Ah, if it wasn’t for the kindness of strangers he thought not for the first time in his life as he perused the subject lines of his spam folder. Funny thing, but it seemed they were forever wanting to either make him fabulously rich or add length to his penis. Sighing, he drummed his fingers impatiently on his knee and took a slow sip of morning coffee and resumed clicking down the long list of emails one by one. There was nothing but more, more, more, of the same, same, same, but nary ...
“Absence thinking.” Now there’s an interesting sounding creative writing exercise: to think and write about what is not there. Its purpose is to maybe shake something loose and get something down on that empty screen. But one has to wonder a little something about that. How on Earth exactly does one go about thinking and writing about something (some thing ?) that is not there? Puzzling. The answer (or at least the answer that finally shakes loose) is: brain...
After this operation completes, the tool will provide you with a report of the malicious software that was detected. “Now wouldn’t that be just too cool for school,” he said out loud to his laptop as he watched the tool on his screen in action speeding through the files of his computer at a dizzying pace. But what he really meant by that was -what he was really thinking was- what if there was a way to run such a program like this on himself . Yes! Exactly! Be...
Remembering the advice he read on line somewhere that there was really no such thing as writer’s block because all one simply had to do was just lower one’s expectations, he began to type. “You can tell these things are marketed to men with a statement like that on the package,” she told him as he crawled back into bed beside her. She was holding the torn open –and now empty- package scrutinizing the label and smoking one of her long, feminine cigar...
The truth was… he knew he was stuck again. It reminded him of those times in his youth of traveling sandy roads out in the big middle of nowhere and the sick feeling he got when his old truck would drag down in the deep sand and slooooooow to an inching crawl and then come to a final, painful, ego bruising, stop. When that happened it was usually all pretty much over but the cussing. Yes, he would be stuck. Of course he would attempt the usual quick f...
A picture had gelled in his mind of a disheveled street beggar sitting cross-legged on a busy intersection holding up a cardboard sign bearing the words WILL WRITE FOR FOOD. Yeah, now wouldn’t that be something? He smiled at the mental image, imagining the looks on people’s faces at such a peculiar sight. Will WRITE for food? He paused, daydreaming over his laptop for a moment if there would be the usual types that hate giving handouts with a purple passion approach him with ...
Even though it had been sixty-two years, he could still remember that day he first held the weapon he was now holding in his hands with absolute perfect clarity. It was a spring day in 1943 when he, while seeking refuge from sniper fire from a yonder tree line, found the dead American lieutenant behind a crumbled garden wall somewhere in southern France. “I think I’ll be having more use of this now than you will, sir” he remembered hastily whispering to the dead officer when h...
It was one of those rare moments that happen from time to time in life that is like a snapshot the brain takes –whether you really want to get the film developed or not- that you’ll never, ever forget: One minute we were enjoying a nice breakfast of waffles and coffee and discussing our love/hate of the writing process (and how one really doesn’t have a choice in what one commits to the empty screen) and in the next Jordan was confessing to me that he knew he was gay since the...
He took in a deep breath and looked at the blue bar at the top of his computer screen: “Document1”it read simply enough. And below it, an expanse of empty white screen. The cursor sat in the upper left hand corner beating, no doubt, to the time of some internal software programmed clock-heart beat that he in a thousand years wouldn’t begin to (or really wanted to, if he were to be honest) understand. The cursor beat, taunting, even begging him it seemed: just write som...
It was the staccato burst of machine gun fire from a heavily fortified concrete bunker raining Third Reich death down upon the beach below that awoke him from his slumber. He lay there a moment confused, disoriented, disconnected. Rat-a-tat-tat! Disembodied voices screaming, officers shouting incoherent orders, distant explosions, young men dying. Glancing about and slowly surveying his surroundings he quickly came to remember where he was. Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! &nb...
When he stumbled across the old photo album while cleaning out his basement he paused because better than anyone he knew the trick: if your opponent is Muhammad Ali, then your best strategy is to simply not get into the ring. But yet…sometimes he just couldn’t help himself, either. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee he whispered inside his head to the ghosts that dwell in dark basements everywhere as he slowly worked the dusty book free from a cardboard box. Sometimes he ju...
He gazed at the picture for the longest. She was pretty and young with a radiant smile in her graduation robes and cocked flat board tasseled cap, but most of all he read and re-read the caption she had typed in beneath it. “Full of hope, lol” Yes, he could see that. It shined in her eyes like the sun. But still… it was what she had typed in as a bit of injection of humor (he figured by her use of the ubiquitous internet “lol”) he read as ...