injaynesworld "Time and Again..."

This week I'm participating in the Trifecta challenge to write 33 words based on the photo image by Eirik Solheim seen here.  Each slice of the photo compilation is a different day of the year, taken from the same location.

http://eirikso.com/2011/01/04/one-year-in-one-image/

Take hold...

Journey with me through time

Ever changing, ever the same

The soul, infinite, travels through many lifetimes

Each a season unto its own

Birth and death but portals for its passage

To learn about the process by which this magnificent image was created, watch the video below.




To see what other writers did with prompt, visit the Trifecta link-up page.

And please, do leave a comment.  They go so well with wine and cheese.  :)

injaynesworld we are "Four Years Old..."

Four years ago this week, I bumbled my way onto the blogging scene with absolutely no idea of what I was doing or why except that someone told me if I wrote something and published it on the Internet, people might read it.

“Is there any money in it?” I asked.

“BWAHAHAHA!!” they replied.

I took that as a “no.”

“Four years from now will I have written nearly 400 posts, published a book of essays that at least a dozen people were arm-twisted into buying, and made friends with some of the most amazing readers and writers I’ve ever known who continue to bless me with their friendship?” I pursued.

“You’ll be lucky if you last six months.”   

“Well, then.  Let’s do it!”  And injaynesworld was born.

You’d think after four years I would have tired of the same old look of the place, but I’m a Taurus and we don’t go in much for change.  Besides, if it got all gussied up, you might come to expect more from the actual content.  I suppose a new profile picture wouldn’t be too much to ask, but on a good day with ample makeup and perfect lighting I can still look like that, and we all know how hard it is to get a decent photo of ourselves.  Nope.  There will be no changes around here.

The rest of the world is changing too goddamn much and too goddamn fast as it is.   Just when you find something you like – BAM!  The “new and improved” version is out to part you from your money.  Be honest.  How many iPhones have you gone through?

On Union Street in San Francisco is a restaurant called “Perry’s.”  It’s been there with the same blue-and-white checked tablecloths, serving exactly the same-tasting Eggs Benedict, bread sticks and Ramos Fizz cocktails (with nutmeg sprinkled on top) since I first started going there in 1970.  I can’t begin to tell you how this comforts me in an age where there is so little you can still count on.  

And so it will be here injaynesworld “… serving up the same delights and diatribes since 2009.”

Thanks for coming by.  It wouldn’t have been any fun without you. 

injaynesworld there are “Grammar Goofs That Gall Me…”

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because it is my long-held belief that should this once-great nation fall, it will not be due to economic implosion, terrorist attacks, or even global warming.  It will be due to bad grammar.  We will have finally dissolved into a giant puddle of imbeciles, unable to even keep from soiling ourselves, who will be scorned and isolated by the rest of the world.  It’s coming.  Trust me. 

I’m not talking about the often misplaced comma or mind-boggling semi-colon.   I mean, really.  A semi-colon.  What anal-retentive thought that up?   I’m talking about the language we use every day when we talk to each other.   Remember talking?    It was popular before the invention of the Internet. 

Maybe, as a writer, I’m more sensitive to the use of language.  I realize that sounds elitist as hell, but really, there are some verbal turds out there that should offend anyone with an education above the third grade and not living in Mississippi.

For example, the past tense for drag is dragged not drug, as in “Look what the cat dragged in.”   Dragged is a verb.  Drug is a noun.   Well, now I take that back.  Drug can be a verb, but only when referring to the administering of drugs as in, “Did you drug your date?”  But mostly it’s a noun.   Which brings us back to the proverbial cat, and while we often attribute to cats strange and wondrous powers, in truth they are incapable of drugging anything.   Yet turn on any talk show or newscast and you will see people who should know better misusing the word “drug” all the time and, because of the power of television, it then spreads like an epidemic of head lice.   

Or take the simple concept of singular and plural:   “Is” and “are.”   I can’t hear the sentence, “There’s photos of Anthony Weiner’s dick on the Internet” without weeping, and not because we’ve all been subjected to pictures of his pathetic private parts.   “There are photos” or the contraction, “There’re.”   What’s so damn hard about that?    No pun intended. 

And don’t even get me started on, “I should have went to the store.”  It’s “I should have gone to the store.”   Were you raised in a barn?

I feel much better now knowing I’ve done my part to protect this nation from, if not outright destruction, certainly worldwide ridicule.  If I could only rid the country of Rush Limbaugh. 

I was compensated by Grammarly for this post because yes, I can be bought.  Any lingering grammatical errors were entirely intentional and fall under the category of artistic license.  Yeah.  Me and Hemmingway.  That’s right, baby.

injaynesworld "Today Is All There Is..."

