He drives rain slicked streets in his Deliverator's car,

Fat, sticky tires clinging to the road like a slug to a leaf.

His machine crouches like a beast stalking it's prey,

As it accelerates and weaves through the concrete jungle.

He is ONE with his car, a perfect melding of man and machine.

The pizzas WILL be on time.

The sudden SLAP of a "poon" alerts the driver that he's picked up a stowaway..

Some brave entrepreneurial idiot is using the Deliverator to get themselves somewhere FAST.

He does NOT like unexpected passengers..

The driver's names, first AND last, are synonymous with hero,

And he fashions himself to be one, of a sort.

He determines to LOOSE this leech.

Glancing back into his blind spot the Deliverator spots the interloper;

Decked out in the flashy colors and modern body armor of a courier,

They are "skiing" off the back of his ride, dangling from the end of the suckered on harpoon.

Okay, damn... I'm gonna end that there.. I started this "poem" as an attempt to pay tribute to one of my favorite books by writing a poem BASED on it, about the main character. Any of my readers who have read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" will have immediately (I hope) recognized Hiro Protagonist in his role as The Deliverator from the beginning of that great, fun, science fiction novel.  I feel like my attempt at an homage was just turning into a sort of butchered reinterpretation of events that Mr. Stephenson himself described far better in his OWN words, in the book.  So rather than sound like I may be ripping him off, or worse, doing a disservice to the tale told in Snow Crash by painting it less than it is, I'll abandon this exercise.  I was inspired to try such a thing by some of my favorite music artists who write songs about great novels that they love and manage to do so poetically and without infringing on the writings of those to whom they are paying tribute.  I will likely try this again, either with the same, or a different subject at a later time.  Perhaps I am being too hard on myself, and this poem was NOT going THAT badly... but for me it stopped even feeling like a poem and felt more like I was trying to tell the story and doing so badly :P  heheh :-D

I will end this post with a quote, directly from the book, a writing style that I can only HOPE to aspire to one day:

Image Copyright of lhn6856

"A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Blog re-launch

At first when I had the thought of restarting and trying to breathe new life into this lapsed blog of mine, I briefly toyed with the idea of re-naming it "Thing-a-Day", a blatant rip-off of Jonathan Coulton, a folksy, humorous, singer/song writer of whom I have recently grown quite fond, and who gained notice through his own musical project "Thing-a-week" in which he put out one new or cover song a week for a year.  After a bit of thought, I decided that, as much as I'd LIKE to be able to say that I would write at least one thing a day, I knew/know myself, and my horrible tendency toward procrastination, better than that.  Hence, Bloem a Week was born. :)  Still a tribute to (sounds nicer than ripoff ;) Mr. Coulton as well as to the band he ripped off.. I mean, was inspired by, They Might Be Giants, whose old Dial-A-Song service, back in the days of answering machines, served as the inspiration for Jonathan's musical project.  Lastly, but most certainly not least, I would be remiss if I did not include my friend Patrick Brennan, whose excellent art/writing blog 52 Fridays  not only ALSO follows this tried-and-true self motivator of weekly postings but also showed me what a blog can be and inspired me to someday maintain my own blog.

Now, despite the fact that I settled on "..A Week" as the 'suffix' to my blog's title, I will by no means use that as an excuse to limit myself to merely one post a week.  If I am able to maintain daily blogs for a while, so be it.  Someone said "Less is More" but, honestly, isn't MORE more??  So I will endeavor to write, as often, and whenever the mood strikes me, and, AT LEAST once a week.  I gave myself that self motivator in the title to do just that, motivate my SELF.  I like the me who writes, even if I don't always care for some of the silliness or aborted attempts at deep philosophic meanderings that spill out of his head and onto the keyboard. :)  So I will practice BEING that me.

- Josh

Alphabetty-Spaghetti

Always Bring Current Documentation.

Effervescent Fairies Glide Haughtily.

Introduce Jocular Kindness, Lavishly.

Meditate Now On Phosphorescence.

Quietly Reflect Serene Thought-forms.

Understand Various Widespread  Xenographies.

