Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 18

The affair of the fedora

The fedora had sat untouched at that jaunty angle for months. Did it miss my head? Was it forlorn and feeling forgotten? Would it ever move again?

All of these thoughts would be rushing through its head, if it only had a head. But fedoras being fedoras, it needed someone else’s head to be complete.

I picked it up and settled it on my head.

Sure enough, it whispered, “You complete me.”

“I hear the voice of a fedora,” I said. “Yes, I have passed through the zippy door into insanity...

J Alfred in the foyer

WB’s note: There’s something odd about the WordPress editor that makes it laborious to add indentations and spaces between words, which in turn makes it hard to reproduce a poem that has uneven indents. So here are pictures of the pages. The main thing you should know is that only one blank line is intended between “gaudy masterpiece” and “page after page.” Thank you and please enjoy.

P.S. This is what I wrote on Page 70 (and 71).

A point of perseverance

This is Day 358 of my “blog every day for 92 days” personal challenge. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, next Saturday I’ll complete a full year of daily blogging for the first time in my decade and a half since discovering how easy it is to have a blog.

Will I quit shortly afterward, like I quit shortly after accomplishing a full 12 months of monthly Myke Phoenix adventures in 2014? Will the urgency fade, like the half-dozen novels I announced and have (so far) left unfinished? Or have ...

What the Menards flier taught me

It’s easy to overlook them as you scan for deals, but Menards — a Wisconsin hardware and home improvement center — puts little quotes of encouragement and inspiration of the bottom of the page in their sales fliers.

“Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” — Denis Waitley

It might be fun to be the person tasked with finding these nuggets every week.

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” ...

Beauty conquers fear

Each life is a gift from a higher power; may we accept this gift with gratitude and recognize the same miracle in others. May our gifts to others add only good and beautiful and love to their lives —

or a smile: May we greet hate and foolishness with humor and grace, because the ugly things in life wither in the face of a smile or a laugh.

I have been greeting alarmist headlines on the TV with an exaggerated “OH MY GAWD,” laughing at the fear mongers. Red may eventually be driven crazy...

Etymology and hitting the fan

My dad did not use “those” words, as a rule, and so it was with some embarrassment that he told the joke.

I had purchased a 45 rpm record at a 10% cut-out sale called “When It Hit the Fan” (because I liked the label, I think – I was a kid) and I didn’t understand the context. So he told me the joke.

A man takes a room on the second floor of a rowdy saloon, and during the night he had an urge for going but didn’t want to walk downstairs through the crowded bar to the outhouse. He saw a ...

All heaven and earth in a book

Today I release the first three paperback editions of the Roger Mifflin Collection: The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley, Men in War by Andreas Latzko, and Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, three forgotten classics that deserve to be remembered.

The Haunted Bookshop is, for lack of a better genre, a mostly-cozy mystery about a book that keeps disappearing and reappearing, a young man who meets a young woman, and the most amazing bookshop owner in modern-ish literature, Roger Mifflin.

...

Waking more than usual

TEN HOURS of sleep in the last 24, including 8.5 hours straight before waking at 5 a.m. Who is this stiff and aching guy plopped in the blue chair waiting for coffee? Wait, I need caffeine? Really?

So: Poisons are cleared from my brain, and what am I thinking? What should I do with a clear brain? “Clear away the clutter in this room!” Come on, that’s what I think normally. So, not much different, just clearer?

… (I write some thoughts to myself about books and audiobooks, and I write a...

Speak

Speak!
You know what you want to say.
You know what needs to be said.
You know what has been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
You don’t know what you want to say,
You don’t know what needs to be said,
You just know it’s been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
It needs to be said,
It wants to be said,
And the world will change
when you say it,
And only then.

Page 70

I’m scribbling on Page 55 of the current journal, and I just took a minute to number the upcoming pages through 70, even though under normal circumstances it may take a week or so before I need Page 70.

I wonder what I’ll be thinking when I get to Page 70? I wonder what I’ll write? Of course, the future person who finds this journal can just turn there now and see, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to page back and see what it was that I wrote when I got there — but for today, it’s th...