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Saturday, October 29, 2011

Winter wins again

A catch in the throat,
a broach of speech,
these winter clouds
piling up in October.

How many expletives
in a plow's smoke?
Let's count.

Know this:
We will haunt the
fast food lanes
with the rest of you

when the power
stutters,
and spirals out.

***

Well, New Hampshire has decided it would be a fun trick to snow a huge amount at the tail-end of October. The ultimate trick or treat? Anyway, according to media reports, this one is going to be a record breaker if it snows a mere 2 inches in the state capital, and this storm looks like it will produce a lot more than 2 inches. Knowing the Somersworth power grid, I doubt I will have power in the next few hours, for the next few days. Don't you just love winter, especially when it's still technically fall?

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Stock photo fail

Coming from a journalism background and seeing firsthand how much the Internet has changed reader habits, I understand how important it is to get people to not only visit a story, but stay involved with it. That said, I think WMUR went overboard with a story about the 50 top-paying jobs in N.H. for 2011. Before I even clicked on the story link I thought "Surely, they're not going to make me click through 50 slides to read this story." But that's exactly what they did.

When you have 50 holes to fill, you're bound to throw pretty much anything in there to fill the space, however tangentially related. Some of the choices were obvious: whenever a teacher job is mentioned, show a grainy shot of a bunch of students milling around at some nondescript campus; whenever anything about business comes up, get to shots of people in business attire doing mock-work for the camera.

And then, there were these two choices.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but management isn't the first thing to come to mind when I see a coed barely in her 20s throwing out her hands in exasperation while two subordinates mope with undisguised contempt.

Seriously, how young is this woman? It's quite possible that it's just her body language that makes her look so young, but all I can hear while looking at this picture is a teen-age tirade about how unfair life is that her best friend gets to go to the concert when she's the true fan, followed by a crescendo of slamming doors. Is there a way I can paid nearly $100K to "lead" like this?

The next picture is even better. All I can say is, I don't think this is the standard operating procedure when it comes to fixing an elevator. But it could make a great poster for one of those Z-grade horror movie that you sometimes find for $5 at Wal-mart.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Figuring some things out


I've come to an astonishing conclusion about poetry blogs. Almost nobody reads them. I started this blog earlier this year, and I have had a sum total of 38 views. Obviously, this is not a sustainable model for growing readership, or frankly, for keeping my interest.

I'm going to start switching things up here. Since I have a full-time job as an editor/writer, I can't promise this will be a fast transition. Also, it's almost Halloween, which means the next couple of weekends are not going to work for getting this thing into gear. However, I've decided I'm going to make this a lot more chatty, and a lot less poetry-inclined. Sure, I'll still post poems as I write them, but it's time to move away from "here are a collection of words to which you might have a difficult time figuring out the narrative" to "here are a collection of words where the narrative is pretty obvious, since it's all about life."

The truth is, I love writing. It's the thing I've done the most and the best since as far back as I can remember. Lately though, I've had absolutely no free time for anything even remotely resembling writing, aside from what I do professionally. My poetry has dried up. The only time I write short stories is when I'm entering a contest. (to whit: machineofdeath.net) And most of my little insights and commentary on the day get tucked inside my accounts on social media vehicles like Facebook and Twitter.

But believe me, I have plenty to talk about, and a rich vantage point from which to do it. First of all, though it's been more than a year since we last recorded, I am a member of the semi electronic/semi who knows what music collective (that sounds so much more impressive than "band") Human Beat Box Light Show. We are planning to soon go out and record a video for our song "Cemetery Moves," in an actual graveyard. Of course, we all have busy lives, so whether or not that comes to pass is anybody's guess. But if it does, hello great story.

Even more importantly than that, I recently got married to the love of my life, Jenn. She actually has her own blog at slytheringirl83.blogspot.com. As you can imagine, we've both been very busy lately since returning from our honeymoon and getting back into the thick of things, so her updates have been even less frequent than mine.

More things I can easily write about: the fact I have Marfan Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes me ridiculously tall and usually results in perfect strangers coming up to me and asking me about my height and basketball-playing potential; the city of Somersworth, N.H., and the surrounding Seacoast region, which is full of crazy characters and situations; my family and friends, always good for a tale or two (especially the well-intentioned horror of my mom's cooking); hobbies like playing old video games, learning the Japanese language, practicing guitar. Yeah, there's a lot to work with here. As Calvin famously said to Hobbes in that comic strip's final episode: "Let's go exploring!"