This morning I woke up from a dream feeling sad. A lot of the details escape me (duh, it was a dream), but the feeling lingered and left me a little slow and dazed. In the dream, I was friends with, and maybe dating, a very pretty and elegant woman (who might have looked like…
Category: Life
Boxes in the Basement
I was off to such a good start today…. I read a little, I submitted a batch of poems to a journal, I revised a poem or two (or at least reread them with an eye towards revision), I vacuumed and straightened up… and then I hit a wall (my boxes in the basement). There…
How We Disagree
I wish people who love each other would say to each other, when they fight, “Please – a little less love, and a little more common decency.” -Kurt Vonnegut When my stepmom asks my dad if the heat is still on, he responds by asking in a mocking and almost harsh tone, “What’s wrong? Are…
Thoughts, Coincidence, and My Brain
The rain started just after the dog and I finished our walk (fortuitous – this usually plays out the other way around). I’ve never been one to believe in fate or divine timing – I suppose I’ve always just thought of coincidence as coincidence. Though like most people, I find many instances to pause and…
Drivel
So concludes another week. Fall is here in its various manifestations – weather, twinge of melancholy, and officially in a calendar sense. It’s 44 degrees this morning – I’m not ready for the colder, darker days ahead. I’m not sure I have much to say here in this space today – though I seldom do…
New Year, New Look
A reasonable question might be how does one celebrate a TurtleSloth birthday? And reasonable follow-up questions might be, is it the turtle’s birthday, the sloth’s birthday, or both? The answer to the first question is, with great irreverence, of course. As for which came first the turtle or the sloth… does it really matter so…
Reflections on Reflections
I’ve been stuck. In another tab, I have a rambling mess of a blog post that I’ve been playing with for an hour or two each day for the past four or five days (very similar to this one). I keep adding and deleting, cutting here, mixing there. It has paragraphs that end mid-way through…
Mild Endorphins
Maybe it’s the Jazz playing or the sun shining or the crisp fall air, but today I feel like I’ve been making real progress as a writer/poet…. At the beginning of the month I submitted some poems to a few literary journals. Some are currently under review, others haven’t even gotten to that stage yet….
Wanting to Be Missed (Part Two), Except Not Really
I love you for shattering.Someone has to. -Dean Young Six new books of poetry arrived yesterday. This morning, with a steady rain tickling the leaves outside, I sat by an open window and started in on Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young. A few weeks ago Young passed away. I had never read…
What I See Isn’t Very Clear
Night lifts. The trees and roof-lines are shrouded in fog. The world feels far through this cotton glass. The lattice pattern on the black, faux wrought iron table, shines glazed in dew. Traffic hums but only when I listen. A single chirp counts the slow beat of morning – maybe it’s a chickadee… The…
Part Three?
I didn’t sleep well. This is nothing new. I woke up at 2-ish and again at 4. I had to force myself back to sleep at 4. I then had a dream about an ex. We had reconnected and were trying again, but had already fallen into the same pattern / trap that was problematic…
Morning Jetsam (Part Two)
The coffee maker is a heavy breather. It huffs, it percolates. Its black plastic lid hat bubbles and taps before it lets out a final sigh. The dog rests his heavy head on the top of my foot. He’s bored – waiting to be fed. His breath is warm. He sighs too. I messed up…