(continued)
The Doctor plodded up the basement staircase, growing increasingly irritated by the now-constant pounding on his distressed front door. He hadn't decided on how to be rid of the pest: the trap-door into the dank, grimy pit? The button that sent bolts of electricity arcing through the air? The switch that sent the huge swinging blades in motion, designed to slice the unwary into neat bits that could be easily swept into the trash? He paused at the door, then shrugged his narrow shoulders. He would let fate decide.
The Doctor turned the doorknob and slowly opened the door, allowing the rusty hinges to produce a predictable but still-menacing creak. He craned his thin neck through the opening to look out upon...nothing. The Doctor blinked twice, slowly, like a tired owl. Maybe he was working too hard. He started to close the door when he heard a voice below him.
"Hey, mister, wanna buy some cookies?" A shudder ran down The Doctor's spine. He looked down to see a tiny, golden-haired little girl with an uncomfortably bright smile that hid the determined look in her eyes. "They're only two dollars a box!"
The Doctor shifted his weight from one foot to another, then back again. Despite his genius, this was something completely out of his realm. Normally such a child wouldn't have come within a country mile of his house. Yet here one stood, staring him down the way a matador stares down a bull. Nor was he alone in his amazement: he looked over the sickeningly golden curls at the two Heebie-Jeebies at the bottom of the stairs, hands stuffed into the pockets of their shabby pants as they stared sullenly at the worn toes of their huge black boots. Beyond them, Creeps, Willies, and Shakes all gathered in a small mob on the scrubby brown lawn, whispering and pointing at the little girl who seemed totally oblivious to their presence. The Doctor's discomfort grew rapidly.
"Pardon me?" he said, in an effort to gain more time to think.
The little girl turned up the wattage on her high-intensity smile, causing The Doctor to wince behind his thick glasses. "I'm a Bonfire Girl," she said, pointing to the bright red sash hanging from her shoulder, festooned with all sorts of colorful, cheery badges. "Our troop wants to adopt a monkey at the zoo, so we're selling cookies to raise money. Wanna buy a box?"
The Doctor felt an urgent need to regain control of the situation. Marshaling his resolve, he said in a cold, firm voice, "No. I despise cookies. Go away."
The girl cocked her head to the side, screwed one eye shut, and looked The Doctor up and down with the other. "You don't like cookies? Why not?"
"I just don't. Leave now."
"That's weird." The girl shook her head, then brightened again. "I bet you'll like these!"
"I doubt that," The Doctor said gruffly, finding his inner Meanie again. "Now go away. I have a monster, " he growled, "that eats little children."
The girl rolled her eyes. "I hope he's scarier than those guys," she huffed, pointing at the Heebie-Jeebies. Hearing this, the beasties looked at the girl, then at one another. Coming to an unspoken agreement, they reached under the porch and brought out a battered suitcase and an old Schwinn roadster held together by rust and wishful thinking. The smaller of the two, holding the suitcase, jumped onto the handlebars, while the larger mounted the seat and began pedaling. They waved to the pack of minor frights on the lawn, then moved off down the road. There were plenty of other kids in the world to scare. The Heebie-Jeebies didn't need this kind of abuse.
The Doctor, now rather vexed at the prospect of having to deal with representatives of the Nightmare Workers Union, bent down toward the girl. "It is considerably scarier," he snarled. "Now begone!"
The Bonfire Girl was unfazed. Little old ladies who remembered when a box of cookies cost a quarter were a harder sell than this skinny kook. "Buy a box of cookies and I'll go," she said through her sweetest smile.
The Doctor was beside himself. "Arrgh!" he groaned, straightening.
"Look, mister, just buy a box," the girl said. "Give them to your dog if you don't want them."
The Doctor snorted. "I don't have a dog. I have a Steve."
The girl raised her eyebrows. "What's a Steve?"
The Doctor began to answer, but thought better of it. "Never mind," he sniffed. He didn't want to answer any more questions from the undertaker. Or the police.
