Month: December 2020

THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING (De Avond Is Ongemak)
by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison
(Winner of Booker International 2020)
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: 2/5
NOT RECOMMENDED AT ALL.

…discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.

The literary community generally crowns the infamous title of the most disgusting piece of prose to Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’. I read Guts. Its puke-inducing horrendous. Well, Guts is Disney’s Scrooge McDuck to this monster I am reviewing now. I mean it.

First thing first. Rijneveld identifies as a non-binary individual and uses the pronoun as ‘they’. Alright. I generally abide by that. Here I wont. I am not going to play along with a person’s social demand who herself do not think twice to violate the most basic social norm: child sexual abuse. So, lets call a spade a spade. Rijneveld is woman I am going to refer her as…

Catherine …. Yesterday may have been a great, fantastic, unbelievable, sky high day for Tabitha, starting early, but in the afternoon it ramped up for Catty.

Catty attends an anime club once a week. She helps out at Comic-Con and other festivals, and plays cards. She is now starting to get into cosplay and costume making (she made Tabby’s Kingdom Hearts’ Gloves). So this is where she is at.

Power Rangers started on television when she was 18 months old, and quite honestly Lisa and I loved the show. She was a Power Ranger girl. she couldn’t get enough of it. We got her toys and videos and her collection grew from there. She has every season on dvd, multiple team sets, Zords etc. She has even moved onto the Japanese originals.

A story we love to tell is about when Alex was born. We hated the maternity hospital and…

MJ has been wrapping Christmas gifts all morning. I can feel winter in the air. The days are getting shorter…just the way that I like them! Vintage Christmas songs are playing and I am in a holiday frame of mind… MJ and I were asked to light the candles on our Advent wreath for our Zoom church service and we had our red sweaters on and the wreath between us on the table. The lighting of the candles during the season of Advent has always been a special joy of mine over my 22 years at First Presbyterian. Each year a different family or couple or individual… lights the candles and also reads some comments appropriate to the season. I have discovered through out my christian walk that the more I know my fellow members of the congregation…the more connected I feel to our church.

Campus Woods was resplendent with Christmas Ornaments this afternoon! It had been a few days since I had walked there and I was amazed at how the adornment of the trees had multiplied! The temperature today is in the lower 50’s and many Christmas walking revelers were taking advantage of the late fall warm-up. I […]

Jingle Bells! — The Jazz Man

As I was waiting on Jonathon to join me, on his lunch hour, for a festive campus woods stroll..I noticed a couple of folks furtively doing something with the random Christmas ornaments that had been hung on the trees along the path. I have been walking the path for 42 years and for many of those years persons, unknown, have been decorating the trees along the paved walking route through the woods. Not long into December you will begin to see a Christmas ornament here and there and the lovingly decorated foliage adds tremendously to the holiday spirit of the woods travelers. Soon after Christmas the ornaments begin to disappear. There is one pine tree that is usually fully adorned with Christmas Tree decorations. Last year it was festooned with berries and popcorn. As Jonathon and I passed the two diligent workers the young lady glared at me with the…

Christmas Eve had finally arrived! Parker woke up to her dreams of the numerous colorfully wrapped gifts that were under her Christmas tree. It was a nine foot live fir tree and she and her father and brother and sister had hiked into the woods to cut it down and drag it to their staton […]

The Abduction of Christmas! — The Jazz Man

Earthy Scent rises
with the early morning mist
mushrooms and moss spring to life

In response to Patrick Jennings Pic and a Word Challenge #249: Rise

All Hallow’s Eve
My shape shifting
In moon shadow

In response to Patrick Jennings Pic and a Word Challenge #250: Fear

The meandering pattern
of rivers and veins
branches and horizons repeating
the grace of symmetry
found in nature
where function
overrules perfection
Fractured fractals
in balanced harmony
sing the universal code of
mathematical probability
bringing imperfect beauty
to life

In response to Patrick Jennings Pic and a Word Challenge #251: Mathematics