An Agglomerate Of Middling Miscellany

I strolled up to the Customer Service area at Fry's Supermarket and placed my PowerBall lottery card and my usual one-dollar bill down onto the counter before my favorite clerk (the young, pretty, well- groomed one who always smiles at me) and was horrified to hear her say, "Sorry Sweetie but a chance on the PowerBall drawing just went up to two dollars."

I know my jaw must have dropped and my eyes probably bugged out some, because she said, "do you still want one?" I told her no, that I could not afford to lose two dollars twice a week on such a long, long shot. So I just bought a ticket on the twice weekly Arizona MegaMillions drawing, which is still only one dollar, and pays out a jackpot in the multii-millions.

PowerBall can go jump in the lake.

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I try to catch Greta Christina's blog each time she posts a new entry. Greta is an outspoken atheist. Greta is happily and proudly a free- thinking lesbian. Greta is an intelligent, skillful, and much published writer.

In The Ten Main Reasons I Don't Believe In God from the Archives, Greta wrote: ". . . I’ll assume that the mind-bogglingly consistent pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones is almost certain to continue."

Now that, I thought, is a fine example of constructing (coining?) a new word -- "mind-bogglingly" -- and is a somewhat subtle slap in the face of all those how-to-write mavens whose first commandment is that writers should avoid using adverbs.

(A maven is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others.)

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Sometimes I read a passage and it stays with me. Such as this one by Gustave Flaubert:

"It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."

The above was copied a while back from The Writer's Almanac

See more here here about Gustave Flaubert

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From Harry Crews came another memorable passage:

"There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with."

(One might ask TV's Doctor House for his thoughts about that particular observation)

I suppose the reason I so often copy into this website quotations and short pieces written by published authors and famous poets is because throughout the years I have failed to write memorable poems and stories myself. But I have read and enjoyed so many works of others, and I get a tremendous amount of pleasure from sharing with those who may not have read them.

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