Pencilcast: Shadow Tale

Fire and Ice

Little nod to Valentine's Day.

On Awaiting Inspiration

Written on January 31st, which means I made my writing goal for the month, muse or no muse!

Shadow of Life

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to try to finish at least two poems and one short story a month. I've pretty much broken all my resolutions already, and this one is liable to be no exception...but I did at least manage to finish this one poem: actually one I kind of started writing around Christmas, and rather on the cynically morose side. Still, at least it means I've completed one third of my resolution for the month!

Darkness and Light (whole bunch of type-cast poetry)

I have a tendency to take things much too much to heart. Last Saturday afternoon, someone removed a comment I'd made on one of their Facebook posts. I can't come up with any sort of reason why, and I was too shy to ask. I was so mortified by the experience, trying to imagine what they must have *thought* I meant, that I was practically non-functional for the rest of the weekend.

Things like being removed from a friend's blogroll paralyze me, even while intellectually I know I've talked about a lot of different things over the years, and since I haven't broken things out into strictly compartmentalized blogs and I bounce around a lot (an understatement), some people will drift away. I try to figure out what it was I did that offended, and beat myself up for imagined wrong-doings. I've also found myself stat-watching, fretting over how many page-loads I get or don't get.

And all of this is just silly. If I'm taking these things so seriously, I think maybe I need to take a step back from this whole Internet thing--or at least the blogging portion thereof--for awhile, take a deep breath, get some perspective, do some writing that will only be seen by me instead of jumping up and down trying to get attention, and then half the time not knowing how to take it if I do get some. Oh, and maybe catch up on letters for once--what a concept.

I'll be back, probably sooner than I intend to be, but I'm taking a vacation, at least for a few weeks, maybe a month or so.

So...hey, if I'm gonna go out for a bit, I'll go out with a bang... First off, here are a few poems I actually wrote a number of years ago, but refrained from posting because of their darkness. I'll count these as my final two vignettes for Art of the Letter's July challenge.





And something a bit more lighthearted--a little poem I wrote back in the late 90s, when I was in Germany in the Air Force. I like this one. It makes me smile.

View From Inside the Kaleidescope

This is the way my mind works.

Double Vision: one image, two poems

Two very different poems, both inspired by broken glass I encountered on a walk.

Bitter:


Sweet:

Vignette #12 - Priorities (plus bonus mini-poem)

And yes, I realize my priorities are as skewed as the other extreme...still working on that whole balance thing. For the record, I *did* do dishes and laundry today...

And a sort of a word doodle sort of thing I scribbled down at work today:

Vignette #10 - Garden Song

Vignette #8 - Sharp

Since I've slipped into poetry, and while I'm in revealing-my-dark-side mode...I present another not altogether cheery piece...

Vignette #7 - Talk at Twilight

A poem this time. Not sure I like this one...there's maybe too much left to the imagination of the reader for it to make sense.

Death to Delay (typecast poetry)

Reading between the lines...I didn't exactly accomplish much this weekend. (Except for--with phone assistance from my luthier sister--putting a new tailpiece on the fiddle I keep attempting to play. I can make LOUD HORRIBLE NOISES now. Woot!)

Ode du Spam Folder | The Kindness of Strangers | Microsoft Bob and the Gardens of Time

1. Ode du Spam


Well, I thought it was funny.  Made up of actual lines from my spam folder.  There's something particularly evocative about the second and third lines...or maybe it's just because I'm currently reading Raymond Chandler and my mind is influenced thusly.

In any case, it makes about as much sense as a lot of other modern poetry.

2. The Kindness of Strangers

On a completely different subject (abrupt switches are what I do), I would like to say thank you to MT Coalhopper.  After the recent dip pen post in which I mentioned the Esterbrook 313 Probate nib, he offered to send me some Esterbrook 312 Judges Quills, which are similar in some respects, but a much finer, more manageable point.  I received his package this week, and not only did it contain a generous quantity of the nibs in question, but also a selection of other points and this beautifully handcrafted little box with slots for each.  I'm very much enjoying trying these out.

3. Bob
Another abrupt change in direction: does anyone at all besides me remember the travesty that was Microsoft Bob?  Essentially, it was supposed to be a kinder, gentler Windows-Within-Microsoft-Windows.  You could set up a virtual "house" with various rooms and various images linked to programs.  For example, in your office, you might set it so when you clicked a pad of paper sitting on the desk, it launched your word processor, or clicking the kitchen stove might open a recipe card program.  Really, it was all rather insultingly cartoony and foolish, and it bombed in a big way. (Except that someone smuggled the various "assistants" out the back door and into Microsoft Office.  You know that irritating bouncing paperclip?  Blame Bob.)

