New Simon's Cat!

I admit it. Like most pet owners, I get a kick out of media that show the true natures of our furry companions. One of my favorites is Simon's Cat. For anyone who has at least one little furball running around their apartment/house, you'll know from the first few seconds how oh so apropos these shorts are.

You can watch the newest one here, but I would also recommend checking out the Simon's Cat channel on YouTube to see all of the shorts. They do not disappoint!

"Salve"

I wrote this as an experimental short story. I guess it reads like a collection of prose poems more than anything else, based on some good feedback I got when I submitted someplace for publication. I plan on rewriting it to be more of short story, but thought I'd share in its earliest form while I deal with reality for a while. Enjoy!

Salve

The Barracks

Yellow. Not piss yellow or canary yellow, but a pallid perversion of a color that would in other surroundings emote tranquility. I swear they put the yellow right in the plaster; the walls don’t serve just as the palate for the paint, but as a sponge, so that no matter how many posters you hang, pictures you hammer, certificates or plaques you fasten, the mocking hue saturates everything around. To complement the decaying glow of the walls is brown: I-haven’t-shit-for-days-brown, layered upon layer, covered with gloss to make it seem more important than it really is: a farce only slightly higher on the color bar than black because it is not completely devoid of color, forgetting that what is presented to the world is representative of that which is repugnant and putrid in life. Every room is the same. Okinawa. Stuttgart. Cape Town. The best time spent here is when you try to fall asleep.

The Ex

    Tangled in orange Egyptian cotton sheets, she said, “What did you expect?” Honor. Loyalty. I expected her to wait in those sheets for me to walk through the bedroom door, not for the gas attendant that fills up my tank every week to come back from washing off her residue and relieving himself of the five beers he’d drunk earlier that day. I didn’t think that was too much. Four years, three continents came together in endless yards of fabric stitched by Asian 6-year-olds that she bought with my Macy’s card. She used to walk out of the room swaying her hips, just to get me hard and sweaty. The furtive smile she would shoot back stabbed a pain in my chest. That day, she threw a grenade instead. At 30, you’d think I’d be smarter than to catch it.

Busy, Busy, Busy

So...it's been a while since my last post. This always happens toward the end of the semester. All sorts of work pours in, and I struggle to keep from drowning in all of the papers that flood my inbox. Even now I'm making notes on research papers for three classes tonight after having finished one class earlier today. And I've got one more class to work on tomorrow.

Anyhow, I'm taking 5 to clear my head a bit. A student in one of my classes asked the other day where he could find more of my writing. I'd given his class 2 of the poems I'd written in grad school as a way to introduce our unit on poetry. It's my dirty little trick to get the students reading and postulating about the poems before revealing their prof is the evil genius behind the pen (as if!).