"C'mon, mister! We want a monkey!"
Here, at least, was something The Doctor thought he could understand in all this unpleasantness. "Are you going to use it for experiments?"
The Bonfire Girl made a face. "Yuck! No! We're going to adopt him. We're going to name him Wally, and buy him a rope swing, and bananas and apples and stuff."
It was The Doctor's turn to raise eyebrows. "Why?"
"Because it's a nice thing to do and monkeys are funny. All the troops in town are adopting one." The Doctor frowned. He was lost again, and found it troubling. "C'mon, mister," the girl sighed. "It's only two bucks."
The Doctor pursed his lips, which didn't amount to much because his lips were very thin. If there was one thing he was good at, it was figuring things out. And he figured the best answer to this problem was to just pony up the dough. He could dispose of door-to-door salesmen by the truckload and likely receive a Civil Service medal, but little girls were different. Someone would notice. "Very well," he said, letting his shoulders fall. "One moment."
Turning on his heel, The Doctor stepped over to a small glass jar sitting by itself on a table awash in dust. He pulled out two bills that were so rumpled, torn and stained they looked like they had been used as chewing gum by a nervous orangutan. Returning to the door, he held out the money in his open palm.
The girl frowned at the wadded pieces of paper. "Don't you have any nicer ones? Those are all wrecked."
Little girl or not, The Doctor had his limits. "Just take the money!" he snapped.
"All right, all right," the girl said, stuffing the bills into her pocket. No need to get all grouchy." A corner of The Doctor's mouth twitched in anger, but he said nothing. "What kind of cookies do you want? I have chocolate chip, peanut butter, mint, or lemon ones." The girl unslung her backpack and rummaged through it.
"I couldn't possibly care less," The Doctor said.
"Then try the lemon ones, sour puss!" The girl giggled at her joke, and handed over a shiny yellow box. She turned and skipped merrily down the stairs, past the motley throng still gathered on the patchy grass, and on down the street, singing nonsense to herself.
The Doctor stood and watched the girl until she was out of sight, still not quite sure what had just happened. He looked down at the box of cookies he held loosely at his side. Grunting, he tore away the end of the box and ripped open the inner package in one savage motion. Letting the debris fall to the porch, he plucked a cookie from the mauled container. The Doctor squinted at the small, yellow-brown disc, then sniffed it cautiously. It smelled like the cleaner Steve used to clean the laboratory after particularly messy experiments, and was likely flavored by the same chemicals. Undaunted, The Doctor brought the cookie to his mouth, and neatly snipped off a bite with his front teeth.
The Doctor's eyes narrowed, and he glared with cold rage in the direction the girl had gone. He would begin visiting the zoo every week, and the first monkey that answered to the name Wally was in for a nasty surprise. A very nasty and unpleasant surprise indeed.
The cookies were stale.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Cookies For A Monkey, Part I
It seems that it's Girl Scout cookie time again, so I thought I'd offer up a few thousand words I've written on the subject. Maybe I'll send them to an actual publisher one day. Hope you enjoy Cookies For A Monkey.
The house stood, as creepy places tend to do, at the end of a long street, cut off from its nearest neighbors by a small marsh. The marsh was fed by a narrow, sluggish stream whose black waters took the stubborn and most un-streamlike attitude of standing still as much as possible. covering only an acre or so, it stank in the summer, and changed to a gooey, half-frozen muck in the winter. Only after a heavy spring rain did the stream move, usually managing to flood the street in the process, staging a damp rebellion at being flushed from its misery. The stream had grown quite comfortable with its misery, and resented any intrusion, which made it the perfect neighbor for the dwelling that stood near the edge of the marsh.
