In trying to find my so called Zentangle "style," I came across a paradigm that I find comfortable and fun. It helps motivate me to do more and I enjoy the results much more than my other Zentangle endeavors. So I gave it a name. A Tangleburst - a burst of tangles coming from one central large element. Hopefully some of you will want to see and know more. Enjoy:
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He saved my life.
Then he sent flowers.
Called.
Wrote.
Visited my hospital room.
But I can't talk to him.
I said he triggered horrific flashbacks.
I might have lied.
For my fiancé?
This is it. My first Diva challenge. Ebony and Ivory, wherein I attempt to blur the line between writing with a black pen on white paper and a white pen on black paper. Successful or not, here it is....
My entry for Mindful Creations Adventures in Monotangles 9
. I seem to have an easier time with white on black.So named because you never draw a curved line and yet look at these curves! For Mindful Creations Adventures In Monotangles 2 I went out of the box and thus was a little late in entering.
We take a break from your regularly scheduled programming to switch from writing to drawing. Today, Mindful Creations Adventures In Monotangles 5: W2 (as the title says.
Liam wasn't surprised to see his father sitting a few rows away. The judge called his case, robbery this time, muttering faintly audibly "the goddamn apple doesn't fall far from the tree, eh?"
A spray of pine needles found umbrage on the breeze. They'd left the mother tree with no quiescence. A swing of blankness ripping wild off the bark. Gone in flapping panic. Quietly hidden.
The world goes 'round and I am its toy. Like a cat with a bell, it bats me across the room, spins me around on my ass, drops me from great heights, and then tucks me under its smelly armpit while it takes a nap.
I don't believe in destiny or fate or that there really is any sort of grand purpose to life. And yet the more forcefully I don't believe, the more life pushes back, sending cryptic messages floating endlessly in my bathroom sink until one day I notice the corked bottle and pull it from the sudsy warm water.
The rolled up note inside says it all. Intention clear as a bright winter noon. Causality unshrouded. Purpose gloriously revealed. Except the note is written in ancient Sumarian and I cannot read it. I know, somehow, that I am holding the keys to the kingdom in my hand, but they are slippery with soap and my fingers fail to grasp them. Down the drain they slide and with them my chance for enlightenment.
I say "my chance" as if there is but one. With questions so large, surely there are more chances. Because I know the answers. Somehow. Somewhere deep in my thick skull I know there is more. Perhaps I simply choose not to try. Perhaps I am scared. Or tired. Or too damaged.
Eventually the cat hits the bell hard enough and it no longer rings. The world has no use for a bell that cannot chime.
During my long career drafting briefs which were destined to be hacked up in committee, I discovered this unflagging rule: the less time spent on the first draft, the more people like it.
This week's 100 Word Song Challenge is ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man." As my second try at this challenge, I feel I have found a better groove with this one. More of an inspired by, and less a reworking of the words, as I (probably mistakenly) did with my prior entry. Here we go....
"Mama, want to wear your sunglasses!"
Little does my three year old know that his Mama has absolutely outrageous taste in sunglasses. From giant white square frames to bedazzled bug-eyes to priceless retro specs with chains instead of arms that hang from the ears like earrings. And little does he care. If it is good enough for Mama, it is surely good enough for him.
He looks absolutely ridiculous in each pair. Still, I take a photo of him every time, and keep an album of his Elton John looks. A once in a lifetime opportunity. To feel loved unconditionally.
True story....
The doctor droned, "The skin has deteriorated. We will have to use cadaverous skin."
"My knee will have zombie skin?"
"No! The skin is cleansed."
"So my knee will just snack on brains?"
Pain doc prescribed some new stuff for my nerve pain last month. Something called "compound cream" which contains various percentages of different pain-type drugs. You can't get this stuff at your local CVS! They send the prescription directly to a special pharmacy and it comes a few days later in the mail. Good thing too, because that is quicker than the husband going to the local store.
So I am researching the various components on Wikipedia and have learned quite a bit, not only about the drugs, but about my condition.
