From Clusterflock:
Understand the history of the medium you are working in.
Understand the best work that has been produced in that medium.
Balance your work against that understanding.
Balance your work against the best of your work.
Continually revise that understanding.
Port: The port of call was 17. She was looking pretty and lean. In her white jeans and light blue tank with a butterfly on her breasts. I watched the world go ’round on her dark-lensed Ray-Bans – sailboat loaded by deckhands, speedboat misbehaving on sunken badlands, sun hanging over the white sands.
Pressed: She pressed the soft inner flesh of the orange against the rotating mound of the juicer. Her knuckles were white. She was standing on the tips of her toes. And the bangs she had just tucked behind her left ear fell in front of her eyes. The juice flowed through the built-in strainer and into the collection glass, ready to be consumed by our hungry little monsters (the children). It was 9am on Saturday morning. Our family was together. There were no youth sporting events or men’s golf leagues to attend. It was just the four of us sitting on the plush pillows of our kitchen nook, eating pancakes and fresh-squeezed orange juice while watching the rain trickle down outside.
Playground: The playground at Pathfinder School – my elementary school in Traverse City, Michigan – wasn’t the typical open field or lot with over-sized toys. It was the wood and all of its components. The myrtle-covered hills, the overgrown wander paths, the elder trees, the soft blanket of brown leaves and the black dirt a farmer would love. I could explore and wander about. I could play games. I could even get lost if I dared to do so.
Dense: The denseness of the flesh of the Honeycrisp apple surprised him as he eased his butcher’s knife through the varying diameter of its body. Still shaken by the rusty blue pick-up truck clipping his dog earlier in the afternoon, his hand was unsteady. The black carbon handle of the knife, which he had just rinsed in the double-basin stainless steel Kohler kitchen sink, was wet. The ball of his right hand, located just below where the index finger joined his palm, was the primary source of pressure on the top side of the knife handle. He leaned into the motion and pressed down harder. His eye twitched. His nose tingled. He sneezed. And then, unknown to him, his hand pressed the knife down through the apple and the index, middle and ring fingers of his left hand. The world seemed to freeze in place as he stared at the grotesque still life depicting two halves of an apple laying open on the antipodal points of what used to be a whole apple, three detached fingertips aligned behind the left apple half and a pool of blood seeping across the backdrop like anti-gravity curtains in an upside down theater.
Link to OneWord.com, which prompts me with each of the words and provides one minute to write about that word. Sometimes I run long.
The couch in the livingroom has a thin film of Yogi slobber. It’s hairy and marred from claws gripping and sharp buttons scraping. But its the couch we got married on. Yes, we got married while sitting on a couch in our living room. It’s not even a full sized couch! It’s a love seat. And our minister, who was on the couch with us, is, according to his mother, June, husky. Sitting between my beautiful bride who was consumed by dozens of layers of crinoline and a plump sweaty semi-stranger was not ideal on a 95* June day. But the couch was important to us.
Our immediate family – six of them – managed to fit on our three-seater couch across the room from us. My sister-in-law (to be at the time) readjusted mid-ceremony and caused the remote control, which was apparently under the third couch cushion, to activate the television. The Golf Channel flashed on at full volume. I did my best not to be distracted during the homily as the immediate family scrambled to mute the television. Their sweaty flesh shifting on and separating from the damp leather sounded like sheets being ripped apart by rabid wolves. Afterwords, even the extended family and friends who were seated outside on the small community lawn along Eighth Street on couches they brought, said they could hear the commotion and feared that I had defected to the “Divot side.” I thought, at the time, that the “Divot side” wasn’t very clever. But what else are non-golfers going to say?
Chance: Every blessed chance that falls from the brilliant morning rose-colored sky to the worn toes of my chucks, I grasp. And if it’s a little further from me, I take a step. I lurch. I dive. I run. I toss my muscles forward like I did when I got my first chance to look into her eyes – when a glimpse became . . . That it was those eyes I wanted to look into when I awoke from a nap on our black leather couches on a stifling hot summer afternoon.
Mist: The mist was dense and low on the cool West Bay water. Yogi stood with his front paws on the end of the wet sand, and leaned down each time a wave swept in. It gave me a chuckle on this early fall morning because he was always about two seconds too late to actually drink the water.
Trade: “I will trade you a Ken Griffy Jr. rookie card for that Tim Hardaway rookie card. Deal?” That’s what I said to Todd, my best friend as a boy. We made the trade and I promptly dropped the card I received between the deck boards of his parents’ house. He offered to undo the trade, but that didn’t seem fair to me. I was out a card. Kinda bummed, but that’s life. Sometimes you drop things down a hole. Other times things fall in your lap.
Account: To account for each moment that has passed without one of us intently focused on the air filling our lungs and fueling our hearts would be a simple matter of counting to seven on any two of our four hands. It wouldn’t matter because we are, and will forever be, together.
Average: See blog entry on September 15th, 2011 titled, “Applebottom, Alberta.”
Pouch: The pale green cotton liner of the frayed like a bottomless nest hemp coin pouch I purchased from a street vendor in Barcelona, Spain while studying abroad during my Junior year at Iowa State (finally) gave way to the weight of my nickles and dimes while I was standing in line at Good Harbor Coffee. The change fell from my waist height to the brown tile floor and rolled in various directions, redirected by the dips and edges formed by the grout and tile. I knew I was on borrowed time with this purse, but found it terribly inconvenient that it had to give way at that moment in time – in a crowded coffee shop – in the morning before I purchased my coffee – on the tile floor.
Link to OneWord.com, which prompts me with each of the words and provides one minute to write about that word. Sometimes I run long.
The average annual snowfall for a small village just north of a long forgotten two-track in western Canada is just over 346 inches. This past summer, the road crew for the village went to the trouble of installing fans 20 feet in diameter along its three-block long main street. The intended effect of the fans was to blow the snow up and away from the village’s main city blocks and onto the rooftops and back alleys. That way, for the six-month-long winter, the residents of the village could walk or snowmobile their way to and from the local market, pharmacy or saloon. However, the fans quickly became overwhelmed by the snow, created two heaping mounds of snow – one covering each of the two rows of buildings – and froze in place. The result, as was discovered by the local stunt helicopter pilot on his bi-weekly trip south for emergency medical provisions for the village’s residents, was the transformation of its main street into a gluteal-like cleft between two enormous pale cheek-like heaps of snow. The pilot snapped a blurry photograph with his iPhone and sent it to his ex-girlfriend Lola, the head anchor for the not-so-local TV 17 & 4 studio. The village main street was featured on that evening’s news and shared throughout Canada for the rest of the week. What many Canadians had long believed to be a fleck of pepper from the national cartographer’s pastrami sandwich was now dubbed “Applebottom, Alberta.”
Written from 11:23 pm to 11:43 pm on Thursday, September 15, 2011 at home in Traverse City, Michigan.
Chris teed off from the blue tees on the first hole of the TCGCC. He plucked his tee from the soft turf, stepped down the grass that his two iron brushed up, and then slid his club back into his PING carry bag. His shot was still in the air while he completed this tasks, but it had felt solid and left on the right trajectory and line. His Titleist ProV1x would be in the fairway and he would have a good shot to the green. Just as he was about to shoulder his bag, he heard a crack behind and to his right. It sounded as if a full grown hardwood tree had been snapped in an instant.
Never open a book with the weather.
Avoid prologues.
Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
Keep your exclamation points under control!
Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Same for places and things.
Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.
Source unknown.