El Gringoqueño

All a man needs out of life is a place to sit ‘n’ spit in the fire.

Page 21 of 51

Forgotten Warrior

July 14, 2009 /

“Mira, look,” the young man whispered, “It is Jose Maria. Quick quick, get out of my way, stupid, I do not want to look at him.” The young man pushed his compatriot ahead of him in a hurried jumble, spilling some of the roots he had gathered in his arms.

“Ya, look what you have made me do,” he said as he stopped to gather his food. The first man looked back with a quick smirk at his good fortune, and made his getaway.

Tiedra, in Castilla y León, was cold this time of year, nestled as it was between nothing on the plane and another great nothing for as far as the eye could see. The flat barren landscape seemed to tuck up into itself seeking a lower profile. Let the merciless wind find the taller structures to lash, it seemed to say. The land did not stand up. It had never stood up. The land cowered beneath the low stone structures, and the winds sweeping through sent the heat scuttling away over stone floors, skipping and whistling through cracks in the thresholds. Overlooking the pueblo, just a few hundred feet away out on a brown grassy little hill, higher than any other structure, stood a church.

The young man was happy to have avoided talking to Jose Maria. He found him disagreeable. Jose Maria traveled through town every morning and spent time, from sun up to mid day, on his knees in that little church with the wind that blew through it. The young man had been in that church many times for misa, but that was different.  The church was tolerable when they were huddled together with the people of the pueblo. He would always find a warm seat by a fat old woman.

He never saw the old man on Sundays, though. The old man must have been pious, one could only suppose. You would have to be to spend so much time on your knees. The young man could hardly stand more than five minutes on that hill in the winter, let alone hours on the hard stone floor. He shuddered, “Cold.” and crossed his arms, pulling his woolen cowl tighter.

“You bastard,” his friend called chuckling, “I almost had to talk to the viejito.” He punched his friend in the arm.

“Forget him. He is old and crazy and does not mean anything to me. He is probably a very bad man, or at least has done something terrible. He goes there for penance. Why else? He has no wife, no children, no sick family to pray for. That I can understand. Surely God would listen to such piety. But this one… no, I would not want to talk to him.”

“But then what? Why doesn’t he go to the priest for absolution? Why doesn’t he buy an indulgence? I have seen that he has some money. He is not a poor man. Wouldn’t it be better to rid himself of this ritual on his knees by paying some money?”

“Who knows such a thing? I do not. He probably just does not want to part with his money. He will wait out his death, perhaps.”

“When? When the bastard is one hundred years old? Would he even remember what he did? The old senile bastard.”

They both chuckled supposing a predicament whereby one would pay penance for sins but have forgotten them. Would not God, they supposed, have to absolve one by default? How could God hold you accountable for sins that you have forgotten. So many childhood sins were never confessed, but they were forgotten. To attempt to confess them now would surely have resulted in another sin, one of speaking falsehoods. Did God have a list? Would he make them guess?

Did the old man remember his sins? Maybe not. Maybe he was just an old miser, clinging to his treasure. He would not pay, but would wring atonement from his bent and withered knees. Had he not suffered enough, though? Surely it was enough, no?

And they arrived where they had begun. Obviously he had not suffered enough, so he must have done something truly terrible, horrible.

They could not forgive him for the thing they could not name.

“Bah, it is all the same to me.  I don’t want any of it on me.”

“Forget that old son of a bitch. No one even knows. I will bet even he doesn’t. Just forget it.”

And they continued on their way toward their homes, to feed their pigs, tend to their fowl, and check their stores. The winters were usually hard, but not terribly long, and come spring they would hunt again.

Change is Simple

July 8, 2009 /

This is a little short story I wrote today based on a prompt.  Alex Keegan runs a boot camp and writing group on Facebook (transplanted from the old Compuserve days), and I’ve been participating by writing at least 500 words a day.  I ran dry with my project, so I used one of his prompts to come up with this.  Read it through, and I’ll tell you what the line was in the comments.

The clinic was as clean and bright as
any. The little room met all the needs of the waiting folk, yet
didn’t encroach. What was it that they said in their literature, he
wondered? Ah, yeah, motherfucking feng shie shit or some goddamned
nonsense. The paint was bright, but not too bright, whites were more
like b­one, and the soft greens were of a child’s room. But there
were no children, Frank mused, not yet, anyway.

