My Wicked, Wicked Ways, p 424

"In those days I would pick up a script, or a script would be sent to my home and a description of the male lead would say: Spike Rudling; lithe, lean, handsome, piercing-eyed, a man not to cross. That would be me.

"Today it is so refreshing. I don't have to look any further than the description, of say, Pete Anderson--a once-handsome man, now decadent, a shadow of his former self and who has taken to the bottle and . . .

"Then I know that must be me." - Errol Flynn

I haven't felt the way I feel today in so long

I remember chasing butterflies in fields of wildflowers
with my brothers and my mother watching over me
like the rotted black hunters' towers sleeping

I must have been tiny
I must have been very young

Where has that gone now
Where is that boy
Where are the butterflies

Where is the bamboo butterfly net catching, catching

In my memories there is no one else

I feel like so much less now
So much of me is gone

Butterflies flying through torn netting

Today's Moment of Horror

You know those moments where you question everything you thought was good and true as the world comes crashing down like a buzzbomb on your coastal British city? I just had that moment. And that moment is this: http://ficly.com/stories/4809

It's nonspecific--the solitary detail is the line near the end about holding her pillow and screaming 'why!', something I doubt anyone outside a Disney teen movie has ever done. It's full of cliches--"heart and soul" being among the worst. It's written in intrusive second person, constantly reminding me that it's not really talking about me. It starts off with quite possibly one of the worst rhymed couplets short of 'life' and 'strife.' It uses 'your' for 'you're.' It uses the word 'heart' four times in twelve lines.

It's from that website I've been touting, and the betrayal of something I championed only makes the pain that much worse.

Because it's covered in praise. Dripping in bleating, sparkling, slack-jawed fawning. While it violates everything I hold sacred about the theory of good writing, it gets a featured slot on the main website. It's like seeing someone beat my best friend to death with a rusty meat tenderizer and then get handed the key to the city by the mayor.

While rocking back and forth clutching my knees in the darkest corner I could find (which in this case was among the spider family living behind my boiler), I've tried to convince myself that it's a satire and everyone is in on the joke. But I just can't believe it. I can't bring myself to.

And if your response is, "Oh, but it's so heartfelt," so is putting your head in a toilet.

The problem here is that this situation raises an inescapable point: when a small percentage of the population thinks clear, detailed, poetic writing is excellent, and a much larger percentage thinks wordy, nonspecific, melodramatic nonsense is excellent, who is right?

Have I just spent the last seven years of my life learning to write the wrong way?

I need to go cry myself to sleep.

(To those who think this is all tongue-in-cheek poking fun at this poem, it's not. Despite the jokes, I'm genuinely distressed about this. My stomach hurts.)

Random Thought

I learned the other day that American English has one remnant from Cockney rhyming slang. "To blow a raspberry", from the rhyming phrase "raspberry tart," meaning "fart."

Don't you feel better about American English now?