Funny Squid

Watch Wednesday (Week 15)

Stats:
Running Mileage: 247.13/1,000
Push-ups: 1,875/10,000
Sit-ups: 1,875/10,000
Pages Read: 3,182/10,000
Books Completed: 9/25
Words Written: 27,513/100,000

Fasts (Days without)
Internet: 26/100
TV: 39/100
Gaming: 97/100
Meat: 40/100
Junk: 23/100
Booze: 18/100

Tough week with the shows and visiting. Managed to get a 10-miler in on Sunday. Great day overall but very busy still. Once again, taking a little break from all the extensive writing to prevent major burnout. Fingers crossed for a relaxing day off next Monday.

Haiku of the Day:
Electrodes attached
to my temple and neck shoot
energizer vibes

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Wisenheimer" from Dictionary.com's word of the day. It's a smart aleck or wiseacre.)

Today's "365" Project (Do something with an old T-shirt)
"The Squid of Monte Carlo"

Spilt

Day of work and visiting. Time thin on the ground, especially for writing. Been a while since I had a short one...I kinda miss it.

Haiku of the Day:

Painy, crampy haze
shrouds my syncopated funk
post booze revelry.

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Arboreal" from MW's word of the day. If you're not familiar with the Latin root, it means something having to do with trees.)

Today's "365" Project (Do something with a mess. I used some old coffee from this morning.)
"Carmel Fish"

Angst, Utterances and Impossibility

Monster Monday

Angst Mites

Angst mites are virtually microscopic pathovores that congregate and flourish on the scalp of human adolescents. Most varieties are strictly parasitic, feasting off the rampant negative energies and sexual frustrations of teenagers and then depositing their eggs on adolescents' faces, backs and sometimes, buttocks while they sleep. There are a few cases of the species establishing a more symbiotic relationship with their hosts, providing them with a false sense of entitlement and a predilection for horrible music and poetry in the form of an oily excrement that is then deposited on the face and genitals, (though some scholars would argue that this is actually more evidence of parasitic behavior, the hosts perceive it to be beneficial and have created entire cultures around their effects.)

Discovered in the early 1950s, angst mites were thought to be the result of poor hygiene on the part of teenagers of the era. This is a common misconception. In fact, much like gut fauna, angst mites are passed down from mother to infant in the womb. They lay dormant on the child until all the joy and enthusiasm of childhood have run out, and the grim realities of life on this miserable planet set in. Some children are fortunate enough to never run out of their childhood joy, and they pass into adulthood without ever providing enough energy to allow their angst mites to flourish. But their numbers are few, and frankly, nobody likes them or their stupid upbeat faces.

Once active, the angst mites feed incessantly and breed quickly. Their egg deposits, more commonly refereed to as zits or pimples, lodge into the pores and wait patiently. To be released, the eggs must be "popped," and thankfully for them, the adolescents lack self-control and are notoriously vain. Most of the fresh young perish in the experience, so the mites must compensate through sheer number of offspring. One human adolescent can house millions of angst mites during the gestation period. The young that do survive, began to feed immediately, and will be capable of copulating and laying eggs  themselves within 12 hours.

Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire "cure" for angst mites, and some people have to live with them their entire lives. But about 90% of the population recovers and comes to a manageable and symptom-free existence with the mites. Heavy doses of requited love, reasonable expectation and "getting over yourself" have proven useful in such cases.

Haiku of the Day:

My utterances

waft about electronically

a cognizant buzz

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Obloquy" from MW's word of the day. It's a term for abusive, condemnatory language)

Today's "365" Project (Make something impossible. I made a blivet or devil's fork.)
"Then Blivet. That works."

Deceptions and Specters

Sonnet Sunday

Upon the seventh try, Deb lost her gall,
and left the booth with her head hanging low,
she couldn't win the tossing game at all,
despite her pointed eye and softball throw.
Deb crossed the trampled field to nearby tent,
and overheard a pair of stallhands chat,
"You hear about the racket run by Trent?
He's got a rig that's controlled with his hat."
Deb slipped away and returned to the booth,
where Trent and his trick hat stood by his game.
"You here for more?" He said, his sneer uncouth,
But Deb just grabbed a ball and took her aim.
With one swift hurl, Deb nailed Trent in the head,
and out his hat, a crafty cockroach fled.

Haiku of the Day:

Stern browed, steely eyed
The master stakes his resolve
on the crimson dusk

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Fulgent" from MW's word of the day. It means dazzling brightly or radiant.)

Today's "365" Project (Do something in the steam of a mirror.)
"The Man Who Looks Back"

Skull Cellars

Someone Saturday

Gilbert lives modestly in a musty cellar at the base of Thomas Grayson's skull. He doesn't entertain often, but when he does he brings out his aunt's Dutch china and his best dinner jacket. Gilbert used to be on good terms with Thomas, and they would frequently carry on well after their bedtimes. But alas, Gilbert's residence in the cellar at the base of Thomas' skull proves to be a taxing affair, and they haven't spoken in months. Thomas has taken to the rather haughty insistence that, quite frankly, Gilbert does not exist and that the occasional grumblings and headaches he endures are the result of too much sherry and bad weather. But you and I and Gilbert know this to be a lie. It is this denial, on the part of poor Mr. Grayson, that ends up causing the deaths of several dozen tourists on the East Harbor Ferry. By sheer coinsidence, both Thomas' dogs were on the ferry and met their demise in the arms of Thomas' landlady, who, in an equaly puzzling coincidence, was the only survivor of the horribly preventable catastrophe. She went on to inherit a sizable estate from an agoraphobic cousin, and lived out her remaining years perusing her two greatest passions: hunting quail and amateur pediatry.

