Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Microfiction Practice #10: The Follow-Through

by Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt:

  • Genre: suspense/thriller
  • Word: promise
  • Action/Subject: walking upstairs

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

No elevator: naturally. From the bottom of the stairwell, he looked up the six-floor stairwell, sighed. Hand on the railing. His right foot on the first step. His left foot on the second…

Too late, he knew. She’d probably been dead for weeks; such victims seldom lived more than a couple days. Yet he had to check. He’d promised, after all…

At the fifth-floor landing, he briefly lost his nerve. Who knew what he’d find inside? He should’ve called the cops—

There, finally. The doorknob, beneath his hand. Then his last irrational act: placing his face to the peephole.

Backing Away from #everyday

by 1 Comment

[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

  • The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
  • I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
  • …which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

[Read more…]

Microfiction Practice #10: Assignment

by Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

I kinda slacked off on this over the last week; my intention — granted, a vague one — had been to knock out at least three practice microfictions in that time. As things developed, though… (Even if you’ve just retired, even during a pandemic, there’s almost too much possibility with which to occupy your time!) So I’ve just drawn a new assignment out of the random-assignment-generator hat… and a result should appear here sometime between now and tomorrow noon(ish).

in the meantime, as you should definitely seen soon, other things are percolating away…

Assignment:

  • Genre: suspense/thriller
  • Word: promise
  • Action/Subject: walking upstairs

(Yum. The act of walking upstairs almost by definition has suspense built-in; if I muff this one, I’ll be very disappointed!)

Disorder: A Fragmentary Catalogue

by Leave a Comment

[Image: poster for magic act performed by one Harry Kellar (1849-1922) — click for a full view. Later in his life, Kellar mentored Harry Houdini; you can read an admiring account of one of his shows, in a letter from Theodore Roosevelt, at the blog of the TR Center at Dickinson State University. One source I consulted said Kellar also inspired the bald-headed Wizard of Oz in an early edition of the book. (This poster, among others for Kellar’s various illusions, is shown at a number of sites; I found it here.)]

From whiskey river:

Money-Madness

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course, if the multitude is mad
the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;
and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.

We quail, money makes us quail.
It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.

But it is not money we are so terrified of,
it is the collective money-madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold.

And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread
so I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt with it.
I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money.

It is that that I am frightened of.
And that fear can become a delirium.
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-men.

We must have some money
to save us from eating dirt.
And this is all wrong.

Bread should be free,
shelter should be free,
fire should be free
to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it.
It’s one thing or the other.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Many of us are using our spirituality as a way to avoid life, to avoid seeing things we really need to see, to avoid being confronted with our own misunderstandings and illusions. It is very important to know that life itself is often our greatest teacher. Life is full of grace—sometimes it’s wonderful grace, beautiful grace, moments of bliss and happiness and joy, and sometimes it’s fierce grace, like illness, losing a job, losing someone we love, or a divorce. Some people make the greatest leaps in their consciousness when addiction has them on their knees, for example, and they find themselves reaching out for a different way of being. Life itself has a tremendous capacity to show us truth, to wake us up. And yet, many of us avoid this thing called life, even as it is attempting to wake us up.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and:

Loves
(excerpt)

Who isn’t selfish enough
to love zoos? Flamingos, baboons,
iguanas, newts.
Surely evolution has a sense of humor.
Surely the world would be something to love
if it weren’t for us, insatiate,
our history of harm.
How hard even to love oneself,
all those things I’ve done
or dreamed of. Those vengeances.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

[Read more…]

Microfiction Practice #9: The Old Ball and Chain

by 2 Comments

[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt #570:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

Story (87 words, per Microsoft Word):

Lucille could always get my goat. “Don’t do it that way,” she’d say. “Do it this way” — the it, that, and this always changed, of course. Sometimes my wardrobe, or the way I drove, or what I ate. But what never changed: really, she was just yanking my chain. Trying, hell — she did yank my chain. Until the day she stopped, abruptly.

Still, a hell of a woman Lucille. I’ll miss her until I get out of stir, which by my count will be sometime this century.

(Okay, I know: it’s dark comedy. I don’t think that breaks any rules.)

Revisiting the Tiny

by 4 Comments

A simple placeholder announcement for now… You may recall that last month, I entered a “100-word Microfiction Challenge.” (If you have no idea what this refers to, I first posted about it here; the, er, post-mortem post — as of the first round’s completion — is here.) That contest’s organizers will announce the results of the first-round judging process on Wednesday, June 24. The top 20 (of no more than 100) participants in each group* will advance to the second round; this runs from 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 26, to 11:59 the next night.

…all of which is to say: I hope to occasionally post a new practice story here at Running After My Hat over the next three weeks. Sadly, I can’t promise that this will be to your benefit; odds are, after all, you won’t even get to experience vicariously the thrill (such as it is) of my advancing to Round 2. And as you already know from last month’s eight practice samples, the quality of the stories themselves will be uneven. No, these practice sessions are mostly for me: to force me into something like the mindset required to “write short,” on random assignments of no more than 100 words each.

I drew my first one of these practice assignments last night:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

…and so I’ll post a micro-story sometime today.

Thank you for continuing to indulge me!

_____

* For the record, I was in group 66, consisting of 95 participants. (All but eight groups included 95 entrants; those eight had 96.) My group’s assignment was to write a 100-word (or shorter) story in the romance genre, featuring some form of the word forget, and involving the act of roller skating. I’ll post I’ve posted the story in an entry here after the first-round results are announced, regardless of whether or not I’ll be going onto Round 2.

