C.B. Potts's Blog, page 9

Just bear with me.

You can't make people do anything, you know. Not your kids, not your parents, not your lover, not your friends, not the politicians you elect, not the people you hire, not random folks living in a town near you. You do not (and I do not) have the power, the ability, the wherewithal, to make people act in the fashion you think best.

But oh, good Lord, the energy we spend trying. We persuade. We educate. We nag and bitch and carry on. We threaten and wave our fists around and smash up all the fu...

Here's a quick one for Tuesday

So I wrote a short story & sent it out this morning. Fingers crossed. I need to do that a lot more; I remember back in the day when I was creating and sending out new work weekly. Somewhere I stopped because I ran out of energy, but what if the energy came from writing the stories? That may be a thing, y'all.

It's Veteran's Day; there is no school. There is work, and there is a kitchen that is a holy mess. I'm actually more tempted by the dishes than the work; procrastination, thy name is Dawn...

Today

Today begins with a certain sense of fragility. We know that we can be broken. But is there anything that lingers as long in our cupboards as the shattered tea cup? Surely someday, we will take up the glue.

I've been reading the Jesuits, in part to better understand the world view they impart to their students, in part to console myself for giving up drinking. And in reading the contemporaries, it strikes me how very self-congratulatory they are. Every article, every bit of punditry, comes wit...

In The Garden

Well, I cut the asparagus. Sad but it was time. Real snow comes tomorrow & it's bad luck to leave it standing.

My gardening practices are guided entirely by the superstitions of old women and hunched back farmers- people who live off what they grow.

Don't touch the garden before Mother's Day, or you'll get a late spring snow.

Peas are planted left to right, never the reverse.

Onions go up and down. Buy sets from blind men when you can; they're the ones that grow the best.

Broccoli, cabbages and br...

Here's a quick one for Tuesday

I have an idea for an honest to God science fiction story, and I am very excited about that. Instead of NaNo, I'm going to devote this month to making this story happen. I already know I can write a lot of words in a hurry. Now I'm going to try to concentrate on making those words really good ones.

Wrote this this morning on Ello - it's about burner identities Not sure if I can link to there yet, so we'll see.

ETA - it doesn't seem to let me link, so here's the text from the Ello piece:

Yesterd...

There Used To Be Marionette Shows

When I was little - in elementary school, in the small gym, where you went down three steps to play on a shiny hardwood floor, where there were blue and gray mats velcroed to the walls, where there was a stage, with curtains that dragged the floor - they used to have marionette shows. These shows were always introduced with a bit about how we were about to see something very special, that marionette shows came from the Old Country, that the art we were seeing was dying out, that soon there wo...

Here's The Tiny Letter I Wrote This Morning

The Earth has split herself open. A slow, thick hot stone river flows; floating black on top, hot fire yellow, molten orange. Jungle trees - lush, leafy, squat - and wet grass goes up in flames at a touch, like last year's Christmas tree.

We watch this on the TV, a world away, waiting to order our coffee at McDonald's. The lava's progress has slowed to an excruciating pace, at least for the homeowners in its path. Inevitability is its own burden.

"Maybe it's stopping," I remark aloud. "All of t...

Today's Observation

A thing I have found is very calming and helps me figure things out is the recitation of facts. Collecting data about whatever issue is troubling, and writing those things down in a list, and then reading that list out loud does something helpful to the brain meats. I'm not sure if it's the repeated contact with the information, or processing it in various ways, or just spending time being calm and as objective as possible about whatever is troubling that does the magic bit, but it does seem...

Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine

The house is completely silent right now. The girls have gone to school; Tim is fresh abed having spent the better part of the night being sick. He'll sleep till noon, when there are things scheduled that must be done - if he feels poorly enough, he just won't do them. Tomorrow is another day.

The geese are flying in big groupings now; two, three, four dozen at a time. The asparagus has gone chartreuse; goldish green throughout, red berries dangling on the fragile fronds. There are dead seedhe...

Go.

An old woman lives surrounded by ghosts; somewhere along the way I lost sight of whether this was meant to imply a surfeit of memory or paranormal activity. I'm not sure if it matters. This morning the TV told me that the Waldorf has been sold, sold to the Chinese. I took a long sip of bad, sweet coffee and said, "And now well, what do we think about that?"

The air filled up with nicotine; I remembered typewriters. Alice, as she was back then, stooped and blind and reading, a gnarled finger tr...