Roses

An assignment from writing workshop (writing with the 'heart' voice)...

I love the smell of roses! Everytime I see the beautiful flower glimmering in the sunshine I run to it. I run to it as if my life depended on it. I must smell it. I must smell this divine creation, this natural effect of the first cause. I sink my nose into the flower, almost forgetting about the petal, the fragile petals. I inhale, consuming the flower's essence. Ahhh...the smell. All is well with the world...if only I could inhale non stop. I need to breathe, I need to take a break. But I can't stop smelling. Like siren's on a rocky coastline, I am drawn in. I don't need to breathe, I need to inhale. I need to become the symbiotic complement to this scent.

Rear Ended

Joe reached into the glove compartment for his gun.  

He couldn’t believe this guy.  He’d been tailgating Joe since the stand of Pines on Sherwood.  Right up on his ass. Joe tapped on his brakes politely, but this guy would not relent.  Joe remembered the moment , the exact moment the switch went off.  The instantaneous rush of heat to his neck, rising like a red tsunami, consuming his head.  He started wishing death on the guy.  He tried to be polite, but this guy would not get off his ass.  This f#*king guy is testing me, Joe had thought.  Who does he think he is, riding my ass like that. I’m gonna f#*king kill him.  Joe’s rage was starting to take over.  He could feel the last shred of self control fading away, dropping through the density, getting smaller and smaller.  The rage was pushing everything else out of the way.  And now his brand new car is ruined, crumpled from the spoiler to the rear axle.  Holy Crap, Joe thought, now he’s gonna stand there and yell at me?  He’s blaming me for this?   Joe’s face looked ugly, scowled and contorted into a horrifying grimace.  He was no longer in control.  The dark half was in control.  Basic survival functioning the only thing in the pilot’s seat.  

Joe reached into the glove compartment for his gun. 

My Eyes Are Up Here

Having just gotten a Vasectomy and a resulting nasty infection, I feel that I have been given a small glimpse into the life of a woman and her body.  Once I returned to public view, every time a woman asked me how I was feeling, she looked at my crotch!  And I started to think.  What if that happened to me my whole life?  What if every time a woman spoke with a man, she fought to not look at his crotch?  Waiting until he looked away to steal a glance, only to get caught when he looked back; or the bold ones just talking to his crotch.  How would men feel, you know, if you take the ‘man’ part out of the equation?  (We are different animals, after all.) 

                From the ripe age of about 13, boys, and later, men, have fought a quiet, internal battle.  Those that are gentlemen successfully win this battle; those that are not stop fighting this battle once their innocence fades.  It is a difficult battle.  For the first 10 years of our pubescent lives we just want to see the female body.  A girl and a stiff wind causes strange things to happen; sometimes just a stiff wind.  What’s a boy to do?  I propose that as a society we should start a desensitizing program as part of the middle school curriculum.  Get it out of their system so they can grow up to be nice, eye-contacting-gentlemen.  Understandably, we would be fighting thousands, perhaps millions, of years of evolutionary hard wiring.  But we are now (allegedly) civilized as a society. 

                Do European men fight this battle?  I don’t know.  Do European woman care?  I don’t know that, either.  But I think the female form is less taboo overseas.  The human body is not kept so secretive in their societies.  Of course, they’ve been societies longer than we have.  And our society has its roots in male dominated religious zealotry, where women had no voice.  So let us unite, and get naked together!