He sat down and grabbed a magazine from
the table and thumbed through it, waiting for his name to be called.
Frank was neither very young, nor very old, but his face was
strained, tired, and his jacket weighed down on his shoulders as he
slouched in the chair. He was tired all the time, no energy. He
was a rusty old engine before his time.

He thumbed through the glossy magazine
with the beautiful, impossibly thin brunette. “Ten Tips to get
Ready for Swimsuit Season!” the title screamed in sixteen point
Helvetica and below that, “lose 10 pounds in two weeks.” There
were beautiful people inside, airy girls, with legs splayed wide in a
loose jangle, knees twisted in, and bitting their lower lips. They
threw up their arms in others, kicking sand or water, laughing,
twisting, fixing on him. They didn’t have a care in the world. A
smooth fashionably disheveled young man flashed perfect white teeth
and flexed tan muscular arms. Those arms, that chest – they belonged
on another planet, the fuck. Maybe I’ll start working out. Maybe
I’ll finally be able to keep it up and make some progress.

Another page asked him if he felt
moody, if he might have some disorder. Ask your doctor, the page
implored. Another goddamned ad, he thought. There were more
advertisements than articles. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the
difference. Scratch that, it didn’t make a difference, they were the
same shit.

Pharmaceutical ads read like clinical
reports from the New England Journal of Medicine, always adding the
helpful “get a medical opinion.” As if that would make a
difference, he thought. Ask your fucking doctor. Motherfucker’s
probably in the back pocket of the salesgirl in the short skirt.
Give me what I want doc. I need some fucking drugs. Modern doctors
were goddamned drug pushers, that’s all – put us all on a
merry-go-round, an’ collect money on every spin.

Actual articles aways seemed to be
pushing something too. Feed the writer with your agenda, and then
write a “solid” article. Bah! Who are they kidding, The ads are
ads, and the articles are too. Guess everybody needs to make a buck,
though, and he shrugged and tossed the magazine back on the little
table. It opened up, some of its pages spilling over the edge,
dragging it, slithering to the ground in a heap. He sighed, knelt
down, and retrieved it, cursing to himself softly.

Maybe he just needed some drugs after
all. Maybe he just needed a drink. Weren’t the solutions all easy?
Isn’t that what they were selling, easy solutions. He was no
different, and he was here to get things fixed. Easy. He pondered
the notion of easy. Was easy uncomplicated or did it just mean with
little effort. Effort is something he was going to have to deal
with. It took effort, lots of it, so yes, he decided, it would not
be easy. It would just be uncomplicated. Not like now anyway.

“Mr. Koloski?” said a young woman
in a smart uniform, “They are ready for you.”

“But are you, hon?” he
joked.

“Oh, Mr. Koloski, you’re much too
young for me,” and she giggled. “Maybe in a few years, hmm?
Sign here, and proceed to room 9.” And she handed him a tablet with
a place to scan his thumb.

Frank shuffled down the hall, leaving
black scuff marks in the newly waxed tiles. He turned the knob to
room 9 and entered.

“Hello, Mr. Koloski,” the doctor
said, smiling, “Welcome, again. Let’s just get a few formalities
out of the way, shall we? Do you have further instructions before
we do the trace? As you know, legally, and practically, the rights
of your person will be terminated at the moment of the procedure.
All we will have to maintain continuity is your trace and this
document. Carefully consider any instructions you have for us, and
rest assured that they will be followed in the strictest confidence
and faithfulness.”

“If possible I would like to be born
C-section this time. My shrink told me that my difficult birth…
left me blocked.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “Time
before that, I didn’t get into a good school. Limited my career.
Yes, I have decided, I would like to have a less traumatic birth this
time. They tell me I’ll have it easier.”

My Choice – A Logical Fallacy

July 8, 2009 /

I’ve written about it before, and I thought that was all I could say on the topic, but leave it to recent events to tweak my logic receptors off the charts.  There are several logical fallacies on either side, granted, but the ones that irritate me the most are pro-choice.  

From an article in the Washington Post (online) on why this soon-to-be doctor would be performing abortions in her practice  (go ahead and read it, I’ll wait):

I was 14 years old when that clinic was bombed, killing a police officer and spraying Emily’s body full of hot nails and shrapnel. Back then, I lived in a small Alabama town, went to church every Sunday and was adamantly opposed to abortion…

"That’s horrible," I reply,  "Such a tragedy for that poor woman who was a victim of an abortion clinic bombing.  There are certainly some wackos out there.  I hope they rot in jail for their crimes.  But I have to ask, why does this make you think performing abortions is a good thing?  So some wacko bombed an abortion clinic, and you said to yourself, "I’m convinced, let’s do some abortions."  I ask for rationality’s sake, because I’m not following your argument."