To say the house was creepy was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Creepy places make the hair on the back of your neck tingle, and your skin crawl with the urge to take it somewhere else, quickly. The house at the end of Elm Street (so named for the giant trees that lurched over the sidewalks) found the Creeps a nice place to start, but lacking in overall menace. The nearer one got to the house, the Creeps began to rub shoulders with the Willies and the Shakes, until standing at last in front of the cracked, uneven concrete path that led to the front door one was greeted by the Heebie-Jeebies, with their red bulging eyes and great grinning fangs. The unfortunate few who actually made it this far found their skin doing its level best to tear away from their bones and hot-foot it back the way it had come, leaving its owner to the mercy of the monsters and the elements.
The house itself was drab and rickety, sagging under its age until the windows and doors had settled well out of their original alignment. It had the look of being about to fall over at any minute, but the walls leaned together in a way that suggested the house couldn't decide which way to fall, so it would be best to remain upright until its mind was made up. There were five stairs, each slanted at a different angle, that led up to a front porch as wide as the house. The rails of the porch pitched and swayed like a madman's roller coaster. The windows on either side of the scratched and blotchy oaken door were perpetually blacked out by heavy velvet curtains gone grey with dust and fading. Their original color remains anyone's guess. The windows of the second story and attic were less fortunate, having either no shade at all or being draped in tattered white rags, liberally stained yellow and brown from years of neglect, hung upon bent brass rods. Any paint on the house had long since peeled away, a bit still clinging in odd corners and under eaves, leaving the whole outside to settle into a slimy, mushroom-grey color, broken only by the muddy film covering the ground-level basement windows that had been painted black from the inside. The house completely failed to please the eye.
This effect suited the owner of the house just fine. He was a busy man and had no time for interruptions. The last thing he wanted was a neat, well-kept abode that would invite strangers to disturb him with encyclopedia sets, aluminum siding, or free samples of Tibetan floor wax. The effect also held at bay the endless stream of fund-raising urchins that prowled the neighborhood, selling everything from magazines to coupon books to sickly sweet globs of sugar that only passed for candy because the boxes they came in said that was what was inside. The Doctor (as he called himself) had once tested a piece of said candy in his laboratory. After igniting it with a welding torch, because the glob had been resistant to lesser degrees of heat, the resulting fire not only scorched and cracked the marble table-top, but melted a pair of stainless steel tongs and burned for two days before finally smoldering out. The Doctor had considered further research, but in the end decided that acids, volatile chemicals, and high-voltage electricity were hazardous enough.
As for The Doctor himself, no one knew his real name. Even The Doctor had forgotten: it had been lost long ago amid strange scribbles and noxious fumes. He didn't miss it, and it didn't miss him, glad to be rid of the lanky, reed-thin oddball that never went to any fun parties. No good being a name, it reasoned, if you were never introduced to anyone. Some of the bolder townsfolk had badgered the mailman for his name, but found no help. All of the mail was addressed simply to "The Doctor", in care of the Marmoset Preservation Society, which was an obvious but unquestioned front: The Doctor hated marmosets, and most other furry critters to boot.
Oddly enough, the MPS had to date received $138.25 in donations, sent by people with more money than common sense and precious little of either. Not one penny had gone to the preservation of anything other than The Doctor's coffee addiction.
Today, like most days, found the scientist in his lab, fine-tuning his equipment for the day's experiments. The only thing missing was Steve, the assistant The Doctor had built by morbid arts from body parts collected in nefarious ways. Aside from one arm being longer than the other, The Doctor had done a decent job of it.
At the moment, however, Steve was crumpled in a gangly heap at the base of the far wall. He had been thrown there yesterday by a power switch that had chosen an unfortunate time to surge. After flopping around like a spasmodic tarantula for a few minutes, Steve had finally collapsed and gone still. The Doctor had left him there: Steve would come around eventually. He was reliable that way.
