Dying commencing or preferred.

Send flowers to funeral.

Meantime, peruse Duotrope.

I would be experiencing one right now. Aerosmith’s “What It Takes.” Really really loud. Yes, I’m singing along. One of the major pleasures of listening to Steven Tyler is screaming along. Another of the major pleasures of listening to Steven Tyler is not seeing Steven Tyler, who is not a handsome man.

Ask me how I know.

Steve’s stitches are out. Again.

Dr. Voodoo is a nice man, but I’m sicksicksick of his face!

I ate deep fried cauliflower for lunch. It is a coworker’s 20th anniversary with the company (wow) and I was sent to pick up pizzas. I was unable to resist the cauliflower. I tell myself it’s a vegetable, but it’s about as healthy as bacon-wrapped lard.

Hannah over here points to Jack over there with a neat poetic exercise hither and thither. Yon is in the tub, with God.

The cardiology section of my training is like this: *snapsnap*.

Why are so many cardiologists Indian? I’m not complaining, mind you. I can’t think of any accent or set of accents I find more reassuring and soothing than the various Indian accents. That’s pretty weird considering that cardiologists are so rarely saying pleasant things when Steve’s around. Hmm.

My recipes involve a lot of eyeing and guesswork, so you’ll want to take these amounts as suggestions rather than absolutes.

Reuben soup:

8-10 oz of corned beef
small amount of butter or oil
1 small onion
1 cup well-drained sauerkraut
3 cups beef stock
8-16 oz swiss cheese, shredded

either:
8 oz brick of cream cheese or
roux

Saute the corned beef and onion in the butter/oil in the bottom of a saucepan. You just want to release some of the great flavors in the onion. Add the stock and the sauerkraut. Simmer for 10-20 minutes until the flavors blend. Turn down heat. Stir in the swiss cheese until melted. Thicken with some cream cheese or roux. Can be topped like french onion soup with a slice of rye bread and some swiss.

Still no consensus on whether we’re despicable.

A Disintegrating Clone has words for the editor of Pebble Lake Review.

Have you been to Bitch | Lab? Try it.

Harry is perplexed by American religiosity. Me too, Harry. Me too.

And have you any itty bitty ditties? Remember Snakeskin.

Read the submission page for The Diagram.

We enjoy traditional forms. We eschew traditional forms. We lie. Send us annotations, schematics, poems, sentence diagrams, definitions. Make us love you.

Now that’s a submission page. Hot damn.

So, because of Rob and Gabriel, I am still off my duff and did some spelunking around to see if I wanted to submit more poetry elsewhere. A number of places said “No rhyming poems.”

Actually, it’s a little more snide than that, like this example from Pebble Lake Review:

We do not accept rhyming poetry, greeting-card verse, poems about vampires, etc.

Classy.

Oh well. I suppose I’m grateful for having my choices limited, since my energy is a little suspect. But frankly, this sort of thing is one of the reasons I’ve never bothered to submit in the first place. Hard to work up a head of steam when you write the equivalent of vampire poems.