Three, Two, One.
No wisdom has achieved the thrust required to escape the drag of the American atmosphere.
Rock Accountant
May 30, 2021
Bit or Bite
Thinking the media informs you is like believing that a mosquito bite inflates you.
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The Extra part of God
The extra part of God I brought back with me from pretty much dying in the hospital this weekend is sitting in the corner of my yard arguing with my dog.
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The Twitter Poet of Avon
When the Poet of Avon, Mr. William Shakespeare, awoke this very morning, he stumbled headfirst into brevity. Twitter.
In doing so, he doomed all other English playwrights, a primarily sterile ladle of plagiarizing snakes, to drone on while in morbid awe of him for all eternity.
The notion of premièring himself on this afternoon, as the writer of fewest words, flung him into malicious merriment. “I am now and forever will be a port-wine reduction sauce of succinctness.
“My genius is the tabernacle of the truncated,” he boasted,” I will leave the breadth of things to the freshmen.”
“Verily,” he bragged (too loudly, for his mother, now overhears him while hiding behind his bedroom door), “and forever, my works will be posted with nails onto trees in twenty-six words and less and will be known to the audience as “tweets.”
Hearing this vow, his mother, the severely verbalized Mary Arden Shakespeare, dismays.
Mary was a woman who could trace her long-windedness as linearly as an erection, back to the most crucial exercise of unnecessary human print, “The Doomsday Book.” She feared her son was maneuvering into a near-criminal puddle of abbreviated verbal sulkiness.
She slumped, legs splayed into bunches of skirts, muttering miserably to herself (wholly in Old English, to her credit), “I will not allow him an eternity of pithiness of verse.”
But Bill speeds by her, determined to stop his life’s drudgery of taxing inventiveness before she can interfere.
“Romeo and Juliet” was already rewriting itself in his mind as a love story that lasts only as long as a stick of sassafras chewing gum.
“Romeo has the scheme, parents will be sorry; R. fucks everything up, big mess, J. is an idiot The End,” was all it needed to be.
Shakespeare sprints to Stratford’s Speaker’s Corner to announce the new course for England’s scholarly conversation.
“Forever on,” Bill bellows to a gathering crowd of the muddy, toothless, and lice-infested, “My tragedies and comedies will come to you now nailed on trees. To be read as “Twits.”
“Be it known that if it must be said, I will say it from inside the prison of twenty-six letterings or less. And all will carry a dollop of gruel for authenticity. Henceforth to be understood as my “gruel tag.”
“My histories, poems, and essays will remain on my Facebook page.”
William Shakespeare.
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If Wishes were Horses, then Beggars would Ride.
Only Americans have wishes. Other countries are stuck with hopes, and that is substantially different.
Hope requires lack while wishes spring from pots of plenty.
May 4, 2021
Serves Him Right, Pittsburgh Style
Three years later, I threw Jimmy down a hill.
My father, in his chair behind the newspaper, heard me say, “I broke his leg. He is in the hospital.”
Without lowering his paper, he said, ” Serves him right.”
Every boy is chiefly the result of his father. Mothers are there to erase what parts of this they believe they should or can.
I was always ashamed of being the biggest. At seventy-two now, I continue to avoid mirrors.
Jimmy, my next-door neighbor and three years older, would push me down and hold me in the mud or dirt until I cried. He was smaller than me, so I was his prize. He would take my hat and keep it until later, tossing it onto our adjacent patio where my dad would find it.
Dad and I grew a dangerous quiet. Both of us were ashamed.
One afternoon, while I was sobbing, my father dragged me to our neighbor’s door and screamed that I was ready to fight him. Jimmy did not come out.
There was no more hat stealing after that.
I grew, but Jimmy did not.
Years later, while briefly home for my father’s funeral, I ran into Jimmy on the same patio., We sat and talked about small things. We were now grown, men.
He turned out OK. Shaking hands, and as I turned away, I knocked his hat off his head.
May 3, 2021
Many Happy Returns
God may reenter my life when He agrees to certain changes.
April 29, 2021
Come out to play
As I sat outside this morning having coffee, I missed the sound of screen doors slamming from my childhood friend’s houses. It meant someone would come to play.
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Where was I?
I spent my evenings for twenty-five years in auditoriums, arenas, or stadiums that held between 1000 and 125,000 other people. Every goddamn one of those people remembers the day, and I can’t recall the year.
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All the difference
The difference between love and hate is that you are ready to kill yourself for love, but you are prepared to kill everyone else for hate.