Breakables

by 2 Comments

[Image: This post’s original title was Things Pass Away. Eventually that changed, obviously, but the phrase stuck in my head. Whence, I wondered, did I remember that “things pass away” phrase? A Google search provided ambiguous results: the full phrase appeared to be either “ALL things pass away,” or “OLD things pass away.” So I turned to the Google Ngram viewer, which counts the number of occurrences over time of one or more phrases, across the entire corpus of books scanned into Google Books OCR-searchable form. The results were illuminating — indicating (to me, at least) that the English-speaking world is much more cynical these days than it was prior to, say, 1860 or so: the proportion of references to the impermanence of ALL things has remained more or less unchanged over time, but the importance of singling out OLD things as temporary, well, who cares about them, anyhow? (More thoughts on this in the note below.)]

From whiskey river:

How Angels Sleep. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude…

Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Microcosmos

When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it’s still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.

The glass doesn’t even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they’re many isn’t saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they’re multiplied.

They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are—or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.

Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don’t know what their moment is.
Since they’re so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.

A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.

I’ve wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it’s a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.

(Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

The Outcry

What I want to do is shout. Happiness? No.
Outrage? No. What I want to do is shout
because we were all wrong, because the point
was not the point, because the world, or what
we took for the world, is breaking, breaking. We were wrong
and are not right. Break! Break! We are here!
What I want to do is shout! Break! Shout!

(William Bronk [source, apparently, but unconfirmed])

[Read more…]

The Seer, the Seen, the Not Quite Seen

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Covered Window,” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH). This is one of an Instagram series I’ve done for a while, tagged “#jesstorypix” and cross-posted to SmugMug; each photo, generally post-processed to within an inch of its life, is captioned with a brief micro-story which the photo inspired (if that’s the word). For the story of “Covered Window,” see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (which paraphrases the full passage below, as does nearly every other Internet source; it’s an excerpt from a fictional dialogue between the narrator, C.S. Lewis, and his Victorian “mentor” George MacDonald — Lewis opens, describing an unhappy woman they’re observing while touring Hell):

“…she’s only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling, and one feels that a little kindness, and rest, and change would put her all right.”

“That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler.”

“I should have thought there was no doubt about that!”

“Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman—even the least trace of one—still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.”

“But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?”

“The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye’ll have had experiences… it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”

(C. S. Lewis [source])

…and:

The One Who Is at Home

Each day I long so much to see
The true teacher. And each time
At dusk when I open the cabin
Door and empty the teapot,
I think I know where he is:
West of us in the forest.

Or perhaps I am the one
Who is out in the night,
The forest sand wet under
my feet, moonlight shining
On the sides of the birch trees,
The sea far off gleaming.

And he is the one who is
At home. He sits in my chair
Calmly; he reads and prays
All night.  He loves to feel
His own body around him;
He does not leave the house.

(Francisco Albanez, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

(That’s Believable! [source])

[Read more…]

Never in a Million Years

by Leave a Comment

[Image: excerpt from Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (“Dancing”); you can see the whole thing over on Salon. The caption to panel not only appeared at whiskey river over the last week (see below), but has been widely quoted elsewhere around the Web in the 20 years since Barry’s comic appeared at Salon.]

From whiskey river:

The Mystery of the Hunt

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,
                   That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously—
The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena—
                    Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters
                                      Play in the surf.

                  It is these small things—and the secret behind them
                                    That fill the heart.
                        The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon
                                That link them together
                      And pull their freedom into our senses,

             The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals

         —The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled.
                                 It is these small things

                   That when brought into vision become an inferno.

(Michael McClure [source])

…and (last two stanzas):

Clouds

The clouds moved in another hundred feet
during the night, just as they have done
each night for the past two weeks.
Now they hang barely above the range
of thrown stones. The sun is someone else’s story,
the rich relation of a slight aquaintance.

Bending over us, the clouds have the texture
of faces seen through smoke.
Thoughts in a confused mind look like that.
Tell me again that they are not hostile,
that they have come merely out of curiosity
to see again that we are possible.

If so, then why are doors more difficult to open,
as if some sadness were leaning against them?
Why do windows darken and trees bend
when there is no wind? You call that occasional
roar the roar of a plane and I imagine
a time when I might have believed that.

But now the darkness has been going on
for too long, and I have accustomed myself
to the pleasure of thinking that soon
there will be no reason to hold on in this place
where rocks are like water and it’s so difficult
to find something solid to hold on to.

(Stephen Dobyns [source])

…and:

The groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.

I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

(Lynda Barry [source])

[Read more…]

Life, Oblique

by Leave a Comment

[Image: “Georgetown,” by Kevin Dooley. Found the original at Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).]

From whiskey river:

Road Warriors

My traveling clothes light up the noon.
I’ve been on my way for a long time
                                                            back to the past,
That irreconcilable city.
Everyone wants to join me, it seems, and I let them.
Roadside flowers drive me to distraction,
                                                                    dragonflies
Hover like lapus lazuli, there, just out of reach.

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
                                                        and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering—for most of us—our lives have been a constant mistake.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

(Dan Albergotti [source])

…and:

Things happen to a person; that is, life deals you a set of cards and you play them as you are able. If I do my best I can and make no trouble for my neighbors, then surely I cannot be blamed either for my existence or my government. There are forces that buffet us through life that no mere individual can withstand. Better to stick to my books and musings about literature and leave the government to those who know best. That was certainly what I believed for years, but this evening I had begun to wonder, foolishly perhaps, if it wasn’t that sort of thinking which had helped bring about this current state of affairs.

(Stephen Dobyns [source])

[Read more…]
Verified by MonsterInsights