--IF I HAD KNOWN BETTER, I WOULDN'T HAVE SAID IT OUT LOUD

…Hey hi, it’s Monday.  What are you up to?

…Here are some things I like:

-"As long as you're alive, you can do something." Valerie Harper

-"I was taught how to work. I think that's everything. Creativity and imagination alone are not going to get you there."- Writer Elizabeth Gilbert

-"He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification." Ayn Rand

-"Poets have to dream, and dreaming in American is no cinch." Saul Bellow

-"Be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive,           still human, and still open to the beauty of the world." Paul Harding

-"Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it." Lily Tomlin

…And here’s a story I wrote a couple of years back that won 1^st place in contest:

           

                                                                 Waterbed

            When the fire burned down our garage my sister could only ask about the waterbed.  “You can’t burn a waterbed, can you?” she asked, her goggle eyes big as pucks.

            She was mine alone to love, like a strange painting or the neighbor’s lonesome cat.  Our father was always away and our mother, well, she didn’t care for retards.

            The man who interviewed me didn’t work for the fire department and I could tell he thought I was the culprit because he charged forth in hot pursuit of a motive.  I could have given him plenty.

            The smell of a fire gets on something; it bores in and can’t ever really be removed.  Rank skunk spray you can get rid of, but fire, it smolders in the fabric forever.

            Jeanie was sis’s name but we changed it up, always with the letter J though: Jezebel, Janine, Jacqui, Junebug.  She rather enjoyed the idea that she could become so many different people so easily.

            When my mother was at Mr. Taylor’s house comparing bird watching stories, Jeanie liked nothing more than to sneak up to my parent’s bedroom and flop about on the waterbed.  She became a mermaid on that thing, so happy.  A queen being ferried betwixt regal landscapes.  A damsel on a raft.  A silly girl, not so smart, who at least knew how to swim.

            When our parents divorced the first thing to go besides Pop was that waterbed.  Mother stabbed it to death with an ice pick and later the carpet man spent the better part of a day fixing things, flooring-wise.  He even carried the rubber matt out to the garage like some defeated sea creature slung over his shoulders.

            I buried it and it’s in a safe place now.  Jeanie and I step over it every morning on our way to school, me to mine and Jeanie to her special one.  I tell her someday she’ll swim again and, as she smiles, I think she believes me.