I bloom for one day and then I’m gone.   For only one short day am I to feel the sun upon my face.  Imagine…

Look at how beautiful I was created.   See all that I offer up so freely to the world.   For hummingbirds, bees and tiny insects I provide nourishment and a place to land and rest, while for others who happen by it is their soul that is nourished just by the sight of me. 

Yet, for many, my appearance and passing matter not, so busy are their minds fretting over things that may never happen, creating conflicts that don’t exist, and living in a virtual world while missing so many miracles of their own.

I wonder if they would spend their lifetime any differently if they knew it was as finite as mine.

This beauty blooms in my garden once a year in July.  I’ve been fortunate to witness it for the two years that I have lived here.    

injaynesworld it's "The Writer..."

The lace curtain rose and fell like a single wing upon the gentle morning breeze as she sat at her desk looking out on the serene little valley still shrouded in clouds.  A gentle rain had come in the  night, “Camelot” rain she called it, and the earth, parched from an assault of intense summer heat, seemed to exhale with relief.

It was unusually quiet, as if time had simply stopped in place, waiting for humanity to cease its endless disharmony, withholding that which we all seek more of until we learn to appreciate that which we have. 

She wished for more faith in mankind, but the years had taught her that knowledge and wisdom were not the same, and that age could just as easily further ignorance as bring enlightenment. 

As patches of clear blue began to weave their way through the dense gray cover, her hands moved across the keyboard, “A mind clouded in fear will reject everything unlike itself.”

From the Five Sentence Fiction prompt “Wisdom.”

injaynesworld "Bang! Bang! You're Dead..."

I’ve lived by myself for most of my life and am well aware of all the news stories of violent crime against women.  I have even had friends who were raped in their own bedrooms by intruders in the night.   Yet, I have never once had the desire to own a gun; just the opposite, in fact.   You see, I fear that the temptation to use it would be too great.   

While I’m a pretty mellow person now, there were years in my life when the needle on my mood meter wavered somewhere between highly-irritated and righteously pissed off, and shooting someone – anyone – would have felt damn good.   So, maybe I couldn’t shoot the head of the network who had put the kibosh on my latest script, but I could damn well shoot the motherfucker who just cut me off and took the parking space I’d been eyeing.

 

Even today, I wouldn’t trust myself to be carrying.   Say someone approaches me with a gun and demands my handbag.  Like hell I’m handing over my Spring 2013 Michael Kors, so I pull out my gun.  Now the guy who really only wanted my stuff has no choice but to shoot my stupid ass and, in all likelihood, he’s going to get his shot off before I do.   

And I consider myself to be above average on the national intelligence scoreboard – a low bar, I know, but still… 

I don’t believe that every single citizen is mature, reasonable, or medicated enough to exercise their “right to bear arms,” those of us with impulse issues, for example.  Or that more guns on our streets make anyone any safer.   I don’t want to go into a bar for a drink where everyone’s packing heat.   Drunks do not have great judgment.  

Though I absolutely believe in self-defense, I’m real iffy about how that applies if you are the one who started the confrontation in the first place.   In the State of Florida, you can stalk a kid walking in your neighborhood whose looks you don’t like, get out of your car and confront him, and then when a fight ensues claim you felt “threatened,” shoot to death the kid that you picked the fight with and no foul.

In auto accident law, there is such a thing as “contributory negligence,” whereby you can be held partially responsible in some scenarios, even when you’re the one on the receiving end of a crash.  In the above scenario – oh, why be coy?  In the Zimmerman case, this would likely translate to manslaughter which, in my humble opinion, would have been a reasonable verdict.  But in America, it would seem that we value our cars more than we value human life.  Unless, of course, that life is still in the womb, and then it’s sacred. 

We’ll never know why Trayvon Martin was walking through that upscale community at that time of night, looking at houses he would never be invited into, because he was dead by the time the police arrived to ask.

I don’t mean to make light of any of the recent events in Florida.   What has occurred there is not only a tragedy for those involved, but the Pandora’s Box that’s been opened can only lead to more of such cases.   While the “Stand Your Ground” law was not technically used in the court case, it would be hard to believe that its influence didn’t emboldened Zimmerman in his actions.   This law is so subjective that it puts more people at risk than it protects and has created a prosecutorial nightmare.   So please.  Do not allow me to have a gun.  I may decide that I “feel threatened” by you, blow you away and who is going to prove otherwise?

Oh, and I’d avoid doing my Christmas shopping on “Black Friday” in the hanging-chad state if I were you.