I stare at the monumental task that stands before me, looking at me from above, from below, from right to left. I don’t have the proper tools to get this done in a reasonable time, so I stand there with a torch and scraper. Fingers raw with so much peeling…
Continue Reading...Author: Matthew Rodriguez
The Screen
I don’t want to be near the light of the screen anymore. I don’t mean not ever, but not often. I want to sit on the porch at night, look at the plane lights go by. The flashing of radio towers. I want to listen to the creatures and critters…
Continue Reading...Catch It
If individuals blunder, society is no different. It blunders en masse, but what can one do? For one is locked in this system with few, if any alternatives but to integrate oneself. Integrate and play the system from within until a better way comes along. Change is always around the…
Continue Reading...Opportunity
And there it came, the moment, the opportunity I had been waiting for, the change needed. Unexpected, out of the blue, not thinking about it. That is how and when God operates. It is He, it is the Cosmos that have written everything down in the Book of Destiny, buried…
Continue Reading...Grandma’s House
Another goodbye, another farewell. A home that brought so many together for so many years. That was grandma’s house. A small house made of wood, concrete, and a tin roof. A house that was ravaged by a hurricane once, then rebuilt just the same. There was the Lonely Room as…
Continue Reading...12
When great men die the birds cry and sing songs of sorrow, rain falls, thunder rumbles. The house is empty; it cries out for its master. It always waits to no avail. Every tomorrow that passes by, we drift away from what was a happy home. Where a father and…
Continue Reading...These Things We Spoke Of
Walking the streets, looking for an area of operation. We went South, then a day later we went West. Both places seem good, seem manageable, but I think we agreed the South would be the better option. Either one is fine, we concluded. The AOs are close enough to one…
Continue Reading...On Writing
The mind is an endless factory of ideas that like water, must find a way to flow on up to the surface. If harbored too long inside without an outlet, these musings can lead to overwhelm. The way to save ourselves from this overwhelm is through self-expression. To open the…
Continue Reading...The End
Sometimes I myself feel like a vet suffering through the pains of PTSD. Sometime I sit in bed like Captain Willard re-experiencing the horrors I saw or the horrors I committed. Like him, I’m waiting for a mission. A clear objective: terminate the Colonel with extreme prejudice. A mission meant…
Continue Reading...Notes on Method
Thompson would say he couldn’t get into a story unless he was there. He found difficulty in going back and recreating the story through his perspective and memory. Perhaps a stream of consciousness approach made sense for some of his works and he wrote as he went along, piecing together…
Continue Reading...