It’s later on the very same day or perhaps a very different day, nobody really gives a fuck. It could be ‘Once upon a time …’ or ‘Eat me I’m a fish’. Yet, writing workshops, or the online places like the one advertised just above this on the Box, will tell you how important the first line is, how it has to grab your attention. Ok, so I don’t know what barefoot writers want besides 49 bucks. Everybody wants It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times … But mostly; Once upon a fish it was a different day works just as well, um, unless you’re transcribing A Tale of Two Cities and then you best start off with how good and shitty the times were.
My daughter is back, her interview went well, if she gets the job she’s going back to Oregon where she should be. Didn’t really dawn on me until she called today how very much I will miss her. In a sort of general way I’ll be leaving one day too and probably not back to Oregon, though in a few years Oregon would make sense. I mean when I start drawing my retirement Oregon tax will come out automatically and if I’m living elsewhere they’ll want a chunk too. My more wistful plans are more fanciful and as likely as any to happen.
So today has been sort of productive all things considered. If it was a thousand below zero with wind chill yesterday, it’s like 1500 below today. Most of my adventures were by phone though. Including, but not limited to, apologizing to a real person for not trusting the voice mail of a few days ago. My apology sounded sincere; we both knew it wasn’t. I was one movie quote from calling the voice mail a skin job (Blade Runner to you Philistines (that’s biblical bad guys to y’all who think I mean Philadelphians)). Another was setting up an appointment to view an assisted living apartment for my dad. Yet another was the dumbass left hand who didn’t know what the right was doing telling me my dad is doing so well he’ll graduate from rehab and I should talk to the guy at assisted living if that’s what I really want.
Still shocked that anyone can talk to my dad for longer than thirty seconds and think he doesn’t need constant supervision. Ok, need is a bit of an exaggeration, he sleeps a lot and he’s perfectly capable of that as long as it’s on a surface he can’t fall of. Some of them people must think I’m a cold hearted son of a bitch. They might be more used to people who are really guilty because they are putting dad/mom in a home and other such circumstances. I made a good year and a half run, if guilty and heroic were my only choices I’d be leaning towards heroic. Dealing with bureaucracy is a bit like those How To Pick Up Girls books; act like you own the joint and you haven’t got the time for small talk. I’ve never read one of those, but I’m pretty sure I’ve the faces of them what have slapped often enough to get the general idea. I don’t have any tips for picking up girls. Ok, I have one; bend at the knees, let your legs do the work not your back. Unless they are really little girls, like infants, then you want to make sure you support the head and neck.
Ok, sorry, didn’t mean to suggest barefoot writers or how to pick up girls are scams and only idiots would consider them. If one eighth of the promises they make are true and I’ve no reason to suspect they aren’t then both programs are invaluable, I’m sure. Personally there are some things I’m very stubborn about, though, if feeling defensive I have a bunch of reasons why it’s sound judgment and not stubbornness. For instance, one of the things I’m looking for in a girl (woman, I haven’t been interested in dating girls since I was a boy. I realize in American English there isn’t a real clear demarcation of age, in fact in ones fifties you start hanging out with the boys or girls even though many of them have worn out body parts that have been replaced --- chill, I meant like toupees and wigs and teeth), oops, let’s start again; One thing I look for in a woman is an insusceptibility to pick-ups. Um, I’m actually not looking at all, but, I wouldn’t be interested in someone stupid enough to fall for obvious pick-ups unless it was something like “Skip the cheesy shit, let’s have sex and then go away” which would have been great in my teens, twenties and half of my thirties. And, I suspect, is the point of such guides. It’s easier with boys/men “Hey do ya wanna?” pretty much gets an immediate answer. If you get no’s from ten in a row you are either in a gay club or perhaps you should be.
Shit, where was I? Oh, yeah, somewhere in this day or another, 1500 below zero, cold blooded, barefoot pick-up lines … wait, really? Shit, whose day was it to watch me? Wandering off trail is one thing, wandering off the map altogether, is, well, Haredawg Drools, I guess.
It’s one thing that always bugged me about that fucking Frost poem. It’s supposed to be significant that dude picks a less traveled trail, like the intellectual renegade is some sort of hero (I gotta tell you in my world the intellectual renegade doesn’t do the whole ABAB iambic pentameter thing, just saying). Both literally and figuratively my instinct when two paths diverge in a wood is to either go off trail or take the one that’s the most direct route, and, you know, if it’s a woods and trail system I know I don’t pause at all, I already knew which fucking trail I was taking before I got to the fork. If it’s all metaphorically, taking the ABAB iambic pentameter trail is not the one least travelled. As a poet Frost was the least risky son of a whore ever. And though he was born only a couple of decades before Whitman died and I’m not a very big fan of Whitman, Frost read like someone who walked through the woods with training wheels and a fucking helmet. They were both Americans and public Ed in this country tries hard to keep it American when they can, it’s one of the reasons Fennimore The Fuck Cooper is always in the curricula, the man couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper sack with holes on both ends and a path diverging to the open wet sack holes. I think, however, for what it’s worth, cooper and frost were better at picking up chicks (that’s a sexual proclivity joke. It’s really funny. Seriously, I am so Rolfing. Ok, so I’m ralphing, you say potato and I say tuber).
So if two paths diverge in a woods, sing the body electric or that last Mohican will eat your lunch (old school phrase for beat you up).
I wrote a flash. I don’t think I’ll post it. It’s tiresome. If I write another and it comes out like that I’m going to go real abstract. Flashes are supposed to surprise you (the author) the one I wrote today is so predictably Haredawg Drools that even if I didn’t write I could be persuaded I did. If it was really good and also predictable I might hang on to it or post it out of pride, but, even so, it’s contrary to practicing what I’ve been preaching, mediocre, predictable and sort of dishonest. It’s ok to write an entry like that, shit, it’s even ok to write a flash or a hundred flashes like that, but not today, not for me. I’d rather write a shitty flash that came from out of deep left field, I mean rather as in I need to, if it can be said ever or at all that one needs to write a flash, than I (this one) need to write a left field flash, the closer to the bleacher the better.
Besides, it’s Wednesday. I have two full days of paths diverging all the fuck over where the woods used to be, or, you know, one to thirty days. The rules to flash Friday have all always been in the keyboard of the beholder. Wait, that’s not right, beholden in the keyboard of the beheldling. Beheldling, that’s a fine word for a left field flash, another 499 and I might just have something, ugly and misshapen perhaps, but something. Perhaps I’ll write a flash about how to pick up ugly and misshapen transgender divergent woodsy chicks.
If I needed an excuse I am, honestly, smoking, in one vape, mint-chocolate and coconut juice and in another dragonfruit and key lime. The mixtures were accidents, at first, and then experiments. The fruit one tastes a bit like putting a roll of regular fruit flavored lifesavers in your mouth, hard to distinguish any one flavor (assuming they are, in fact, any one flavor) the chocolate mint and coconut is kind of cool if I leave it alone without adding anymore of either flavor. It does, however, seem like two perfectly acceptable excuses for being a bit off, though it’s a chicken egg kind of thing.
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