May 2013
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Jury-Rig
He’ll find us! she yelps, hopping to keep the swarm of amber ants from devouring her exposed feet. She keeps the binocs glued to her brow with one arm, hugs herself with the other despite the sun.
I know. Shut up, he growls around the wrench in his teeth. The ants dislike the scent of the steely fluid dripping into the warm sand, so leave him alone. Angry clanks and scrapes sound from the...
April 2013
1 post
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March 2013
4 posts
WatchI suddenly realize what I want out of life. This iron blade, rendered from a railroad spike.
northerncrescentiron:
This is a video of how we forge out our railroad spike knives. It’s a quick video that we shot with my iPhone and I edited using iMovie.
If you would like to purchase a knife just Click Here. They start at only 38 bucks.
To see our website, Here.
Enjoy!
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Saturday midmorning, Silver Lake
I pace without purpose through our farmer’s market, dodging strollers, past the flowers and the vegetation and the fermentation. There is no one today with a clipboard and a question to ask me.
I stop into MorningsNights for iced liquid, saying hello to A, D and E.
A man is outside who looks like, plays left-handed like, has his hair bound up with a scarf like, sounds like, spot-on Jimi...
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We're gonna need a bigger stirring spoon
Okay, guess I should sleep. My story outline is mixing up its syncretism with its eschatology with its psychopomps. And there’s a Fimbulwinter in there somewhere. And angels on motorbikes. And rum flavored with gunpowder. *yawn*
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Anonymous asked: Just wanted to let you know I came across your website a few weeks ago, downloaded Umbril's Tale and finished reading it last night. It was spectacular! Thank you so much! I gave you a 5 star rating on Goodreads (dot com). I hope to read more.
February 2013
1 post
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Weathering
Prone on a motel bed, hating it but not enough. Like the increase of mass as its velocity approaches that of light, every finger twitch requires energy enough to have killed something else in the world, and I am not that selfish.
My addiction scrapes through tiny channels, trying to remind me of its past-due feeding, but I ignore it, letting my thighs tense up and my feet shiver. Copper-flavored...
January 2013
2 posts
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Montague Summers Gets It
“It should be remarked, and I hardly think that the point has been noticed before in this connexion, what gloomy yet intensive delight the mid-Victorians took in funerals, interments, and all the trappings of mortuary woe. How raven-black was the velvet pall, how solemnly nodded the hearse-plumes, how awful stood the train of mutes, how long was the deep crape worn by the relicts of the...
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December 2012
1 post
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"Falling" in Crack the Spine Issue 47
A brief scene, just shy of a thousand words, is nestled in the middle of Crack the Spine’s 47th issue. Please do have a read… and enjoy the other remarkable prose and poetry throughout the issue.
November 2012
1 post
Ah. Story Rejection. An old friend who darkens my doorstep occasionally, and whose arrival compels consolatory glasses of whisky.
October 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Must Write
“And you?”
“I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”
“And what do you want?”
“To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.”
- Ernest Hemingway, Green...
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Experiencing
I am now forty-five, a weathered but unsure halfway point. There remains a world I haven’t touched, and things not yet seen, and I agonize over what I’ve missed and slept through. I’ve done a few things, so few, and it will never be enough.
- I have sat in a jacuzzi with raindrops falling, listening to distant sirens and the roars of Bourbon Street.
- I have watched the sun...
September 2012
2 posts
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“Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This...”
– Laurence D’Orsay, Writer’s Digest, October 1929
Of course, this was back right during the modernist reactions to all those pastoral, league-long novels of the late 1800s… and it’s still got merit. I don’t, however, think it should be as tightly latched onto as it is....
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August 2012
2 posts
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Small Bits
It is a tiny little thing, barely five hundred characters, hovering at the end of issue thirty-eight of a poignant, writerly online publication, but it is a start.
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11 More Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent →
nevver:
Seigneur-terraces (French)
Coffee shop dwellers who sit at tables a long time but spend little money.
Ya’arburnee (Arabic)
This word is the hopeful declaration that you will die before someone you love deeply, because you cannot stand to live without them. Literally, may you bury me.
Schlimazel (Yiddish)
Someone prone to bad luck. Yiddish distinguishes between the schlemiel and...
June 2012
1 post
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How single malt bottles become suspiciously...
Rejection notices, no matter how considerately written, have a unique quality of rendering the day numb.
They are reasonable, and polite, and some have personal notes, which are greatly appreciated. Thank you; unfortunately, the submission didn’t happen to be the right fit, for this time.
But through no fault of the rejection’s own, a writer does not process this easily. The...
May 2012
1 post
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Slogging through
From chapter 2 of Billy Budd:
“And here it be submitted that, apparently going to corraborate the doctrine of man’s fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to...
April 2012
1 post
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“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable...”
– - Raymond Chandler
March 2012
1 post
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Closure
I dropped everything I carried and stood, gazing up at 1307 Whippoorwill Road. There were fifteen more years on it, fifteen stubborn and remorseful years, a sodden two-story mobbed by tall grasses and lived in only by small animals. The country was always wet around here, and the house hadn’t aged well.
I didn’t need the city’s yellow Unsafe sign to tell me our family...
February 2012
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Nemesis
“Ugh, Charlie, can you kill that?” Annette points at the corner halfway up the wall.
“Leave it alone, Annette. Probably a wolf spider. They help keep the house pest-free. They don’t hurt any.” He bobs the packet of tea up and down in his cup, trying to pull strength from it into the hot water. She always wants him to kill spiders.
