““The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
― George R.R. Martin

Are we always responsible for our actions?
The Executioner by Jennifer Marie Brissett
From Lightspeed
““The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
― George R.R. Martin

Are we always responsible for our actions?
From Lightspeed
“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”
― Marilyn Monroe

Sometimes the internet is a time machine – a melancholy and distorted one.
“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

There is a certain kind of long-term despair….
“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

Joyce Carol Oates is such a genius – it is scary. Her stories never turn out how you think they will and… most importantly… she is not afraid to go there.
“With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.”
― Tim Parks

Keys, a dream, canoes, and the latest squeeze.
From the New Yorker.
“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

A short piece about hope – and the idea that maybe we aren’t as stupid as we seem.
“This is what I say: I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past.
The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.
The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

If you could go into the future – maybe only a few hours – can you have your cake and eat it too?
from Flash Fiction Online
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

We all wake up in the middle of the night or maybe even five minutes before the alarm goes off and hear them walking around. Hear who? I don’t know.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

A friend called me one Saturday morning to tell me there were fields of Sunflowers blooming, vast, beside the Interstate on the way to Austin. I drove down there to take photographs. It was amazingly beautiful, the miles of yellow faces looking into the sun.

Today’s story reminded me of that day and these photographs.



“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
