More Things I Don’t Have Time to Write About

1. I am ever fonder of my BIC Velocity 0.9 #2 mechanical pencils. It’s the writing utensil equivalent of sloppy stomp Professor Longhair blues. It’s like the bold, lush confidence of big stinky black markers, but precise and impermanent. It could inspire the invention of Japanese calligraphy.

2. The new Shapes and Sizes is my listen of the week. A lovely, red, oaky chaos. I dig the horns. Squirrel Nut Femmesistry. I’m trying to get around to saying something about Derek Webb. He haunts me. Like an inevitable wet-willie. Also, speaking of Shapes and Sizes, here, uninitiated readers: know about this tap-dancing band from Omaha for a minute.

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Winning is for Losers

Time to wrap this thing up, so I can get back to writing about the weather and commenting on my aches and pains. Oy, vey.

I didn’t really get 10 entries on topic, which was the condition for awarding a prize, but everyone’s work was so fantastic – just brilliant, really – that you are all winners in my book. I mean that.

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They should have sent a poet.

Entries rejected for insensitivity:

Five, four, three, two, one. . . .
Ground control to Major Tom:
Ignite psych profiles.

Spin, media, spin.
Houston, we have a problem.
Hope for star shooting.

Hell hath no fury
Like my alleged assault charge.
Final frontier, fool.

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High queue

Here’s the competition so far (just to save you some click-and-scroll time). I’ll keep the box open until Thursday, and then declare which writer is the most gifted poet in the World.

Orbit passion thwart
“zero-g and I feel fine”
Earthbound rubber tubes

White rocket flying
Love-tranced white-knuckled driving
Whom can I Depend?

In space, heads are home.
If hearts stayed weightless on Earth
We’d all jump the moon.

So early in life
So late in my sanity
It’s diaper time

disguise, pepper spray
BB-gun, new steel mallet
knife, rubber tubing

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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

A call for haikus:
Whose light verse will reign supreme?
The gauntlet is down.

Of this site’s three readers, I can think of two who are remarkably imaginative (yes, I mean you). This whole avenging astronaut story so lends itself to seventeen syllables, I cannot let the moment pass. I declare a contest: if I receive 10 submissions of haikus related to this story, I will award the most worthy with a prize.* Submit your work in the comments to this post.

This is meant to be neither exploitative nor to represent a prioritization of this story over the real news happening in the world.** But this little narrative is so chock-full of syllables too rarely put to verse, and captures so many themes at the heart of our culture; it is bursting with potential.

*Prizes may include one or none of the following: 1/4 pound of Coffee Klatch Sumatra beans; $5 gift certificate to Audio Lunchbox; 1/4 flock of chicks donated in your name through Heifer Int’l.

**Option 2: In haiku form, provide a brief reflection on the cultural and religious tensions dividing Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, and a proposal for a movement towards peace in that arena.

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water lilies (of doom)

hurtling sunward,
my astronaut diaper speeds
love’s furious trunk.

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