Sign of the Times

Love this sign... it has gotten a lot of laughs around the courthouse. I realize these are tough times but forcing your car to get a job to make ends meet is taking things to a new level.

This Friday Night - Spoken Word at Crossroads Coffee House

Reading at CROSSROADS COFFEE HOUSE

  OPEN MIC  7PM
    310 Southwest Blvd. K.C., MO 64108

Heard any good metaphors?

"A thousand naked fornicating couples with their moans and contortions are nothing compared to a good metaphor." ~ Charles Simic, The Gettysburg Review, Winter 1995

Confession Tuesday - Sick No More Edition

Dear Reader:

It’s Tuesday evening and I’m supposed to do some soul searching so let’s hurry to the confessional.

It’s been a week now since my last confession. A week in which some sense of normalcy has begun to return to my body. I confess that the concept of feeling good has become an enigma of sorts because I don’t think I’ve really fell well since before Thanksgiving. The most recent health issue was the acquisition of influenza and I believe we’ve knocked that out and I’m getting stronger daily.  A public service announcement at this point… I had a flu shot this fall and evidently there is a sizable failure rate with the most recent vaccine.  Also worth noting if you live in Missouri the CDC indicates the flu is widespread.  A week or so ago it was the only state in the US that was highlighted red – the highest level.

I think when you’ve been sick off and on for about 4 months you kind of lose that feistiness that tends to get you in trouble.  As a result I don’t have any really exciting vices to report.  Though during the work drive this week my wife noted I must be feeling better because I was a bit cranky.  I didn’t know I had to feel good to be cranky but maybe it all fits together in with being feisty.

And this week, another positive sign is I’m starting to feel like my writing mojo is coming back.  I’m convinced that creativity is one of the first casualties of sickness.  I confess that my writing was starting to feel like a self fulfilling prophecy of failure.

I confess that I’ve eaten a sinful amount of Black Walnut ice cream this past week.  But on a positive note, I’ve remained true to my sacrifice of Diet Coke for lent. Coke shares must be plummeting (good time to buy) but they will be back on the rise come Easter.  Actually, I’m thinking I will not be as big a Coke drinker after this. We’ll see.

Mag 108: Bobby Socks and Bare Knees

My memory of the neighbor girl
is burrowed in the back of my mind.
Tucked away all these years
this 7 year olds crush,
this awakening,
this curiosity,
maybe twice my age
definitely older

staked a claim on my thoughts
this afternoon—      why after all these years
do I recall the bobby socks and bare knees
how her flimsy dresses were forever
blowing in my psyche? 

How some cold mornings
her bare arms would grow goose bumps end to end.
I was hopelessly inquisitive about her;
she carried herself affable—  unlike any girls
my own age.  I didn’t even notice.

I knew nothing of pubescent girls at the time.
I only knew there was something different,
this one looked supple but sturdy
and even from a bicycle length
I could smell a difference.

Her father changed jobs
relocating to another area
that May.  I don’t recall
another girl for a long time.


Michael A. Wells

Magpie 108

Romanticizing the Paper

"Though the middle ground may eventually disappear - paperback fiction, for example - the ongoing rise of ebooks should actually encourage the making of beautiful physical books. Readers want the volumes they keep on their shelves to be as striking and as sensory as possible. And so, while most publishers are racing to keep up with the conquest of the screen, the true mavericks may well be people who are doing something very old-fashioned very well."  More

When reading the passage above I feel almost a romantic atmosphere illuminating in the words. It does cause me to wonder more about the future of books than perhaps any prognostication of the future or any pontification from the many already sold on electronics publications that I've read in the past couple of years about the future of books. Could there be a resonance in hard back books around the corner?  

I’ve made it pretty clear in past blog posts that I like my books with real pages.  I do have an e-reader on my phone and I have both a Kindle for PC and Nook for PC on my laptop.  I don’t use them a lot and I suppose one reason is that I don’t like to pay the price of a book for a digital file.  It’s a hang-up, yes.  I will admit it, but it remains a fact. One that I have had since day one of my introduction to e-books and it hasn’t eroded any that I can tell.

There are plenty of people that for one reason or another have trouble accepting e-books, I run across them routinely.  I suspect that at some point many of these hold outs, myself included may soften to e-books, but for many of us e-readers are not the novelty that they are for others.  I know this because while I’ve been easily drawn to many electronic gadgets this hasn’t happened where e-readers are concerned.

If and when I do gravitate more towards acceptance, I can tell you that I am likely to find the real novelty will be in that which still has paper pages to turn.  So will there become a cottage industry for those small presses that turn out books in smaller numbers in hardback?  Will the future choice be to order an e-book or a hardback?  Will most books be published as e-books and then after being out a while the really successful ones go to hardback, a sort of reverse of the traditional publishing paradigm?

Unless we read poetry

"Unless we read poetry, we"ll never have our hearts broken by language, which is an indispensable preliminary to a civilized life." ~Anatole Broyard - The New York Times