Professional Protesting

"There's a blind spot on the edge of seventeen," Annie intoned with a sigh. She emptied her wineglass as I waited for her to continue. "A child on that razor edge wants to be treated as an adult but doesn't shoulder any adult responsibilities."

"Yes," Lynda agreed, "That's exactly right."

"It's rather like have a boss who always takes credit for your work and doesn't even fathom why you are continually pissed off. Or just pissed," Annie said, finishing her second glass in as many minutes.

"You know, if passing out drunk is your aim, I do have some whiskey in the house," Lynda offered.

"No, no," Annie replied. "Sorry, just stressed. Always stressed. I'm a perpetual stress machine."

Both women watched the river of protestors pass down below. "We should join them..." Annie began.

"Just a sec...putting my protesting shoes on."

"I wear mine all the time now -- went to a New Year's Eve party in Reeboks and a sequined mini-dress. Post-Trump American fashion statement."

"Where will the protest be tomorrow?"

"Santa Barbara. Too far to go without a car and parking is a bitch anyway; but, the Government Center here is the day after."

"Oh goodie! I've made new signs," Annie said. "Trump tweets about professional protestors -- where do we go to get hired? I've done enough amateur protesting."

"Maybe email Buzzfeed, Mother Jones, or Democracy Now? While they're still in business."

"Maybe," Annie mused as they joined the throng.

The Last Dragon

Prompt: Death bed scene. Man is appalled to learn that he is NOT adopted, as he had long been led to believe 😉

"Pig farmers. I was raised by pig farmers. Staunch doughty Southerners of German descent, devoid of creativity, devoid of spice, devoid of life. Bacon-eating, beer swilling rednecks. I loathed them. My only saving grace was that I was adopted."

The famous artist took a deep breath, hand trembling slightly with the effort of feeling, remembering, living...dying. "But I wasn't, you know, adopted." He leaned toward me confessed the horror of it all in a harsh whisper. "I wasn't. Mama lied to me -- her one stroke of creative genius. You, my son, are special. You were adopted from gypsies, artists, musicians, geniuses, one and all, you are as far beyond our humble genes as caviar and truffles are from cornbread, beans, and fatback. So she told me and so I was."

A deathbed confession, a last interview, this was what I had come to the Big Apple to gain, insight and wisdom from the greatest artist of the age. I wanted to be told his secrets, how he had slain the dragons of art, not to be told the secret was a sham and he had lost his belief and slain his last dragon. "How did you find out you weren't adopted?"

"Mortality, my dear, struck down in my time by an exceedingly rare genetic disease, one that I can trace back to those pig farmers. One that can't be traced back to the gypsy geniuses that danced the stars into being and painted the sky. I am, when all is said and done, ordinary."

"No," I demurred. "Look at all you have done, the great art you have created, the changes you have wrought in the world. You are anything but ordinary."

"Nothing but pork fat, my dear, genes don't lie," he wheezed as he fell back into the plush pillow. "Genes don't lie," he breathed on his last labored breath.

No more dragons to slay, I thought as I walked slowly away from the hospital, or, more accurately, one less dragon slayer. I clutched tighter to my own lies and dreamed of the next story I would tell.

I Hate My Life

I hate my life. I hate my life. I HATE my life. I HATE MY LIFE! The litany, running through my mind in a monotone voice, is now an almost constant refrain. Heartbroken, exhausted, terrified - a deer run to ground by hungry wolves. Death's inevitability is a cold comfort at best, but comfort it is. I want to sink in warm water and bleed out my tears, but death comes slowly, minutes nibbled away second by second until I want to scream. No. I want a wall, a vast wall, far and wide and high as I can see on which to tag my death song. I hate my life. I hate my life. I HATE my life...

Totally Tosh

#CreativeSprint Day 3: Make something inspired by your own name.

The esteemed Oxford Dictionary defines "tosh" as "nonsense." To have a name that means nonsense, or foolish nonsense as another source puts it, delights me since I am a professor. In pondering today's prompt, my mind went immediately to politics and the circus that surrounds our current election cycle. I set that aside as too divisive and then, while procrastinating (a process that included watching a Cracked  video on why procrastination is a boon to creativity), I came across this factoid in a Seth Meyers' A Closer Look offering:

I am from Florida and have many friends and relatives still in Florida. I cannot wrap my mind around this and I wonder and call out to Florida connections to tell me whether there is a rationale to this or whether it is totally tosh.