I read the entire article.  Ms. Love seems to be a thoughtful person, a decent person.  I’m not knocking her intentions, nor her conscience.  I’m kickin’ it to her logic.  Here’s another gem:

One friend begged me to help her concoct a legitimate-sounding excuse — painful or irregular periods, say — for why she needed to be on birth control. No one could know the real reason: She was sexually active and didn’t want to get pregnant.

Her point, using the ever helpful friend scenario, was that people were kept ignorant by the bible thumping masses, that they didn’t know about their own biological reproductive systems, that they couldn’t get the pill or condoms.  First, I don’t think in this day and age, that these anecdotal stories should be the basis of public policy, but again I’d like to know what this has to do with abortion? 

And finally:

It wasn’t until I spent time in ultrasound rooms during a research job in graduate school that I began to see late-trimester abortions in a very different light. In one case, the patient’s baby had just been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. The high likelihood was that it wouldn’t survive after birth for more than a few minutes. As long as the baby remained in her mother’s womb, however, she would live. I asked the physician what this woman’s options were. The answer was, not many. She could choose to continue the pregnancy, but then she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own. She was past the point where she could legally terminate the pregnancy in Alabama.

Instead of evaluating these issues on a case by case basis, she’d be more willing to say that now she favors late term abortions.  I’d wager that late term abortions are rare and heart wrenching in any scenario, but here we have another logical fallacy, or at least a conclusion being made with a very small data set, and it leaves out something very important.

The child.

The little baby was forgotten, malformed or not, wanted or not, imperfect or not.  That little baby was everything it was going to be at the moment of conception.  You hear that?  Conception.  It’s not magic, breath of God, type stuff.  It’s simple biology.

When my children were born (all four of them), they were locked in at the moment of conception.  Jaimito became Jaimito at the point.  Olaia became Olaia.  Javier, loud as he is, was Javier.  And little sweet Asier was nothing more and nothing less than Asier at the moment of conception.  What else could they have been?  Somebody show me how that little embryo could have turned out to be something other than what it was unless someone intervened? 

I have the benefit of hindsight, of course.  I didn’t know what my children would be like until they were born, but that doesn’t change their history.  Just because I was not privy to their uniqueness in utero, doesn’t mean they weren’t unique and special.  I can step their biological development back to that point, start it up again, and they would still be them.  Before conception?  They didn’t exist in a fixed format.  There is no beginning point.  Statistics and probability govern their futures before conception.  No one can say what would have happened if conception had occurred an instant before or an instant after.

No, it is at the moment of conception, that their being, their essence was fixed.  I can’t and won’t debate souls, or magic pixie dust, or legalities, because I find no value in proving the existence of a soul, nor am I a lawyer.  All I can say is what I know – that at the moment the sperm fertilized the egg, each of their little lives was on a irrevocable march through life and onward to natural death.

In our society, a society that cares about whales, stray dogs, and trees, I find it hard to reconcile the absolute rights of a woman with a basic right to live, to breathe.  If a gestating human is not a person, what is it?  At what point does it become something other than what it is?  Is it magic when it passes the birth canal?  If it is a person today, what was it yesterday? 

If a doctor’s first duty is to do no harm, how do we reconcile human rights with what a mother wants?

Nelson Mandela’s Secret Weapon

June 25, 2009 /

I just finished Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and throughout I kept asking myself, how did he stay true?  How did he persevere?  By his own admission, there were others who were smarter, bolder, and wiser.  So many of the things that he wrote about himself sketched an ordinary man, but there had to be something extraordinary and I wanted to find it.  And there is was on page 615, his secret weapon.

"I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur.  Not only because of the great heroes I have already cited, but because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country.  I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there was mercy and generosity.  No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.  Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going.  Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.

Nelson Mandela hated apartheid, but he never hated its agents.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

June 10, 2009 /

We were watching CNN this morning.  The morning show gave a brief introduction to Soledad O’Brien’s "Black in America" with a short report and a plug for the series. 

