In Which We Writ Small

 

The recent chill and wet weather has conspired to make my nose run like it's being paid overtime.  It flows pretty much year round anyway, but lately it seems to have taken on a new urgency.  Anytime I bend my head even slightly it feels like the tide has decided to go out.  When I die, please tell them to list the cause of death as "drowned" instead of "crazy old man bullshit."

I got exactly as far in writing this post as the word "bullshit" above when I took a break.  I do that, I take lots of breaks.  Unfortunately, when I eventually wandered back into writing mode, I realized I had completely forgotten what I had planned to write about here.  Oops.  I am pretty sure, despite the lead paragraph, that I was not going to focus on my mucus. Also, in journalism school, they taught us to spell the first paragraph of a story as "lede." I have no idea why.

Considering how short these posts are, it's sort of amazing how long it takes me to scratch them out.  But that's always how my creative process (if you could call it that) has worked.  At my job, when I would write a press release (a chore that popped up on the regular because, well, it was my job) I always had to allot sufficient time for wandering around the office while wrestling with synonyms for "small business" even though early on I did discover how to spell the word "entrepreneur." 

I would saunter away from my desk and make laps around the office thinking press release thoughts.  I have no idea what my coworkers made of this, but I didn't like most of them anyway.  A big part of my rambles involved avoiding the jerks and checking in on my friends.  I always got the releases out on time and I got in some exercise.  It was a win-win all around.

Now that I have retired and am a free man, my writing is still kind of peripatetic, but now I can take 4 days to write 4 paragraphs and I don't have to worry about my erratic punctuation and spelling, all of which suits me just fine. But no matter how casual I am about a deadline, or lack thereof, I still really need to have a topic even if it is how I absolutely do not have one.

Guys worth writing about:

Christian Power, which has to be one of the more amusing nom de smut I have run into.

Surfer dudes, always a welcome sight in mrpeenee's universe.

Once again, I'm pretty sure I knew this guy's name at one point, but it eludes me now.

Winter has been unusually mild, even by San Francisco standards.  I have not worn a sweater all winter.

Beefy, with extra big feet for you freaks.

Everybody likes breakfast.

It's a Perfectly Good Word.

In an email to my finance guy and my realtor, I referred to the condition of the little love nest n New Orleans I'm trying to buy as "squalorous" and the fucking autocorrect function refused to recognize the word and kept trying to change it to "squalors" and is that even a word?  Are there multiples of squalor?  Is squalor ever used as a verb?  No, I think not.  And what kind of editing software has never heard of the word "squalorous" but is okay with "fucking?"  It's a pretty cool word, even if the chances of it coming up in Boggle are tiny.

I realize I have not been including any images of attractive, scantily clad young men, so here.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Today is Dorothy Parker's birthday. In her honor, I plan to do no housework, knock back some vicodan and recite my favorite Parker ode:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

a medley of extemporanea;

and love is a thing that can never go wrong.

And I am Marie of Romania.

This is not Miss Parker. It is a glorious cycle of something or the other.

Whatever It Takes

One of my favorite blogs, Go Fug Yourself, is crafted by two sassy gals who also have a gig writing a column for New York magazine. In their charming post about the loss we all share of Bea Arthur, they mention:

“whenever one of us runs up against writer's block … the person in question gives up and types, "And then there's Maude," and turns the column over to the other for an infusion of ideas”

A confession which makes me feel so connected to the world of Real Journalism, since I too use gibberish to move past being stuck. When I write press releases, I frequently (actually, every single time) get frozen and unable to think of another goddam synonym for "business." When that happens, I temporarily use as a filler a sentence I would have employed had I followed my dream of being the author of a series of trashy romance novels for Ladies.

The sentence?

My lips burned from the lash of his kisses.

Fabulous, huh? Had I been the new Barbara Cartland, I would have stuck it in every single book. It would have been my trademark.

That said, my constant fear is that some day I will forget to edit that little gem out and will distribute a release to the wide world that includes a quote from mrpeenee announcing “My lips burned etc., etc….”

For more Romance covers go here

Fresh Hell

The charming Muscato reminds us August 22 is the birthday of my favorite writer, Dorothy Parker. Miss Parker was author of one of the few poems I can quote from memory:

O life is a glorious cycle of song;
A medley of extemporanea.
And love is a thing that can never go wrong.
And I am Marie of Romania.


Well, here we are.