was concerned I wouldn't have any fun at the supermarket anymore because I wasn't haunting the aisles at 2 AM. Fortunately, it turns out I don't have to worry.

The grubby guy put his basket on the conveyer, and as it moved forward towards the cashier he'd slide it back towards me. Two times he does this. The cashier rings the grubby purchases through, the grubby basket is conveyed towards the front, the grubby guy pushes it towards the back. I can't put my own purchases down because I'm feeling the barrier of politeness; his basket is there. My own is getting heavy.

Finally the cashier, seeing the traveling basket is empty, stashes it behind the counter, sliding the bar to separate the groceries down my way. I began putting my groceries onto the counter. The grubby man, having lost his grubby basket that was acting as a buffer, begins picking up my groceries and placing them at the back of the conveyer.

I stop. I don't like anybody touching my groceries. That's taboo. A taboo I heartily endorse. Although it seems a dotted line that gets broken fairly often (ask me about the old man who purposefully squished my cake). Mostly I'm shocked this guy is picking up my groceries and moving them as if he has some sort of demilitarized zone lined out near the front of the conveyer that my food is violating.

The conveyer, of course, works on a sensor. An item places on the conveyer will move up until another sensor stops it. It's not going to stop while there's items on the belt. Seeing the guy was obviously not going to stop, the cashier halts the belt. This time when the grubby guy manhandles my groceries, they stay where he wants. Neither I nor the cashier are impressed by this grubby man's attempt at perpetual motion.

The worst is over, I think. Problem solved. Our hero may return home happy with his spicy pizza.

No so.

The grubby man whips out his pen and a cheque. I look up at his tally on the blue screen. Twenty-three dollars worth of cat food, wieners, and crystal lite. It's like an odd kind of poetry seeing the same items repeated on the supermarket screens.

Crystal Lite - 250g -                          99c

Crystal Lite - 250g -                          99c

Wieners

Wieners

Yes, a glimpse into my world.

The cashier can't cash the cheque for the grubby man. She doesn't have the authority. She has to go check in with her supervisor in regards to the cheque. She leaves.

The grubby man seems nervous. He steps five feet away from where I am and begins pacing, pacing, his hands behind his back, pacing. It's over five minutes the cashier is gone verifying the veracity of the legal paper exchange and he paces all the while. Pacing.

When the cashier comes back she brings with her a sympathetic look for me as if to say sorry. Me with my meager groceries spread out on the conveyer belt, excluding the demilitarized zone near the front. Waiting. I don't look at her, though I saw. In truth, I don't mind. I've been in my room all day writing damnable dull query letters. Compared to that a good jab with a sharp stick would be preferable. I'm actually kind of amused. I'm already seeing the words 'I'm ravenously hungry. I've been writing a query letter for six hours' in my head.

She asks the grubby man for more pieces of identification, which he promptly whips out. Identifying himself is probably his mundane super power. Probably a pretty useful one seeing how grubby he is. The cashier shoots me another sympathetic look, having not caught my eye yet, and leaves again.

This time, instead of pacing, the grubby man begins to study my purchases. He never looks at me. Never once does he acknowledge that I exist. He's as leisurely as if he's pawing through the apple bin, leaving grubby bits over every Granny Red that he touches. He picks up my tuna and reads the label. It doesn't captivate him so he picks up my green bananas. They are very green. Green doesn't meet up with his measure. He puts them down and returns to his pacing, pacing.

Five minutes more goes by and the cashier returns. The grubby man's project of twenty three dollars has been approved. Proud new owner of twenty three dollars worth of cat food, crystal lite, and wieners, the grubby man picks up his bags and goes. Real life continues.

My own purchases had no duplicates, no poetry. Green bananas, spicy chicken pizza, tomato ... just doesn't have the same ring.

On the way home it was still raining. All the pretty girls had their hoods up and their pretty eyes shone out of dark cloth tunnels.

Who am I kidding? Pretty girls don't walk, especially in the rain. Who knows what monstrosities were hiding inside the mouths of those hoods?

Oh wait. I did have a duplicate.

Perogies.

Perogies.

2 for 1.

Mmmm.

So worth it.

1:  On the first date, try to impress a girl by telling her you can bend spoons with your mind.

2:  Invent a language of your own. Decide that the first girl to decipher it will be The One.

Sometimes it seems very incongruous that we check the credentials of every author we read, but going to the barber, we just sit down in the chair and say, "Sure, define how I look for the next six weeks...."