Jaimito asked me,"Daddy?  What means Black in America?"

"It’s kind of complicated, Jaimito, but let me try to explain."  So I ran through a basic primer of just what it meant to be black in America since the days of slavery and why it was still an issue.  Olaia helpfully pointed out that things had gotten better because Barack Obama was elected President.  "I agree," I said, "and I think it says a lot that the majority of America has gotten past color as a qualification, but that doesn’t mean prejudice doesn’t exist."

And that was that.  They asked, I tried to sum up years of legal and cultural discrimination over breakfast.   They seemed satisfied and a few minutes passed until Jaimito, who was obviously still pondering something, asked.

"Daddy," he began, "am I black?"

The Humpty Dance as Dinner Music

June 1, 2009 /

I’m a whiner.  Anybody who knows me, knows this to be true.  But I really prefer to keep my whining verbal, rather than fix it in written word, so it is only sometimes that it spills out here.  In any case, things have been kind of rough for us here for a while, for me personally and for the family.  I’ve been in a funk, lost my mojo, and been a mofo.  I could blame approaching forty, economic downturn, feeling like I’ve not accomplished what I’ve wanted to, stress, overworked, underpaid, blah blah blah.  It’s just not that interesting.  I’m sure we all have funks, no? 

So here’s the scoop: I just had a really nice dinner made possible by the following:

  1. My new super duper outdoor kitchen grill.  It’s an early Father’s day gift, a super awesome backyard propane grilling monster with rotisserie, external gas burner and 36,000 btus of gas grilling power.  Hear me roar.  I like to cook, and this makes me feel useful.
  2. Squash and churrasco cooked and grilled to perfection eaten on our patio that we tiled ourselves.  It was a beautiful clear night.  The wine was delicious, the lights added a cozy ambiance, and the dinner conversation with the niños was sparkling.  Javier smacked my shoulder every time he had something to say.  He’s boricua through and through, and it tickles his mommy so.
  3. Olaia’s iPod, loaded with my music because she knows I like it.  Such a sweet little girl.   Midway through dinner we jammed to the Digital Underground’s, Humpty Dance.  It was a riot.

It just doesn’t get any better than eating under the stars, laughing with your children, cracking each other up, and jamming to the Humpty Dance.

I Promise This Won’t Turn into a Tomato Blog

May 7, 2009 /

­­Laura said she hadn’t had a tom­ato that good since Italy.

­tomato_sliced_0061_sm

Doesn’t that look good?  It was.  I haven’t had a tomato that tasty since the ones we were forced to grow as kids.  I never would have known what I was missing.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Excited By My First Tomatoes

May 2, 2009 /

I finally got off my butt this year and planted a little vegetable garden.  I have always loved fresh tomatoes, and I find the quality of grocery store produce has declined so drastically that you’re basically paying for tasteless fibrous water.  Starting with Olaia’s science fair project on compost, we began our green journey to the perfect tomato.  The vegetable garden is about fifteen feet long by two and half feet wide or so and has been stocked with nearly three cubic feet of homemade soil from compost. 

Our compost is composed of yard waste (green grass and leaves), vegetable and fruit waste from the kitchen, coffee grounds, a bit of ash from barbecuing, some paper waste, and egg shells.  You should not use meat or protein as it is said to attract varmints.   Anyway, all that lead to the creation of this:

­my_first_tomatoes_2_0046_sm

Lovely, isn’t it?  Isn’t nature cool? 

I planted two varieties, roma and these called beefeaters.  Today, I was surprised to find that a third variety had sprouted from the composted seeds and was bearing a different type of fruit. I imagine that even though they are from tasteless grocery store tomato seeds, homegrown they will taste much better.

I can’t wait to eat it tomorrow on an egg sandwich with lettuce, fresh mayonnaise, and cheddar cheese on bakery bread.

And then I took this little picture for Olaia for a class project as we dined outside next to our garden in the cool night air.

Chee-bow-bow, the moon.

­night_time_0005_cropped_sm­

Gutenberg.org

April 21, 2009 /

I’ve been using and abusing Gutenberg.org a lot lately.  It’s a web site dedicated to public domain books, mostly in English but there is variety in other languages too including Beowulf in Old English.  You can basically find anything you want that was published before 1923.  They have ebook formats, pdfs, html documents, and a lot of audio books submitted by supporters.  All the classics are there.