Although I never actually used it as a user interface, I wasted I don't know how much time decorating my Microsoft Bob house.  I was incredibly drawn in by the ability to set up rooms, rearrange furniture, change decor, etc. etc. at the click of a button, likely due to my lack of any real-life housekeeping or gardening skills.

The punch line?  This weekend I stumbled into a Facebook game (Garden of Time) with two components, one of which is a rather addicting game with two subsets (find-the-hidden-objects and spot-the-differences, in various historical time periods), and the other has you set out your "garden" on a grid, Visio style.  Both components sucked me in this weekend.  I accomplished pretty much nothing, aside from endlessly shuffling white flowers and park benches (with dreamy music playing in the background) and clicking on hidden playing cards and pineapples.

Well, that, and I did type up some eight or nine thousand words of the last NaNoWriMo.  I'm somewhere past the halfway point on that project.

Oh, and I broke down and ordered some Noodler's "Black Swan in Australian Roses" ink.  For that, I blame Adwoa.

(And tonight, I did actually work in the real garden for an hour or so...though somehow, there are a lot more weeds and bugs in the real world...)

Driving Home From Work on a (Very) Rainy Friday

To March, in sympathy

Sent from Leo, a 1948 Royal Arrow, who arrived with the month.  More on him later.  My Royal slot is filled!  (And aren't those commas beautiful?)

A sleepy morning sort of poem...

Nice to just daydream for a few extra moments before getting up on a Sunday morning...though the daydreams always seem to get away from me!

Cult Au Jus

So...in my defense, the story in that last post seemed a lot better at five-thirty or six in the morning than it did a few hours later when it was too late to pretend it never happened.  I'll do the next best thing and move on quickly...to something equally silly.  I just never learn, do I?

Thursdays are French Dip day at the deli downstairs at work.  And it is a seriously popular choice--sometimes seems like half the building lines up for some.  I usually pack a lunch from home, but every now and again, I have to resort to buying lunch downstairs, and I admit, the French Dip is good...but the nonconformist in me is bothered by following the crowd, even when the crowd *could* be right.

Typecast Poetry: Finis

Been awhile since I did a poem, hasn't it?



And here are the "before" pictures--I tend to start poems as a bunch of phrases that come to me every which way, starting with one initial phrase (in this case, I've been carrying "Crazy candlelight" around with me for a few months now...just finally started picking at it until it came apart).

I Resolve: A Typecast Reflection

Brought to you courtesy of the SCM Galaxie Deluxe.

Milk crates full of memories...

Faced with housework, I procrastinate in every way possible. This weekend, I organized my journals while putting off vacuuming. After my move this spring, they'd been crammed onto shelves in no particular place or order, so I gathered them from the four corners of the house and arranged by date. (Mostly by date, anyway--for some reason, there are a few journals in 1997 that overlap. Apparently 1997 was the Year of Living Disorganizedly.) They span some twenty-seven years now: that little one all the way on the left was given to me for Christmas when I was six, when I was first learning to write.

And of course, once they were all nicely organized like that, I proceeded to yank them off the shelves (those classy milk-crate shelves...) and look through them. Some are in better shape than others. The colored journals I favored in the nineties fared the worst: the blue fountain pen ink I used in some entries vanished, and at least one journal was the victim of temporary storage in a damp basement. And there are large gaps in the record: I tend to write more when there isn’t as much going on, which means that most of my entries, especially those in the most recent journals, are mundane daily details and rambling. Their value is in the writing of them: they help me process my days and sort out thoughts, and many may never be read again. But other content makes me smile, or laugh out loud, or get a little weepy. Inconsistent though they may be, they contain a lot of memories, these books.

There is evidence of my long standing fascination with office supplies:

Translation: John and Jim got a car. I got crayons.

There are birthday reports:

I recall this as one of my best birthdays *ever*, especially the bird seed, strangely enough!

Book reports:


I’ve waxed poetic:

I was twelve when I wrote this entry, and apparently hadn’t yet learned appropriate apostrophe use in its vs. it’s. I guess I’ll cut my young self some slack....

I’ve attempted artsy:



Sometimes relatively casual entries make me smile, looking back. Stumbled across this comment about a conversation with my brother as I was flipping through...


A wedding and several children later...I’d say it turned out pretty well!

I’ve recorded thoughts on births, deaths, current events, pets, books and music, bemoaned my own bad habits and worries about the present and future. Reading through these, I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed in some ways, and how little in others. It’s kind of fun to revisit once in awhile on a rainy afternoon.

And speaking of revisiting and rainy afternoons, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I picked up the gloriously restored Olympia SG-1 from Blue Moon Camera.



Happy rebirthday, big guy!