With his apparati finally to his liking, The Doctor lit several burners on the tables and got to work. He was currently experimenting with a formula that not only had tripled the brainpower of his lab rats, but gave them the ability to shoot heat rays from their eyes. This had come as a pleasant surprise to The Doctor, and a frightful shock to the mangy, one-eyed cat that slunk through the hidden places of the house. The cat had seen his seventh life vanish in a raging crossfire of the scorching beams; thereupon he took his remaining lives and retired quietly to the seashore, to live off whatever dead fish and seaweed the tide washed in.
The Doctor had been pleased with the initial results, but after three days the rats brainpower not only returned to normal but dropped far below it, without the loss of the heat rays. The rats now sat mindlessly in their cages, occasionally zapping off their own tails and starting random fires throughout the laboratory. Several had also gone obviously insane, but The Doctor hardly noticed. He had been insane for many years now, and regarded his madness as another man might regard a comfortable sweater. But the loss of brainpower would not do at all.
When a large vat had begun to bubble nicely, The Doctor went to a small, locked cabinet and took out a short, fat bottle. Bringing it back to the table, he set it down, then pulled on heavy, black rubber gloves that came nearly to his elbows. The bottle was made of a heavy red glass and strengthened by a web of brass wires wrapped around it. A metal label attached to the front held the letters of a long-forgotten alphabet, which said, had anyone been able to read it, "Put This Bottle Down NOW!" The Doctor would have ignored the warning in any case. He was that kind of person.
The Doctor unstoppered the bottle, releasing an odor that would have been unpleasant on a garbage scow. He was just about to pour a few drops into the now-boiling vat, when his concentration was shattered by a loud knocking on the front door. Standing bolt upright, The Doctor flung a single drop of the purple-red liquid high into the air, which came down on the head of one of the rats, and promptly dissolved it.
The Doctor shook his head in amazement. No one ever knocked on his door. It was a practice he soundly discouraged, often in violent and unhealthy ways. But just when he was certain he'd imagined it (he was crazy, after all), the knock sounded again. Louder, longer, more insistent. He re-corked the bottle and set it slowly and deliberately on the table. This was unacceptable. How did people expect a Serious Man of Science to take over the world with an army of intelligent, pyrokinetic rats when he is constantly being interrupted?
Now the knocking was accompanied by the distinct thuds of kicking. At this point The Doctor normally sent Steve to get rid of the intruder. But seeing that Steve was still piled in an unconscious mound on the floor, he would have to take care of it himself. The Doctor smiled thinly: it had been a long time. He would enjoy this.
(continued)
The house stood, as creepy places tend to do, at the end of a long street, cut off from its nearest neighbors by a small marsh. The marsh was fed by a narrow, sluggish stream whose black waters took the stubborn and most un-streamlike attitude of standing still as much as possible. covering only an acre or so, it stank in the summer, and changed to a gooey, half-frozen muck in the winter. Only after a heavy spring rain did the stream move, usually managing to flood the street in the process, staging a damp rebellion at being flushed from its misery. The stream had grown quite comfortable with its misery, and resented any intrusion, which made it the perfect neighbor for the dwelling that stood near the edge of the marsh.
To say the house was creepy was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Creepy places make the hair on the back of your neck tingle, and your skin crawl with the urge to take it somewhere else, quickly. The house at the end of Elm Street (so named for the giant trees that lurched over the sidewalks) found the Creeps a nice place to start, but lacking in overall menace. The nearer one got to the house, the Creeps began to rub shoulders with the Willies and the Shakes, until standing at last in front of the cracked, uneven concrete path that led to the front door one was greeted by the Heebie-Jeebies, with their red bulging eyes and great grinning fangs. The unfortunate few who actually made it this far found their skin doing its level best to tear away from their bones and hot-foot it back the way it had come, leaving its owner to the mercy of the monsters and the elements.
