Carter’s Little Pill

The next few days might prove challenging.

The challenge: Take the mythological hero/heroine or do-gooder of your choice and reveal (expose?) their dark side or troubled past

My entry:

Shekel

I was not so much betting on the lots
as on my nerve. Though Thomas looked at me
suspiciously whenever he could see
me make the slightest gesture in the knot

of men all innocently laying odds
with shekels. I have told him I don’t cheat,
but he has doubts, and when I meet defeat
he thinks it a lure. But I put God’s

prescience to the side. I am as blind
as bread. It tempts me sometimes, just to know
which way the lots will fall or coins will go,
but I don’t hedge my bets, or get the wind

to blow just right, just there. And when I lose?
Oh, Judas gives me coins. I don’t ask whose.

Two poems in this Shit Creek Review. I feel all proprietary because Michael Cantor’s Ali poem uses a title I suggested on Whup Ass. FAME! FORTUNE! Well, fame at least.

Well, at least a blog post.

That’s going to count for now.

My goal is simply to get more exercise, so I’m doing 100 days straight. Look, I even have a ticker. I’m not sure that I would want to watch a baseball game in which the batter kept getting closer and closer to the pitcher, but… well… it’s a ticker. Get off my back!

18 days in, because I rock.

I tried a new chili recipe last night because a certain person, not naming any names, Chris, doesn’t like beans and I tend to like chili with some sort of something other than meat and spices.

So I found a substitute.

Gird your loins.

It’s pumpkin. One 15 oz can for a recipe with a little over a pound of meat. I used hot sausage because I was a little afraid the pumpkin taste needed covered up, but I think it would work with ground beef.

So, your normal chili recipe plus a can of pumpkin (my god, don’t buy the pumpkin pie filling) or your normal recipe less beans plus pumpkin. Don’t tell Chris, but it’s even healthy!

Let it be known that winter sucks.

I got my second LSAT score back. It’s better than the last one. Not as good as I was hoping for, but I’m greedy and a perfectionist.

The more I get rid of stuff from my house, the more stuff I seem to have. I’m starting to think it’s like using astringent on oily skin–you’re just tempting those cells to produce more out of spite.

I found a cd entitled “Celtic Bagpipes.” It’s good they were clear about that, because I don’t want any damned unCeltic bagpipes. Those things suck.

My ears are cold.

Cat Cuthbert likes to stand in the sink and watch water swirling down the drain. I would like to believe that he is thinking Great Thoughts, but I have a feeling he’s just wondering how hard it would be to Screw That Up and Make Life Difficult. I wouldn’t be surprised to come down one morning and discover he’s shoved an entire cat bed, and possibly Bertram, into the drain.

Someone told me to my face the other day that if he had one of my cats in his possession he would kill it. What’s most remarkable about this is that the person didn’t think I would be shocked by this comment.

The election is Tuesday and I’m a presiding judge. I am not looking forward to this. On the plus side, it’s forcing me to clean my car, possibly leading to such great discoveries as “Martial Marches” and “German Beethoven.” Stay tuned.

Steve was born on October 24, 1960 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Tomorrow would have been his 50th birthday.

Fifty still feels like such a long way from me. I’m 39. I’ll be 40 when I start law school. Will I, like Steve, spend my 50th birthday as ashes? Will I still remember him in ten and a half years? I ask the questions, but I don’t really want to know. I like my future vague and opaque.

I have given away hundreds if not thousands of books in the past few years, but have set aside a few authors. Those authors, I had said, were my untouchable collection.

It’s only when I start to count those books that I realize I have hundreds of them. I thought there were only two authors, or three, but there are a dozen, and most of them were prolific.

I don’t want to pack and move hundreds of books. I just don’t. So, I’m commencing on the big read. I’m going to read the books in my untouchable collection. If it’s good, I’ll decide then whether I need to keep it. If it’s bad, out it goes to Goodwill.

Maybe I should call it the big re-read, since I’ve read most of them before.

There’s something liberating for me in saying that even my favorite authors aren’t necessary on my shelves. But I might have to make exceptions for MM Kaye, and Patricia Wentworth, and Dick Francis… Oh dear.

Chris yesterday inadvertently created a brilliant word: snowpokes. You know, people who drive slowly because there’s a light dusting of snow on the ground.

Snowpokes. Use it in good health.

Awaiting Esther

He wants another wife. He wants my head–
the one I wouldn’t bare before his friends
to cap their drunken revels at night’s end–
to be exposed to pecking birds instead.

Now that I’m free to spit into his face–
Nebuchadnezzar’s granddaughter’s not a peasant
woman bred for slaughter or a present
to dispel an upstart king’s disgrace–

send Esther to me. Send her. I will tell
her how to bend him, how to make her Jews
safe from him. She mustn’t think I lose
by dying. It’s a gift to choose your hell.

I hope the sword is sharp. I hope my blood
stains everything. He comes? No? She comes? Good.