Drowning (an anti-poem)

I feel the world crushing down on me,

And I really mean that,

It feels like a there are a thousand gallons above

And everyone of them is trying to enter me,

Every aquatic demon is pulling at my feet

As I desperately try to fight

The most basic laws of nature,

This is not a complex metaphor

or a simile really about time,

I’m drowning in the ocean,

And could really use a lifeline

Flower poem (that rhymes)

apparently the poem was supposed to rhyme.

 

Flowers have many petals

and a man has many loves

I don’t care about any others

just you, my little dove

flower poem

a poem  about “a flower”

 

I pulled the petals,

one by one,

Until the love of a girl

Was verified, scientifically

And then I thought

How much nicer it would be

To have that flower back

collective nouns (Something I like)

Collective nouns are all those special words that we use for groups of specific things.  These include everything from a murder of crows to a load of laundry.  I like these because they basically make the english language much more complicated, but also more poetic and wondrous.

Some of them are easy to forget as special, a deck of cards, a fleet of ships, and a forest of trees are so common that you can forget about them.   A murder of crows, a pride of lions, and a gaggle of geese are more recognizable.

There’s some controversy whether a murder of crows was really ever used or if it was just invented placed into the language.  Part of the magic of collective nouns in the english language is that there is some leeway on what you can just invent, as long it makes sense in some way.

So, i’m going to invent a few of my own, feel free to add your own.

A disaster of politicians

A lyric of poets

A triumph of awards

That Macy’s commercial is a LIE!!!! and yes Andrew McCarthy is part of it

Many people have opined that the new Macy’s commercial, celebrating their place in pop culture through the last century, was the highlight of a lackluster Emmy’s night.  Others have pointed out that they paid for their appearance in those reality show so they shouldn’t count, which isn’t really fair, since they paid for the parades too, and they most likely paid for most of their mentions.

My problem with the commercial (and I do like the concept) is the use of a clip from Mannequin.  You might have missed this clip, because it is the only clip that does not have it’s own audio.  It is just a second of the late Estelle Getty walking with Andrew McCarthy down an aisle.  Mannequin (a truly bad movie) did not take place at Macy’s (so, obviously there would be no clip of Macy’s being mentioned), it took place at a fictional store, called Prince and Company, and was filmed at the department store Wanamaker’s (where my great grandparents had their first date, btw), in Philadelphia.  The store became a Macy’s in 1995, but it was not at the time of filming.  It has no real, pop cultural connection with that terrible, terrible movie at all.

Outline (Monkey trial)

Okay, here’s my advice for the world of writing: Always make an outline.  It really helps.  I didn’t realize it until late in college, but once you have an outline, you just need to fill out the rest with a few sentences to make paragraphs, and that’s easy.

So here’s my outline for my play (first act so far) on the Scopes Monkey Trial based on the actual facts of the trial:

Four actors and a table.

scene 1: Rappleyea family in dayton waiting for father to get home.  The kids hate Tennessee after moving from New York.  The wife is trying to hold everything together for her family.  The father comes home and they talk about how there isn’t enough money for a carnival to get in some outside people to the town.  He takes out a newspaper and sees the headline for the new Tennessee law, making the teaching of evolution illegal.

scene 2:  Basically just a scene to get the story going: The newly formed ACLU in NYC.  the members are furious as they look at the paper.  they brainstorm a way to fight what they see as an affront to free speech.  They decide to buy a full page add in the Ohio paper, offering to pay for the legal fees and any fines incurred by someone that defied the law.

scene 3: might be the most important scene of the play, setting up the whole premise that the whole thing was orchestrated: the city council is having a meeting, and one of the members is reading the paper with the ACLU ad in it.  They decide that having this high profile trial will bring in the media and much needed money to the town.  Scopes mentions that he’s substituting as biology teacher at the school and says that he thinks the law is stupid and would be happy to try teaching evolution.

Scene 4: quick scene showing William Jennings Bryan entering the prosecution: WJB is reading a newspaper about the arrest of Scopes and decides that this is a good chance to get back in the public spotlight.  He collects his team and heads for Dayton.

Scene 5: The final scene of act 1 introduces Clarence Darrow: Rappleyea goes to NYC to recruit Darrow to lead the defense.  Darrow talks about putting the law on trial in a misdemeanor case.  He first brings about attacking creationism, and the need to bring the media on their side.

End act 1

How to be Naked in the City Without Being Noticed (day 103)

Day 103

    Hmm, Doug has started a new ritual that could be real trouble.  Thursday nights, I play a rough, overly serious tennis game with the girls.  I come home, take a long shower, while Doug watches TV.  When I come out, sans makeup or hairpins, wearing just an old boyfriend’s boxers and a favorite half Tee, he scoots over and pulls a pillow over for me to collapse onto it.  Then, whoever is closest to the remote switches to TMC for the weekly Marx Brothers’ movie.  Usually, he’ll make some popcorn and turn off the lights, it’s actually, unfortunately quite romantic.  I wish I could delude myself into thinking that my brain is shut down and my body is exhausted, but the awful truth is that I look forward to it the rest of the week.

    At some point, early on, I cup my shoulder and murmur a bit, it’s more of an order than a request.  His hands actually spread out to be wider than my whole back, and he can work about a quarter of my back muscles at once.  He is really ambidextrous, but he must also be ambi-fingered too, he can rub each muscle differently at the same time.