The house itself was drab and rickety, sagging under its age until the windows and doors had settled well out of their original alignment. It had the look of being about to fall over at any minute, but the walls leaned together in a way that suggested the house couldn't decide which way to fall, so it would be best to remain upright until its mind was made up. There were five stairs, each slanted at a different angle, that led up to a front porch as wide as the house. The rails of the porch pitched and swayed like a madman's roller coaster. The windows on either side of the scratched and blotchy oaken door were perpetually blacked out by heavy velvet curtains gone grey with dust and fading. Their original color remains anyone's guess. The windows of the second story and attic were less fortunate, having either no shade at all or being draped in tattered white rags, liberally stained yellow and brown from years of neglect, hung upon bent brass rods. Any paint on the house had long since peeled away, a bit still clinging in odd corners and under eaves, leaving the whole outside to settle into a slimy, mushroom-grey color, broken only by the muddy film covering the ground-level basement windows that had been painted black from the inside. The house completely failed to please the eye.
This effect suited the owner of the house just fine. He was a busy man and had no time for interruptions. The last thing he wanted was a neat, well-kept abode that would invite strangers to disturb him with encyclopedia sets, aluminum siding, or free samples of Tibetan floor wax. The effect also held at bay the endless stream of fund-raising urchins that prowled the neighborhood, selling everything from magazines to coupon books to sickly sweet globs of sugar that only passed for candy because the boxes they came in said that was what was inside. The Doctor (as he called himself) had once tested a piece of said candy in his laboratory. After igniting it with a welding torch, because the glob had been resistant to lesser degrees of heat, the resulting fire not only scorched and cracked the marble table-top, but melted a pair of stainless steel tongs and burned for two days before finally smoldering out. The Doctor had considered further research, but in the end decided that acids, volatile chemicals, and high-voltage electricity were hazardous enough.
As for The Doctor himself, no one knew his real name. Even The Doctor had forgotten: it had been lost long ago amid strange scribbles and noxious fumes. He didn't miss it, and it didn't miss him, glad to be rid of the lanky, reed-thin oddball that never went to any fun parties. No good being a name, it reasoned, if you were never introduced to anyone. Some of the bolder townsfolk had badgered the mailman for his name, but found no help. All of the mail was addressed simply to "The Doctor", in care of the Marmoset Preservation Society, which was an obvious but unquestioned front: The Doctor hated marmosets, and most other furry critters to boot.
Oddly enough, the MPS had to date received $138.25 in donations, sent by people with more money than common sense and precious little of either. Not one penny had gone to the preservation of anything other than The Doctor's coffee addiction.
Today, like most days, found the scientist in his lab, fine-tuning his equipment for the day's experiments. The only thing missing was Steve, the assistant The Doctor had built by morbid arts from body parts collected in nefarious ways. Aside from one arm being longer than the other, The Doctor had done a decent job of it.
At the moment, however, Steve was crumpled in a gangly heap at the base of the far wall. He had been thrown there yesterday by a power switch that had chosen an unfortunate time to surge. After flopping around like a spasmodic tarantula for a few minutes, Steve had finally collapsed and gone still. The Doctor had left him there: Steve would come around eventually. He was reliable that way.
With his apparati finally to his liking, The Doctor lit several burners on the tables and got to work. He was currently experimenting with a formula that not only had tripled the brainpower of his lab rats, but gave them the ability to shoot heat rays from their eyes. This had come as a pleasant surprise to The Doctor, and a frightful shock to the mangy, one-eyed cat that slunk through the hidden places of the house. The cat had seen his seventh life vanish in a raging crossfire of the scorching beams; thereupon he took his remaining lives and retired quietly to the seashore, to live off whatever dead fish and seaweed the tide washed in.
The Doctor had been pleased with the initial results, but after three days the rats brainpower not only returned to normal but dropped far below it, without the loss of the heat rays. The rats now sat mindlessly in their cages, occasionally zapping off their own tails and starting random fires throughout the laboratory. Several had also gone obviously insane, but The Doctor hardly noticed. He had been insane for many years now, and regarded his madness as another man might regard a comfortable sweater. But the loss of brainpower would not do at all.
