we had an assignment to write the first and last paragraphs of a novel for two declamations. i don't have a name or even a real plot for this, but i knew the feel i wanted. something as dark as poe, as angsty as fitzgerald, as heart-wrenching as graham greene, as metaphor-rich as bradbury, as concise as o'connor. obviously i failed. the question is by how much. the feel of the second part is different because the only end i saw for the story at the beginning was a kiss or a bullet. when the time came, i wanted neither. anyhow. there it is.

first paragraph

The sky was the color of her coffee in the Seattle midnight. Streetlight trapped by clouds, pressed tight against the city’s dirty heaving bosom. I had my collar flipped up to keep the rain out; not that it mattered anyhow. I’d been walking for so many hours that my shirt was soaked beneath my pea coat. My socks sopped as I stepped through the puddles and raindrop curtains surrounding the awnings of lawyers and bail bondsmen. The cigarette I started five or six blocks ago was already burning my lips. I stopped to light another on the doorstep of an apartment complex, alluringly dubbed Bayview Manors in extravagant swoops of neon light. I wondered if any of them could even see the city, what with the newspaper and burglar bars. I stepped away from the flyer in the window that promised me the lifestyle I’d always wanted. I looked up into the downpour. The rain was thick, falling like sorrows on the heads of the just.

last paragraph

Does it ever stop raining in this city? One last cigarette and the coppery taste of blood in my mouth. Smoke is good thing; it gives you something to think about besides pain and at that point the cut on my head was still bleeding down my cheek. I tensed up when a couple sirens squealed and fishtailed around the corner, but they flew by. Should have known nobody would call the cops. Not in this neighborhood. A taxi pulled up next to me. The driver’s window slid down and her face caught the moonlight and spun it back at me in a tired smile. I smiled back – still not used to the idea of a woman taxi driver, much less her. I climbed in the passenger seat, and we wove through the dripping steel of the city. Stores and then lights faded behind as we drove. Now even the rusty clouds have disappeared in the west as we drive faster and faster, trying to make the daylight come sooner, trying to get out of the night.

you have to go on and be crazy. craziness is like heaven.

jimi hendrix

here's to friday nights full of smoke and flame and friends and laughter.

here's to ch, lr, se, bh, mh, mm, rm, jf, jw, ta, tk, and rn.

here's to trucks skimming across snow and down hills.

here's to ash.

via Ash H

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”

Jean-Luc Godard

i should note that i'm surprisingly comfortable with this.

via the impossible cool. another blog every person should read daily.

Again, the death of the Lord is the ransom of all, and by it "the middle wall of partition" is broken down and the call of the Gentiles comes about. How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched? Here, again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself. Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Myself." ... Here, again, you see how right and natural it was that the Lord should suffer thus; for being thus "lifted up," He cleansed the air from all the evil influences of the enemy. "I beheld Satan as lightning falling," He says; and thus He re-opened the road to heaven, saying again, "Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors." For it was not the Word Himself Who needed an opening of the gates, He being Lord of all, nor was any of His works closed to their Maker. No, it was we who needed it, we whom He Himself upbore in His own body—that body which He first offered to death on behalf of all, and then made through it a path to heaven.

St. Athanasius On the Incarnation 4.25

via claire

Joy

Who could need more proof than honey—



How the bees with such skill and purpose


enter flower after flower


sing their way home


to create and cap the new honey


just to get through the flowerless winter.



And how the bear with intention and cunning


raids the hive


shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth


bats away indignant bees


stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness.



And how we humans can’t resist its viscosity


its taste of clover and wind


its metaphorical power:


don’t we yearn for a land of milk and honey?


don’t we call our loved ones “honey?”



all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do.



Oh, who could need more proof than honey


to know that our world 


was meant to be


and 



was meant to be


sweet?

—Julie Cadwallader Staub

via among the pines

Why is the Christmas season so hard on men? There are many complex reasons, by which I mean: women.

- Dave Barry

from the miami herald

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

- Winston Churchill

via 1001 rules

Well, does it take more guts to twice traverse a staircase in a burning building, or to make a one-time leap into a volcano? Damned if I know, Kimosabe. All I know is when you’re making those kind of calls, you’re up in the high country.

- S. H. Graynamore

via 1001 rules for my unborn son, one of my new favorite blogs of all time. read it, and read it now.

“Did you mark how naturally – as if he’d been born for it – the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you in a kind of bottleneck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. … You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?’

As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degredation of it! – that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories … Only you were left outside.

He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clrity itself, and wears the form of a Man. You would like, if you could, to interpret the paitent’s prostration in the Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes, Wormwood, a clearer knowledge even than yours) on the analogy of your own choking and paralyzing sensations when you encounted the deadly air that breathes from the heart of Heaven. But it’s all nonsense. Pains he still may have to encounter, but they embrace those pains.

CS Lewis

screwtape letters, no. 31

"Leave my cane? Leave my cane? Then how do you expect me to poke holes through the oil paintings?"

Mark Twain, when asked to check his cane before entering an art museum in new york.