Tag Archives: human interest

Photo

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He stared at it for a long time.

There before him, his likeness stood frozen for all eternity in a pose that indicated a pinnacle moment, but one he could scarcely remember. It was obviously a clear enough moment for the one who posted it and important enough to them to make them raise it of from the deep-sea of all things past and forgotten to shine under the new light of the modern future.

Was that even him, he wondered.

He didn’t feel he looked like that anymore. He probably didn’t think like that anymore and if he did, he hoped his thinking, and his behavior was a bit more refined.

And what was his obligation to this resurgence of the past? Did he need to explain it? Embrace it? Support it? Deny it? Was there a need to defend this person and these actions – whatever they were? Or was the better choice to ignore it as if it had never come up. Was it really so big a deal as even this amount of consideration?

Still here stared.

That younger face was foreign to him. Those settings, that time seemed connected to him, sort of, but by a very, very thin thread, and so distant that it might have been easy to deny that was him and to make a strong case in support of that. A doppelganger perhaps.
He spent a long time looking at the face, the eyes. Where did that boy go?

Was he a better person now? Did he do enough of the right things between that time and now? And when the current version of himself is forced to recall this time, will he be able to look back on this time and think well of the time that passed? Did he progress? Did he grow? Did he take care of his people? Did he learn enough and do enough to be well prepared to leave the world a tiny bit better than he found it?

An open letter to Mark Burnett

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Java typed with determination and focus, as she was prone to do in these situations:

An open letter to Mark Burnett –

Dear mark Burnett:

I don’t know you. Chances are I never will.  I understand you are the reason the show ‘Survivor’ exists. Good for you. I enjoyed watching the first season, but after that, it just got all “same old, same old,” me.

Last night, I had a dream where I was climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, you sat in a giant golden chair with bright light all around you making it appear as if you were glowing in regal splendor. There was a line of people waiting to see you. It was Free Idea Thursday. One day of every week, you allowed the little people of the planet a chance to have an audience with you to share their ideas and thoughts about your programs.

You had all the people whose ideas you like carried away on chariots, while the ones you didn’t found themselves mysteriously flung from the mountain by an invisible force.  Screaming.

As with all dreams, the moment it was my turn and I began to speak, while shielding my eyes from your glory…I woke up.

So, because I believe I was destined for your magical chariot ride, here is my idea.

Scandalous Survivor.

Taste that for a moment before you fling me from the mountain.

You gather up all the people who are currently embroiled in scandal and controversy and let them fight for their survival in the very harshest of conditions. These people seem to be skilled liars, keen manipulators, deeply motivated by self-preservation, self-promotion, ego, cash and power. I’d be shocked if their hubris would allow them to decline.

I can sense your interest. Ponder the wonder of possibility as I share with you some thoughts about the cast.

  • Anthony Weiner – too obvious?
  • Eliot Spitzer
  • Michele Bachmann
  • Bob Filner
  • Dick Cheney
  • David Rivera
  • Laura Richardson
  • Tom Delay
  • Maybe that guy who was leading BP at the time of that giant oil spill just to mix it up

The list is virtually endless.

I’ll leave you now and I’ll let you stew on that one for a bit. I’m sure it won’t take long for you to imagine the possibilities. Your skill at bringing the wondrously dysfunctional to our TV screens will certainly help you mold this nugget of inspiration into ratings gold.

Be well. Eat lots of fruit. Oh, and I do enjoy Shark Tank.

– Java

Loneliness

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She awoke in the morning,
from a night of restless dreams,
where a faceless body screams out – you’re alive!

Then she stares at the mirror,
taking stock of body aches,
rubbing at the circles near her eyes.

And she welcomes the coffee,
something warm to fill her up,
once his hand but now this cup, oh why?

She retrieves the paper,
looking out into the sky,
wishing for another day to say goodbye.

–

When she clears the table,
the reporter on TV,
says another normal day has gone by.

And the light turns to darkness,
she runs her fingers through her hair,
one more hand of solitaire, oh my.

As she steps to the bedroom,
She says a silent solemn prayer,
to any angels who may care – oh please!

Stop this endless cycle.
All my work down here is done.
Take me home to the other part of me.

Four Magazines

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“Four magazines?”

“Yeah”

“How long did you expect to be in there?”

“I never really know.”

“Really? Never?”

