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“Top Of The World, Ma,” Cagney in “White Heat.”
I’ve had little time to post a blog until now. Why? Down to a Sunless Sea has won an Indie Excellence FINALIST Book Award. It it also placed as a semi-finalist for the Reader Views Literary Awards. So, I composed a pr letter and forwarded the news to reviewers, bloggers and friends. This Monday morning I was notified by Wheatmark, Inc, a print on demand publisher which I highly recommend — email me if you want more information, that I was a finalist in the “popular fiction” category of the 2008 Arizona Book Awards, sponsored by the Arizona Book Association. The publishers are…
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Land And Marbles
It was an aimless game with a competitive edge to it, much like the incessant, monotonous drive of Monopoly played for long Saturday afternoons. It whiled away the time and required some finesse with a pocketknife; we all carried them in the 50s, as much a symbol of maturity as of masculinity, symbolic of our emulation of our fathers and as Freudian as one could get. I recall how i stretched my young finger down the spine of the blade, after countless attempts at discovering methods that would control the flight and drive the feral blade deep into the earth.…
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A Drop More, Please
On the one hand, if we are somewhat aware, up and running, the corner cut man having restored some life in us, we struggle to put off being conditioned. While we struggle, as we haltingly catch our breath, we walk into some awareness, some sense of self that happily creates doubt and dissonance in us so that we can clearly see our way. Before we can get started, we often die. Timing is beyond our control. So much of our lives are contingencies that we cannot lift ourselves into flight. What I like about Sisyphus is his realization that the gods,…
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A Long Draft of Lemmonade
To be free to agonize is better to me than not to be free, enjoying all the conditional glut a market economy can afford. Flick on the tube, stand 20 paces away, fine tune your mind and what do you behold: pollution. I was in Target the other night browsing for a sunshade to ward off the Tucson sun and I passed several 10 or 11-year-olds, no older, holding pistol-like grips in their hands, playing games on a console that had several screens. I made a judgment quickly which is my way and I recalled how playing marbles held me…