Category Archives: creativity

Look What I Found!

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This week’s Discover Challenge at The Daily Post asks us to look back at our blog posts for this past year and find a way to build on or synthesize our best work of 2016.

My best work? Well, having only managed a single post for most of the months this year, the “best” of it becomes a rather short list. Nonetheless, I’ve taken on the challenge of using lines from previous posts to create a “found poem.” Here it is:

Glass Scraps

Things aren’t always what they seem.
You can’t sleep on glass, you know.
Does it matter what smashed it?
I really don’t know how it feels to sleep in a ditch,
having never done so. That I recall.

Chewing on lead… bad idea.
What? You think?
Tell that to your Scrabble companions!

Stuff seems to seek us out at every port,
clinging to us like barnacles on a boat.
Take hostas for example. You know,
those green leafy plants that don’t look like ferns.
They do have a certain je ne sais quoi about them, no?
Or maybe a coagulation of gunked up motor oil
stuck to the floor of a mechanic’s garage.
You know how that is, right?

I never goosed anything, quantum or otherwise.
Since I’m too impatient to do all of that,
that session was cut short once the rock shrapnel
began pummeling the inside lining of my kiln.
Okay, I made that last part up.
This is starting to sound like that twine theory stuff.
Much better than the exploding rock episode.

So what is the significance of all of this?
If you can’t stand the heat,
don’t touch the tip of the soldering iron.
But where’s the fun in that?

If Dart has instilled in you a crippling fear of Tiffany lamp shades,
and since that seemed boring as all get out –
well… his work here is done.

The Daily Post’s Discover Challenge: Retrospective

Chiseled Features

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Art comes in many media and creative techniques. These three faces were carved from logs with chain saws, with final touches added by chisel.

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The first two represent lumberjacks. And the third is none other than Sasquatch (Big Foot) himself.

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These large carvings are on display at Camp 18 Logging Museum in Elsie, Oregon. Photos showing a more distant view of the lumberjacks can be seen in this post on my sister blog, “What Rhymes with Stanza?”

The Daily Post weekly photo challenge: Face

A Smashing Success

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I’m going to make a hole in a window

You’re going to break a window?

Not break a window. Just put a hole in one.

So smash it, you mean.

Yes, it might look smashed.

What will you smash it with?

Does it matter what smashed it?

If you want to smash a hole in a window, you have to hit it with something.

What would you use, if you were to smash a window?

Me? I’d use a baseball. Maybe smack it hard with a bat. You could hit it from clear across a field and no one would know it was you.

People will know I smashed this window.

See, that’s why you use a baseball or something. Make it look like an accident.

So, an unfortunate baseball incident?

Exactly.

 

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“The Unfortunate Baseball Incident”

S  S is for Smashing.

Jetsam: Lightening the Load

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Flotsam, Jetsam & Lagan: sounds like a prestigious law firm, doesn’t it? Or maybe a 1960s folk rock group? But no, these terms have a more nautical theme.

I’ll let dictionary.com explain:

Flotsam — 1. the part of the wreckage of a ship and its cargo found floating on the water. 2. material or refuse floating on water. 3. useless or unimportant items; odds and ends.

Lagan — anything sunk in the sea, but attached to a buoy or the like so that it may be recovered.

Jetsam — goods cast overboard deliberately, as to lighten a vessel or improve its stability in an emergency, which sink where jettisoned or are washed ashore.

⊕⊕⊕⊕⊕

I won’t be channeling my inner pirate here; I get seasick in the bath tub if I take my eyes off the horizon. The thought of people chucking things into the ocean intentionally is also rather sickening, but I’ll save that for another post.

The point of this post is:

 Life is like a shipwreck.

Wait, that doesn’t sound quite right… Anyway, I’ll wade in with my analogy:

Sometimes we go about life having taken on a lot of unnecessary “odds and ends,” and when we get hit with – “stormy weather” shall we say — we founder and end up floating about, all wet. The “useless and unimportant” baggage we were needlessly hanging onto bobs about pointlessly in the waves nearby as we frantically dog paddle and wait for rescue. That’s flotsam.

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Sometimes we get the “ship” kicked out of us and lose our footing on dry land, but we manage to take stock of what happened and what’s important to us, and we can devise a plan for how to recover from our losses. That’s lagan.

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And then there’s jetsam, when we rid ourselves of the unnecessary baggage that’s weighing us down, impeding our progress, or endangering our stability. And having done that – and continuing to do it – we sail through situations that might otherwise have sunk us.

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I’m striving for jetsam; lightening my load of unnecessary stress, worries and material “stuff.” It’s definitely an ongoing process. Stuff seems to seek us out at every port, clinging to us like barnacles on a boat.

Okay, swabbies, I think this ship has sailed. I’m off to the galley for some chow. I suddenly have a hankering for fish and chips.

J  J is for Jetsam.