1. Never, ever open a freelance check while sitting in your car and exclaim, "All RIGHT, $2,309!"  because your car will immediately break down to the exact tune of the amount on the freelance check (yes, I said exact.)

2. All running shoes will eventually go over to the dark side, and no amount of Dr. Scholl's spray or baking soda will remove the demonic odor that has no name. 

3. As soon as you leave a fishing spot on a lake after having caught…

This guy writes, you know the guy, Mamet, he writes dialogue that sounds like one side of a phone conversation.

Where did he grow up that people -- I'm telling you, listen to what I'm saying -- that people talk  like the EL train's roaring by and you only hear  part -- it doesn't matter WHICH  part, just a part -- and they have to repeat it.

That guy writes, it's all herky jerky, it's all clicky-clackey, like the tracks on an old railroad bed. That guy, the one  like a turbine…

It appears that Alabamians have been bamboozled by a fish import company. The front page of today’s hometown paper says a corporation selling fish to our restaurants and grocery stores has been passing off Vietnamese catfish as such high-priced, fancy fish as sole, grouper and flounder.

Moreover, the report continued, those bad people have been selling shrimp imported from other oceans but labeling them as fresh Gulf shrimp from Alabama.

I have to say that, given the…

Later today, at a brew pub in Atlanta, I will be sitting in the same room booth as Jamie Hogan and Bill Floyd. They're gonna drive from North Carolina, six hours, to have lunch with me. This is HUGE, y'all, I mean huge like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger saying, "Oi, Gita, we want to meet ya, luv."…

Afterwards,  she is as silent as a Carmelite. I am a taut cord. 

Even by our usual standards of bluntness, which make  Huns look like Tele-Tubbies, this last fight was brutal.

We go to our separate corners, which for her means a gaming website and for me a deep glass of single malt, and I realize that each of us is positioned in a room facing the door.

When did we arrange the furniture so that our backs are never vulnerable to the other's approach? 

How long ago…

I. That woman who followed me home had nothing but trash to talk. But you worried for days with a stubborn jealousy, refusing to touch me.…

He is homesick, but not for a place. Rather, it is for certain things, like the silver of old cedar shakes, the tang of wood smoke and belling of hounds on their return from the fields.

He is lonesome, it’s true, but he has been more lonesome at other times -- though, were he to measure it, and be honest, he is less lonesome now than when his heartless Chella was alive, although he’d never say that to the…

Bootsy Sykes examined his bare feet during his breakfast of Frosted Flakes and decided he probably needed a pedicure, so he phoned his neighbor, Charlene Shiner,  but Stump answered the phone, instead.

" 'Sup, Boots?" asked Stump, who had just awoken, himself, and was likewise barefooted.

Bootsy explained his predicament, somewhat abashedly, causing Stump to look at his own yellowing…

Evenings, as he wrote by lamplight, Leszek Kolakowski occasionally shifted his glance to Karl, his marmalade cat. The Polish philosopher believed that  only two things were worth doing well: writing his analysis of Marxism and tending to the cat which had been left in his care by dear friends who'd fled Warsaw's Nazi invasion.

Over time, Kolakowski observed that Karl was easily satisfied with very little, and that moving dust motes or breeze-stirred curtains amused the animal no less…

Yes, I am the one who wrote the ransom note.

The detective brought me a Pepsi and talked nicely when he handed me a pen and paper and told me which words to write five times each -- daughter, money, police, bills, suitcase, deliver -- in cursive script, not printing.



"Who asked you to write the note, sweetheart, and why you?" he asked me from across the small table with sparks coming…

The Internal Revenue Service occupies several rooms in a second-rate office tower in downtown Montgomery where used furniture goes to die.

After you ride in an elevator that was last inspected (according to a label above the floor numbers) in 1989, you arrive at a corridor permeated by the odors of nervous sweat and copier…

I received an unexpected email yesterday from someone I dated briefly 20-plus years ago, had totally forgotten, and barely recalled even after searching my memory files. My reply, in fact, to his email was: Who are you?

It's not important, he's not important, but what IS important is that he was able to find me.

Because I blog widely -- politics over on Like The Dew and fiction in four different places -- it's hardly as if I'm a shy recluse. But I have been careful to maintain…

 Sandra Davies is the winner of the 2010 Year-End Contest  for "Honour Sought in Maeshowe!"

Her entry was chosen for the following reasons: She voiced her piece in harmony with the original poem. She continued the plot of the poem faithfully, which would be hard to do under the best of circumstances, but she did it seamlessly. But most of all, Sandra did the historical research which showed that the Norse people had been to Scotland long ago, and she used the facts in a fresh…