“Well…”

“How old are you? How long have you ever been in there? Even in the worst of circumstances?”

“I never really thought of it. There was that one time I was in there all day. It was awful. I wish I had a magazine or two then.”

“How long were you in there just now?”

“I guess about four…maybe five minutes.”

“That’s not enough time to get through one magazine was it?”

“Nah.”

“But you brought four in.”

“Yeah. Look, I’m not sure what the big deal is. It’s really more of a habit than anything else.”

“A habit?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I just find it curious that you have a ‘habit’ of taking dense reading material in when you know you’re only going to be in there a few minutes.”

“Sometimes it’s longer.”

“Yeah. Probably because you’re in there reading four magazines.”

“They have pictures.”

“Does that help in some way?”

“It does if I’m not in the mood to read.”

“So it’s a mood thing?”

“It can be.”

“And these are old magazines. You’ve read these before.”

“Right.”

“So, you take a bunch of magazines in and what you take depends on your mood. You often take in magazines you’ve already read, but that’s OK because they have pictures you can look at when you’re not in the mood to read.”

“That gets it.”

“And this…’helps’ you in some way?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you ever bring magazines other places where you might have to wait?”

“Not really. Doctors usually have magazines. Not good ones. And I don’t like taking my books and magazines places. They might get stuff on them, or I could drop them and they could get jacked up.”

“But you’ll take them in there without a care in the world.”

“It helps pass the time.”

“What time? The five minutes?”

“Are you telling me you never bring anything in?”

“On a rare occasion, I might have brought in a brochure from the mail or something…if I was in a rush.”

“Well, there you go. It’s the same thing.”

“Not hardly.”

“Were you wanting to go in or something?”

“Well, yes. Yes I was.”

“Do you want one of these? I have Popular Mechanics.”

“No. No thank you. I think I can manage this without Popular Mechanics.”

“To each his own.”

“Look, where are you going with those?”

“I’m going to put them back.”

“Where is back?”

“You know…where I got them.”

“You should have them burned.”

Soily

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It was Soily’s job to clean the maces.

Sure, everybody talked about the glorious battles, the bravery, the challenges, the feats of strength and endurance, but few…agh…nobody ever talked about what happens after.

Yes, they tend to long after, politically, such as the great Battle of Aldendire changed the fate of the Grommlins for years to follow, but never right after. Like, they never say, “As soon as the surviving warriors of the great Battle of Aldendire left the grounds, intrepid bands of Whartlings moved in to clean, clear, save, repair and otherwise set back to right that which was altered at the hands of war.”

Soily was one of them. He was maces. He started in bodies – which was just bloody awful – pardon the pun. Then he moved to headgear, which wasn’t much better. One day he hoped to move up to swords, or better still, the ultimate – personal effects.

Maces was a true and fortunate step up the ranks, but it carried with it it’s own set of challenges. Maces were heavy and depending on the construction, spike length and such, they could be just gruesome things to work with.

He traced the grounds carefully placing any mace he could find in his wagon. Then he travelled back to Yartling Bins to unload and begin the process of cleaning and repairing. It wasn’t a bad life. Whartlings weren’t suited for battle, which he considered lucky.  Still and all, he felt good about what he could do on the home front to support the war effort.

Blue

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It was a heavy day. The blue stuck to him like a thick, yet invisible muck. The subtle strains of the week’s exhaustion seemed to come early making the weight of the air and the gravity more prominent. Each deliberate movement seemed slow, and forced, and draining.

There was no one focal point of consternation, rather a collection of a thousand and one annoyances that all vied for his time and demanded his attention. Under the guise of being critical, each item more trivial than the last piled on like a self-generating to-do list created by some dark presence testing his system, working to see what would force the eventual overload.

Comparatively, if you matched his world point for point against those in the throes of a real life and death drama, his troubles were few, his battles simple and his inability to maintain perspective pathetic.

He approached the looming pile of cosmic debris with a half-hearted determination. With his head down, he worked to chip away, to make progress, to sort and sort again, to handle and resolve, but the problems and aggravations multiplied faster than he had the energy to even fully recognize.

The weight of the day was oppressive, resolutions and solutions elusive. His brain generated a multitude of grand and seductive notions about shaking everything loose and then stepping away fast enough to watch it all fall. He’d have a laugh. Where was the value, the payoff for this day-to-day struggle? Is there even a remote chance it will all be better tomorrow?

