Meg Ryan

Rhapsody

Snowy moors surround my ivory tower at the wuthering heights. I write my fairy tale amidst naughty lolitas (muses) and hungry kenders (diversions), in a wild sway between war and peace of intellect, crime, that is, impatience, and punishment, more impatience, sometimes chemically neutralized.

My conversations with Shakespeare and Dante, I shall confess, have been somewhat hostile, since they deny me influence. Albeit, I answer them a bit upset, you exceeded Marlowe and Virgilius in genius, every rival word you wrote is forever haunted by them, and, lo, I already don't mind your ghosts, only advise to cheer up.

The double comedy of the job, hell and humor (Homer, the poet, Homer, the Simpson), not at all divine, will sound like a distant, fancy midsummer night's dream once done, but the bliss of ignorance, the bleak paradise, is already lost, says Milton, confirms the Bible, sentences Kafka, moody and grim.

Then why, by Kihei, by Eros, by Thanatos, Camões or Tolstoy or Athena, do I keep celebrating pacts with sly Mephistopheles, tell me, cursed Dorian Gray, argue me out, vain Socrates.

Those who dared going down had Beatrix and Gretchen conveniently placed in the machinery of salvation. I bet they'd give me Mistress Bovary or worse.

Allow me to finish my rouge and noir book and I'll redeem you as scorn.

Blog

Starbucks writing.

Analogy

"Good music is very close to primitive language." -- Denis Diderot

"Bad music is very close to modern language." -- Lohan

Lystenfow

Bards would wish to sing it was a misty day, but was just ashy. I stood bolt upright, practicing my Evil Bowfly routines, when this smoky wayfarer crossed Lystenfow's gates.

- Howdy, pally! I said. What whirlwinds bring you to these lands?

- Salute, native fellow, I'm a historian, I come to study your dilly town, he uttered with a pipe in his wrinkled mouth.

- Oh, you seem clerkish to me. Is that healing herb in your pipe?

- Nay, dude, it ain't.

- You erudites always confuse me with your whimsical jargon.

- Hohoho! Scholarship produces eloquence.

- I see. Well, best luck with your research.

- Thank you a damn much.

The dude, as they say, stayed at Sniffdog's Lodge till pixies' season and I didn't get to speak to him again. Ere he left us, though, he forgot a broad leaf with freakish letters which may constitute part of his work. I didn't understand it. Here's the content:

"All work and no play makes Tolkien a dull boy."

Repeated ad infinitum, kind of, the leaf wasn't so huge. But exaggerating is a principle of outstanding storytelling, as the historian likely knew.

Fame

The burden of fame, literary or otherwise, is people strive to know your personal life. I already told my 3 readers (yes, you) I'm an open book - on advanced quantum physics.

Eyecandy

Private Woods

Sergeant Henry was fat in looks and smell, he proudly transported his belly around when shouting his orders at us, the seventh company. He had piggish nostrils which dilated when he was angry with our performance or being scolded by his superiors, by then he would pause for about a minute, sweating, breathing heavily, his hairy hands at his waist, his mind wandering, looking retarded, in fact.

Apart from the properties of an anxious meatball, he was a rather gentle buddy at our non-official parties, held at Goldsmith's house. He would bring booze to drown the whole Navy. He would briskly invite everyone to take his money, I mean, play cards with him, drunk and tilted.

How pitiful were his conversations with women, when, trying to look manly, he'd scare them with his (true, I confess) stories about his severe command of the company, holding his belly with both hands, as if it could fall down at any moment while his quivering laugh penetrated every room of the house.

I never thought I'd miss him more than anyone else, but I still cry when I remember he died in Iraq, victim of a landmine.

Cathy

Dear diary,

I think I'm in love. Today, when Jessica and I were leaving the school, I saw Billy among his friends wearing a most cute red cap and he came to me and asked if he could hold my backpack until my dad arrives.

O he was so cute! I think he's shy because he concealed his eyes a little with the brim and rubbed his neck and nape. Jessica said bye bye and I blushed and let him take it.

I didn't know what to say and he wasn't talking too, so we stared at the street and waited for my dad. I noticed he moved his foot from left to right and then to left again.

When daddy came, Billy kissed my cheek and said I'm pretty! I took my pack and ran to the car. Daddy smiled and asked me who was that boy, I told him I didn't know and looked away. I guess he knew I was in love.

Charlize Theron

Astrology

Fortune favours the bold, avoid underline and italic.

Note

Recall the fate of Adam and Eve for being original.

The Exam

1

- Lorazepam. Sounds godlike, but it never fails to answer my prayers, said Lohan admiring the tiny yellow pill between his thumb and index fingers before swallowing carelessly. He thrusted his hand in his pocket and tapped a rock'n'roll beat on the medication box. Amen!

Four-eyed Paul was sitting near him with an arm over the back of the chair, attempting to read a book on civil law.

- Amen, you damn addict. The exam is tomorrow, won't you study?, he said.

- Why, no. What's the point of studying a science I didn't invent yet?