Nancy, while also a British slang term, means graceful and nothing combines grace and nonsense as well as my cat, Miss Rosie:

I wanted to end this on a happier note. Have a great day and, in between political snippets and news, look at cats. It'll make you feel better. And that ain't tosh.

Running to Stand Still

"I wonder if there is a freedom from financial worry to be had by having enough money," Delores pondered.

"Well, of course, that's how you make it...isn't it?" Agnes snapped. She didn't like deep thought or unsweetened tea, both favorites of her best friend.

"I don't think so. The rich worry about losing what they have and they often do just that. It's worse for the middle class. When I was young and poor I had a lot more freedom from financial worry. Nothing to worry about losing...but, I don't know," Agnes furrowed her brow, "It changed when I became a mother."

"All that responsibility," Agnes concurred, stirring more sugar into her tea.

"Yes, exactly. Although my daughter is seventeen now and I don't think I'll be one of those parents who keeps supporting her children long after they cease to be children."

"You'll kick her out?" Agnes arched her eyebrows in question. She still semi-supported her children and grandchildren. It was why she worked.

"No, no, not that, but I think I may end up more of a roommate. I hate the bitterness of always giving and not receiving and that bitterness is souring my thoughts on parenting," Delores frowned, getting to the real point. "Entitlement and feeling like whatever I give is ever enough...well, it makes me want to run away."

"Then run. I always thought we should travel more," Agnes said in support. "Next year run. I'll help you move back home."

"But even the prodigal son, after wasting his inheritance, came back home and found a place and his father's support. I am likely a bad mother," Delores sank deeper into her funk and sipped her too hot tea. "I don't know what to do. About anything. I want to love, I want to run, I find myself thinking that dying -- not that I'm suicidal mind you -- but that dying wouldn't be such a bad break in the day."

"Honey," Agnes said, laying her hand over Delores' slightly trembling fingers, "a trip to the Big Apple would be a much nicer break, don't you think?"

Drowning in the Sea of Love

There is a dark side of love. Love borne out of fear, out of lack, a step away from obsession, the kind of love a drowning person has for a would-be savior they pull down into the dark, foreboding deep. Musicians sing about it while sane people shy from it -- preferring their passion set to music or the screen, well removed from day-to-day life. I always thought I was far too logical for the dark queen of love, a queen of unsettled lakes with hidden depths and far too many monsters. I was wrong.

The Philosophy of Daisies

"She loves me, she loves me not," Abigail intoned while idly dismembering a daisy. "Silly really, there's so many layers between love and not love."

"Still," Martin sighed, "It's irrational to expect philosophic depths from a daisy.

"Of course," Abigail answered, beheading the daisy with a savage twist as it ended on "she loves me not," one needs at least a chrysanthemum for that. She stood up and closed the conversation with a wicked, "Mums the word now Martin" brushing her hands off on him as he covered his head and groaned.

"Tell me, Abby," he began, "would you have been any less savage had the daisy spoken of love?"

"Of course not," Abigail answered, twirling under the cotton candy sky, "Love -- and not love -- is a savage thing." 

The Dreams of Fools

Spaceport terminals, like the airline predecessors, were a study in opposites. Large but cramped, hurried and delayed, full of intimate strangers meeting and parting and studiously ignoring one another whenever possible. T'Mara stood in her tattered clothes and gazed at her reflection in the curved glass. She looked a ghost, transparent against the darkness of space tattered by stars, dark hair, dark eyed, still while strangers passed in huddled, hurried groups behind her. 

The planet she was set to leave was not home although it had birthed her. Her family -- her father -- dreamed of the stars but they had never been her dream. Until he died, dreams unfulfilled, and she had taken her small inheritance to fulfill them in his stead. She was a fool she thought, a fool who didn't want to go adventuring but would go nonetheless, looking in reverse while charging forward in the deep night of the unknown. 

She resettled her pack and hurried forward to the gleaming needle that would spread gossamer wings to fly, powered by solar winds of invisible light as she slept and dreamed the dreams of fools.