One thing about owning an old car is that it gives you a good excuse to spend hours poking around wrecking yards, archaeological sites of great interest and value as repositories of automotive truth. Having just excised two adjectives from that sentence, I’m wondering whether to put them back in and whether I should find…
Bamboo Shoots Submission for Year of the Rat -- January 2021 Contest
75 Words Sans Title
Fading upside-down at the bottom-back of the last yellow page of the steno pad I grab on my way to the couch to write my version of the 75 words the Buckaroo has mandated this time — not more, not less, but do title words count? — I find the name Steve Jones, followed by…
Bamboo Shoots breeze
A very rough first draft: ON HE RODE — Chapter Thirty-Two
To complete the Carlsbad Experience, cavewalkers are encouraged to return at sunset to watch clouds of bats emerge from the depths of orifices far beyond the gentle limits of our polite walk, their nightly maraud of the desert sky. Affirmative. I shall return, but in the meantime I’ll find a quiet place at the back…
Bamboo Shoots breeze
ON HE RODE — Chapter Thirty-One (a very rough first draft)
It’s becoming a bit obvious that I need to talk to somebody — anybody will do, anybody who will deign to put up with the likes of me. The radio might tide me over, if I could get it perking, but even at full volume there’s not a hint of static. Maybe I should get…
Bamboo Shoots Submission for Year of the Rat -- November Contest
Ahem, Aloha!
The best thing to keep in mind when you are asked to write a hundred words on any topic is that it won’t be deathless prose and that all you really need to do is keep picking them up and putting them down like a middle-distance runner, not worrying about cleverness or elegance of expression…
Bamboo Shoots breeze
ON HE RODE — Chapter Thirty
Ha-wong! Or would that be kara-whong!? Just what sound does a meteor make when it plows full-speed into hard desert rock? Anything like the Smack! of horsehide on cowhide of a Big Jim Wilson fastball to the open pocket of a catcher’s mitt? Of course I jest. It’s more like the sound of one giant…
Bamboo Shoots Submission for Year of the Rat -- October Contest
October Words
October Words (Sing to the tune of “Battle of New Orleans”.) The Buckaroo says we should take him by surprise And write whatever words we see Within our inner eye, A challenge aimed my way, it seems, like, “Catch this where you are,” A bucking knuckleball he hurls, White lightning in a jar. (Stop singing.)…
Bamboo Shoots Submission for Year of the Rat -- October Contest
Aloha Tower Clock in Covid-19 Time
(At 5:10 pm Saturday in Honolulu, Hawaii, it is 5:10 am Sunday in Paris, France), a twelve-hour parenthesis conjoining (this week’s last day with last week’s first) or vice-versa (first day of this, final day of previous, depending on whether you stand in Paris or Honolulu facing east or facing west). By all accounts, their…
Bamboo Shoots breeze
ON HE RODE — Chapter Twenty-Nine (A Rough Draft)
Lucky for me, the car never hit the bike and the ditch flattened out to cushioning undergrowth. My great black Dutch ditch-bike was a girder on wheels, impervious to bending or breaking, and, like a full-body splint, all my guts and gizzards stayed more or less securely in place while lightly skimming over the handlebars…
Bamboo Shoots breeze
ON HE RODE — Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nothing much going on botanically as far as I can tell, but the truth is, Northwest greenie that I am, I can’t tell much. Drifting along, tumbleweed’s love to the ground, etcetera sounds great from Pioneer’s Sons, but I’d sure like right now to hug a smelly, fat-barked old Douglas fir. Protection. Security. Aspiration. The…