“Doesn’t look like...
December 2011
3 posts
Anonymous asked: What is your favorite place to eat mexican food?
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Things to Read
My brain still performs a melodramatic little swoon (replete with arm draped over brow and Victorian-era couch in readiness underneath) when faced with the idea that someone, somewhere, chose something I wrote out of a collection of others. It gives me hope that I’ll get more words between the covers of a book, like in Bianca’s hoodie pocket above.
(Do those books have my words in...
August 2011
1 post
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Displaced
I am scheduled to have two wisdom teeth evicted tomorrow, by force, and am feeling apprehensive about it.
More than apprehensive. Such a procedure typically uses general anesthesia, which is a fairly common thing to be phobic about, but which I have never in my adult life experienced.
A secret truth about this shell I inhabit: I have a poor memory, and an abject fear of memory loss. This is...
June 2011
1 post
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March 2011
2 posts
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February 2011
1 post
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Oak
The oak tree probably doesn’t need me at all; it’s been there for generations. But it’s alone on this plateau, and it’s special. I’ve watered it every few days, laboring under this arid sun with a sloshing bucket in my hands. Today’s the last day. Sam Conrad’s come back to Rainbow Gulch, and Sam Conrad needs to die.
I straighten up and wince....
January 2011
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One Sentence
From Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s “Children of the Sky”:
During the day the mud on their bodies dries and flakes off but leaves a residue of grime on their skin like a darkening mold that might not ever be expunged, just as their own destiny on the streets, which fate has forged, cannot be changed even if they bathe one hundred times a day in the slowly moving river whose dark...
December 2010
2 posts
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Optics
I haven’t been myself, not really, not since my eyes shorted out. The first time they went on the fritz, anyway. That was the big issue with those early versions, the Infralites and the Windsor Ultra-Hue v20s. They tended to surge when they got wet or when you walked into a high-rad area, and your eye sockets started to smoke.
Hurt? Hell, yeah, it hurts. Feels like someone’s...
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Other Ghosts
Life is in layers. Death, too.
This is why ghosts appear behind you, or before you, in the mirror, against the far wall where handprints glow.
(Filmmakers understand this.)
Ghosts do not manifest by your side, do not walk next to you. They cannot.
Worlds can be slid into sideways, in fact must be; life and death must be entered, or exited. A threshold is not a threshold if you can pass...
November 2010
1 post
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Xmas Musak and the Urge to Kick Puppies
So upon wrestling with the local laundromat that plays KOST-FM’s seasonal barrage, and then having my errand-filled day completely aborted by the trafficked and chaotic presence of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which raised street barriers all the way down to Santa Monica, I was feeling particularly sour. The holidays have come banging on our collective doors with unhealthy fervor this...
October 2010
2 posts
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Function
Life was not okay, but it was dormant for now. Mark could move in the world without feeling guilty, without judgment by his peers and his betters. He was the type of young man who lived his life as if on a breaking ice shelf, leaping from floe to floe, afraid to slide into the icy deeps of the world and its responsibilities. He had just given up a lifestyle, left a world behind.
...
August 2010
5 posts
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Anonymous asked: Plumber's Apprentice????
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Sitting outside the Thrifty Wash on Hyperion
I look up from reading while colors tumble.
Hundreds of birds wheel in dozens of directions, in front of the daytime waxing moon.
It has an eerie chaos, such that Frazetta might have painted it.
With extra serpentine coils to menace womanly flesh in the foreground.
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Broken into little therapeutic shards
I haven’t been creative much lately. Poke my head in, shake it to clear my day, grimace, and exit without commentary.
I haven’t written, I haven’t sat and thought. I have been tired, and sickly, and in pain.
Partly this is due to my working schedule, which can be busy and long and spasmic and unpredictable, and I have a good/bad habit of keeping my email open long after I...
July 2010
10 posts
Anonymous asked: Why Polarbeast?
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All our icons are leaving us
Since we’ve lived here, Silver Lake has wrestled with a balance between its mythical, paradisaical art-colony vibe and a swelling hipster gentrification.
And all the while we’ve watched the things dear to us perish. Our neighbor across the street, the elderly, Peter O’Toolesque Mike, passed a few years ago, doubtless followed by Spike, his comfortably rotund pug. Bingo the...
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Barbering
Some few places provide me an instant, smiling serenity when I walk into them. A reputable cigar shop with a well-maintained humidor. A certain unpretentious local Sicilian restaurant with Americanized red sauce and a scent of childhood. A thumping, uninhibited goth-industrial dancefloor. Hidden alcoves in Los Angeles where black silhouettes of palm trees are attractively marred by power lines.
...
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Tropical Los Angeles
A warm morning swells upward from sleep, blinking and sticky.
Thinking itself in the monsoon season, it rains, sideways, for a handful of minutes.
It stops, confused.
Birds take up a cautious song.
The dryer upstairs snaps and clanks in its busy way.
Anonymous asked: How can any self-respecting bibliophile leave a cigar to die unfinished? Is this not blasphemy?
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A Letter of Resignation from an Apprentice
Dear Great and Worshipful Master Martin Greenbones,
It is with some regret that I must tender my resignation as your apprentice. While I realize that I signed on for a goodly number of years, and I am thankful for the scraps of knowledge that have fallen into my hands, I feel it is best to take my leave of you now before something even worse happens. I feel that I am simply not cut out...
Anonymous asked: If I was an alien, would I choose you to take back to my planet?
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