Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
Beneath the pulled shades and the night-light left glowing late into the morning, the house was almost still except for one early riser. Weak light tried its best to leak through the curtains but only managed a bright stain in the material. The little girl slept in the big bed with her body turned sideways, her head rested in a crook in her father’s arm from middle-night to now: half passed seven on an overly cold March morning. Blankets are tangled and rolled into large piles, folds have enveloped the toys she took to bed with her – a toy horse and a miniature bicycle it balances on. And she slept beyond her normal hour of rising by some two hours and her father guessed that maybe it was his presence that helped her sleep along.
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Tags: Kids
Despite what might appear to be a growing infrequency in blog posts, I am still writing everyday at the same prodigious amounts as before. Much of what I’ve written the last few weeks has not been publishable. The quality has met my standards, but the pieces have either been personal or purely fictional accounts that begin well enough, then wind around on the page the way a treasure map might, and end up back at the beginning or off on their own course that is just becoming interesting when my attention wanes. I didn’t think those would be entertaining reads, though I am considering including them here in one big hodge-podge blog post. I believe I’ve done that once before and it worked well. I remember the creative sensation was like emptying my head, abandoning all the small ideas I’d kept lingering, hoping they’d turn to something more formidable, but instead wound up littering my e-mail in box. I almost write entirely now on my Blackberry and send myself occasional e-mail with chunks or full blog posts, then copy and paste them to the site through Word Press. The times I allow myself to write have moved from the early morning to the late night. Last week, there were a few times when I’d fallen asleep with the hand-held on my chest and the flashing red covering my face in small blips. Those are the best nights, when you’ve come home from a night out and the visions are still fresh. I don’t feel particularly inspired, but the words come anyway because what you’ve experienced is fresh material and given that writing is only half of the practice – the other is living – your writing feels new again. And when you are going through something that changes your viewpoint, your mind changes the way it perceives, and that adds another freshness. (more…)
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Tags: Free Writing
The You Sew Good alterations shop was exactly where she told me it would be. Like she’d said, the predominant store in the strip mall was a furnace repair shop with pick-up trucks and vans out front that broke the building’s sight line from passing traffic. The furnace store had a broad sign lettered in a style common to auto repair shops – navy block letters on a white backdrop – and I saw F-U-R-N-A-C-E just before finding the street sign. I pulled blindly down the incline and thought it an appropriate place to find an alterations storefront even after the miscommunication that came earlier in the day. (more…)
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Tags: People
After a final snow, the sun broke and spread spring freely through the neighborhoods, the farm fields and the slummy parking lots. Filled with puddles of melting snow and bodies misshapen from months of eating indoors and no exercise, the lazy people were stretching on the walks from their cars to the grocery store’s sliding doors, the chill gone from the air and the briskness gone from their walks. Contentment is easy to find on a day like this, sunny and in the 40s, the wind light and with a chill layered in it, but not as threatening as February’s brutality. The sinster feeling fled on the carrying clouds. (more…)
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Tags: Spring
Face-high wrought iron fencing blocked the stairwell from the sidewalk. Bold letters as black as the spires announced on a sign that the restaraunt was closed. Lill’s on 17th is perched high on the street – an overlook on the crumbling sidewalk and the trendy-dressed urban dwellers who seem to pass casually by but actually frequent these streets and search them out as a diversion from the real lives they feign interest in suddenly along these housefronts. Lill’s is housed in a 19th Century Victorian, among the first built on what was then the city’s west side but is now the city itself, a few blocks from the high rise skyscrapers and corporate cubicles stacked layer after layer upon each other. But with a gentle push, the gate gave way and I held it open for another guest so that we could attend another Urban Times creative meeting. (more…)
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Tags: Urban Times
