Weird Carla Writes: A Call to Freedom

 

A Call to Freedom

In the mirror I looked at a Super Freak, at least a Super Freak according to the so-called “good people” of this town. To go outside was to risk having their dogs set on us, from bowsers to schnauzers. We called ourselves the Sons of Freedom and call on people to think for themselves, to be unique, to wear an orange tiger striped fluffy fleece hat if you want. Currently we were fighting for the earth, to keep them from boring a tunnel through downtown and entombing us all, financially, certainly, and in an earthquake, maybe.

          But they claimed that where the Sons of Freedom made their home, leave the earth to Satan and his slaves. They claimed going along with the majority and community was heaven, and made you one with God and the angels. They claimed their attacks on us were justified by saying, “for that which longer nurseth the disease, spread the rot, and made them all tainted and unclean.”

          We still struggle, we hide, we protest, we run, each of us convinced of our purpose, and knowing freedom has no expiration date. It is an idea that will not die.

Accessory Poem

I hold up a mirror
For that which longer nurseth the disease
Is reflected in my face, my hair, my clothes
I am called a Super Freak,
But Freedom has no expiration date
I long to fly away, find the place
Where the Sons of Freedom make their home,
Leave the earth to Satan and his slaves

By Carla Blaschka, August 6, 2011

An exercise. I was given 3 words and 2 lines and 20 minutes to write a story. The words: Mirror, Super Freak, and Expiration Date were drawn at random from one bag. The second bag contained lines from Sonnet #147 by William Shakespeare and lyrics from Into The Void and Under the Sun / Every Day Comes and Goes by Black Sabbath. And I happened to luck into a line from Black Sabbath's song Into the Void and one line from Sonnet #147.

Goodbye Seattle (I'll Always Love You)

 

Yesterday, I ran through a field of luscious uncut alfalfa hay
It swirled around my legs
banking this way and that way in unison
like a cloud of phosphorescent plankton
I was naked
Not alone
I conversed with the wind

Today, I stepped off a Greyhound
I strutted out a skyline of emerald towers
into a neighborhood
that has been my lover for eight years
I saw the Wizard of Oz for the first time
people mill around insane, high, straight, colorful, gay, lesbian, and transgendered
and I just now realized how astonishing this city is

It is summer, the rain showers down sideways, warm
I left my umbrella behind the door
in my apartment on Capitol Hill
but somehow my clothes are still dry

Tomorrow my life here will end
I will be born new
Reincarnated into a boot
that has seen too many miles of asphalt
On the right shoe
the big toe has been exposed to air laden with petro-pollen fumes
Newspaper is stuffed into the other,
it stops ground water from seeping through holes
A starving hermit retreats into a shell
stolen from the shadow of a tree snail
it drinks sand from the exiting tide
and reads fear on the front page

This new place I’ll be going is monocromatic
Batter ladled into a skillet bubbling as it fries into a hotcake
is bumpier as it crawls and sprawls from wall to mart

What will come next I do not know
I’ve been unhinged from this life
I call home

Shannon Kringen’s Variation of and Exquisite Corpse

The first thing I saw when I walked up to the rubber mat was a molted yellow brown filling the screen.

It was obvious to me that I was going to miss my appointment and I would need to clean up the mess. 90 degree F heat and Rubber don't mix. The screen was torn and rusty with spider webs all over it. It had green metallic beetles all wrapped up in their silk spider web coffins ready to be eaten.

I wanted to take some close up macro photos but left my camera at the castle nearby. The accordion music played outside the door was perfect funeral music for beetles. I got out my spray paint.

All now begin to fade as I stare at yellow ground filling the screen.

Metallic green will now replace the yellow.

The screen must transform. In these chaos days where nothing makes sense you may as well use colors you enjoy the sight of. Wind chimes distracted me as I sniffed the hideous toxic fumes of the paint. I thought of my ex calling me a narcissist. Must cover that yellow brown I thought. ERASE THE PAST.

I sprayed it out with black paint

But then realized it's better to mostly stick with metallic green and layer the two colors. After all, the beetles are both green and black. It all matches and is a metaphor for something bigger. There are always repeating patterns that mirror and echo. The inner and outer life are connected but I wonder where it starts? Chicken or egg?

They pulled pranks between engine strokes and reminded me of dew.

Which also reminds me of “ranks” and hierarchies: the games people play with their false selves. What a game it is to be human on planet earth. Pros and cons to that! I wish I could turn my skin to metallic green and go live in the jungle. “Get back to nature” as they say.

His hands were now tainted with the blood of the undesirables’.

Just as mine were. Aren't we all tainted in some way I thought silently to myself? I ache to be free of these burdens. Can I learn to be more like a worm and ground myself in earth and absorb nutrients and let go of judging Self and others? Maybe I am a narcissist but at least I am aware of this possibility. I have been told that a true narcissist never questions whether they are a narcissist or not! Projections? Scapegoating? Live and learn.

—Shannon Kringen, Saturday, July 30, 2011

Shannon wrote: "here is the weird story i wrote with a group in the park. the lines in italic are from other writers who gave me a line and i added my own words after that. each other us ended up with totally different stories. very cool exercise!

Bio of the Artist

:

Multi Media Artist Shannon Kringen grew up in San Diego California and Whidbey Island Washington. She is a self-taught photographer with a background in Graphic Design. She works as a figure model and is designing her BA degree with a concentration on Photography. Shannon also paints onto shoes and creates fully abstract paintings on canvas. She recently began learning printmaking and plans to combine photography with monotype prints. She sees her creative expression as a tool to connect with community and a way of increasing self-awareness and tap into a deeper wisdom within.

http://www.shannonkringen.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonkringen/

Weird Carla Blankovic's variation of an Exquisite Corpse

How Many Kills Can One Killer Claim?