I’ve been reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books to the kids at bed time.  I loved those books as a kid and now despite limited library space and an unwillingness to store any more books in this house, I can read the classics to my heart’s content.

So here’s the work flow:  Download a book at gutenberg.org, open it up in konqueror or firefox and when you come upon a strange archaic word pop it into your kdict public domain dictionary reader and peruse several different definitions and usage entries.  I’m simply amazed at how awesome the public domain is and how many volunteers have come together to make it all possible.  Consider donating to gutenberg.org.

I just noticed that the character of Tarzan went into the public domain in 1998.  Is it a coincidence that Disney’s movie was released in 1999?  Hmmm.

Good Art

April 11, 2009 /

I was at a client’s office working on their office server this Thursday.  In addition to all the crawling around under tables and dealing with cables, switches, and routers, I also have been re-creating their website.  I was getting short on photos.  “Do you have any more photos I could use?” I asked their accountant/onsite help desk guy, “I’ve exhausted all of the ones I’ve shot myself and I need some more.”

“Oh yeah, we have tons,” he replied, “One of our members is a photographer.  He has a photography firm and he takes all the pictures for us.  El es un fotografo buenismo y toma fotos increibles.  (he is a really good photographer and takes incredible pictures). I’ll burn you a CD.”  And he disappeared to his computer and the burning.

I went back to trying to figure out why Samba had decided to stop working, dumping core, and refusing connections.  Bizarre. It was doing something all right, just not what it was supposed to do.*

After a few minutes, he returned.  “Here,” he said, dropping the CD in my hand, “This is from an event from last week.”

I opened my laptop and anxious to see these beautiful photos, clicked it into the drive tray.  After hearing all about the photographer and his mad skills, I prepared myself for a huge pile of awesome photos for the website. This was going to make my life easier.  I’ll have more to choose from.  I opened the CD and started browsing.  I furrowed my brow.  “These photos aren’t really all that good,” I said, “They’re kind of bad, actually.  I thought you said this guy was as good.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, those are actually photos I took.  I have a crappy little camera.  They are just snapshots.”

“Hmm,” I replied.  “After all the talk about this professional guy, I was worried.  Okay, I’m glad.  Do you want to know how to make your shots better?  You could improve a lot with just a few simple tips, even with a crappy camera.”

“My wife takes nice pictures,” he said. “Her photos are a lot better.  She has a lot of artists in her family.  Her brother is an artist.”  I could tell he was a little embarrassed by my accidental bluntness.  But, hell, I’ll just go with it.  I am not a mealy-mouthed type.  He could spent the rest of his life taking shitty photos and never have anyone give him any pointers “to save his feelings,” but I wanted his photos to say something or at least fake saying something, anything but stand still.

“Yes, an artist probably has some formation and training for using the space and telling a story, showing action or whatever.  I have a couple of basic tricks to go from beginner to amateur.  Do you want to know what they are?”

rule-of-thirds

“First, is the rule of thirds.  It goes like this.  Take your canvas and divide it into thirds, horizontally and vertically.  Your intersecting points are interest areas.  For example, why do shots of the ocean always fail to live up to the moment?  I’m sure you’ve taken lots of shots of the ocean, beach, la isla, and they never come out the way you remember them, right?”

“Yes, pictures never capture how beautiful it was,” he agreed.  He was shuffling his feet and seemed to be losing interest.  They are forever polite and have little capacity to deal with uncomfortable moments.

Hang in there a little longer, and I’ll have you fixed up, I thought.  “Okay, so a little trick for the ocean is to make sure that the sky always takes up either one third or two thirds of the frame.  Never half.  If the ocean is two thirds, the sky is one third.  If the sky is one third, t­he ocean is two thirds.  If the ocean is in the middle, the way your eye perceives it, you end up with a boring shot.  The shitty picture that you all know and ends up in a box with the thousands of others.”

rincon_0134_sm

I continued, “If you are shooting people, make sure you get close.  If it’s a group, apart from a planned group portrait, try to focus in on one or two people.  Basically, just get closer.­  When in doubt, get closer.  Those are my two tips, and they will cover 99% of circumstances.  As you improve, and believe me, I’m no professional, you can break these guidelines.  But to start out, they’ll help you turn snapshots into art.  Really great photographers ca­n tell amazing stories with bigger groups, more complex elements, and from farther away, but the beginner doesn’t know how how to balance so many things at first.  Just be patient and get closer.  Stick to one or two elements and tell a simple story.”