    We sit and watch the movie, while he absentmindedly brings me lovely pleasure.  Sometimes leftover wine is involved, but not enough that I get to blame that.  He steals, I give, little feels of side boob, nothing overtly sexual, but certainly not innocent.  All I do is barely lift my arms so he can rub my sides, then I don’t move forward as his hands rise up, there might be just the slightest bit of sinking on my part, but I’m relaxed, and maybe just a little fired up from tennis.  That blood is flowing, my muscles are aching, and I won’t be ashamed of getting or giving a cheap thrill.  The truth is: I’ve had male masseurs rub more than that, but that’s different, and I can’t use it as an excuse.

    The other two times, there was a boring musical interlude, I laid my head down on the pillow and he rubbed my temples.  Then, he’d do my neck, my left shoulder, arm, and hand, which is always the more sore side after tennis.  He could actually grab my tits and twizzle my nipples, and it wouldn’t feel nearly as excruciatingly, intensely intimate as him rubbing my hand.  He was far too slow, far too soft, it reminded me of being back in middle school, when some young punk was working his way up to first base.

    That was my torture the last two weeks.  This time, the Marx Brothers betrayed me with a lack of love songs.  When he greeted me as I came home, I had mentioned that the match was especially brutal.  I chose to wear a long wife beater and my lounging panties (pink, pretty, comfortable, more material than a bikini bottom, a bit indecent without the T-shirt covering it).  Half way through the movie, two wine glasses in, back completely rubbed, he asked me if anything was hurting especially bad.  As nonchalantly as a deer walks in front of a truck, I told him my legs were burning.  He grabbed some sports muscle lotion, and I swung around my legs, putting my calves on his lap, lying back on the couch, my head turned to the TV so I wasn’t looking at him.  He took a pillow and put it in between my legs and his lap.  I laughed, and asked if he was afraid I’d feel “Little Doogie.”

    “Shut up and watch the movie, I’m trying to make you comfortable.”

    I just laid there, quietly smiling and laughing, blaming the Brothers, as he rubbed my calves and my thighs.  He started at my right ankle, working his way up my legs, rubbing all around them.  My ability to pretend that he couldn’t see all the way above my panties from when I slid around was destroyed when he reached my hip, gave my navel a little tickle, and continued to my left hip.  Dammit, I was probably showing him a cameltoe, and he probably had a boner under that pillow.

    He didn’t really rub my feet, just my heels.  I had a fleeting hope that the movie would end with a solid conclusion, but it ended with the same anarchy and confusion that was happening to my stupid willpower.

    “Thanks Doug, thanks miracle hands.  You’re the best.”

    “No problem, Mel, same time next week?”

    “Absolutely.”

    The reason my willpower is “stupid” is that sometimes I wish I could just give up, grab some delight, and get on with my life.  Doug will occasionally rub my shoulders, but our little, old married couple, ritual is what I look forward to the rest of the week.  I can only hope that the same cauldron of desire is boiling over in his mind also.  If it isn’t, then I’m just a lonely girl with a crush.  On the other hand, if he isn’t into me, after he just spent ten minutes rubbing my thighs, he’s gay and I’m repugnant.

    I have to get a new boyfriend, and I have to set Doug up with one of my slutty/desperate friends that stare at his butt when he’s in his jogging shorts.  Perhaps, I can get him and Diane drunk, and hook them up, just for a night.  As for me, I’m sure something will come up, and I won’t have to fantasize about Doug anymore, maybe, someday.  In the mean time, we’ll have our mutual fantasies, and our own hands and toys to go that extra distance that we can’t go together.

    Now, I have a question to ponder.  Phone sex is two people, a thousand miles away, making love with words through a silly phone, and that’s called sex.  So, what if the two people aren’t talking while they do it, but they’re thinking about each other, with just a single wall between them, is that sex?

Words that annoy me more than they should: coed

Why do we need this word anymore?  Why do I still see it occasionally in news articles or plot descriptions?  i.e. “Sally was a young coed who had no idea the political intrigue that awaited her during the summer”

Co-ed is an abbreviation for Co-educational, referring to a female student going to a school with both female and male students, from the 19th century.  ”Girls and boys going to school? Together? What kind of world are we living in?  Why, we must have have a special term for this most egregious exceptional event,” the blogger said sarcastically.

Shouldn’t we have a special word for all the dozens of young ladies that attend female only schools?  Wouldn’t that be a more more uncommon occurrence that necessitates extra adjectives?

So, the next time you see the word ‘coed’ in anything written written after 1950, I want you to find the author, throw the book, article, or internet at him and yell, “You wasted my time with anachronistic descriptions!  And I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Worse Movie I Saw Today: Cannonball Run 2

The movies that I’m writing about simply bad, they are not “so bad that they’re good”, and they are not simply unwatchable.  They are so bad, so poorly conceived, implemented, and presented on every level that they need to be seen.  Movies that epitomize some basic aspect of hubris, laziness, or madness innate in humanity

Which brings me to Cannonball Run 2, a sequel to a mediocre movie which belongs to that strange group of celebrity laden cross country race movies.  The entire sequel is ripe with the stench of contractual obligation.  That is why it is a must see.  What is contractual obligation in such a large and complicated thing as a major motion picture?  It is a cross country race from LA to Conn that never leaves Nevada.  It is Frank  Sinatra being edited into  scene with Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin without actually being on the same set.  And it is ending the race with a nonsense cartoon, clips from earlier in the film, and simply saying that no one won.  It is beautiful, and amazing, and must be seen to believe.

Heroes poem

I’m waiting for the Heroes season premiere to begin in a few minutes, so here’s a quickie poem:

Sometimes you have to pretend

That things could get better

And potential is unlimited,

Just for an hour, before returning to unforgiving reality,

So I’ll appreciate this time as a special bubble in the turbulence,

And create a special snack to enjoy as I relax on my comfy couch.