Man Watches Futility in Action. Cliff Harkum, of  Radium Springs, Ga, watches hopefully but also with a modicum of lifelong learned emptiness, that maybe just maybe, this time the roll of the ball will result in a strike.  However, as this reporter observed, futility once again ruled the day. After watching the final pin wobble from side to side but remain standing Cliff, said, "Gosh, almost!"  He then returned to the scorecard, solemnly penned "9" and ordered another Bud Light.

Savoring The View

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

savoring the view from zalensky's ornate dacha 

overlooking the black sea of putin's brain

alarmingly beautiful in all directions

but oh what sullies the horizon, my countrymen?

oh! is that a little man down there 

eating himself alive?

the dacha looms large from down below –

beady eyes leer at the gracious verandah 

where a somewhat jewish comedian president

lavishes laughter and leadership 

on a feisty nation unafraid to live large

or die larger

or possibly dream of all possible possibilities perhaps

beyond fiction we deem this unreality

over yonder

the duma of a dictator's miasmic dream

all swirling together and howling mad

the dumbness and the guns and the 

cavalcades of badness 

and the wild wild hope

that the bad guy will die 

sobbing low below 

the dacha where the good guy lives large

the good guy dies large 

forever large in the sky dacha

my own personal schadenfreude: 

putin’s puckered brain and swollen face

dilated by noxious gasses 

from hollowed dreams of rotting empires

a tsarist zombie feeding on its own wasting gray matter

royal ukase turned toilet paper

shit stain made manifest mutiny

but i digress…

zalensky turns from the view over the black sea of putin’s brain

looks back down the hallway where faces peer out

babushkas smiling with steaming samovars

pushkin poets raise thumbs up while scribbling verse

a real new history brought near to present day

wishing him well, so very extremely well

 Area woman reads fine print in Wal-Mart Halloween display, has epiphany. After picking out two pairs of reading glasses ("2 fer $4-Ize") at the Get Glassed! section of her local Wal-Mart, Enid Snipgrass corralled her kids (4 fer 3 seat pram) and proceeded to the pumpkin hued holiday display to pick out various interchangeable and equally priced plastic and sugar coated items for the upcoming Horror Hotel web series cast party, which featured her cousin Velma as a zombie dominatrix in webisode 5 ("Room 911 - Brainz and Chainz!!!"). Unable to read the fine print underneath the giant lurid crimson fonts, Enid donned her new not-quite-yet-purchased spectacles and, as a test of their efficacy, peered closely at the 8 point verbiage crammed below the price point:

Every thing is different from any other thing. No identity exists. Names for things are invented, traded, equated. They (the names) are not things. They are a shepherd's call. Invisible restraints to bunch real things. Herein lies meaning. It may seem demeaning, yet it holds everything together. Its incredible.

Upon reading the fine print, Enid took off her glasses and paused a moment, surveying the 2 acre expanse of products and prices arrayed around her as if she were (as a nearby oxygen challenged Wal-Mart greeter later gravely stated) "the epicenter of a torus-shaped shockwave of pure consciousness, radiating out to imbibe all things within its purview", whereupon she placed the not-yet-purchased glasses  astride the triangular eyes of the nearest jack-o-lantern, gathered her kids with a nod and a keen whistle, and exited the store without paying for squat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember the Thing with the Elephant 
and the Lima Beans and the Rabid Python?  

I took so many pictures while you guys were gone! 

but none of them did justice 

to the piercing and varied beauty 

that ravished my retinae each passing parsec.

I was forced to delete them all 

some sweetness cannot be borne.

and I wrote a sonnet every morning!

but so inflamed was I by the new and stimulating vistas

that confounded my senses daily 

and left me weeping by teatime, 

that I was forced to burn them each night 

and watch them curl into ash 

over the same candle 

whose illumination they had been writ by

that selfsame day

 

 

Area Man’s Triglycerides Flying High Above Normal.

 

Item: Area Man’s Triglycerides Flying High Above Normal. Fleek Schmivel, resident of South
Claxyon Canyon, recently was tested by Dr. Dooshman at the Inner Shitty Urgent Care and Bikini Wacks Emporium Laboratory. Schmivel was tested for a variety of conditions and all in all did pretty well scoring 8 out of 10 for life reduction vectors. He is overweight, underpaid, overeducated, out of pocket, uninsured, left-handed, with a sore anus, a split lip, a lumpy neck, and at least one hilariously misfigured ear lobe (looks like a partially circumcised pecker). After a zesty lecture from Dr. Dooshman, owner of the Medical College of Greater Huffakers, New Zealand, on the dangers of living too long and being too happy, Fleek fled the doctor's office for emergency curbside service at the CheesyGreasyEasy Does It Drive Inn Emporium and ordered the Instant Gratification Fatty Dog Burger with Extra Grease and a side of fried pork shank dry rubbed with cheetos, and to top it all off, a melted SugarDairyMilkCream sandwich-in-a-butter-tub for dessert. “Hell, why stop at tri-glycerides?”, enthused Schmivel, “I might as well go all the way for dodeca-glycerides and see how Dooshman deals on that dealio,” before ducking back into  the CheesyGreasyEasy Does It Drive Inn Emporium for just one more Fatty Dog Burger “for a friend.”

 

Area Man Gets Sideswiped by Pedestal, Basically.

Item: Area Man Gets Sideswiped by Pedestal, Basically. The Statue of Limitations, long a towering feature at the epicenter of the roundabout in downtown Sue Falls Down And Cries Piteously, Manitoba, vanished sometime last night leaving only a faint rueful fart of an outline of legal poesy in the dry concrete pedestal and a trail of vague stinky innuendo spreading in all directions. There appear to be no witnesses to this enigmatic and mysterious act of public vandalism save for one Shane Link, local ribald raconteur, flaneur and self-described Totipotent Orgasmic Lifeforce, who said he was mindlessly minding his own bizwax at 3am having just described a quasi-semi-circular arc round and round and roundabout the Statue Of Limitations on his way easterly to his just desserts (lime cream pie at Beacon’s All Night Diner and Drinks On The Edge Of Town), behind the wheel of his snappy Chevron Algonquin electric diesel pontoon truck known as Al Paca when, in his words, “I was sideswiped! Preempted, sidetracked, and redirected violently, you might say and would say if you saw what I saw. And as I said, I looked around and there was nothing there! And I mean nada, zero, nix! And that includes the Statue of Limitations!”

One Word at a Time