- Overcoming your ego, maybe.

- That's transcendent. I'd mingle harmoniously with nature. Peace, yoko.

- Just don't bother me, alright?

Lohan heard the water spurting furiously from the clouds, evenly over the saints and the sinners, the stoners and the stones, entered his bedroom, unzipped his clothes and his imagination, drooping until he smashed the chubby pillow in his head, or the other way around.

- My... precious...

2

Although he obviously didn't study the concerning laws, missed most of the classes since day one - he showed up only to meet the new girls -, wrote poems for distraction during the few he did attend and was even caught drinking red wine at college to celebrate the absence of the professor of general philosophy, he, whom, I suspect, is the alter-ego of your narrator, of your author, indeed, looked good in the mirror.

Meticulously, he adjusted in his azure jeans the front of the white shirt, almost whiter than his ghost-white skin, leaving deliberately the sides and back out, which matched his worn-out tennis; armed his long, dark-honey hair with a sober ponytail and checked the other angles.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall
don't they love me, every gal?"

Then grabbed Paul's older vade mecum and left to college, an exception he allowed on exam days to avoid bureaucracy. His beery perception of space and time, he attributed to sleep deprivation.

- I'm sorry, gentlemen, I'll tell Charlize Theron I can't be late next time. Meanwhile, master, may I take the test?

- No, answered the bald professor with a grimace of disgust.

This unexpected answer disturbed Lohan, whom spryly recomposed himself with a smirk and whispered:

- Tom, Tom... Would you like to meet Cynthia again? I'm sure you still feel her taste, don't you? We could arrange that. She told me she misses you. Would you hand me my exam, please?

- Enough. That fine woman you introduced me out of friendship, Thomas answered in a loud voice, shall be treated with the utmost respect, insolent, filthy boy! She's not a bribe!

Lohan couldn't conceal his embarassment when his confusing mass of coleagues began to giggle.

- Look, professor...

- No!

- I was just gonna ask you to point me the way out, however, said him swallowing another pill and feigning seriousness, since you restarted this conversation, could we reconsider my delay? It was a salty slice of an hour, half, something we can neglect for I'm about to graduate, and for your own benefit, professor, as the principal wouldn't like to know you dismissed such a bright student who happens to know the right wrong things.

In absolute silence, Thomas turned red, then purple.

- Take it!, insolent boy, take it and sit far from me!

- Remarkable attitude, master! I'll hire you once I graduate for such integrity.

He turned around, noticed the other students had vanished, strangely leaving the desks perfectly aligned, and concluded the dreadful exam Paul abhorred was as easy as Cynthia on ecstasy. He sat and read it, and understood nothing, which wasn't unusual, reached for his vade mecum, hoping for an answer to sparkle in its infinite, infinitely wise pages, but it didn't cover civil law.

"Socrates' dull excuse, the first-rate sophist's, hipocryte's one, does nothing for me."

Lohan was defeated.

3

A thick book thudded on his chest.

- You've got an exam, lazy bastard, wake up!, shouted peevish Paul.

Lohan blinked and protected his eyes from the light with the sheets. A second later, he burst into laughing.

Elegy

You know, I'm overskeptical about everything but what I desire utterly to be true, thus I deplore that, everytime I write, Aphrodite breaks a nail.

American Beauty

On Life

If you were given weak cards, bluff.

Delusion

The orange leaves in autumn and the smell of moist grass, as the morning slant of light through the kitchen's windows, sometimes evoke images of delusion - Santa's fake beard, a lone wedding ring.

Sandra walked on her huge yard, each step a cracking, towards the highest oak. The slow, contrast dance of shadows and lights which slipped across the frond ceiling, formed patterns akin to fractals on the ground.

She knelt before the tree, scratching softly its trunk, where reads an inscription: Sandra & Mark, inside a carved heart. Her hands landed on her knees and she wept mourningly.

Jittery

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Illness

Something may be wrong with you when your blog is bipolar, your computer has Alzheimer's and your car, Parkinson's.

Abandonment

Sublime

There are two major themes in art which reassert themselves over the centuries despite the fads and conventions of a certain time, Love and Death, which derive from the source of our greatest motivations, survival. Most literary masterpieces cover both, but so do most pulp fictions.

What detaches the sublime from the common junk is subtle nastiness. Here's an excerpt from Venus and Adonis, a lovely poem by William Shakespeare:

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Quotations

If your head is wax, don't walk in the sun.
Benjamin Franklin

We are what we repeatedly do.
Aristotle

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Sir Winston Churchill

It is easier to stay out than get out.
Mark Twain

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W. Somerset Maugham

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell

One dies only once, and then for such a long time!
Molière

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.
Michel de Montaigne

War cannot be avoided; it can only be postponed to the other's advantage.
Niccolo Machiavelli

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Virtues

Inspired by Benjamin Franklin's plan of virtues, a controlled list he devised in his twenties from a reading of the Bible, I made myself a shorter and more useful one for an enlightenment life.

