Category Archives: Blogs

PROMPT: Three Years

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What will your life be like in three years?

Who can say? I could be dead. I could be one of the last humans alive after the next pandemic or a nuclear Holocaust or a solar flare that sends humanity back to the Stone Age, or some combination of these and / or other disasters. I could be sitting where I currently sit, doing what I’m currently doing.

I’m no fortune-teller. (If there’s one thing my time as a social scientist taught me, it’s that people think they are much better at making predictions than they are.)

PROMPT: Holiday Invention

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Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Mad Saints Day. In honor of all the crazy sages throughout history (e.g. Hanshan, Diogenes the Cynic, Ikkyu, St. Isadora, Drukpa Kunley, Nasreddin, Milarepa, William Blake, etc.)

It’s celebrated by violating some societal convention that doesn’t have direct adverse health and safety consequences (This is not “The Purge.”) Of course, violating even the most absurdly arbitrary societal convention will cause many people to freak out, so the other element of celebrating Mad Saints Day is just getting the f@$& over it.

Crow Cabal [Haiku]

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three crows circled up.
 their conversational look
  makes me nervous.

Vanishing [Haiku]

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crossing a clearing,
 a deer disappears before
  eyes can lock on it.

DAILY PHOTO: Harold Washington Library Center

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PROMPT: Favorite Websites

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What are your favorite websites?

I guess if time spent on them indicates “favoriteness,” that would be Google, YouTube, and WordPress— in who knows what order.

Octopus [Free Verse]

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Eight arms
   seeking eight
   different states
     of being.

Winding sinuously 
   toward eight
   different ends.

Wrapping opposing 
   limbs around
   antipodal objectives,
     it risks tearing
       itself in twain…

but knows better.

First to Fall [Haiku]

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by the green river,
 one tree prematurely 
  takes Fall colors.

DAILY PHOTO: Budapest’s Tiny Sculptures

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PROMPT: Re-live

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Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

If I could do so as the me I am now, I’d do any of them (post-High School,) but if I’d be the me I was at the time, then I don’t see the point. Either way, there would be changes that would ripple through the rest of my life, to varying degrees. I got through largely without unnecessary tragedy, I’d as likely screw it up as improve upon it.

If nothing downstream could be changed, that would be like watching a boring documentary that had none of the tedious parts cut out. Like watching the 17 days a wildlife photographer sat freezing his ass off uneventfully before he got footage of a snow leopard. I really don’t see the point of that.

Life is beautiful because one has no idea what it might bring.