A Poem for Your Sore Eyes

english war

“or when he performed it.”

“what?” I said.

“that sentence doesn’t even make sense!”

but she wasn’t listening to me;

she was already onto her next victim.

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Coffee, Booze, or Benzedrine?

I guess it depends on what you're writing, what kind of chemistry you got goin' on in your body naturally--but what is most interesting about the list below is how unsurprising it is that so many writers depend/ed on some kind of drug in order to be productive.

Believe me, I can relate--if you knew how many horse tranquilizers I was snorting every day, your puny little unenlightened mind would explode.

(courtesy Lapham's Quarterly)

Most of these associations are not terribly surprising, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning on laudanum? That one caught me off guard.

Good for her.

Bad for us:

Until the 20th century, laudanum was available over-the-counter, despite the fact that it contains opium, morphine, and codeine. Today, only infants born to heroin addicts or people with Guinness-record diarrhea can get permission to have a taste of that bitter delight.

Even more reason to try that muy picante salsa...


Dessert:
Much like laudanum, Benzedrine sounds like it was a whole lotta fun as long as you didn't know what it was doing to you in the long run...

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Weirdo At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Earlier today, in Los Angeles, my friend and I went to Griffith Park to lay in the sun/shade and read through a script we've been writing.


Despite the fact that we were two guys reading aloud to each other in a park, things were going well. Then we got swarmed by ten-year-olds on their lunch-break, riding out the back-end of a sugar-filled field trip to the nearby Griffith Observatory.

(photo courtesy LA Times)

Whoa! Don't worry--we survived. It didn't get that hairy.
It's amazing how far a box of Nerds can take you, when scattered 'at random' by a professional...

Anyway, after all that hullaballoo ran its course and the bambinos were herded back onto their school buses, emaciated teenagers of both sexes began trotting around in strange matching uniforms, oddly tolerating the unreasonable barks of some overweight, Napoleanic coach sitting in a low-rent camping chair. I overheard him telling those kids the following, as they diligently set up an obscurely-branded 10' x 20' pop-up tent under a tree:

"Alright, alright--let's move this into the shade. Come on! Okay...let's get those waters out there, and the Gatorade. Make sure you put the Gatorade next to the water--no--ON TOP OF the water--but make sure you drink BOTH today, guys. Seriously..."

It was quite distracting--and not in the good way you might be thinking (none of them were hot). By the time we were back in the zone, my buddy had to head off to an inconvenient job assignment. I say that like it was court-mandated or something, but it wasn't. Well...no--it wasn't. That's all I can say. Legally.

Our semi-productive day cut short, we trudged through several feet of sunshine, back to my glistening Lamborghini Countach.

On the way, I couldn't help but notice this:


A totally creepy guy hanging outside his serial-killer-issue van, dancing drunkenly to deafening, shitty country music, in broad daylight, at a high-school cross-country meet, just after a four-bus-load junior-high field trip finished eating their lunch.

ROCK ON, MAN!!!!!!!!

Right?

Wait--or is pedophilia not cool anymore?

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