Despite the overwhelming and obvious evidence that it would most assuredly not be better tomorrow, a small, barely noticeable, and yet quite obvious and determined voice would whisper from the back of his head, cutting through the clatter and noise of his useless imagination, “Keep going.”

Cut

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Tork hated the way his mind worked…sometimes.

The cut on his hand was an accident. Just a stupid accident. But it felt substantial and there was a lot of blood. He was afraid to look too close to better avoid the chance of throwing up. A cut with lots of blood was one thing. A cut with lots of blood while vomiting was a whole other thing. He tried to remember the last time he had a cut like this. Nothing came to mind. This felt really substantial.

He remembers pulling paper towels from the rack and wadding them up to staunch the wound, but the blood was aggressive and soaked through that fairly quickly. He reached for more paper towels and witnessed – almost in slow motion – the last 1, 2, 3, sheets pulling away from the tube and leaving the brown core to spin freely as if it were laughing at him.

Crap!

He stumbled down the hallway to the closet where he kept the extra rolls of paper towels. The door swung wide to reveal an unexpected vacancy where the paper towels usually stood in waiting.

Gah!

Maybe there were more in the basement. Treated like a small storage facility for the things he had too much of at any one moment, he took the stairs down and pushed his way through jars of peanut butter and dishwasher cleaning solutions to where he thought the paper towels must be. The 1, 2, 3, sheets he got from upstairs were taking on a healthy red coloring. There were cookies down here. Hm. He wondered if they had expired yet.

A brand new package of 6 rolls – which had the absorbency of 8 – stood before him. He grabbed the package and tried to puncture the plastic housing with one hand. Again, as if in slow motion, the 6 rolls with the absorbency of 8 all flew away from him. He noticed the room getting warm, or he was getting warm. Yes, he was sweating now and he watched the rolls rain to the ground and spill away from him.

He dropped to the ground and grabbed at the closest roll, spinning it in his hand looking for the starter sheet. It seemed impossible. How did they secure that first sheet he wondered. Then he wondered if it might not be better to insert a small tab on the first sheet to make it easier to access. It was certainly something worth contacting the company about. It was like a public service, making the sheets easier to access in emergencies such as spilled chocolate milk or blood…Right! The blood!

He tossed away the now dripping 1, 2, 3, sheets from upstairs away revealing the cut for longer than he had hoped. Ugh! A feeling gurgled in his stomach.

Unable to find the elusive first sheet, he crammed the whole roll onto the cut. He applied as much pressure as he could to stop the bleeding and rolled onto his back.

That felt good.

A nap might be nice now.

He lay there for a moment, holding his hand to the roll for dear life as the room swirled around him. He sensed this was a good plan. He made a mental note that the gutter on the left side of the house might be clogged. He needed to check that. Also, these paper towels felt nice. He should write a letter to tell the company telling them how pleasant they were. Oh, and why did he have so much peanut butter?

SOC 412

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All right…class…everybody? I’d like to get started.

Thank you.

Good morning and welcome. My name is Dr. Dane Cooper. Please check your schedules to make sure you are in the right place. This is Advanced Senior Sociology 412 or as I’ve seen it labelled on the Internet, “Extreme Soc.” If you do not have that on your schedule, you are in the wrong place. You will also be one of the first lessons for the rest of the class. We won’t be laughing at you. We will be laughing with you.

And that is the first lie I will be sharing with you. We will be laughing at you.

Because we will be spending a lot of time together, and I define a lot of time using scientific terms like, “probably more than you could ever be humanly comfortable with,” you may be inclined to begin addressing me in ways that represent a deeper familiarity. Coop, Cooper, Doc, Dane, D.C., D.D.C and so on. That would be a mistake on your part. We will not be as familiar as you feel. Dr. Cooper is the best way to address me and anything else provides me with the unique opportunity to adjust your grade in ways undesirable to you. If you feel that is unfair or makes me an “ass,” you should probably leave now. And that will provide the class with the second lesson of the day.

In addition to spending enormous amounts of time together, you will likely get dirty. Not so much in the physical sense, however that does occur during some of our offsite lessons, but no, I’m talking about your conscience. In order to study human behavior we often need to create circumstances that will generate actual, measurable human behavior. This sometimes crosses with some people’s definition of ethics. I assure you everything we do will be done with the highest respect to ethics and the high moral standard on which this school hangs its hat. We will however dance on that line like the cast of Riverdance performing a sold out show for the Queen and an international television audience while the signal is being beamed out to space for other universes to behold.

