Celebrity

Someone has probably said this already.  In fact, I have vague memories of reading it somewhere before.  But nevertheless…
…I cannot find a source of it online, but if you’ve ever read I, Claudius, you might remember some of his descriptions of the religious rites of Roman-age British.  In one particularly fun festival, a beautiful young [...]

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Even if it weren’t like this, it would probably be like this

It may be because I grew up Catholic, or because I’m in a high-competition high-status low-pay profession, or just because the Flying Spaghetti Monster made me that way, but I’m a worrier.  I worry about pretty much everything, and I pretty much always have some nagging thing that I’m worrying about. Money, practicing, auditions, writing, [...]

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Worth a thousand words

This is a picture of a hair elastic that fell on the floor. I did not tamper with it in any way.
Compare it with this:

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 30: Vegetarianism-ism + To Train Up a Child

I go vegetarian, and compare Debi and Michael Pearl’s “child-training” (note: not “child-rearing”) book, “To Train Up a Child” to the work of Cesar Millan, aka The Dog Whisperer.  Also: the difference between puppies and babies, and why eating animals is not NECESSARILY bad.
Link.

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An oddly hopeful image

I spent the afternoon today at the art gallery again. Every time I’m there I see the same man go past the window at about 2:00.
He looks indeterminately elderly but could, I suppose, be anywhere from 50 to 80. He’s always wearing the same red shirt and ballcap with wispy grey hair leaking [...]

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What was THIS supposed to be?

Ran across a file today titled “The Migraine Muse”.  I don’t remember writing it, though it’s obvious that I did.
The Migraine Muse
Ellen bit her lip.  The pain was subsiding, and with it she felt her grasp on her story slip away – Dolly the pretty one, Marjorie the silent stern patient one, Mickey the lovable [...]

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Twitter: An actually helpful writing tool.

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I treat it more like an opportunity for random weirdness and very short-form poetry than a chance to tell the world what I ate for dinner.  All in good fun.  But just now it occured to me that Twitter is actually teaching me to write [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 28: Fiddling while Rome burns.

Is America becoming fascist?  If so, should I be doing something about it?
Smarter people with better research skills have written about this:
at Orcinus
at Crooks and Liars
on Alternet
and many other places
Link to the episode

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The enemy of archaeology

“You are the enemy of archaeology!” I once yelled at my mother.
I think I was fourteen or fifteen, and in one of her periodic “throw random things away” moments she must have gotten rid of something I had wanted to keep.  “It’s people like you that will make it hard for future archaeologists to piece [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 27.5, Literary Supplement: The Reject Cast.

The literary supplement returns with some stuff that either got rejected from other stuff or that Ben rejected as PRO lyrics.  As my friend Alex Eddington says, “Beautiful writing is all very well, but people need to know what the f*ck you’re talking about.”
In this episode:
- “Is it too much to ask?”
- Revenant
- “I was [...]

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