Tag: link

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Lady on a Jug

http://ffffound.com/image/787ab062e373c88327e2de3becde20fb0ec075d6

John sets an overfull Hammermill paper box on the worn rug of the upstairs room he and Katie decided would be their attic.  The several LPs on top sluice to the side and spill, ramp-like, under Katie’s grandmother’s rocking chair.

“Ah, shit.”  John spots Cream’s Wheels of Fire album in the spread and wonders where the turntable got unloaded.  “Katie!  Do you know where the record player is?” he absently aims his yelling out the door and down the stairs.  Ahead of him he hears a noise he doesn’t recognize as a sob.

“Ah, shit.  What the hell Katie?”

John’s wife perches on a stout earthernware vase which sits on a lace doily which is draped over an antique coffee table—also her Grandmother’s.  She’s cast aside her slip-on tennis shoes and is wearing someone else’s white high heel shoes.  The flat front soles she balanced across most of the vase’s rim.  She managed to get the pegs perfectly on the other side of the rim.  She’s squatting with her hands behind her back and her long comfortably brown hair drapes her face.  He is impressed, confounded, and curious simultaneously.  He’s too afraid to go nearer.

“I can’t get down,” Katie sobs.

John’s arms surround his wife; he doesn’t recall closing the distance between them to get to her.  He lifts her into his arms.  Katie scuffs off the high heels and plants her feet firmly on the ground but continues to cling to him.  There’s nothing to say so he keeps quiet.

“I just…it made sense…at the time.”

Got no more time today for this one.  I’ll try to come back some day soon.

Day 357

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I Know a New Word

I like words OK, but I really love vocabulary. Having a precise word for a grand feeling, a quaint situation, or a complex thing excites me. I don’t need to be able to use it in everyday conversation or even ever use it as long as I know I’ve safely pinned it to a corkboard and splayed it’s wings a bit.

My favorite (internal) exclamation is “They’ve got a word for that?!”

Yesterday I came across a word I’d been collecting in picture and anecdotal form for some time. Though capturing the vapor is nice, distilling the essence is much much better. There had to be an arrangement of letters into a word for what I collected, but where do you turn a definition into the term–the dictionary just doesn’t work that way. So the great thing about stumbling onto the textual form was my complete ignorance in getting there. Sure, you’re in a magic castle and you unlock a strange chest you’re going to be amazed but not truly surprised. But if you’re cleaning out the front coat closet looking for an old pair of gloves and you dump over a shoebox full of rookie baseball cards you’re going to be shit-your-pants overjoyed. I typed this word as part of a larger string of words into a search box looking for references to a bit of art I’d found. I got pages of hits with this one word highlighted–wait what?–I clicked the best of the bunch and serendipity escorted me right to the definition.

I’m certain I read none of the page, but still knew what it said.

image

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In Which I Use the Word Chonmage

streetfighterI’m digging through some of my Internet finds I’ve tagged as ‘inspirational’.  Let’s see if I can do the creative thing.  I’ve subjected all of us to to much blather this past week.

I’m going to riff off this illustration I found back in July or so I guess.  I’ve reduced the picture from original size and provided links per my normal habit.  Appending the actual illustration to this post rather than just a link is new for me since maybe the first 50 posts when I decided not to.  I worried that doing so distracted me from my writing, I didn’t want to unduly influence a reader’s judgment of my writing, and I worried about infringing on copyrights.

Since my readers and I will work out the first two issues together I should make a note to Bobby Chui of Imaginism Studios, the artist (and any artist I may display or link to), that I’ve shrunk the image as much as I thought reasonable to cover (my interpretation of) fair use and provided credit links in as many places as seem reasonable.  If I need to pull or shrink, just shoot me a note.  I’ll get a man on it.

Oh, and Streetfighter as a game or reference or whatever means nothing to me.  Long time readers will recall when I wrote something inspired by an artist’s pin-up of some other game character and I didn’t realize till later.

“You don’t know what you like; you know when you like it,” Tarô said as he pulled a stretchy-cuffed black leather hoodie from a hanger.

“That Confucius?” Boot asked.

“Don’t be petulant Boot.  My Mom says that,” Tarô answered.  The 140 kilo seventeen year old shuffled into a jacket the size some would spread across a bed and snapped it up.

“Small?”

“No.  Just right.”

“Hood’ll fukup your chonmage.”

“I’m not gonna pull the hood on.  And you’re in a shit mood today Boot.  Why’d you come with me in first place.”

Boot shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fukif.”  Saliva spattered from his left tusk then strung to the floor before he wiped it away with the back of his claw.  He scuffed the drool that made it to the floor into the carpet with the sole of his docksiders.  Tarô rolled his eyes.  Boot shrugged his shoulders again.

“Shit happens,” Draper says to his two short friends.

“God shit Draper!” Boot jumped to the side and cracked his head on the clothing rack. “Quit fukin sneakin up on us.  Bad enough I have to stare at your junk all day.”  He rubbed the knot forming on his green-skinned skull.

Draper mirrored Boot’s movement across his own head more out of habit than empathy, but still a little of the later.  His ‘fro-stripes always itched on real humid days–Houston’s air was a muggy wall out there today.  “Two and a half meters and a hundred kilos means all I can do is sneak up.”

Day 237