Ikenberry Orchards, Daleville, Virginia

Botetourt County.  Those trees you see in the last photo are apple trees.

 

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Publication notice: Eric Robert Nolan to be featured via the “Poems-For-All” project.

I’m honored today to share some terrific news — four samples of my writing will be featured via Richard Hansen’s unique “Poems-For-All” project in California.  As the video below shows, Mr. Hansen produces miniature “books” of poetry that are about the size of business cards.  They can then be distributed randomly.

Here’s the description on the Facebook page for Poems-For-All: “They’re scattered around town — on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger’s back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. To be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.”

The poems selected were “Consciousness Haiku” and the first stanza of “Confession.”  (Mr. Hansen suggested it worked fine as a standalone poem.)  “Confession” first appeared at Dead Beats Literary Blog in 2013, and was then featured last year by Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine.

In addition, Mr. Hansen selected my 100-word horror story, “There in the Bags,” as well as my entries for the popular online Six-Word-Sci-Fi Story Challenge.  (He also publishes micro-fiction in the “little book” format.)

This is such a cool, unique project, and I’m grateful to be able to participate.

For more information on Poems-For-All, check out the video below.  Or you can visit the blog for the project here: https://poems-for-all.com/.

 

Botetourt County, Virginia

A pal of mine gave me the grand tour.  She’s entirely sweet about putting up with my touristy picture-taking.

Note the mighty bobcat that I bravely confronted.

Pictures absolutely cannot do this place justice.

 

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(They’re generally more congenial anyway.)

When I want an intelligent answer on a national security question, do I trust Sean Spicer?

I’d rather trust the Spice Girls.

 

Midnight Existential Angst (Revisited)

I wrote this two years ago today.  It’s truer now than then.

Midnight existential angst.  It is always at its apex when, in silence and under cover of darkness, one day supplants another.  Sleep recedes, drawing back like the tide of an ever quickening, warm ocean.

Freud wrote that we are driven by two basic needs: the sex urge and the desire to be great.  Is it a sign of advancing age that the latter eclipses the former?

When I was young, I chased young women.  But at midnight now my mind will chase the racing, red, flame-bright hare of purpose, that year by year gains distance from me with its burning slim legs, as the years ahead themselves grow fewer.

 

 

I’m supposed to be eating healthier.

But I just got back from shopping, and I’m pretty sure I bought ALL the Taco Bell.

I’ve occasionally run pictures of me on this blog, and, I swear to you, I am carefully endeavoring to hide my giNORmous pot belly.  I look like I’m pregnant.  I look like I have a beer belly, and I haven’t had a beer in years.  I look like my “spirit animal” is a pot-bellied pig.

I might just ask for help from the Internet community.  I might publish my cell phone number on this blog and on Facebook, and just ask everyone to call me at all hours of the day and night, and just scream at me to “STOP EATING SUGAR AND FATTY FOODS!!” And then just hang up.  That’ll teach me.

This madness has got to stop.

Also … you people could also scream at me to do my laundry on a timely basis, and to stop being such a prick about people’s religions.  (I could use some mellowing out.)

 

 

 

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“When you see a superior man …”

When you see a superior man, then seek to equal him; when you see an inferior man, search yourself for his faults.

— Confucius

 

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WALKER LANE.

A friend of mine lives on this street in Salem, Virginia.

She says the rents are dirt cheap, but it sucks having to keep the windows boarded up to keep the zombies out.

Can you imagine if the cross street was named “Grimes Avenue?”  That would be F%*#ing EPIC.

 

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“The Door,” by W. H. Auden

“The Door,” (Part I of “The Quest” by W. H. Auden)

Out of it steps our future, through this door
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.

Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.

We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made

Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.

 

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Photo credit: By Tim Green from Bradford (Door, King’s Manor, York) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers