Category Archives: the no-scape

2026, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.21.26

“Art is not the privilege of a class; it is essentially human and is both individual and universal.” – George Ward Nicols, 1877

The morning radio host had to tell me “If You Leave” by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack turned 40 today. There’s a moment here where I’m supposed to say “ouch” and wax nostalgic for a few beats. And I suppose I did. It’s good to remember that I was 12 years old when I went in search of the arcane knowledge about high school and adulthood in the movies. Being gifted and cursed with an active and strong imagination, I tended to live like I was living the layers of a life. I was a spy with a cover story. I was a crash-landed alien stuck and waiting to be rescued, turning it into a research mission to occupy my time until the mothership arrived.

I didn’t figure out what I’d done to myself until I heard it in the David Cronenberg’s movie of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. “It’s like an agent who’s come to believe his own cover story,” Benway told William Lee, mixing the cure in with the bug powder. “But who’s in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out.” Later, when Lee was trading the mugmump machine back for Clarknova, the enemy (?) handler tried to convince Lee not to believe his own cover story by warning about an agent in Anexia who had come to believe her cover story.
It took some years to work myself back out, I suppose.

Struggling a little to focus this morning. Yesterday was a day with too little sleep. Today is a day after having slept maybe too well. We are fully enveloped in winter, which is to say it feels a little early in comparison to the last few years. A hard cold winter will make for a good spring, though, or so I tell myself. It lets the earth rest right and proper. Let’s hope the earth wakes up focused and ready to work. There will be plenty of it to do. So goes into the report, anyway.

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.15.26

doodle by Mick Parsons

January is a tease and I am tired of the feedback loop. Last week it felt like spring. This morning, the temperature kills indiscriminate, the jackboots of the season. The Belle of Louisville is being pushed home down a cold river, returning to dream and remember in spite of everyone’s desire to wake and make her forget.  There is no cold quite like the one that creeps up through the soles of the boots and wool socks from cold metal deck plating. It grows up into the bones, a mycelial network that builds cold tendrils up into the medulla oblongata. The dream and memory infection lasts as long as the floating world and the water lasts. These legs are too accustomed to dry land and the cement is reaching up, too. In dreams just on this side of my eyelids I am rooted in place, arms stretched out and over, a preacher a prayer a poem, feet bound to the shore of my final baptism, denied.

But someday, the mycelium-like ties will cast me forth,  set me free. 

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Storytelling, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.8.26

I wonder what they’ll call penny matches when pennies have fallen out of the common vernacular. Will it be one of those terms that hangs on for a few generations until some “word histories” TikTok (or whatever will replace TikTok, when the base age of its users gets too old to be considered relevant by marketeers) does a bit on it, including both “penny wise, pound foolish” (which may already be archaic according to internet time) and “Pennywise the Clown” which, of course, has nothing to do with pennies; but maybe it will cause a resurgence in the interest of scary clowns and Stephen King novels, and someone will find The Stand and realize that scary stories can come true.

There will be t-shirts dedicated to The Trashcan Man. He will be the symbol of our age.

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