Neuropathic pain can be very difficult to treat with only some 40-60% of patients achieving partial relief. ... Determining the best treatment for individual patients remains challenging. Attempts to translate scientific studies into best practices are limited by factors such as differences in reference populations and a lack of head-to-head studies.(References omitted.)
Well isn't that special. I wish for more surgery every fucking day, yet am slow to find someone who can do it. The first guy, well, second guy who worked on it reduced a huge amount of the problem. I want him back so badly, but it doesn't seem in the cards. In fact, it seems quite impossible. Damn.
I asked for faith, and my newly discovered soul was bound in chains.
I asked for hope, and my prized objectivity was clouded by possibility.
I asked for love, and I got you.
Today, I woke up in a box. A small box in which I fit nicely and not at all. My fingers wiggle and my toes curl. The movement of my breath reaches the edges, my lungs expanding as they fill with air.
I cannot see the box, for all is black. I am black, it is black, we blend as one. But we are not one. It traps me. It supresses the very essence of my being. I am nothing in this impossibly small box in which I cannot move.
You put me in here, I think. Your daily nitpicking, your unkindnesses, your infidelities. They have piled upon me until I cannot move beneath them. The weight of their lid supported by cruelness and beautifully complex Cabernet.
I can smell it. A single ray of hope, out of place in this void. A bouquet of cherries and chocolate and leather and just a tinge of apropos dark grey pencil lead. Is it here with me? In the box? Do you taunt me as well with my favorite smell? Maybe it is taste. My senses are blending to one here in the dark stillness of the box in which I woke.
Speech fails me. My ears hear naught, and my mouth remains still. There is nothing but the box, filled with the appearance of death and the smell of joyous life. Is there no way out?
No light.
No sound.
No movement.
No sense.
No life.
No pain.
No love.
Nothing.
Y pues nada.
Harry taunted Torty every afternoon. "What a slowpoke you are, my friend. Pick up the pace already."
Torty was fed up. "Fine, you want to race, you scatterbrained fuck?"
"Let's do it then."
On the count of three....
A new writing challenge to avoid having to think for myself: The 100 Word Song. This week, Chasing Cars. Amazingly, a current song I not only know, but sing at karaoke sometimes. It is supposed to be a story inspjred by the lyrics of a song. I meshed everything up because it just worked that way. Here we go....
Before you were my best friend
And before you were my confidante,
I was so in love with you.
But friendship was all we had.
I told you once.
How I felt.
You let me down most gently.
Years have past,
We are oh so close.
Don't think I don't sometimes wonder.
If I just lay here, would you lie with with me and just forget the world?
Forget the decisions we've made, the decades of others, the times we've missed.
Forget what we're told, we're already too old.
All that I want is to be perfect in your eyes.
What would you do if you had only three days? If the world was ending and you knew they were the last three days of everything you knew? Would you party like it was, well, like it was the end of the world? Make love non-stop to you husband? Toss your marriage and fuck a bunch of strangers? Read the bible? Pray for salvation? Think you could do anything to change what you have been told is inevitable? Three days and infinite choices.
But what would you do if you didn't know the world would end in three days? Wake up to your usual alarm, kiss your girlfriend as you both ran out the door, work a 12 hour day and meet her later for dinner? Cheap Chinese delivery? A crappy movie on TV, the news, some mundane emailing, and bed? The possibilities not even passing through your mind.
I had three days once. On a Monday evening, the man I loved got down on one knee and proposed marriage. He had waited 33 years to meet the woman of his dreams, and there I was, screaming at the top of my lungs and not caring that there wasn't a ring or that his words were uneasy instead of eloquent. I loved him in ways I didn't know existed. I loved his faults. And he mine.
We spent the next three days finishing moving in together, calling friends and relatives. Working. Taking the bus rather than a taxi after being lectured about saving money. Walking the dog. Dishes, trash, errands, bills, email, web, TV, news, bed.
On a Thursday afternoon, our world ended. Very suddenly and involving a very heavy bus. And we hadn't even danced.