Your Zen-like Zealous Youth.

Xylomancy With Variegated Undergrowth.

Trans-formative States Revealed Quickly.

Psychic Observances Newly Made.

Leaving Knowledgeable Jobs Inexplicably.

Hypnotic Guidance From Elsewhere.

Delivers Consciousness Broadly Awakened.

Blogger's Neglect

So I guess I dropped the ball on this blog for a week or so.  It's not that I did not think about blogging, or more to the point, the fact that I had not contributed anything to my blog in a while, I just did not have any clear inspiration and I was coming home pretty tired all week from my first real physical work in quite some time.  Even the inspiration for THIS blog is just the lack of inspiration I have had and to assuage my writer's guilt.

     I did have a few thoughts over the course of the last 10 days on some topics I could blog about.  I realized that there are some, perhaps even many, things that I do not feel I can share in this particular blog.  Things that if I wanted to write about I would publish anonymously or even in a private journal for my eyes only.  This is my public blog.  I want this blog to be accessible to any of my friends and family on facebook who might be interested in reading what I have to say on whatever various topics I choose to write about.  That said, there are certainly some aspects of my(and surely of anyone's) life that I wouldn't choose to share with everyone.  And I'm sure it is just as true that not everyone would want to know the things that I would not talk about here.

     I am still struggling for inspiration so I guess I will accept that this is all I have to contribute to my blog at this time.  Maybe I will just write a detailed account of what I did at work last week for my next post.  Could be incredibly boring but at least I will feel like I made an effort to write and share some of my life with others.  I did see both a sea otter and a beautiful soaring eagle at my job site last week.  Too bad I was not inspired to write a sonnet or something about the graceful beauty of an eagle's flight.  Okay, I feel silly and cliched now, so I will end this post.  Hopefully I will find something that I want to write about soon.  At the very least I can start recycling my old poetry on here.  I am sure some of it is in need of a little re-writing.

Alternate Mes

I had an idea for a post, it could even be an idea for a story or book, about possible alternate versions of myself.  Say, for instance, I had been born in a different century.  I could have been born into a far flung future(if humanity indeed exists far into the future) or into the distant past.

Perhaps there is an alternate me wherein my pirate garbed persona is not just a costumed affectation I don for SCA and other just for fun events, but is, instead, my true swashbuckling self; a salty sea dog aboard a ship of other scoundrels taking what we can from those weaker than us.  If an alternate, pirate, me exists, I am sure that he/me would not be a very nice person.  As much as Hollywood and books would like to have us believe in the fantasy of the noble and honorable rogue of the sea, the handsome trickster who may be a thief but he loathes to kill and he fights on the side of right, I doubt such fantastical heroic figures existed among the bloodthirsty lot of murderers, rapists and thieves who actually roamed the seas in search of ships to plunder and booty to loot.  So, Josh the Red, would likely look upon the version of me who is writing this blog as a weak-bellied land-lubber, and kill me for even pretending to be any kind of relation to his vile rum-swilling self.

Still, it would be interesting to live a day in the life of that cutthroat pirate.  Even to experience the more distasteful elements of his sea fairing and marauding, the actions of true pirates, that have been sanitized from all the Disney and family friendly pirate portrayals.  Murder, death, sickness at sea, kidnapping, rape, ransoming, primitive medicine and nutrition.  Truth is painful in many ways, even the true lives of our stories' white knights in shining armor were much grittier and less honorable than they are portrayed in the stories we tell today.  I wanted to go further with this post.  Maybe even write an imagined 'Day in the Life Of' Josh the Red.  Perhaps I will get around to that in a future post.  I would also like to hypothesize on a future-born self. I've met many people who say that they feel as if they were born in the wrong century, wishing they lived in simpler times like the olden days or during the renaissance(often seeming to overlook just how HARD life was in those times..)  I am not one of these, I am a lover of sci-fi and often wished as a kid that I lived in the world of Star Trek, where money is an outmoded concept and teleportation as a mode of travel and replicators that can make any meal you desire in an instant are a reality.  I do not know if such a Utopian vision of humanity can ever come to pass, but if it could, I would wish to live in THAT century.  Even the gritty, near-future world that William Gibson describes in his cyberpunk novels appeals to me more than our world of menial jobs, mortgage payments and reality TV.  I don't know.  Maybe I am just a dissatisfied soul, and I would find something disagreeable even in an alternate life where I was king of a peaceful empire and had my every need catered to.  If so, blame my pessimistic Cancerian nature.  I DO love the internet, so I am least grateful to live in the age of Google and information at our fingertips.  I know not everyone agrees that this is a good thing, but that is a part of what makes this me ME and I would not have it any other way.

