Sometime Last Century, No. 1

Sometimes when I’m feeling a little full of myself, I like to think back to the day I took Daniel to a mall to buy a baseball. He kept playing with it and putting it down and generally being a boy. I said, “Keep your hands on that baseball or you’ll go off and forget it.” 

Then I shrieked, “AIIIIIEEEEE,” grabbed his arm, and raced back to JC Penney, where I’d left my Canon AE-1 on the shelf in the bathroom stall. Fortunately, some kind soul had turned it in to the office.

Remember the days when you didn’t know your photos were crappy/blurry until you got your film developed? Then it was Sorry, sucker, you’ll never get that Kodak moment back. Digital cameras: the Ultimate Do-Over Machine.

 

Note

I love getting Christmas cards, and I save most of them in a bin in the garage. I do this knowing that one day, a van will pull up and the driver will say, “Get ready, old woman, we’re putting you in Shady Pines.”

I fantasize that I’ll have a chance to go through the card bins first and say, “Who the hell are these people?” Much like what happens when people send me Friend requests on Facebook now.

My first meme of 2011

I actually did this on Facebook, but figured I’d share it here, too. In no particular order, 15(ish) movies that almost made me stop liking movies:

1. A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. The only good thing about this one was that Tom and I saw it at the Dollar Movie, and the tub o’popcorn was cheap, too.

2. The Godfather, Part III. You realize how thoroughly a sequel’s ruined a franchise for you when you don’t care that a Corleone daughter is gunned down.

3. The Last House on the Left. The original one. It forever killed my desire to score a joint from a stranger on an adventure in the city with my BFF.

4. Big Trouble in Little China. Sorry, Marika, but if I could have those 99 minutes with Tom, Tim, Lisa, and Mark back, anything would be more fun. Except that Jimmy Reardon movie.

5. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. You know, it may not even be Jar Jar Binks. But sometimes late at night, my mind still fumbles with the convoluted queen/decoy thing. Probably because I’ve endured this movie only once.

6. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. I only remember this because someone else mentioned it. Though it did give Lynne and me the chance to start many, many sentences with, “You know, my old man told me, before he left this shitty world…”

7. I only watch movies with dogs if someone assures me the dog doesn’t get it. So any movie with a stealthy dog death makes this list, and I can’t name one because I probably required memory-erasing therapy after seeing it. Wait–didn’t a dog die in that movie with John Travolta as an angel? Quick! My Vicodin!

8. I think Russell Crowe must have killed my dog in a former life, because if he’s in it, I just can’t bear to watch it.

9. Nine Months. I think that’s how long the movie lasted, too. When good actors get talked into doing bad things.

10. Bedazzled. When bad actors get talked into doing worse things.

11. Queen of the Damned. Dreadful.

12. Rhinestone. Why, Dolly, WHY?

13. A Clockwork Orange. Yeah, I know. Whatever.

14. Jabberwocky. Do they take the Internet away from me if I don’t like something with tenuous connections to Monty Python?

15. The War of the Roses. HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE.

Magnetic Poetry 365:1

From 1998 to 2004, I’d occasionally pull a handful of magnetic words from my silver poetry box or this refrigerator magnet game, and a few friends and I would each write poems using those words. We could use as many or as few of the words as we wanted, but we couldn’t add any words. I kept the poems in this journal; I don’t know how brilliant the poems are, but I do know that there are occasional word combinations that evoke vivid imagery or would make excellent titles for stories or songs.

In 2010, I wrote almost nothing beyond what’s in my LiveJournal. I did a lot of other creative things–designing, painting, sketching, sewing–but I’m a writer, and I miss putting words together, playing with them, creating with them.

Inspired by artist Gilbert Ruiz’s Draw365 and Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poetry, I’ve decided to pull words every day for a year and create a poem from them. Good, bad, boring–doesn’t matter. I just need to start using my writing cells again. And if you’ve a mind to, feel free to use the words I pull to create your own poems.