Fighting a fever, a bronchial cough and the side effects of caffeine withdrawal, I finished writing a 1,700-word article this week that will be published in Present Magazine on Monday. I actually typed about half of it before the symptoms worsened the day before, using my thumbs and my BlackBerry. The handheld device and its miniature screen seems so much less daunting than a PC and is apparently a medium in which I feel less pressue to write well. It must be a Zen thing. Less thought, more emotion, and feeling more comfortable in using my first flashes on a subject – my first thoughts on whatever comes to mind.
When you’re writing on deadline, as I was, you have no choice but to perform no matter what the circumstances. The fever kept me strangely focused. I could feel it behind my eyes, locked on the screen and working the buttons while I layed on my back – flat in bed on a thick comforter, under the whips of the ceiling fan, across from a bay of windows that let’s in soft light and opens up onto an intersection where the neighborhood boys gather in the summertime and cuss as loduly as they see fit until an adult comes out to check the mail or walk the driveway and they hush their voices. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Present Mag., Writing Practice
After I pumped my fist a few times, she slipped the needle in, cold and clean, in the tightened skin on the inside of elbow. The nurse had massaged that place for a few seconds, maybe 20, to get the vein to surface, and when it did, it was round and long, deep blue, like underground electrical wiring.
“Just squeeze that every five seconds.”
That was my only direction before she attached the empty collection underneath the thin metal hospital bed and walked away. She had affixed the needle to my arm with a large, scare bandage that was see through and its that were fastened with little ripples to my skins were already beige with fresh blood. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Blood
I saw the lightning flash in the clouds above the dashboard, about 20 miles south on a highway that crosses the Kansas River and rolls past farm fields kept verdant by elebaroate watering systems. We we were cutting a swath between storm fronts. The streets were thick with water but only sprinkles were falling now, and the closer we got to home, the more evident it became that we would miss the most severe weather.
I was afraid for a moment that with the storm dead ahead, we would have to drive straight through high-powered winds and blinding rains. With the fear disappating – when something as potentially threatening as driving through strong Midwest thunderstorms that can transform roads into slippery and unpredictable ice rinks turns out not to be a threat after all – the flashes up ahead became harmless entertainment for us. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Rain
Every spare moment since launching this blog I have tried to fill with words – either writing or reading, my own or someone else’s work. To borrow a line from a favorite poet, it seems that “I’ve traded my soul for pretty words, love essences.”
This has been a down week, locked in a sort of holding pattern while waiting for magazine assignments to come through. Tomorrow, the drought ends with the comic artist interview I promised in a previous post. Assignments for Urban Times were also issued on Friday. I’m interested to see how freelance reporting impacts my blog output. I suppose what’s important is to continue writing, continue reading, and continue to improve no what medium the words appear in, if at all. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Writing Practice
Beer drinkers sit out in the driveway, their conversation carrying in the windless night. Some faces and bodies can be seen in the faint light from the small fire burning at the center of their encircled camp chairs. They aim to get a little drunk and share some conversation, but also to take advantage of an evening with no bugs and temperatures that at only 10 degrees cooler than the afternoon high, still feel somewhat relieving.
Breezes haven’t blown since last Sunday. From the plain states to Michigan, the center of the continent has been hit with warm fronts and the wind has gone too, as if the earth simply forgot to rotate once it reached mid-July. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Neighbors, Suburbia
