...This morning I got a series of micros accepted at Red Fez. I love that lit journal. They're one of the best out there, so i feel especially honored.

...I am going to send something else to PANK in a second. They have rejected me so many times that I could turn them in for assault. Now, it's like I'm a physically abused wife that keeps going back despite it all.

...I subscribe to Quote A Day. I got this one today: "I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." -- Peter De Vries

...Both of my kids are gone for a week. This house is vacant and big and quiet like a cave. I don't like it. The term "Empty Nest" creeps me out.

...Maybe that's why, moments ago, I wrote this:




Compass

Yesterday my wife got lost in the bathroom. When she came out, I asked what took so long. She said there was another woman in there with her, a gal that looked a lot like her, who mimicked her movements, and every time my wife went for the door this other woman got in her way. I said, “Honey, that’s just the mirror.” She looked at me astonished, the same way she did that day I told her JFK had just been shot. We were young then. The world was big and wide open, a peach of a thing, juicy but also ripe.
I told her again about the mirror. “It was just you,” I said. “You were seeing yourself, your reflection.”
A moment later my wife started to laugh. I thought she was getting it. That’s the way Alzheimer’s works, an Off and On switch sometimes. But, instead, she pawed my arm with her age-spotted hands and told me how funny I was, said what a card I was. “That thing you left in my underwear drawer, why, I thought it was a compass!”
On our Anniversary I’d stashed a toy in her bottom drawer. We were ten years married. Things were getting dull, but my love for her had not wavered then, or now.
She laughed some more until she was crying, the tears warm and clear across her cheeks. “Compass,” she said. “Oh my.”