Invader
This is obviously homemade, but google and I couldn’t turn up the creator. I really just wanted to provide a visualization of how I’m feeling, but now I realize this is a Lego video game I want to play.
Category: personal info
Ruh Roh
We’ve finally settled into our new place, although we’re still waiting out the usual suspects as far as utilities go – no internet till Thursday is my understanding. Hopefully that won’t interfere with tonight’s Mulligan story, but we’re sort of playing things by ear at the moment.
The best piece of news is that we (and by we, I mean a trained professional) have corrected the carbon monoxide concern, so everything is safe and fantastic.
Now I just need to figure out where all the light switches are.
Last Night
This is just sort of an odd personal note, but:
As I’ve been using as an excuse for tardiness lately, we’ve recently moved and are still settling in to our new digs. In a quest for snack food, and to explore the town a bit, Opopanax and I took a walk. Stumbling upon a 24-hour chain convenience store, we pushed inside, and, after some browsing, Opop convinced me to pick up some chips and dip.
Now, I didn’t start off particularly excited about the idea, but a few hours later I was daydreaming about salt and dill, so I decided to crack open our loot.
I wasn’t the first however – the Philadelphia had already been opened. A single, deep-furrowed rut had been pulled from it: someone had preemptively dipped into our goods.
Maybe it was for the best, however, as we realized during transport to the garbage that it was a month past due anyhow.
Not a good omen for future use of the store, but now, even this morning, I’m left craving salty, creamy, pickle taste.
Framing
If my iPhone camera has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t quite have surgeon’s hands.
Adventure Photos
You don’t want to meet the withered and blackened husk who answers THE NIGHT TELEPHONE. (Coming to the USA network this fall, or a failed Rod Serling show?)
Oddly, this tower makes me long for a world in which we grow our houses out of the ground – where a beautiful and sprawling residence isn’t a function of money, but instead of care-taking and time.
Country Living (In The Grass)
Can you identify what this is?
(Quick hint: it wasn’t that flat until it had suffered through some farmer’s traffic.)
Here’s the lid, if that helps:
I could be wrong, but I believe it’s an abandoned snake enclosure. It isn’t the first I’ve come across while on a country stroll*.
My best guess – based on the fact that it appears the former owners simply cracked the lid and ran – is that the size of the thing had gotten to a point where it worried them, so they released it into the “wilds” of a corn field.
I’m glad that whatever it was (baby Burmese Python?) is now slithering about somewhere on my block.
The truth is, these people may as well have taken a rock and cracked the poor bugger’s skull open. This is no easy area for an exotic pet to be wandering.
*At least this one was relatively small.
Fight Songs
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cjORoHfTcg]
When I was a youth, I loved to be buried in a wall of bass and guitar. In truth, even today, when I’m out on the road with my tongue wagging from heat and effort, there are few things that will rouse me quite like a fast beat and shouted lyrics.
Still, in the moments that I need strength – and not just adrenaline – there is little in the world that compares to the above live performance by The National. It is one of those videos I return to every few months, with a sudden craving, especially when I need to grab hold of something larger than myself.
I’m not sure if it strikes at the ridge of memory that holds my childhood experiences of watching my family, and extended family, gathering up their strings and bows to make music together in the front-room of my grandparent’s farmhouse, but there’s something in the imperfections and improvised instrumentation that makes this recording greater to me than any clean-cut album version could ever be.
About Last Night
Last night, this happened:
Dog demanded a trip outside – we both got locked in life or death struggle with an adventurous frog. Everyone survived. Back to bed.
JRD Skinner
JRDSkinner
I got a few comments in the morning wondering about the details – I love my dog, but I think this small chart I whipped up does a lot of the explaining:
Once I’d waved Mina off the frog – who, for some reason, had decided the pond was too full, and had relocated into our porch instead – the tiny amphibian attempted to make his escape.
With a mighty leap, it found a perfect hiding place to wedge itself into: between the door and the jamb.
“What do you think you’re doing!?” I asked
“Erp,” it replied, staring at me with its stupid amphibian eyes.
It took my still half-asleep brain a few moments to summon my “No, seriously.” voice to send the dog away – a few moments that mostly consisted of me trying to balance keeping the door open and keeping the dog back, all while being dive bombed by Mothra’s cousins.
Some Notes On Geeston
Oddly, Sunday In Geeston has more biography in it than most of the stories I’ve put up via Flash Pulp. I could take you to that little office, and I wasted more than one afternoon with a man not unlike Eddie, who took quite a bit of enjoyment in spending Sundays waiting for people to climb the post office’s tall cement steps.
I worked for the Eddie-alike, although he was too weird to truly insert into fiction. I intervened one day during a particularly sad case of stair-climbing, and, despite the fact that I may have saved that old man a hip, I was greeted with a dour look when I returned.
The store he operated eventually went under and we stopped talking shortly afterwards – actually, the day after he spent an afternoon showing me his KISS doll collection.
