I rode my bicycle to the Château de Versailles the other day and spent the afternoon exploring the gardens. Since I have been actively participating in writers' workshops, and making friends with professional writers of all types: novelists, journalists, screenwriters, etc. hoping to find inspiration and hoping that some of their talent might rub off on me.
I've been trying to come up with ideas for stories. I've written a large chunk of a short story and here are a few paragraphs. I don't remember writing it..... I imagine because of the large amounts of morphine I've been taking. That and I write late at night and my ability to form memories is shot by then anyway. The project is that it has to be autobiographical, and the characters are supposed to be based on family members and friends so I thought I would create a character based on that.
What is really keeping me up late tonight though is that I am convinced that I wrote a nearly complete draft of a short story, but I cannot find where I saved it.
(The Garden of Floral Magic)
The Man led me out through the arched window which flung itself open as we approached. We flew into the courtyard below the windows. Though it had been night while still in the room, it was now day.
This was a garden of floral magic. This vast courtyard garden was an exquisite mingling of torture with horticulture, blood with flowers, and agony with sublime delight. Sparkling paths which are sanded with pulverized gem stones wind colorfully through the brilliant green lawns and foliage. Between the emerald shrubs, pansies in their broad range of colors, caladium, anemones, salix, clerodendron, peones, and heuchera spot the grass. Mosses covered with tiny white flowerettes, strange cryptograms, and lichens grow in the shade. Colorful small birds chirp all around.
In the midst of this flowery delight, there arise scaffolds carved and painted with violent scenes, the apparatus of crucifixion adorned with demons’ heads, high gallows for simple strangulation, and lower gibbets mechanically equipped for the tearing of flesh. The chains on the scaffolds tinkle gently in the sweetest of summer breezes.
We continued through an archway into a swampy bower. A towering juniper stands out in black silhouette against the sky. Crows and vultures are destroying the ripe body of a man who has been hanged from this tree. The corpse had been decorated with festive garlands. Heavy intestines hang from the collapsed belly. Dark, greasy fluids run down the crusty thighs and drip to the marshy ground.
Here and there, bright-hued flowering vines twisted around decomposing corpses, tortured to death in place for the amusement of the lord and his family.
My mother stood near a high privet hedge cutting nightshade (datura stramoium - Jimson weed) pods with a stubby pair of powerful, rusty scissors. She watched me for a moment and then went back to her work. She was nearly 60. Her face was puffy and weak, and her eyes were red and irritated; her work with the scissors was as joyless as her face. The stramonium stalks seemed too tough and fibrous for her lack of energy.
Her figure looked ursine and heavy in her costume, a filthy robe whose original color is a mystery and that she has not changed for as long as I could remember. Her toes poked through holes in rotting velour slippers. A trowel and scratcher, a knife, and basket of seed pods were arrayed around her feet.
She brushed some strings of gray hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, and left a smudge on her forehead doing it. Far behind stood the courtyard wall with its high dark windows. She cast another look toward me. I stumbled as I passed the gallows. She snorted hatefully. Her eyes narrowed slightly. She stuck her hard fingers down into some new green sprouts and looked down among close-growing leaves. Several slugs were there. Her pale fingers pulled their fat bodies from the leaves and squeezed them until they burst against her palm.
The Man showed me the location of a ring (shows it falling from the rectum of the ruined corpse of a tortured king as he decomposes on the gallows. He must have swallowed it when he was captured. A mushroom had sprouted up over it overnight (it fell at night) and hidden the ring from everyone. Tehre it lay for 100s of years.
We emerged from the arbour into a central esplanade for the diversion of the the lord and his family. In the mall were gibbets, wheels of torture, racks, stakes, strange devices.
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************** Blog ************ Vacillations, continued ***********
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I'm about to do a 2 week trek through the Alps solo tomorrow. I will probably try to taper off the morphine while in the mountains over the next 2 weeks. Little by little. That's better than WDs while going through the customs line in Algeria. I understand that heroin is all over the place there, but I won't have any way to get it safely so it is better to quit here. I can always take it back up when I get back.
Ritzko is on a business trip in Italy so I haven't seen her for a week. Ariadne is finally back from her month long vacation today and just sent me a text message asking if I want to go out and do something. She invited me to a boat party (péniche) Wednesday. I need to hurry and buy the train ticket for the Alps...
By coincidence, a friend, Lucia a Columbian expat, is moving to Phnom Penh in October.
I like movies and watch all kinds of them. A lot of what I pick I really like andl most is good enough to finish. But yesterday, I started to watch something that hurt me. It was Terminator 2015. Immediately it begins with recycled lines from Terminator 1 as though the writers think they are being clever by re-using cheesy Iines in a way I'm sure they think is ironic. And the appearance of Schwarsanegar himself reminded me of Grandpa doing karaoke to 'Bad to the Bone' at the local dive bar. He was pathetic. Not that I hate him. He was great in Blazing Saddles and one of the Conan movies. But this was too much. It's like he's too far gone now mentally to realize what the movie is bad and takes it way too seriously. The pain by the first 20 minutes of this movie was unbearable adn I had to turn it off.