­­­2007_camp_eureka_0088_cropped_sm

­”Okay, thanks James,” and he excused himself.  I could tell he was only being polite.  It’s probably why his pictures will continue to be shitty.  But that is another story.  I decided that I was going to write down what good art looks like, feels like, and is.  Since I’m a multi-disciplined person I think I am qualified to define what makes good art in a variety of media.  I think I can even tie it into what makes a good battle plan and a good life.  I use the word “good” because to be “great” you’ve got to dedicate yourself to one thing.  To be merely good, requires only a little bit of passion and purpose.

So let us begin, shall we?

The photography/graphic arts “rule-of-thirds” is really just a trick.  You trick your viewer into believing something is happening in the frame.  Take the sky and ocean example.  Put the ocean in the middle and it is stagnant, locked in stasis with the sky, a stalemate, neither giving nor receiving.  The sky and ocean just sit there.  The photo says nothing and gives nothing either way.  Should, however, the sky yield to the ocean or the ocean to the sky, now you’ve got something.  Movement.  Purpose.  It is small, yes, but with the ocean spilling into the sky or the sky pushing down the ocean you have begun a process  It is this something, this movement, that makes the picture interesting.  Bingo.  It’s not the greatest picture in the world, but neither is it the worst.

Instead of shooting a person right smack in the middle of the shot, put them off to one side.  Which way are they looking?  Are they leaving the frame, or entering it.  If they are in the middle, most of the time it’s a boring photograph because the perception is that nothing is happening and the space around the sub­ject it distracting or wasted.  Maybe you should crop it or get closer or offset the subject.

­javier_and_asier_0013_sm

There’s a lot of clutter behind, little Mr. Asier, but instead of putting him in the middle frame with clutter all around, I have his motion moving in frame with the clutter blurred and de-emphasized.   A great photographer might have planned this better, but sometimes you just have to shoot what you have in front of you.  With a few simple tips you can turn ho-hum snapshot into something you and others will adore.

Beginning writers are told to show don’t tell, to use adverbs sparingly.  Don’t tell me about what someone said or did.  Show me.  If someone was sad, don’t tell me:  He was sad.  Show me how he was sad.  And don’t say:  He walked sadly.  Tell me he walked without picking up his feet and the sound they made as they dragged over the dirty floor.  Tell me how his clothes drooped, or how his hair was flat and oily or how when he answered questions he mumbled or looked away and didn’t meet your gaze.   The key is that good writers can take any subject and make it interesting and put you in the moment.  Take this passage for example about coming home, sitting on the toilet and through a simple discovery realizing true love.  Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world. Except for a nice MLT: a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They’re so perky, I love that.  But I digress.

From http://sigg3.net/:

Thinking about this, I smiled as I made my way up the godforsaken five floors I have to climb every fucking day to get to the apartment. I got inside, put the groceries down and headed for the bathroom. It felt good, if you have to know. (And reading this, I suppose you do.) Went back into the kitchen, picked out the beer and put ’em in the fridge, put the frozen pizza on the table and turned on the oven. That’s when I saw it. At first I couldn’t believe it, it just couldn’t be true. Was it really real? I swallowed solemnly while revering every inch of the realization that crept upon me like a slow sunrise in the time frame of geological foreplay.

Lady C had actually taken out the trash.

All of it.

All by herself.

from: http://www.sigg3.net/b2.php?p=1346

Note the spare use of adverbs, the build up, each mundane detail, the slow difficult climb, taking a dump, putting some groceries down, and the frozen pizza (how clever).  Each serves as contrast to the final realization: LOVE.  But not just any love.  Our writer has cleverly placed the ultimate force of the universe within the confines of a small act of refuse disposal.  Doubly clever.  Touché.  It doesn’t get any better than that folks, and is basically the rule of thirds.  Contrast, movement, purpose.  Some people do it naturally, some do not.  The key is, however, anybody can learn this.

A little imbalance allows your electrons to flow.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

There must be movement.  Movement for movement’s sake is okay for the amateur, but your goal is purpose of course, willful story telling.

If you had to sum up good art in one word it would be “contrast.”

* it ended up being a GCC 3.4.6 hardened compiler problem.  I don’t now what specifically, but after upgrading to the 4.x series GCC Samba stopped dumping core.

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