This list consists of 10 virtues, which you may call the Ten Commandments, and such they are:

1. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought, except when you can save face not doing it.

2. Serenity: Be not disturbed by trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable, since they happened to other people.

3. Temperance: Eat not to dullness, otherwise you won't be sexy, and drink not to elevation, get high, though not as high as heaven.

4. Order: Let all things have their places, even if it changes often and randomly.

5. Confidence: Be not shy nor omissive. Girls don't dig it.

6. Exercise: Be healthy, active and strong, so you can burn the fat of your chopp-barrel belly.

7. Cleanliness: Dude, do smell good. Really.

8. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful, necessary or utterly pleasant.

9. Frugality: Make no useless expense. Let her pay.

10. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit your beloved talc-smelling butt. Hear your mom.

Melancholy

Truth

Truth is like a hot potato, none can hold it forever.

Literature

If the devil is in the details, literature is its room mate.

World Cup

Oops, they did it again. A bunch of stars is not a constellation.

France 1x0 Brazil

Justice

I saw a cute irony at the mall: there was a table statue of Justice, her body slender, holding a sword in one hand, scales in the other, both eyes blindfolded.

She was expensive.

Smile

Do it.

Old Man

What lies beyond, what lies, I must
bethink what lies beyond the dust,
the flesh, the hunger, the decay,
why joy evades and dwells dismay!

Seduced by faith in bleary youth,
I crossed its path to find the truth
and early learned to be kind
and early learned to be blind,

a perfect prayful prey of church
I was encaged, on a perch,
meanwhile they gave me in a flood,
to eat, His meat, to drink, His blood.

Then came the time my mother died,
I raised my arms and opened wide,
and asked the Lord to let her stay,
but like a blow she faded away...

I barely lived, I lived for toil,
my sweat and blood pervade this soil
because they told me, when a lad,
a man must work to earn his bread.

A man must work to earn his bread...
I lost my faith and was misled
by friends of destiny to trust
my hazy impetus of lust.

And when the sand was up my nose,
inside the hourglass I arose
and tasted the honey with my tongue,
my fate would sing and I along.

I sinned: I stole, I raped, I killed,
in every curse I would be skilled.
And still today when I daydream
an angel bleeds until I scream!

What lies beyond, what lies, I must
bethink what lies beyond the dust,
for I feel weak and old, I'm lying,
I don't feel sick - my soul is dying!

Nostalgy...

... results from an aesthethic recyclement of the past.

Battle

Love, hatred, shouts, fights, wounds, lies, heroism, angst, a heart-shattering operatic drama.

Portugal 1x0 Netherlands, best game of the World Cup so far.

Beauty

A child running over the yard, tasting the anxiety of Christmas Eve. His eyes, little stars, happier than a baby's laugh.

The simple solution of a daunting problem.

A teenager feeding his girlfriend cherries and strawberries, laid on grass, awkwardly kissing her cheeks.

A balerina's pink bellybutton.

A tear slipping down a pretty, resolute countenance - the absurd on the face of reason, the inevitable on the face of resignation.

The A minor scale played on a Steinway during a lazy Sunday evening.

Streetlights of a curve by the sea at midnight, viewed from the top of a tall building, slightly blurred by whisky.

The carefully crafted handwriting of a love letter.

Alicia Silverstone

Emo Kid

Men despair and cry, albeit I may seem
to overreact a bit like Rachel Green,
my tragedy within, to put it blunt,
would certainly delight the stupid Kant
for it is metaphysical, maybe,
and don't you call me for that a baby!

I want a cool car and I want it badly,

daddy won't gimme because I ain't deadly,
I loathe brutality and won't kill fish
to eat, I'd rather cook a salad dish.
I'm not gay! Don't be rude because I seem
to overreact a bit like Rachel Green!

Glasses

Hopefully, the extra eyes will aid me to capture the evading, most colorful fairies and butterflies of reality, and perhaps make me sexier.

Routine

The walls are pale green. I push the door. Good morning. A pulled chair screeches. Regular typing. The noisy, distant cars on the street, oftentimes a honk. The smell of old paper. I'm sleepy. Numbers. Sad, serious faces staring at computer screens. The phone rings. Good morning. The dreamy, dull light of a bulb in the morning. Somebody goes to the bathroom. The air conditioning sounds irritated, I don't blame it. What are the uncanny gossips? More numbers. Nobody likes taxes. Nor deadlines. Mistress, I'm just doing my job. The door is slammed. Pause. The regular typing restarts. I'm dazed, should have eaten better. More paper comes in, more numbers. Good morning. The screamy laser printer vomits another work. Bureaucratic blabbering. The air is too dry. An old, grim woman joins the room. No, nobody is available, sorry. Somebody could pull the plug of this telephone. It's pretty small here... and all these people. Well. Doctor Big-shot in the so-so room will provide you the information, mister... Clueless. We are not self-help gurus. Ah, sleep deprivation may drive me insane. Hunger. Time is up. See you tomorrow.