New Old Post..

I failed to post in the past two days so here is a quick re-post from my facebook poetry:

The Ending Has Just Begun

They say all good things must come to an end.

The same must be true of bad things.

But sometimes an ending is just the beginning,

and a new beginning may be the end to an old story.

Endings can take longer than expected,

when expectations are based on false assumptions,

and prior experience of a simpler time.

This ending has just begun.

This ending is a story in itself.

This ending has it's own beginning

and this ending has an end.

This ending has just begun.

I don't know how to end this.

This is not the end.

But I don't know where to take this.

I don't know where to begin.

This may have ended before it ever began.

And maybe I'm a fool for beginning it to begin with.

This ending has just begun.

This ending is a story in itself.

This ending has it's own beginning

and this ending has an end.

This ending has just begun.

Now I've slipped into absurity and repitition.

Maybe it is time to just end this.

Or begin it properly.

But I am bad at endings.

So I will just say this:

The End.

My favorite of my recent poems..

 I wanted to start sharing some of my poetry here on this blog, so here 

is my favorite of my poems I have written within the last year:

When the World Ends

When the world ends

I will walk with you, hand in hand,

Under starlight, in the middle of the day.

When the world ends

When the world ends

I will stand with you, back to back,

Shotguns at the ready, popping zombie heads.

When the world ends

When the world ends

We will watch as all that we love falls

And laugh, for we know it is just the beginning,

When the world ends

When the world ends

We will joke about reincarnating as roaches

Upon the barren rock that may remain

When the world ends

When the world ends

We shall ascend as beings of Light and Soul

To embark upon a new journey together

When the world Begins...

First Post

Writer's block is a funny thing.  Not "funny ha-ha" mind you, but funny nonetheless.  Trying to think of something to write here I ran up against my old friend/foe, the writer's block.  I have come to think of it as a sort of entity unto itself after all these years.  I have within me, a gift for writing, or at least so I have felt and been told in the past.  However, I also struggle to find inspiration, motivation and forward momentum in wordsmithery.  (Yeah, I think I just made up that last word, but it sounded right..)  I constantly find myself "up against the block" as it were, wanting, on some level at least, to express myself with words(written, typed, even occasionally spoken) and yet unable to think of the thing to say, or the clever metaphor, even just some way new of observing something, so as not to seem boring, obtuse or plagiarizing.

     So it comes that my first post on my new blog is about writer's block.  I have written about writer's block before.  Maybe it comes from a hope that in giving "the block" some undue, hopefully unwanted(it is my FOE after all, I want for 'it' any of the things it does not want) attention, it will GO AWAY.  I suppose it is possible that "the block" knows what is best for me, and it only surfaces to stymie and stop my writing efforts when it is in the better interest of my own mental health that I NOT write what I intended to, writing on other subjects, or at times, not writing at all.  Perhaps "the block" is a silent hero in my life, saving bits of my sanity by it's efforts to block my creative outlets at times of my own mental weakness.  Or it is just a dick.  Not wanting creative expression of any kind to exist when it is around.

     I think I had more to say in that last paragraph, but I do not think that "the block" likes me talking about him, as my fount of words seems to have run dry once more.  Ah well.. I have bleed a fair amount of words onto this digital page all the while fighting the writer's block, so I will have to accept 3 paragraphs as a decent affront to "the block"s efforts to silence my pixelated penmanship.  I hope I am able to find a successful outlet in this blog for the imp of creativity that sometimes dwells behind my eyes.  And maybe if I battle "the block" more often, he will torment me less.