Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 65

Day Four

What you ate today

(I'm also including what I drank today because I tend to consume more beverages than food.)

Coffee.

Coffee.

Banana.

Veggie wrap. Chips, pickle.

Cannoli.

Cheesecake. Cinnamon roll.

Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.

Cava. Cava. Cava.

Chardonnay. (There was no more cava, alas.)

Feta (fake) burgers.

Chardonnay.

Herb-infused mozzarella.

Hummus and rice crackers.

Chardonnay. (I am not a lush and it was a weekend.)

Dried apricots.

Coffee.

Day Three

Your Parents

I am so fucking lucky.

I even realized this when I was a teenager when it came to my parents. All I had to do was look around at my friends' parents. (Yes, if you're reading this, I secretly judged your mom and dad. They were found lacking.) One friend's parents were divorced, and his mother was the first person I ever called the C word. God, she was a total fucking bitch, I remember thinking that someone her age should act like an adult. She was a hairdresser, and I'm surprised...

Day Two

Your first love

Becky, don't read this.

My first love was a dog named Major. He was a German Shepherd, and I was five years old. He was quite simply the most beautiful creature to walk the face of the earth. (Yes, he was even more beautiful than Ryan Reynolds.) He was the first dog my family had during my lifetime. We lived in North Carolina at the time. I don't remember how we came to be owned by him, but we also had two cats at the time: Sheba, a seal point Siamese; and George, a white...

Day One

I'll admit, I'm cheating a bit at this. Inspired by 'Nathan's taking on this 30 days exercise and feeling guilty at not writing blog entries more often, I decided to take a stab at this. However, I started writing several days ago so I would have a few under my belt before I began posting them. "Under-promise, over-deliver" has been a motto of mine for a while. Besides, I know how I write: Slowly.



Day 01. Introduce yourself.

I could tell you where I was born and where I've lived, and what my ...

How Jonathan Franzen works

I finally read the Time cover story on Jonathan Franzen. I may be the only person left in the Western world who hasn't read The Corrections (though it's on my list), but the part that stood out for me was a small picture of his spartan desk and a description of his workspace:

"Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he was scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system...

Quotable

"The worst thing to ever happen to me was when my writing device became a shopping mall, television movie theater, magazine stand and mailbox."

Alexander Chee, " New World, Again "

The quote is actually from one of Alex's comments below the story, but I think it sums up my ambivalence about this modern convenience that I'm using right now to share, not my own thoughts, but the thoughts of someone who in this case saved me the trouble of putting those thoughts into my own words.

If this were a...

Looking for a change in the weather

Around about May, I start looking wistfully at the calendar and wondering when fall will get here. Now that it's August in St. Louis, I think about nothing more than how much I'd like to be someplace else.

And blizzards. I think about blizzards.

I've tried to acclimate to the Gateway City. Really, I have. Even though I've been here for nearly nineteen years, however, my roots have never gone deep, and I think a strong breeze could pull me up and send me aloft. It's no coincidence that my first ...

Red sky at morning

I took this last week. No, the city was not on fire. (Wishful thinking, sometimes.) I lightened this a bit and bumped the saturation, but only slightly. It was a very red morning.

New Normal now available

Cover of New Normal

My short story "New Normal" is now available for download from Untreed Reads in ePub, PDF, and eReader formats. Want to read an excerpt before you buy? You can do that too. It's also available from Smashwords in several other formats, including Kindle (of course, you can read a PDF on Kindle, as well). A mere buck fifty! And it's a short story, so you know you have time to read it.

I hope you enjoy it. If you do download it, let me know what you think.

Continue the...

Random thoughts in search of a theme

Ever have one of those weeks where it seems as if every time you sit down, your work ethic/ideas/ability to move your fingers across the keyboard instead of just stare at the screen until a line of drool forms at the corner of your mouth (whew) just up and leaves town. Yeah, like that. Welcome to the week that was for me.

(Has anyone in the Midwest noticed that there seem to be a lot more dragonflies around this summer, or am I just noticing something that's always been there?)

I've probably...