The neighbor's wife

Orson Scott Card once said: "I sat in a conversation with a screenwriting professor discussing English majors screenplays. He told me 'They come to class with long plays full of pretty language with lots of feelings and symbols in which nothing happens. They need to understand that films require stories.
'That other stuff is for poems'"

I disagree.
A good story is like an old shoe. It feels nice to listen to it now and then and kick it around.
Poems should be the same. Remember that feeling you got when you first heard "Richard Cory"?
This one did the same to me.
Please read it twice

The neighbor's wife
-by Susan Palwick

It sprouts wings every few weeks
but as yet has flown no further
then the woodpile in the yard
where we found it six months ago.

Colin Wilcox thought it was his wife
returned as a angel. It still wore
its headset then, lying trapped
in a crushed metal basket; Colin freed it,

muttering something about harps and haloes,
and the rest of us stayed quiet. Colin carried it
into the house and for three weeks nursed it
in his bed, on the side unwarmed since Marella,

the old Marella, had her heart attack.
When it could walk on six legs Colin taught
it to fry bacon, weed the garden, milk
the goats, which cower at its touch.

"Reminding her what she forgot in Heaven,"
he tells us, but she has not remembered speech,
this new Marella who is purple and croaks
like bullfrogs on the hottest summer nights,

who surely came from somewhere, if not God.
Lately it uses those stubby wings to carry
the heaviest logs from the woodpile. For Colin's sake
no one has tried to frighten it away.




That feeling of self-induced insanity. Of forbearance and long-suffering beyond explanation, with the only justification: habitation in proximity.
Of the simple and true fact: Beyond the five senses THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING UNDERNEATH!
If I never write anything that makes you feel fuzzy, I should walk on unconcerned. If I never write anything that makes you stop and think, I am not a writer, but a verbal masseuse.

Unsung Hardass

The usual examples of all things exemplary in the Bible tend to follow the same oft repeated tune. But at devotions yesterday a thought struck me (they're rare enough, I know).

In popular media, and the homage we pay to Hollywood, there has developed a class of man who doesn't always win against his enemy, doesn't beat up everyone he rumbles with, not a superhero in power, but doesn't let it stop him. I'm thinking of everything from the classic Rocky (1) to Die Hard (all of them). Hollywood has us idolizing guys who don't let things like broken bones and 40% blood loss stop us from going the distance.

Jesus and Daniel's 3 buddies were like that too.
Alot is always lost in translation.

Jesus said: "That thou doest, do quickly." (Jn 13: 27)
Now-a-days imagine a different scenario, Jesus knew Judas was running off to kill him.

Imagine a long wooden stage with a post and a noose attached to it; a small crowd has gathered, and the sun is starting to make people sweat.
Jesus walks up and says: "Can we get on with it, I don't have all day."

Shad, Meesh, and To-bed-you-go were standing in front of the MOST painful way to die then as well as now. They weren't the important tools Daniel was, and a whole lot of pain was definitely on the menu.
They knew that God had pulled off a big one for Daniel before and it was possibly that He could save them, but, they weren't positive.

They said: "O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.
Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand. But if not, be it known that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up."

Imagine a well lit windowless room. In it there's a table with weird looking knives and syringes filled with weird colors, winches, posts, and hooks coming out of the walls and ceiling. A generator hums loudly in the corner and frail man with a accent and glasses is waiting with no emotion on his face.

Someone tells 3 prisoners: "You don't even have to give up your own religion. Just say this other god is a supreme god as well, and we'll let you go. If you can't say it now, there won't be a chance to say it later. We'll try to see how long you can last"
"I believe the record so far is 28 hours"

The prisoners say: "My God is pretty big. I can't just push him away - He takes up too much space. Your god is cuddly and soft. He needs somewhere cushy and warm - I know... why don't you SHOVE HIM UP YOUR..."

- you get the point. Those men, they were manly men!