If that makes you uncomfortable, the door is there to your right. Please provide us with lesson three for the day.

No one?

Very good. I will now collect your waivers and we shall begin.

Standoff

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“My name is Denali Bins,” He shouted. “I am a baker from Chesterfield!”

Officer Clay Ashton held his stance, arms out and service revolver trained on the target. “Put the gun down Mr. Bins and we can work this all out.”

“We tried that. I didn’t do this! I don’t do things like this!”

“And yet here we are, Mr. Bins. You are holding a gun, you are covered with blood and you’re standing over a dead body.”

“I make bread!”

“Mr. Bins…”

“I make hard rolls…and donuts!”

“And I’ll bet they are delicious, but right now we have to take care of this problem.”

Bins quickly swung the gun back and forth between the two figures stepping up behind Ashton. If it was even possible his eyes grew wider and darted between the now three officers. “Keep them back!”

“They’re just here to make sure nobody else gets hurt.”

“I tell you I didn’t do this!”

“Put the gun down Mr. Bins and we’ll figure it all out.”

“You said that yesterday at the station! We’ll figure it all out! That’s what you said!”

“And yet, you took off.”

“You said there was video! That’s a lie! I make cream puffs and scones!”

A crackle in Ashton’s earpiece preceded the order. The time for chatting was over. The order was given. Put him down.

 

Pre-Internet

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“Look,” Brin said to the sulking Lara. “You kids are lucky. You just don’t realize it. I met your father ‘pre-Internet.’ Do you know what that means?”

Lara pulled the Seventeen magazine on the table to her and began flipping through the pages aggressively. It was a half-baked attempt to show she wasn’t listening, but Brin knew that if she really wasn’t listening, she would have left by now.

“Yes, pre-Internet. Clearly, when I met the man who was to become your father, I didn’t have access to all the information that you people have today. After I met him, I had to talk to him – in person – to get to know him and he was the only source of information I had. You can’t imagine that, because it’s not the world you grew up in.

Sure, he had friends, but they only told me what a ‘great guy he was.’

Had I been able to look him up on Facebook or pull together some kind of Google search, you know…I might have made some different decisions.”

“Ugh…Mom, are you serious?”

“Look, I love your father. I’m just saying pre-Internet people had a huge learning curve to overcome. There was no ‘wikipedia’ to tell me all about what kind of person he was, no electronic photo albums, no friends lists, no texts, no Skype, no unlimited minute phone calls, no Twitter to let me know where he was, what he was doing, what he thought about things…none of it. So all I can say is we did the best we could with the information we had.

You know, come to think of it, maybe I found out he got on the dean’s list once…maybe not, I’m not sure. I’ve blocked so much.

Anyhow, the point is, people today, once you meet each other, and sometimes you don’t even actually meet, you have access to a world of information in minutes that can help you figure out what you might like or not like before you get too invested.”

“You think Daddy feels the same way?”

“Look, pre-Internet or not, your father is very lucky the way things worked out for him. You should have seen him when I found him.”

Lara slid the magazine back across the table. Her phone uttered a short beep causing her to look down immediately. “It’s Phil.”

“You see? How long did that take? Eleven minutes? Don’t even get me started on how long it took to ‘resolve issues’ before the Internet. You kids don’t even know what a fight is anymore. What does he say?”

“He wants to meet…to talk.”

“Uh huh. Let me give you one more piece of advice. One thing we did learn pre-Internet is that when it came time to work things out, we were already pretty good at actual real live talking. Do yourself a favor. If you really want to work on things, put the phone down. Stop texting and go talk to him.

Then…you can text me and to let me know how things go!”

Forgiveness

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He stood there on the doorstep, soaking wet as if he conjured the storm just to appear more pathetic when she opened the door.

She stood in the crack she created by pulling the door open just enough to cover the distance of her shoulders, a gesture to signal an intent to listen, but not an invitation.

He stood in silence. He had a lot to say. Most of it he already said and his intent was to say it again and if there was a way to say it with greater meaning, with a greater sense of promise, he would do it. Still, when the door opened, the practiced words seemed to evaporate.

