March 2nd, 2007

The next Post Of The Week will be announced on Sunday evening.
Please note that nominations for next week cannot be accepted until then.

1. Acerbia: Legacy

The day he died was like letting out a breath you have held in so long that the taste in your mouth has gone stale. Your eyes are half closed and your lungs squeeze. You expel the air like an evil spirit and as the muscles ache the feeling is like cramp inside. You realise this is how it feels to be empty inside; the next breath won’t fill you up again. Nothing will, not for a long time, not until you adjust to the loss.

2. AngryBlackBitch: Retro…

“Why did she wear that?” …as if her wearing that was a deliberate statement to you…an insult…a “fuck you and your future chil’ren so I decided to wear this shade of yellow just to offend you” kind of slap to the face.

“Oh my Gaaaaaaawd, did you see her hair?” …as if it’s 1983 and celebrities are living out some twisted John Hughes meets Heathers nightmarish popular girl from hell social reinforcement fantasy.

3. Edvard Moonk: The Smoking Creature From the Black Lagoon

‘My lord, the defendant claims that quitting his beloved cigarettes is an impossibility at present, on account of it interfering with the thinking processes involved in the writing of his blog’, the last word uttered with half-shut eyes and the mouth of someone who has just found a pubic hair in his sandwich.

4. No Method, Just Madness: I have my reasons for believing I’m alive in part because my mother would have killed me if I’d died …

For a few, blissfully unaware moments, the fact that we were quite suddenly unable to touch down anymore seemed interesting, rather than dangerous, to me. I turned toward the shore to look back at the piece of driftwood where we’d set our things…my bright orange sarong was now merely a blurry speck of color roughly 40 feet away. Hmm, would you look at that? I thought.

5. Reluctant Nomad: The fucking cheek of it!

Then, on Sunday night, I heard screeching sounds. They sounded like fighting noises but they could have been the noises of mouse revelry. How does one distinguish between the two? I’ve no idea. But there was definitely more than one mouse in the kitchen.

6. The Other Side of the Mountain: … ay, there’s the rub

The Talk swiftly devolved into an extended rant on The Evils of Masturbation. According to him, it was crime so disgusting and heinous, it was roughly equivalent to smearing yourself with human excrement and going on a kitten-killing rampage. I will be forever grateful to my dear ol’ dad for turning what had previously been an innocent pleasure into a guilty one.

7. Uffish Thoughts: An Undignified Burial

Up the elevator I went in my big red Arkansas hoodie, “Bad Kitty” pajama bottoms, and sock monkey slippers, the traditional rodent disposal garments of my people.

8. Unreliable Witness: Strange Day (second in a never-ending series)

Despite the somewhat unusual situation, for the first time since this - for want of a better term - Missing Leg Business started, I no longer felt like I was a patient or some extraordinary medical case. Everyone was very friendly, down-to-earth and resolutely non-medical.

9. Wyndham the Triffid: The Cold Shoulder

It’s quite unnerving when I whirl around on my heels to discover nobody there. You’re probably thinking trapped nerve, he’s only got a trapped nerve, and you’d be right. In a few weeks it will have ironed itself out and I’ll forget it ever happened at all.

But it’s difficult, every so often, not to attribute it to some stranger power, as if some modest supernatural force, fed up with all the histrionics of that dread harpy of Death, the Banshee, has opted for a more discreet introduction to yours truly.