National media actually titled the squall the Obama administration brushed off in mid-May “Scandal Week.” Wonderful. Brain cramps even infected the nation’s reputable information arbiters. What else could’ve sunk the country’s “scandal” threshold below curb height? Continue reading The Name of This Band Is Barking Heads
Mother died in January 2013. Since it was winter, I didn’t pull a Meursault. Even if I had random murderous urges and revolver handy, I couldn’t. What two strangers would be strolling on a North Atlantic beach in winter? One? Okay. But two? Please. Continue reading Cool Tours into Evening
Isn’t today’s job search akin to escaping a pitch-black labyrinth? Landing new employment challenges during prosperity. Prospective hires and potential employers are now further separated by debasing technology and muddied qualifications.
The latter can be overcome. The former fairly requires a semanticist. You know, a specialist who renders the fat around bullshit down to its bones. Continue reading Am Facile. Will Travel.
Caleb Abercrombie found Hajna’s cigarette lighter and lipstick while vacuuming out his car. The previous night she’d badgered him about their disappearance. He’d thought nothing of either then. After all, what were they but trifles?
He and Hajna had been, for absence of a more genteel term, fuck-buddies throughout the period he’d sundered reporting for teaching. Her acquiescence, their finding quick mutual satisfaction blurred his career transition.
Nowhere near serious enough to have substantive conversation, both nonetheless comfortably shared intimacies. They were happily situated in the loose expanse between promiscuity and insouciance. Until Hajna’s drug use veered into irresponsible from recreational, neither saw any need for adjustment. Continue reading Double Down
Another obscure Islamic cleric has thundered in self-righteous indignation about a young woman who didn’t know her place. A woman, who, God forfend, expressed herself without concern how it would enrage some screaming man who’d forgotten his last erection. Continue reading Woman Is a Devil
Demise ignites “One Above and One Below,” the fourth and concluding story from Reveries. Actresses Valerie Quennessen and Consuelo de Haviland inspired “One Above and One Below.”
While glimpsed from today’s vantage, events occur in the pivotal year of 1989. In this telling, Caleb Abercrombie joins Paul Knox, one of his best buds from his undergraduate years, in a European sojourn. Perhaps their travel might be seen as a last gasp of irresponsibility and irrepressibility. Continue reading One Above and One Below
“Stretched Bliss,” the third story from the Slow Boat Media e-book Reveries, begins with Caleb Abercrombie’s interior disquisition on gratification. The professor muses during a late-morning moment of post-lovemaking languor with Paz Duarte.
Long before the sweaty twining of their fevered bodies, mutual satisfaction, apparent exhaustion, and his subsequent daydreaming, they enjoyed a night on the town. Even when the attraction is based on exchanging pleasure, shouldn’t a minuet of sorts be observed?
Hours ahead of sheets getting rumpled and pillows being ruffled in the throes of fulfillment, as well as the random calls and responses of lovers, the pair observed the social component that distinguishes human carnality from lower species’ rutting. It’s the thing that sets both apart. Though just barely. Continue reading Stretched Bliss
A Graham Greene entertainment inspired the second offering from Reveries. One of his earlier efforts.
Greene’s tale features a dip into the wild side. Published in the late 1930s, readers might’ve been titillated by the louche excursion. Looser as society has become what aroused then could now pass as mild diversion. Coolly presented rather than hotly conflicted, the story lacks the agony of his subsequent, more anguished fictions. Continue reading On Display
Four brisk entertainments sharing the same theme comprise Reveries.
Caleb Abercrombie dominates the narratives. An untethered academic, the middle-aged Abercrombie fully enjoys the advantages of being a confident male whose vocation fulfills him.
Paz Duarte, Abercrombie’s considerably younger foil, sounding board, and for lack of a better term, though nonetheless apt, serves as his fuck-buddy. They also share another calling. A vertical one.
The excerpt offered by Amazon Kindle dissatisfied me. What the casually curious could’ve read were merely the first pages of the opening story, “Beyond the Classroom.”
A good start? Yup! The sample gave an interesting taste. Like parfait. But further reading rewards with greater flavor. Why, by the last page of Reveries’ concluding story let’s say a creamy fudge ripple has been whipped up.
Those who’ve already read it are probably chuckling at the reference. Good. Continue reading Beyond the Classroom
Let’s hope the president was just being cynical when he tossed in video games and movies as perhaps energizing America’s gun nut culture. Pop culture does not incite mindless violence. Simple-minded adulation? Yes. Boy bands prove that.
Fads that draw double takes such as severe serial tattooing and Marquis de Sade piercing? Certainly. Just in case carnival midways run short of, oh, geeks.
But the force behind lapses into updates of the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays”? Uh, no. Continue reading The Whole Shooting Match