Category: Daily

Posted on

Day 108: Snow Day in OK

This is one of those posts where I talk to myself.  Their always a chance I’ll end up saying something interesting, but if you have better things to do with your day than take chances on me I’d advise you step off here.

If you’re a regular of 1000 Days you’ll have noticed that I do short things.  I’ll call them things for now since they aren’t really scenes because even those have beginnings, middles, and ends.  I like to think that my things nearly have those, but its not what I am shooting for so they don’t always.  It’s still about the habit and the free-writing.  I like the variety of what I do.  I feel like I accomplish a few core things in the short time I spend with the few words I conjure up, but I don’t plot.

I would like to plot.

I know that one thing comes after another and that sometimes the second grows from the first.  Then there is a third thing and a fourth.  The last thing can wrap it all up or tear it all down.  It’s good when it’s planned and better when it doesn’t look like it was.

The reason I can’t get A to come after B is because I don’t think that way.  I don’t recognize cause and effect on that scale.  I know things like I drop a glass that glass will break, but I don’t know that in bending over to clean up the mess I’ll slip in the scotch, cut myself on a shard, have to go tot he hospital and end up saving the world from nuclear war with the cute nurse I hook up with while getting sutures.  I wait for the next thing to happen I don’t anticipate what that thing will be.

I am thinking I might try my hand at summarizing plots I’ve read.  Maybe if I recite the work of others, I’ll be able to get a feel for it myself.

Word count: pending

Posted on

Day 107: I Wasted Ink on This

I keep wanting to tell my mates I just got laid.  Not just laid but exceptionally laid unexpectedly.

Right now it’s a one night stand, but it’s only the next day.  It’s a one night stand that shouldn’t be–better not be.

My mates sip their pints and so do I.  They don’t know yet that I have changed and I am not sure how to tell them.

The above is badly inspired by "The Holiday".

Word count: 78

Posted on

Day 106: The Mighty Workshop of Shunder

Shunder Bon Thon translates to ‘the mighty workshop of Shunder’.  The main building–which is not what draws first attention–follows the curve of the hillside like a fat dilapidated snake.  Apparently no one new how to excavate or build up and down the slope because it meanders along the contour cantilevered in some places on stilts in others.  Sometimes the lumpy thing even loops out from the hillside altogether to create little grottos or atriums.  From the right angle, one that you can only reach from another hillside a mile to the south, the entire mess grades perfectly level.

Of course it was built in sections over many years, but always with the same local trees and same practical style.  A local could tell you ten maybe twelve sections of construction history.  Travelers are lucky to guess correctly two sections deep.

At night the multicolored windows light with a surprising pattern you wouldn’t expect from an otherwise arrhythmic structure.  But even those panes are susceptible to the vagaries of materials availability. The regular six pane pattern might be four or five deep red and one or two red-orange.  Some sextets will be entirely clear with a single out of place blue or green or lavender pane.  Others alternate two glass, two painted over, and two glass again.  If you want to focus on the main building you must see it at night, because during the day your attention just can’t get past the monstrous hoops circling the building.

Shunder Bon Thon is encircled in a horizontal column of twenty-three copper hoops.

These cyclopean rings rise as high as a wren ever needs to fly and measure maybe a large woodshed wide.  No one knows who made them or how they remain erect.  All of them are partially buried in the hillside, but a few not as much as you’d like.  Number seventeen exposes it’s entire inner surface and worries even the oldest of the locals.  But even their outrageous size draws less attention than the reality that all twenty-three align perfectly along a single axis.  The workshop winds in and out following the hillside, but the hoops never veer from perfect.

Word count: 362