Rusted guardrails and sidewalks lined with poison ivy. 
My Hometown
49 Words (4.9% of a picture)
These are the rules. Write a story.
- Seven sentences of seven words.
- Each sentence begins with the successive word of the first sentence.
And now…..
Broccoli and My Feelings for You: A Breakup Story
“I don’t think I want broccoli tonight.”
“Don’t starting making demands—you’re not deserving.”
Think first, he mused, and then speak.
“I am tired of you saying I’m unworthy–”
“Want to argue this now?” she responded.
“–Broccoli is a metaphor for our relationship.”
Tonight, he thought, this thing finally ends.
FIN
I read the news today, oh shit.
How can you stay active in the world, try and fight the good fight, and still leave the news out of it?
Ya can’t.
But then you seen in the paper that a man went into a burning building 5 times to save people, but only came out 4. Or that the activist daughter of Eric Garner (strangled to death by the NYPD, officers acquitted) has died at age 27, subsequent to complications from an asthma attack.
The murderers of 4 in Troy, NY were found, but the police still can’t bring themselves to say how they were killed, due to the brutality.
I need a break.
The muse, not the news.
I remember the day my clock radio went off, and instead of hearing Brahms, the local NPR (I was in Madison, WI) at the time, had switched to an all-talk format.
I’m going back to music on the box.
New Year
September. Elul.
Children back in school, since before Labor Day, which is some sort of obscene perversion, that we all put up with form some strange reason. The lawn is a riot of different species, while my neighbor spends hundreds if not thousands on the boring monoculture of something as uninteresting as fescue, or bluegrass, or whatever it is they waste drinking water on. Not on my property. Glad there is no property owner’s association.
Hurricanes. Summer starting to die, and the prospect of another long New England winter lies ahead.
President ends DACA, pardons Arpaio, threatens nuclear war, while life proceeds with the torpor of normality. The dog is an excuse to get out of the house for a walk, the cats view the world from the windows, just feet from a bird who must know that eating the pokeweed berries is safe, a screen keeping the cats at bay. NPR on the radio too much, I have to do something about that.
Jewish New Year about to arrive. Even though mostly stripped of the religious trappings, the imprint of the years and the habit of intense self-reflection, with all of its painful realizations, ameliorated by going to spend time with family, my 1,000-mile distant support system.
This is why I’m not a writer
I just haven’t felt like writing. The noise of life is too deafening. The readers, few that they are, have demonstrated more interest in my co-parenting and other personal topics than in politics, which is loud, everywhere, and therefore unavoidable. And I feel I should write about theses things, rather than my own solipsistic mewling.
Things are crazy now. An isolated, paranoid, and vindictive child holds the keys to what he wants to make his kingdom. We watch astounded. Everyone accuses everyone else of lying, and thinks that that makes things equal. I begin to wonder if the US is a failed experiment: If the Constitution can allow this, how can we ever make it right? Anyway, I could go on, but, as I said, you can find worry like this anywhere, and probably better written (The New Yorker has been great).
The sun is actually out, and we haven’t seen it in a while, so I think that I’ll take some sunshine over fretting.
Another problem I’ve been having: I have to decide who I want my audience to be? I guess the big question for every writer who has children is, what will they think when they come across my writing one day, and am I okay with that? I’m in awe of some writers’ abilities to be brave and bold. I’m am neither. I could don’t think that I would have ever–as a child of living parents and children–had the guts to write Philip Roth’s line from Portnoy’s Complaint:
“I fucked my own family’s dinner.”
Good golly, and what great book.
The Meta-Bug 