Category: Daily

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Day 99: Penultimate Days

I’ve just noticed that the 100th day of writing here on 1000 Days will coincide with the my and my wife’s 10th anniversary.  This was not planned or foreseen–not till today anyway.

I’m inclined to derive some meaning from this concurrence.  I began writing at 1000 Days in a fairly random way.  I’ve failed to write a couple days and and scheduled a couple outages.  One hundred days isn’t exactly a easy duration to apply to a calendar to find a finish line from a start date.  All this is to say that I didn’t and probably couldn’t have planned to have done this on purpose.  It must be fate.  The trouble is I am at a loss for what meaning it could provide.

My wife and I don’t both write.  She’s not encouraging me to quit my day job to go pro (nor am I).  She doesn’t even read this site.  That leaves me to side  with my unromantic mathematical friend that this coincidence contains no meaning.  I won’t go so far as to fell it foolish to even think that it should; he can go there on his own.

I should spend the time instead getting a card or drawing a picture or writing a poem.

Word count:  206

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Day 98: Attempting Cartoon Prose

A lumpy line of green–I believe Dark Grass Green–established the distant treeline.  It’s tone necessarily darker than the foreground; it’s definition necessarily less distinct as well.  Next up the Light Grass Green and almost identical shrubs even distributed themselves along the horizon.  The conical shrubs in the distance smaller than those nearer in.  Finish off with a Brilliant Green lawn and a sinuous Grayish Yellow path entering on the left and exiting on the right.  Cue some entertaining music and the players enter.

This effort was so lame I considered not posting it at all.  As it is I delayed it’s release a day taking the time.  But that’s not what I am about here on 1000 Days.  We’ll leave judgement for the editors.

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Day 97: Five More Water Sketches

The home stretch to Day 100 is proving tough indeed. Think of this a regrouping.

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The morning water draws a line from bank to bank. Bare aspens stagger out of the beaver pond and climb up the flooded slope. The edge is crisped with ice.

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The first pellet of rain draws a line from a sagging cloud bruised purple by the punch of a Canadian cold front into the trailing edge of a Midwestern warm thing. The drop never hits the ground. It wallops the windshield of Anna Cortez’s Honda loud enough to startle her from fidgeting with the radio.

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A vinegar water squirt draws a line from the red nozzle of a spray bottle to the fleeing head of an overcurious cat.

“Son of a bitch! I already fed you.”

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The meniscus draws a line on the graduated cylinder indicating that Ian has just added 8 milliliters too much acid to his lab experiment. Again. It’s either dump it out and start over or do the math to figure out how many more moles of sodium hydroxide to measure out.

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The edge of the water crystal draws a line to the next branch then angles to an obtuse 120 degrees. The branch grows in hexaradial symmetry to the next corner and makes a 240 degree turn back to parallel before the author stops trying to use geometry to describe a snowflake.

Word count:  236