My dudes, THANK YOU for all of the fun and hilarious birthday messages yesterday. It means a lot to me.
I’m happy to mark my half-century on this planet with such thoughtful friends. 🙂
Photo credit: Ominae, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.
It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead
Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.
It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.
— excerpt from W. H. Auden’s “A Walk After Dark”
So I’m a little bit of a weird guy. I had this absolutely vivid dream the night before last that I was a world-famous singer-songwriter. And I stopped into my old college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where all of my school’s deans and professors came out to greet me and invite me over for coffee. I was a celebrity.
The reason I was in Fredericksburg was to record a new version of my latest big hit at a local church — this time it would be a gospel version of the song. (Think of U2’s Rattle and Hum album.) This song, which had been my most popular ever, was called “My Girlfriend Got Eaten by a Gator.”
Here’s the thing — I SWEAR I can remember it perfectly. It’s stuck in my head. I was humming it all day yesterday. If only I knew how to write music, I’d write it down and go all the way to the Grammys.
Update — sorry for not posting a trigger warning for any unfortunate souls whose girlfriends were, tragically, eaten by gators. My bad.
Photo credit: The Howard Gospel Choir performs at Kulturama in Stockholm. US Embassy Sweden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Early birthday present from a fellow creative. Writers make the greatest friends. They know exactly what fuel you need.
And these happened along at exactly the right time, as I am making good on a vow to start writing stories again. They are currently helping me to conjure killer robots.
I am so happy today to see Spillwords Press feature my poem, “An Altogether Different Slumber.” You can read it right here.
Thanks, as always, to Dagmara K. and the rest of the editorial staff at Spillwords Press. It’s great fun being part of this vibrant creative community! 🙂
DC Comics. I noticed here that the words “The Master Race” were eliminated from the title for the French edition.