She looked at him with cautious and hesitant eyes. She bit ever so softly on the inside of her lip. It became a habit over the years that she apparently developed when she was deep in concentration or trying to figure things out. She first noticed it when frosting a cake some time ago.

“I…,” he started.

“Don’t,” she said. “I know.”

He forced his hands deeper into his pockets. “I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t sure how this all landed on her, but the ball, as they say, was clearly in her court. He did some really stupid things. Even now, there was a part of her who wanted to punch him in the face, and she wasn’t taking that off the table, but it was decision time. She was culpable in this too.

She stood in the doorway filling the space between the jam and the door thinking, considering, hoping, debating, cursing, resisting, deciding, redeciding and redeciding again. She took in a very deep breath and looked around him blinking away a tear before slowly opening the door to create an invitation.

As he moved to step inside and out of the rain, he stopped, turned to her and pulled her close.

She hugged him back. Even soaking wet, the greater apology came through.

Maybe she would punch him later.

Return

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He flipped through the stacks. Each one sparked a glimmer of memory through sight and sound.

It had been years since the fire. Years since he touched vinyl. Years now since things seemed to go…sour.

It seemed trivial on the surface. Others might think it irrational to tie fate so closely to something possessed. Yet, while these material items were not his originals, there was still a kinship.

Oh…this one got him through his break up with Mary Ellen Newburgh, and this one was pretty much the root soundtrack to the summer after he graduated college. A consistent presence in a time of change and turmoil.

They were all his friends.

His mind raced to find a way to claim them all, but it was impossible. It just helped to know that they were here.

Then he found it, or it found him. The one he needed. He looked up as a tear welled in the corner of his eye. An embarrassed warmth hit his cheeks as he tired quickly to blink it away. He snapped it up and held it close to his chest as if he had just found a lump of gold. He would have it back now. It was the very first step that felt like the right step in a good long time.

Plan B

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Bits stopped listening the instant Jelly uttered the words, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” And the whole time Jelly extolled the benefits of his ‘Plan B,’ Bits wondered about the phrase.

Where did it come from? What could possibly require one to know how to skin a cat, say nothing about why they would need more than one way? How many ways were there? Did someone at some point change the problem from skinning the cat at the onset to actually working through a number of potential ways to determine which one worked best?

She imagined a small research team charting and plotting the goal of getting a cat skinned only to realize once they finished that there might be many more efficient ways to accomplish the task.

“We are going to need a lot more cats,” she heard one say in the back of her mind.

She was also convinced that Jelly’s ‘Plan B’ was doomed to fail. Just casually throwing out the cat skinning analogy without knowing spit about actual cat skinning implied to her that he really had no idea what he was talking about.

Muffin

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Muffin romped over the top of the hill down into Farrington Glenn.

Gimple’s sigh and following scowl drew Custer’s attention. “What worries you so,” he asked.

“She’s slight and reckless,” Gimple answered.

“She’s smarter than you give her credit for,” said Custer. “And she’s only doing what we all agreed needed to be done.”

Gimple tightened his grip on the wooden lever, the trigger of the trap. He watched as Muffin tumbled down the hill giggling. Nearly blissful, he thought. She should be more aware. The pangs of guilt made his stomach roll. “She doesn’t really realize, does she?”

Custer grabbed his shoulder with a comforting squeeze. “She knows.”

Gimple looked at Custer with a quick side glance, “She’s bait.”

Custer squinted out over the hill top letting a heavy breath ease its way from his chest. Another of Muffin’s giggles floated back to him. “She knows.”

Precocious

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At the age of seven and a half, Criss’s grandmother dubbed her as ‘precocious.’ Since then, it’s been a private goal of hers to live up to that.

She could not remember much about her grandmother or many of the things she might have said to her for as their visits to her stately home in Crendinmore were many, their direct interactions were few.

Their visits were routine. There would be hugs and hearty greetings at the door, then the adults would either step away to the sitting room or gather around a large table in the kitchen to talk. In the mornings they would sip coffee and nibble at coffeecakes. Visits later in the day involved simple drinks of alcohol and the sharing of a modest, yet adequate platter of cheese and crackers.

The children were to play. They were given all the freedom they could handle, but the expectation was that they would play, and play nicely, without raising a ruckus so as to disturb the adults. So they played simply, or flipped through old books and magazines to keep the noise to a minimum and the prospect of getting in trouble at bay.