I've been trying to come up with ideas for stories. I've written a large chunk of a short story and here are a few paragraphs. I don't remember writing it..... I imagine because of the large amounts of morphine I've been taking. That and I write late at night and my ability to form memories is shot by then anyway. The project is that it has to be autobiographical, and the characters are supposed to be based on family members and friends so I thought I would create a character based on that.
What is really keeping me up late tonight though is that I am convinced that I wrote a nearly complete draft of a short story, but I cannot find where I saved it.
(The Garden of Floral Magic)
The Man led me out through the arched window which flung itself open as we approached. We flew into the courtyard below the windows. Though it had been night while still in the room, it was now day.
This was a garden of floral magic. This vast courtyard garden was an exquisite mingling of torture with horticulture, blood with flowers, and agony with sublime delight. Sparkling paths which are sanded with pulverized gem stones wind colorfully through the brilliant green lawns and foliage. Between the emerald shrubs, pansies in their broad range of colors, caladium, anemones, salix, clerodendron, peones, and heuchera spot the grass. Mosses covered with tiny white flowerettes, strange cryptograms, and lichens grow in the shade. Colorful small birds chirp all around.
In the midst of this flowery delight, there arise scaffolds carved and painted with violent scenes, the apparatus of crucifixion adorned with demons’ heads, high gallows for simple strangulation, and lower gibbets mechanically equipped for the tearing of flesh. The chains on the scaffolds tinkle gently in the sweetest of summer breezes.
We continued through an archway into a swampy bower. A towering juniper stands out in black silhouette against the sky. Crows and vultures are destroying the ripe body of a man who has been hanged from this tree. The corpse had been decorated with festive garlands. Heavy intestines hang from the collapsed belly. Dark, greasy fluids run down the crusty thighs and drip to the marshy ground.
Here and there, bright-hued flowering vines twisted around decomposing corpses, tortured to death in place for the amusement of the lord and his family.
My mother stood near a high privet hedge cutting nightshade (datura stramoium - Jimson weed) pods with a stubby pair of powerful, rusty scissors. She watched me for a moment and then went back to her work. She was nearly 60. Her face was puffy and weak, and her eyes were red and irritated; her work with the scissors was as joyless as her face. The stramonium stalks seemed too tough and fibrous for her lack of energy.
Her figure looked ursine and heavy in her costume, a filthy robe whose original color is a mystery and that she has not changed for as long as I could remember. Her toes poked through holes in rotting velour slippers. A trowel and scratcher, a knife, and basket of seed pods were arrayed around her feet.
She brushed some strings of gray hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, and left a smudge on her forehead doing it. Far behind stood the courtyard wall with its high dark windows. She cast another look toward me. I stumbled as I passed the gallows. She snorted hatefully. Her eyes narrowed slightly. She stuck her hard fingers down into some new green sprouts and looked down among close-growing leaves. Several slugs were there. Her pale fingers pulled their fat bodies from the leaves and squeezed them until they burst against her palm.
The Man showed me the location of a ring (shows it falling from the rectum of the ruined corpse of a tortured king as he decomposes on the gallows. He must have swallowed it when he was captured. A mushroom had sprouted up over it overnight (it fell at night) and hidden the ring from everyone. Tehre it lay for 100s of years.
We emerged from the arbour into a central esplanade for the diversion of the the lord and his family. In the mall were gibbets, wheels of torture, racks, stakes, strange devices.
************************************************** ******************
************** Blog ************ Vacillations, continued ***********
************************************************** ******************
I'm about to do a 2 week trek through the Alps solo tomorrow. I will probably try to taper off the morphine while in the mountains over the next 2 weeks. Little by little. That's better than WDs while going through the customs line in Algeria. I understand that heroin is all over the place there, but I won't have any way to get it safely so it is better to quit here. I can always take it back up when I get back.
Ritzko is on a business trip in Italy so I haven't seen her for a week. Ariadne is finally back from her month long vacation today and just sent me a text message asking if I want to go out and do something. She invited me to a boat party (péniche) Wednesday. I need to hurry and buy the train ticket for the Alps...
By coincidence, a friend, Lucia a Columbian expat, is moving to Phnom Penh in October.
I like movies and watch all kinds of them. A lot of what I pick I really like andl most is good enough to finish. But yesterday, I started to watch something that hurt me. It was Terminator 2015. Immediately it begins with recycled lines from Terminator 1 as though the writers think they are being clever by re-using cheesy Iines in a way I'm sure they think is ironic. And the appearance of Schwarsanegar himself reminded me of Grandpa doing karaoke to 'Bad to the Bone' at the local dive bar. He was pathetic. Not that I hate him. He was great in Blazing Saddles and one of the Conan movies. But this was too much. It's like he's too far gone now mentally to realize what the movie is bad and takes it way too seriously. The pain by the first 20 minutes of this movie was unbearable adn I had to turn it off.
