The Post-Christmas Ceremony
Double up on armloads of toilet paper,
It’s time for the post Christmas toilet ceremony!
We’ll all rush to our separate homes
Get naked
Sit on our toilets
And void our regrets.
Sarah
The Broken Purse
Some kind of a weird noir parody. Best read with a sleazy saxophone solo playing in the background, because that’s how it got written.
I can feel this seedy bar etching itself into the backs of my eyelids. Once you’ve been in a bar like this, you can never really leave. Smoke from the lungs of a hundred scumbags saturates your soul, and then it seeps out of your pores for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter how clean you get or how freshly pressed your suit; good honest folks can still smell it, and wrinkle their noses when you walk by.
She knew I was looking her way. Animals like her have a sixth sense for these things.
Well, I tried not to think about it. But then she sidles on over to me and starts purring like a kitten.
“Buy me a drink,” she says.
“Baby,” I says, “I’ll buy a dame like you a whole bottle.”
So we get to talking. Turns out she’s from Maine. Land of the lobsters, I say. She says nobody talks like that and I don’t know jack shit about Maine.
As we talk I get to studying her face. You can read some faces just like a book. Where they’ve been, what they’ve seen. Behind those velvet eyes lay a Pandora’s box of trouble. She’d seen more than most, lost more. She had a low speaking voice, the kind you had to really listen to hear. And a slow motion walk, like she carried in her hips the watery swells of the great lakes. Maine. Nobody ever leaves Maine. It’s too good there.
She tells me she’s been shopping, that she bought a new purse. That the strap broke today. She looks at me with those deep black eyes and my heart split into twenty pieces of silver.
“I’ll fix your purse, sweetheart,” I says to her. And I stretch out my hand.
She hands me the purse. Charming the way she tied it together. A perfect square knot, not a loose strap of leather anywhere. An organized woman.
Yeah, I offered to fix her purse. But I wasn’t playing straight with her. I didn’t know the first thing about sewing. But I knew something about knots. I knew about tight places. Ah, she had a dress on so tight, it could strangle a python.
I sneak myself a peek into her purse and I see a shiny wallet, a set of keys, lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara, and $300 in cold hard cash.
Yeah, I’m a lousy guy, and I love a beautiful woman with sad eyes, but I ain’t a sucker. I tell you she had a contact list in her phone that was a mile long, all of them Johns.
“Sweetheart,” I says. “It’s been a pleasure. I’ll fix this for you in a jiffy, just gotta run to the car.”
She looked kinda troubled when I said that. “Wait,” she says.
I get up and I move fast. She’s got too much of the Great Lakes in her, those rolly hips balanced on high heels couldn’t get any speed. She says something at my back, I think it was, “he’s got my purse! You son of a bitch!”
A couple of heroes try to stop me but I hit em right where their weight settled and knock em down.
Yeah. I am a son of a bitch. I’m a fast son of a bitch. And no one will ever catch up to me.
I made a choice that night. Sometimes, when I’m in bed, my thoughts come sneaking in through the crack of light under the door. I close my eyes and I see the bar again, and I see the girl from Maine with the velvet eyes. And when I look at the tattoo those three hundred dollars got me, I wonder if it was all worth it. A Woody Woodpecker caricature lasts a long time in ink. But a kiss from a woman like that, maybe that’s what forever tastes like.
Wrapping paper shreds
Wrapping paper shreds
Exploded packaging and
Happy hugs, chatter
Each left with a little sack of
Their own to take home.
A hundred tiny lights shine
Gentle illumination
Everyone’s smiling
In pools of mixing color.
Santa is watching.
Hugs all around us.
Life has slowed down for today.
Have some more egg nog.
I almost forgot
To get out the apple pie!
Let me help you with that.
Thank you.
Cozy Kitchen Poem and Evil Cat Journal
At 5:30 Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Satan himself breaking into the bedroom. Kato kitty had seen another cat outside the window, which lent him evil feelings, put a crack in his pure soul, and allowed the devil to possess him.