When a large vat had begun to bubble nicely, The Doctor went to a small, locked cabinet and took out a short, fat bottle. Bringing it back to the table, he set it down, then pulled on heavy, black rubber gloves that came nearly to his elbows. The bottle was made of a heavy red glass and strengthened by a web of brass wires wrapped around it. A metal label attached to the front held the letters of a long-forgotten alphabet, which said, had anyone been able to read it, "Put This Bottle Down NOW!" The Doctor would have ignored the warning in any case. He was that kind of person.
The Doctor unstoppered the bottle, releasing an odor that would have been unpleasant on a garbage scow. He was just about to pour a few drops into the now-boiling vat, when his concentration was shattered by a loud knocking on the front door. Standing bolt upright, The Doctor flung a single drop of the purple-red liquid high into the air, which came down on the head of one of the rats, and promptly dissolved it.
The Doctor shook his head in amazement. No one ever knocked on his door. It was a practice he soundly discouraged, often in violent and unhealthy ways. But just when he was certain he'd imagined it (he was crazy, after all), the knock sounded again. Louder, longer, more insistent. He re-corked the bottle and set it slowly and deliberately on the table. This was unacceptable. How did people expect a Serious Man of Science to take over the world with an army of intelligent, pyrokinetic rats when he is constantly being interrupted?
Now the knocking was accompanied by the distinct thuds of kicking. At this point The Doctor normally sent Steve to get rid of the intruder. But seeing that Steve was still piled in an unconscious mound on the floor, he would have to take care of it himself. The Doctor smiled thinly: it had been a long time. He would enjoy this.
(continued)
H.P Lovecraft on Edgar Allan Poe
I have several authors that I'm a big fan of, and read as much as I can of their works. Lovecraft is one, along with Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, Bernard Cornwell, Christopher Moore, and Hideyuki Kikuchi, to name a few. But if I was ever stranded on the proverbial desert isle, Poe is the author I'd want to have along: The Grand Master. I think this excerpt from Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature is telling, (from Chapter 7, "Edgar Allan Poe"...imagine that):
"In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in it's final and perfected state."
I'm always surprised (but increasingly less so in this age of schlock- and fluff- horror) at how few people know anything of Poe beyond The Raven, and of those that do, dismiss his influence as boring or antiquated. What they fail to realize is what Lovecraft points out: without Poe, the modern horror tale as we know it, which has given rise to all sorts of sub-genres (some decent enough, some downright awful), wouldn't exist. Neither would detective fiction (as Poe created in The Murders in the Rue Morgue), or, arguably, science fiction (which some credit Poe with creating in Ligeia).
I'm in complete agreement with Lovecraft: Poe's influence in Literature cannot be underestimated. If you already read Poe's works, great. Keep reading and pas them on. If you don't read Poe...start!
"In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in it's final and perfected state."
I'm always surprised (but increasingly less so in this age of schlock- and fluff- horror) at how few people know anything of Poe beyond The Raven, and of those that do, dismiss his influence as boring or antiquated. What they fail to realize is what Lovecraft points out: without Poe, the modern horror tale as we know it, which has given rise to all sorts of sub-genres (some decent enough, some downright awful), wouldn't exist. Neither would detective fiction (as Poe created in The Murders in the Rue Morgue), or, arguably, science fiction (which some credit Poe with creating in Ligeia).
I'm in complete agreement with Lovecraft: Poe's influence in Literature cannot be underestimated. If you already read Poe's works, great. Keep reading and pas them on. If you don't read Poe...start!
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I Got Nothin'...
I'm in a bit of a wasteland lately, creatively speaking. Haven't done much of anything, and I don't know why. But hopefully that will change quite soon.
Maybe I'm not drinking enough...
Maybe I'm not drinking enough...
Friday, February 12, 2010
Snow + No School =
Winter fun, I suppose.
Taking my kids and a few of their friends sledding...hopefully I'll come back unbruised and ambulatory.