     The first thing I saw when I walked up to the rubber mat was a molted yellow brown filling the screen.

     Andy had recommended the butcher to me and I was excited to pick up some fresh prosciutto. I hadn't realized just how fresh the meat would be as I gazed at chicken skin and unsaleable chicken parts; this wasn't the International District, after all, being washed down the drain.

     Fresh tongue laughed at me.

     I got out my spray paint. I waved it at the owner and he pointed to the back. I walked through hanging racks of beef and out the door. Detroit was pretty aggressive about cleaning up graffiti, but the butcher just wanted to go the cheap route and have me paint over it. This time someone had written "MURDERER" in day glo paint on the back alley wall. I sprayed it out with black paint.

     Wandering fingers at the fairway meant I had several more hours of community service to do and I needed to get this signed off. The butcher came out to see what I was doing and I handed him my form. He took it and pulled out a wax pencil with a blood-stained hand. He was about to sign when he glanced at the wall.

     "What the hell?" he said.

     I turned and stared. The phantom day glo paint had seeped through the black and was even more visible than ever.

     "MURDERER", it cried.

     "Bloody hippies," he growled, and grabbed the can of spray paint out of my hand.

     I watched as the mom and child slipped from sight. The ninth thing was the ground-score cupcakes, the homemade cookies and the ice cream walking by. I was counting the different things people had in their hands as they walked through the alley as I waited, crouched with my back against the wall. The butcher kept growing more and more angry as each coat of paint made the words go brighter. His big, red face was sweating and he was starting to shout incoherently. Phrases such as “Get a job, you lazy bums” and “a chicken in every pot, that’s what I provide, you think your pot tastes like chicken, ha!” drifted over my head.

     I rested my chin on her head and stroked the golden brown hair of the butcher’s daughter. I don't see that glow in her eyes and spark in her voice after all of this, I thought, and immediately berated myself for thinking that at a time like this. Susi was in my class at school and I had had a crush on her since 9th grade. After the EMT's pronounced her dad dead of a heart attack, she cried on my shoulder for an hour. The shop was closed; we were still in the alley staring at the wall and its message when I noticed something. I went over and lightly sprayed the last of the paint above and below the word "murderer" and waited. After a moment or two more became visible. Now against the black were the words "I AM A" and "I KILLED JIMMY H..."

     H what?

     I shook the can but there was no more paint to reveal the truth.

     "I AM A MURDERER. I KILLED JIMMY H..."

     "Is that next letter an "O" do you think?

     Susi just shook her head, full from fresh death and uninterested in dry, aged meat.

Written Saturday, July 30, 2011

At Cal Anderson Park. The words in italic were given to me by other members of my writing group during an exercise called "Exquisite Corpse."

I am clever. I figured out how to do a paragraph indent in html! I tried many fancy things including inserting a css code, but to no avail. The css code worked in part, but it ultimately failed to do what I wanted. The style code, instead of indenting the first line, indented all the lines in the paragraph. The more I work solely in html the less foreign code begins to look. It won't be long before I'll be able to modify templates. Now, if I can only figure out how to indent "5" spaces instead of three. I put in five of these characters "  & n b s p ;  " without spaces and it should have worked, but it didn't. If someone knows how to solve my problem, just leave the code as a comment. Thanks.

Purple Mark's variation of an Exquisite Corpse

 

Photo by Seattle PI

Things Seen: One Through Fourteen

The First Thing I saw was the mottled Yellow ground beyond the fiber mat. There were the fallen leaves of the approaching Autumn caught in its weave.

The Second Thing was a Rose that lay Browning after being filched from someone’s garden and abandoned on the uncaring sun-heated ground.

The Third Thing was a peculiar toy: a strange Chinese blend of Disney and San Rio of a baby/cat hybrid that crawled on the ground and mewed.

The Fourth was the gurgling laughter under the trees off the basketball court from the two mad scientists who had found the key to turning off Gravity by a Fifth Force which ran parallel to and repelled the ground.

The Sixth Thing were the bright Green tennis balls which hadn’t cleared the net and lay disregarded on the ground.

The Seventh Thing were the hoops of stone along the court’s grounds and of the dreams of Mayans anxious to not win the game and thus lose their hearts.

The Eighth Thing was the rumble of unmufflered motorcycles prowling Pine Street and the sound of bicycle tires on the gravel scattered over the ground.

The Ninth Thing were the tiny ground-score Lemon cupcakes, home-maid chocolate-chip cookies and the parade of ice-cream walkers.

There was a big ‘X’ or the number Ten where a “Bloody Hippy” had spray-painted the hot ground with a desperate need for attention: I was here!

There were Eleven bounces between attempts by the boy to make a basket: None of which went in and rebounded to the ground off the backboard.

The Twelve days of Summer were half over with park-goers eager to get their fill of Vitamin D before it rained and the ground turned to mud again.

The Thirteenth Thing were the metallic green sandals that looked more at home in the jungle than on this asphalted ground.

The fourteenth thing was the planes which drifted overhead as people walked on the walls instead of the ground as the writing exercise came to an end.

—Purple Mark, Written at a writers circle that met Saturday at Cal Anderson Park, July 30, 2011