While sitting at Borders this afternoon, I scribbled out this drivel. I think it basically counts as prose poetry. At any rate, here it is:

I get scared of how fast the day speeds by. This morning went by in a fog of unremembrance, and I did nothing to mark the day. I read a few news articles, I wrote a few e-mails, bathed. But now the noon hour has passed, and what has come of it?

I get scared of the way these meaningless days telescope and drift into each other, like puddles of water in a growing storm, melding into each other, edges blending and then disappearing altogether.

The days grow shorter too; I do less and less, and the hours pass by with greater and greater speed.

And most of all I get scared of this big block inside of me, this sleeping, slow, stupid giant that pulls on my limbs and my midsection, that gnaws on something inside, that wills down the rain and longs for the permanent fluidity of days, when all awareness of passage is gone and the fog of unremembrance is as featureless and welcoming and cold as the fallen snow in deep winter.

Yes, it exaggerates my mood a bit, but what are you gonna do? Great art demands great hyperbole. So does bad art.

In other news, it is a weird world after all. NPR’s "All Things Considered" broadcast a story (link forthcoming) about how some workers in a rest home in the Southeast somewhere are accusing labor organizers of using voodoo to frighten co-workers into forming a union. The chief labor organizer testifies that she knows nothing of voodoo, and that the "voodoo beads" she carries around with her are really a rosary. Sometimes, people are just too excitable for their own good.

And CNN is carrying this story about a "mysterious black blob" found floating in the waters off the coast of Florida.

Students of fiction writing are frequently told not to base their tales on real life events, because real life is sometimes far too unbelievable to make a good novel. I admit, though, that if I were to run a Call of Cthulhu game tonight, or write a modern day horror novel, both of these two news pieces would have a very prominent role.