I’m not sure what exactly I heard but I actually woke up screaming. I’m not an easy girl to scare but oh my god he got me good, and whatever I felt, Don felt it times three. Needless to say, he wasn’t allowed to haunt the bedroom anymore; he was liable to eat any one of us in this state. I got him in the kitty equivalent of a full Nelson put him in the garage until the possession had passed.
What is it about a kitchen.
Warm and cozy
Oven on
Skillet toasting
The smell of butter and onions
Or homemade bread
Or chocolate chip cookies
Puts its arm around your shoulders
And plants a warm kiss on your cheek.
The kitchen chairs are rarely the most comfortable
But it doesn’t matter
Everyone is too happy to care.
Talking, tasting, drinking, joking
Home is where the hostess is.
Deep down, we’re all like-and-follow whores
A friend asked me about getting more likes and followers, and I drafted this in response. It’s a little summary of things I’ve picked up since I started blogging.
I figured it would be worth sharing with you all, too. Maybe there’ll be something in this list that you never knew.
- Content
- Find the thing you enjoy writing/posting the most, and stick with it. Whatever you want your site to be, there will be an audience for it somewhere. If you enjoy writing it, it’ll be an enjoyable read. The thing that comes easiest to you is most likely your strength.
- Honesty is key. People respond to the humanity of others. People love to read about people.
- Titles should be succinct, searchable, intriguing.
- Tag your posts with every possible search term. It’s OK to go ballistic on this, especially if you choose to hide the tags so they don’t clutter your site.
- Brief content is more quickly read and processed, and gets more likes. You can spam the hell out of people with one-liners, and they don’t seem to mind.
- When you create a website, you are fostering a little culture of your own. Whatever your content, likeminded people will follow your site. Whether or not you write weightier content or fluffy content is up to you; go with your gut. You’ll make weightier or fluffier friends, so choose wisely what you want your friends to weigh.
- Consistency
- Post consistently. This is major. Consistent readers want consistent writers, and you want consistent readers. It doesn’t matter if it’s every day, every week, or every month, so long as you deliver on the same day each time.
- Write consistently. Choose a theme for your site and stick to it. Your readers get more comfortable once they know what to expect. If you have a variety of interests, consider organizing them into a consistent pattern. For example, you could do a real life post on Monday, a song post on Wednesday, and a quote on Friday. If your interests are too disparate, consider maintaining different sites for each.
- It takes time to build an audience. Don’t give up, don’t slack off. Schedule posts ahead of time if you need a break.
- Marketing
- The more links there are to your content, the more searchable your work will be online. This means the more time you spend being active online (commenting, tweeting, FB group posting, etc) the more people will find you.
- Comment on other pages. If you consistently give feedback, you’ll make friends, and they’ll come back to your blog and comment back. This is especially rewarding, but you will find yourself investing a lot of time in reading others’ posts. It’s a question of what kind of an effort and reward you’re looking for. You get back whatever you put in.
- Take advantage of writing contests, prompts, word-of-the-day, etc. Readers who are curious about responses to the prompt will be driven to your site.
- Search for websites related to your favorite topics and make comments on their pages too. Don’t pander for likes, but an informed, thoughtful, or witty comment followed by your URL might get some attention.
- Follow the trends. If you truly want your site to be big, then take a look at which of your posts got the biggest responses, and lean your content that way. Be very careful with this tip: if you follow the trends too closely, you could end up a successful blogger, spend all your time blogging about blogging, and lose your soul.
- You don’t want to be popular anyway
- The popular kids are the ones who don’t care about being popular, right? It’s a catch-22. If you don’t want to be popular, and don’t try to be popular, then people will be drawn to your confidence. You’ll post what you want, and your work will have integrity for it, and people will be drawn to that, too.
- Have FUN! There’s no point if you don’t have fun. Odds are you won’t be famous. But you will learn lots, and you’ll make friends, and you’ll have a creative outlet to be proud of. If you’re good, might get your site to pay for itself. If you’re downright amazing, you might get your site to pay for your sandwiches.
