Me: Why do I have to care?
Spouse: You’re alive. You want something, if only a glass of water.
Me: I don’t want to want something… I don’t want to follow narrative rules. I don’t want to be in a story. Especially not one written by Kurt Vonnegut.
Author: marylowd
Flowers Want to Be Free
by Mary E. Lowd
A Deep Sky Anchor Original, January 2023
The city stretches as far as I know in every direction. Some kids at school say it covers the entire world, wrapping the globe of our planet in concrete snakes and strangling tentacles, dimpling its surface with metal and glass towers. I don’t know if they’re right. The websites that would tell me for sure — the good, scientific, trustworthy ones — are behind paywalls, and my parents say we can’t trust what we read on the free sites.
I know we can’t trust what we’re taught in school. Continue reading “Flowers Want to Be Free”
Hummingbirds
I got a hummingbird feeder for Christmas, and it’s already getting visitors!
Their little wings are so much louder than I expected!
Masking
It’s confusing how “masking” means both:
- wearing a piece of cloth on your face to protect yourself and others against illness
- contorting your personality to fit uncomfortable and seemingly random social norms leaving you constantly exhausted and unsure who you even are
Magic: The Gathering
I played Magic: The Gathering for the first time today in about 25 years. A quarter of a century. Wow.
We taught my kids and mom to play, using a special kit of five balanced starter decks. Amazingly, everyone had fun. We don’t usually all like the same game like that. Continue reading “Magic: The Gathering”
Pen Pals with the Tooth Fairy
by Mary E. Lowd
A Deep Sky Anchor Original, December 2022
Ella didn’t like apples, but she’d been trying to wiggle her loose tooth out for an hour. Now it was almost bedtime, and if she didn’t eat something with a big CRUNCH, then she wouldn’t get to introduce the tooth fairy to Santa Claus. So, she took the crunchiest looking apple from the kitchen counter — one of the horrible green ones that her mother liked — and sank her teeth into its sour flesh.
Bingo. She spat out the mouthful of apple into her palm… and her tooth too! Continue reading “Pen Pals with the Tooth Fairy”
Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?
I’ve only seen Die Hard once, many years ago, so we thought it’d be fun to watch it and figure out if it’s a Christmas movie, because my vague memory says it’s not.
So far… it seems less like I have an opinion on whether it’s a Christmas movie & more like I just don’t like it…
Sudden Precipitation in Various Forms
It seems unfair that’s it’s under freezing… and raining. If it’s going to be this cold, the condensation should be SNOW.
So much slush reading…
It’s both wonderful to be deluged with furry stories now that Zooscape is open again and also kind of overwhelming.
Voice and Cookies
That feeling when someone tells you that something you’ve written is “voicey,” and that’s kind of neat, but also? You just don’t see it, because it sounds completely plainly said to you.
My 15-year-old made cranberry-orange cookies today, and I’m usually very much a proponent of dessert = chocolate, but wow, these things are good. Continue reading “Voice and Cookies”
Rewatching Gremlins
I’m a little troubled on this rewatch of Gremlins by the extent to which the humans just start immediately slaughtering the mogwai as soon as they no longer have cute fuzzy fur.
A surprising amount of the gremlins’ aggression and chaos is simply coming off as self-defense… Continue reading “Rewatching Gremlins”