Author: headhermit

I’m part of a local writers group and each week we write spontaneously for about 15 minutes on a prompt supplied by our fearless leader, Dave.  Here’s what I had to say about this picture one Saturday afternoon:

Cliffhangers are so charismatic, with their easy strength and near dominion over gravity and friction.  I’ve watched them since I was a child, their fingers clinging to the rock face and their bodies continually unfurling as each new hand hold allows them to lower themselves down, always having the appearance of free fall held in place by their own grace and precision.  No wonder the whole village looks on the cliffhangers as our special ones.

Today my brother will climb and try a descent.  I will watch and hope that he will find himself in the focus of a cliffhanger’s movement.  He will carry more than his own weight as he hangs in the air–the grief which has recently found him makes him heavier, slower in every way as its leaden sorrow pulls on every joint, every thought, every breath.  Some deep interior wisdom told him to take this weight to the cliff, to hang it in the wind, to feel the extent and the limits of it.  If he can make his way down safely, he will be welcomed into the small elite group who have learned to carry desolation within their bodies.  He will be my brother, the survivor, the brave, and a shaman for our people.  I know he will make it down.

I’m part of a local writers group and each week we write spontaneously for about 15 minutes on a prompt supplied by our fearless leader, Dave.  Here’s what I had to say about this picture one Saturday afternoon:

A massive mountain range rises in the background, jagged but indistinct.  You’d assume it had always been there.  It has the illusion of inevitability, of existing outside of process, or twists of fate, as if it weren’t every bit the results of how things happened to go.  Break out any tiny piece, any single moment of interaction between one rock, one surface, and it shows up: that it could’ve gone another way.  The wind could’ve cleared the track left behind a moving stone or the sun might’ve baked it well enough to form a channel that grew deeper with each light rain.  The path from plateau to cliff seems grand to us, whose sensory apparatus recoils away from anything of such timescale or immensity.  The single rock, the single track of friction, we can see, touch, conceptualize this and understand that these things could impact on another, could make changes we can conceptualize.  We just can’t really scale that understanding to anything much larger than our own moments.  This is a reminder to me that I write one letter, one word, at a time and this is not a failing, it is a design limitation and one that can offer focus and delicacy and detail if I let it.  Small, clear, moments pulled from the morass of my hulking backlog of experience are my assignment for now.

I’m part of a local writers group and each week we write spontaneously for about 15 minutes on a prompt supplied by our fearless leader, Dave.  Here’s what I had to say about this picture one Saturday afternoon:

Please.  I saw some warnings posted about pink flamingos and just laughed.  You know what that reporter must not have heard about?  The passive aggressive squirrels who are decimating my neighborhood.  It’s violent, it’s dangerous, it’s fuzzy.  How is this not the lead story?  There is this one squirrel who has acquired the name Bitter Alan.  He wanders around giving every resident the side-eye of judgement.  This direct indictment from the natural world has caused some ugly outbursts—people running uselessly after Bitter Alan, full of defensive excuses for whatever they assume he’s found wanting.  This nearly always ends up with the person running full tilt into massive tree trunk when Alan goes vertical.  Many residents have been bloodied in this way.  I would like to challenge any T Rex out there to come try to live out its days when there are roaming packs of rodents who will scatter across a lawn, exchange looks of disgust with one another, and roll their little eyes in unison as if to say, “That T. Rex has really let itself go.  How embarrassing.” Those stupid squirrels never come right out and say anything, though.  At least the flamingos are straightforward.  They will destroy you from the outside.  Any idiot can see them coming in their fluorescent predatory glory—what we need is news coverage on is the scourge of passive aggressive squirrels.  I think I’ll start a blog.

I’m part of a local writers group and each week we write spontaneously for about 15 minutes on a prompt supplied by our fearless leader, Dave.  Here’s what I had to say about this picture one Saturday afternoon:

Families.  Is there anything so interesting or confusing?  I met my husband, a tawny, stocky pitbull, when we were both at a dog training class at some random PetCo.  It’s the one in town that smells like cat food instead of dogfood—you ‘ll know the one I mean.  Ridiculous priorities of management there.  Anyway, he’d been brought by a man who was called Paul for a long time, but he goes by Honey now.  I was brought by Lucy.  I know perfectly well that her name is Lucy, but Honey calls her Deario.  As I say, families get confusing.  Just for the record, my name is Lulubell and I roll with Duke.  One day Paul, or Honey, or whatever his name is, brought home a little creature named Jesse and I’m not exactly sure how she fits in, but she is family, too, now.  I don’t know how that happens, exactly.  One minute you’re strangers and then you’re related.  That’s kind of the story of how Duke and I met, too.  We met in the parking lot, headed into the same class.  He was obviously here to help curb his impulse to pull and jump and generally be a nut.  I was there because Lucy told me I needed to get to know some more dogs, like I was too shy or something.  Not true, by the way, but most dogs are just not that interesting.  This guy, though?  I don’t know…have you ever seen someone and known that your life would be divided between before today and after today?  I just got that Duke was desperate to connect because his heart was too big to fit inside him.  If that’s not husband material, I don’t know what is.  So, we just insisted on being by each other, all class, every class, until Paul and Lucy scheduled playdates outside of class and then just moved in together.  I think they could tell that Duke and I were a match, so that was nice of them.