Bill Floyd's Blog – February 2011 Archive (10)

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The Hours Between

Gary dropped by yesterday afternoon to watch the game.  He was a little quieter than usual, sure, but we knew he'd been going through a rough patch so we let him be.  He left after a couple of hours and drove to the Quik Pick store up the road, where he shot the clerk and  a customer and held off the cops for an hour before they brought him down.  Channel Eleven interrupted the post-game show with BREAKING NEWS and my wife pointed at the screen where they were showing the view from the… Continue

Added by Bill Floyd on February 23, 2011 at 10:30am — 14 Comments

Self-Immolation

I will burn myself down.  My ashes will seed blood in your streets, corrode your iron.

 

I will burn you and your system down.

 

You may hose my cinders into the sewer grate, but my ghost will choke your lungs.  The future belongs to those who live for their cause, but I have lived long enough and this is all I have left to give.

 

You lose all control over a man who commits to the flame.

 

 

 

Added by Bill Floyd on February 18, 2011 at 12:10pm — 9 Comments

Controllers

Tom's mentor explains that the test he must pass in order to attain Level III status involves going to a park or other public place and mentally transferring his intentions to a complete stranger.  Initially, Tom focuses on a young mother pushing her son on the swingset, concentrating his full psychic force upon her for nearly twenty minutes--clap! clap!--without prompting any response whatsoever.  Frustration builds, but frustration is a suppressive emotion, so he calms himself and…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 17, 2011 at 10:39am — 8 Comments

Crowd

The ones at the rear are afraid they're missing something, and begin to shove.

 

You don't know me, nor I you, but here we are, pressed together, the scent, the sweat, the very hair on our limbs mingling in the tidal swell.  In this crucible we will find out what the mass of us all together equals; this is where we lose ourselves, give ourselves over to the collective result, a wager that can only truly be laid from within the throng.  Whether we strain toward…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 11, 2011 at 10:00am — 9 Comments

An Article in the Local Paper

The kid burst out of the woods along the shoulder of US 321, waving his arms with this frantic look on his face.  He was wearing a tie-dye and seemed to be about our age, so we pulled over and he ran up to us shouting, "My girlfriend just fell off a hundred-foot cliff!"  We offered to drive him to find help (this was in the late '80s, before everyone had cell phones), but just then, in a timely inversion of the "You can never find a cop when you need one" cliche, a State Trooper drove by and…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 10, 2011 at 12:15pm — 4 Comments

UNC vs. Duke

And so it begins: the annual battle of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, public vs. private, entitled Jersey prep-school kids vs. slightly less entitled Carolina homesquats.

 

In Will Blythe's essential history of the rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, the author has a momentary crisis of conscience when pondering how to explain the intensity of his emotions to his girlfriend's young son; after all, this is an impressionable kid and Blythe will be…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 9, 2011 at 10:41am — 4 Comments

Into the Panopticon

The website is pure voyeur catnip: a random series of real-time security cam views lifted from across the globe: a misty dockside in Murmansk; a shopping mall in Akron; a nameless high school hallway, the kids moving silently between their lockers and the classroom doors; an intersection where there never seems to be any traffic.  Chester's friends can't understand his particular obsession with the site, and he has trouble articulating how he savors the sense of undetected intrusion, of…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 8, 2011 at 2:20pm — 7 Comments

Some Observations from Super Sunday

Once I'd recovered from Fox's clumsily manipulative, putridly exploitive pre-game patriot porn, I was pleased to discover I could still appreciate that actual GAME despite the penumbra of hype surrounding it.  By the ten minute mark in the first quarter, I'd been deeply drawn into the chess match between Green Bay and Pittsburgh, two old-school powerhouses more dependent on defense and grit than that Brady/Manning finesse crap.

 

The first homoerotic commercial aired during the…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 7, 2011 at 2:52pm — 4 Comments

Kenophobia*

It's the stillness that kills.  The void.  

 

(Please please please give me TV texting email handhelds spoon-feeding pills functional sex trend-dependency 24-hour-news-cycles celebrity meltdowns conventional wisdom tee times tea leaves soccer practice distraction distraction anything anything to fill up the space.)

 

In measurements of microseconds this image grows stale, feed me a new image, this image is used up, replace this with another (image) to hold my…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 4, 2011 at 2:50pm — 9 Comments

Hometown Haunting (6 X 2)

William Mark Alley

The anniversary is tomorrow, and he will have been missing for over a decade.  He's my best friend's cousin, and we have all known each other since we were just kids.

 

The circumstances surrounding Mark's disappearance are suspicious, and in dispute: Mark was accused of involvement in embezzlement from the Davidson County Museum  of Art, but no one who knows him personally is buying it.  I acknowledge that people can hide some dark…

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Added by Bill Floyd on February 1, 2011 at 12:13pm — 6 Comments

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