My apologies. I have digressed. It's a tiresome side effect of my own cellar-skull resident. His name is Sagel and he refuses to turn down his Estonian pop rock after seven pm. I think he's running an illegal organelle fighting ring. At least he pays his rent on time.

What was I saying? Good GOD SAGEL TURN IT DOWN!!! There's no stopping him now. He's already half deaf to begin with.

So this is where I leave you, delirious and addled by moisture and miniature men. Ta ta web wanderers!

Haiku of the Day:

Sweat drenched twice today
Red noses and colorful
Ruffles abounding

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Boobook" from Dictionary.com's word of the day. It's an owl native to Australia and New Zealand.)

Today's "365" Project (Make a palindrome, a word that's the same when the letters are switched from forward to backward. It turns out I'm really bad at flipping things around in my head...but I doctored this from a few I found. )

Step on! Deliver Dennis Sagas - sinned, reviled. No Pets.

Perdition Condition

This is part one of my "365" Project. The other part is in its usual place at the bottom.

Wendell, the weary fiend, having a cigarette with Potash, the miserable cullion, at Hell's Brink.

"Looks like rain." Wendell muttered, gesturing to the expansive firescape over his head with a noncommittal shrug.
"Yeah." Potash gingerly passed his cigarette over to Wendell. "The Daily Omen said something about a maelstrom rolling in about mid-afternoon."
Wendell took a contemplative drag while some poor wretch howled in agony in the distance.
 "You watch last night's Dungeon Makeover?" Potash asked, picking at his needle-sharp incisors.
"Nah."
"It was another chain job. Studded manacles. Wall to wall razor wire. It was really something." Potash kicked a pumice stone over the edge of the Brink. He knew better than to wait for a sound.
Wendell just took another drag of the cigarette, eyes deader than usual.
Potash adjusted his stance and turned to Wendell.
"Can we talk about what happened yesterday?" Potash gave Wendell the hard look, the one he gave his victims to make them feel at ease before evisceration.
Wendell just stared at the abyss.
"Come on, Delly." Potash pleaded with a glint in his eye. "I haven't told the other demons, if that'd what you think."
Wendell put the cigarette out on his forehead and flicked it down the abyss.
"I don't care who you tell," he fixed his gaze upward. "It's not like I prayed or something."
"No." Potash grinned. "Thank badness for that."
A moment lingered between them as the air sizzled and crackled in the heat.
"But," Potash persisted. "You know what'll happen if they find out, right?"
Wendell's already stony face stiffened.
"Yeah. I know. But they won't find out."
"How can you be so-" Potash's thought was clipped short by a billowing of flame from Wendell's unhinged jaw. In a swift kick, the blackened corpse that once was Potash plummeted down the Brink.
Wendell yawned, spread his wings, and took off, just as the first drops of magma began to fall.

Haiku of the Day:

Anticipating
a sudden jolt of lightning
to strike the system

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "Hempy" from Dictionary.com's word of the day. It's a Scottish term in origin for mischievous.)

Today's "365" Project (Turn to a page of a book and do something with the first sentence you come across. I found a copy of Paradise Lost and turned to a page, laid down a finger, and discovered there aren't really sentences. So I picked a phrase: "Into the wild abyss this weary fiend stood on the brink of hell, and look'd a while" Then I wrote the story above and took some pictures of Wendell by abysses {Emily herself is not an abyss, she just made an "abyssesque" face.})

100 DAYS!!

Woooooooo! PARTY! I've done this for 100 days now! I've you haven't checked it out yet, you can see all my drawings and haikus in one place on the sidebar thingy. I've also put together a collection of my favorite "365 days" projects for perusal, organized thematically rather than by date.

It's been fun to go back and look through a few of the early posts and get a sense or where I was and what I was feeling with the project. I'm surprised at how quickly I've adapted to these creative habits. I'm almost inclined to do more...

I've already begun setting up a series of prompts for my daily writings, so I'm considering compiling those into their own galleries as well, hopefully with some heavy editing to polish the inevitable roughness of the daily entries. I was thinking of giving a home to Sonnets, Lymericks, Characters, Top Tens and maybe even a Bestiary for my Monster Monday prompts.

In addition, I'm thinking of doing a voice recording a day too, maybe starting around Christmas time. I've thought about this before because I've enjoyed doing voice work in the past, but I never had the opportunity. Have to look into getting some good sound equipment.

I also would like to do something that involves challenging all the wonderfully talented and loving people I have in my life...May issuing mini challenges each day and posting the results. Worth thinking about. If you want in, send me a line and I'll try to send you a challenge!

Haiku of the Day:

181 Harvard
reunited for O's game.
Rampent nostalgia.

Today's Drawing (I just started drawing that's where I was at...)

Today's "365" Project (Make a pinata! I saved this one for today...and then paper mache takes a long time to dry. So that will be Sunday probably.  Ended up folding an anti-climactic napkin)