Taking my kids and a few of their friends sledding...hopefully I'll come back unbruised and ambulatory.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Profound and Remarkable Beauty of Doing Nothing
I had some time to myself this weekend. My wife took our kids out of town to see her parents, leaving me and my dog to our own devices, with no responsibilities other than eating and not burning the house down (both accomplished successfully). I took full advantage of this time to do absolutely nothing.
I was supposed to have my monthly poker game Saturday night, but it got canceled. I had a brief meeting with a few softball coaches in the afternoon that went as scheduled, but other than that...nothing. I ate a leisurely breakfast, read the paper, tooled around Facebook even more aimlessly than usual, read for a while, took a nap, and had a half-hearted wrestling match with my equally lazy hound, who spent most of his day lounging in a patch of sunlight. I ordered some hot wings and watched the Blackhawks game at 7:00, watched the Stooges in between periods. I did nothing of serious note, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
I like to consider myself a connoisseur of low-impact leisure time. Sitting and doing nothing. Practicing Non-Ado, as the Taoists like to say. Which likely serves me well in the hunting blind: I can sit still for several hours at a time and just enjoy the scenery, although I will admit that sitting for an entire day and not seeing one stinking deer is somewhat south of pleasant. But you see what I mean: in this hectic, full-speed-all-the-time world, sitting on your back deck of an evening with a drink in hand just watching the wind rustle through the trees is truly pleasing. Granted, I'm always up for doing something fun, but doing nothing has its merits as well.
I was nine kinds of mellow this weekend, and it was marvelous. Once I got the call that my family had arrived safely and weren't stuck in the cold on the highway somewhere, I let the coolness get into my vertebrae. Only one place to be, and that took place in a bar; no one needing my services, no running around getting other people where they need to go, no listening to a constant stream of antagonistic chatter that is the by-product of two siblings kept inside by the cold. In a word, sublime.
I was supposed to have my monthly poker game Saturday night, but it got canceled. I had a brief meeting with a few softball coaches in the afternoon that went as scheduled, but other than that...nothing. I ate a leisurely breakfast, read the paper, tooled around Facebook even more aimlessly than usual, read for a while, took a nap, and had a half-hearted wrestling match with my equally lazy hound, who spent most of his day lounging in a patch of sunlight. I ordered some hot wings and watched the Blackhawks game at 7:00, watched the Stooges in between periods. I did nothing of serious note, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
I like to consider myself a connoisseur of low-impact leisure time. Sitting and doing nothing. Practicing Non-Ado, as the Taoists like to say. Which likely serves me well in the hunting blind: I can sit still for several hours at a time and just enjoy the scenery, although I will admit that sitting for an entire day and not seeing one stinking deer is somewhat south of pleasant. But you see what I mean: in this hectic, full-speed-all-the-time world, sitting on your back deck of an evening with a drink in hand just watching the wind rustle through the trees is truly pleasing. Granted, I'm always up for doing something fun, but doing nothing has its merits as well.
I was nine kinds of mellow this weekend, and it was marvelous. Once I got the call that my family had arrived safely and weren't stuck in the cold on the highway somewhere, I let the coolness get into my vertebrae. Only one place to be, and that took place in a bar; no one needing my services, no running around getting other people where they need to go, no listening to a constant stream of antagonistic chatter that is the by-product of two siblings kept inside by the cold. In a word, sublime.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
GET OUT AND VOTE!!!
I know I said I wanted to keep politics and such flammable topics out of this blog, but some things are too important not to recognize.
Be part of the process: get out and vote!
*Republican*
Be part of the process: get out and vote!
*Republican*
Monday, February 1, 2010
So Sue Me
Hey...I had things to do this weekend, so I'm a little behind on posting the exploits of my fabulously exciting, thrill-a-minute life. As soon as I catch my breath from all the hoopla, I'll catch up on the Captain's blog...
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