#uncoffeed...

Some men attacked him, forcing him from his below the bridge home. He wandered aimlessly. He was a  #troll  without a bridge. On a whim, he boarded a train headed north, luxuriating in the plush seats & all the delicious conversations flitting around the train car. - Jonathan Roman @deft_notes Gaping impolitely at a giggling woman with a young man whispering into her ear, the troll heard a voice over his own shoulder. "Ticket, please." The troll flinched, causing bugs and bits of riverbed to shake out of his grizzled hair. The voice came at him again. "I need your ticket, sir." A smallish person came within the troll's view, hand extended. "Sir?" The troll was surprised by his own voice, which sounded like gravel rolling underfoot. He'd heard himself roar, and snarl, but never words. He made shapes with his lips to speak them. "What's my ticket?" The smallish person sniffed, and pushed smallish glasses up a tiny ...

I followed my own advice:  when you don't know what to do, garden. Pulling weeds does something to clarify the bigger picture.  What keeps growing back is native; understand its purpose. Study your soil and weather - and the local wildlife - when choosing to interject a garden into what's already there. You can take risks and plant something you really like, but know that it may not survive the environment even if you dedicate yourself to protecting it. Decide which way you're gonna play this - in my opinion, there are no wrong answers. Sometimes I feel like I'm standing a planet away from what should be my peers. As a rebellious teen cliché, I gravitated toward highly intelligent people who did not hold degrees. They made sense to me, and I seemed to make sense to them. They were happy in their hippie lives, happier than I was in mine. They presented a version of stability to which I could aspire. I get very clear signals from time to time that I did ...

So here's what happened:  I just wanted roti canai . But on my way out of work I saw a car on the parkway, driver door open and person standing outside the car.  It's a dark curve with no shoulder - not a safe place to stop.  I slowed and rolled down my window to see if I could be of assistance; the person said everything was fine, so I kept going. I went to the Asian market to get some frozen roti, and I left my purse in the car, which I never do. I put my wallet in my pocket and congratulated myself for being lighter. I got really excited when I found a sign for Peshwari Naan , and then I got really tetchy when I dug through several rows of frozen bread and found none. You don't falsely claim to have Peshwari naan when there isn't any. That's just rude. So I got the plain roti I'd come for. I went back to the car - my big ugly pink purse was gone.  The passenger window was still open, which is also something I never do. I could see it so clearly: wh...

I've gone around the block and come to an undeniable truth: public opinion matters.  What your friends think about you, your life, your mate, should be noted. What you do with this information is not so cut-and-dried  (that's a farming term, if you didn't  know.)  Plan on continuing the discussion. Public opinion matters because our American society is a complex amalgam , no matter how badly certain people don't want to see it that way.  You can use the metaphor macadam if the other reminds you of uncomfortable dental visits, but I sort of like the idea that there's an element blended into the mix which is unhealthy, like mercury.  Macadam may be more accurate in describing America, as it's a collection of disparate objects which have settled and compressed into one collective substance which is comprised of individuals but becomes another entity in toto.   Y tú también. And that's my point here:  Public opinion of you helps you det...

Today my grandson didn't want to go to school.  He's 4 years old. I was also 4, maybe 5, when I first didn't want to go to school; when I wanted to stay home and keep my life the way it was. I didn't want to hatch out of the egg. My parents, like my daughter probably did with my grandson, cracked that sucker for me and dumped me out. Get dressed, to go work - this is what the rest of your life is going to look like. Start getting used to it now, kid. Half a century later, I am still scarred by the bullying that started in kindergarten.  Back then the  idea that a child might not be emotionally ready to socialise was newly-formed.  The idea that parents needed affordable day-care, though, is old as time.  My mom was fully prepared by her public education to be a top-notch housewife and then she gave birth to imperfect children (we all do, no matter how perfect we want our children to be.) Maybe she should have kept me home another year, and sent me to school w...

I'm wrestling, as always, with art - I have bruises. It's wrong to merely follow a set of instructions; it needs to rise from my gorge on its own volition, force me to vomit it out. These are too many words. But when you birth children, you want at some point for others to find them as wonderful as you do. And you listen carefully to the judg(e)ments made over them. And when they are not separate humans from yourself but things which live only in clay or on paper , you have the option to act on those judgments, or not. You have the opportunity which you don't with human children: you can adjust them, make them closer to perfect. It's tempting, and the struggle begins. A-grades were always easy for me.  I knew the correct answers: I gave truth and it met the parameters set forth by the instructors.  I felt the envy of my peers, and for one split second it felt good before it turned ugly. A part of me wants to recapture that feeling and I start craving, manipulat...