Writing My Mind.com: September 2022

# 102:

The source is not important,
it’s the inspiration that counts.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Twenty Dollars

I wanted to ask her to marry me, but I needed twenty dollars, bad. So I asked her for the twenty, figuring I’d see how that went, then maybe I’d ask her to marry me, later, after I’d paid her back.

“You don’t have twenty dollars?” she opined inquisitively.

“Well, not on me,” I rejoined affirmatively.

I began to think this exchange did not bode well for my chances of matrimony. At least not with her, the exotic gothic office receptionist with an Iron Cross tattooed on her left shoulder.

I needed the Andy Jackson because I was suddenly stricken by a prehistoric hunger for major meat—perhaps of the barbecued-rib variety—and the twenty would cover it. Normally, I bring my lunch to the office in a brown paper bag, and, actually, I had brought my lunch. But every once in a while the hunger for meat on a bone overwhelms my senses.

Were this an earlier age and were I your run-of-the-mill Cro-Magnon, then I would have taken my Magnon minions on a hunt and laid low a big beefy bison or perhaps a wily warthog or two. It’s a guy thing.

“What do you need twenty dollars for?” she Spanish inquisitioned.

“Meat.”

“Ha! Right!” she obtused, laughing mockingly as she pretended to answer the phone suddenly.

“Well, if you can’t spare the twenty, how about marrying me?” I said to her mentally.

Perhaps it was all for the best. Perhaps she would not make the ideal mate. Perhaps I was moving a little too fast, considering this was her first day on the job. But it’s like my great-great grandfather used to tell my great-grandfather, who passed this ancient wisdom on to my grandfather, who, in turn, passed it on to me, over and over again: “Take your aim and stake your claim.”

Then I remembered the killer asteroid. In a movie I’d watched the night before, this killer asteroid came careening into Earth and made a terrible mess, dooming nearly everyone except those who were unusually photogenic—and cockroaches.

There is no killer asteroid, I appreciated spontaneously. Not yet. No killer asteroid. No end of the world. Just day after day of waking up and slicing hair off my face with sharpened steel and scraping away dead skin cells with a lathered loofah. Yes, everything is OK, even when it’s boring.

I looked down upon my small self and laughed. My petty concerns. Ha! Ha! Ha! How petty. How very petty. This momentary illumination subsided and I refocused on the immediate task at hand: trying to satisfy my most animalistic, procreational desires, i.e., meat and sex.

Near the end of the working day I returned to the desk of the new receptionist and asked her if she’d like to go out to dinner.

“You’re kidding,” she ridiculed.

“Not at all. I think I love you,” I extravaganzized. “At least I am interested enough in you to eat food in your company.”

“I thought you needed twenty dollars,” she rationalized perplexingly. “I thought you were broke.”

“I just remembered,” I announced in an orgasmic burst of self-realization. “I have a credit card.”

Later, after dinner, we went to her apartment and made love for two hours while she insulted me. It was great.

~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

# 273:

It's taken me a lot of practice

to be this spontaneous.

~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Suburban Twilight

Suburban twilight,
Punctuated by porch lights
Welcoming weary workers home.

“Hello darling,”
She says,
“I missed you,”
Her bare shoulders
Framed by the thin straps,
Too loose,
Of her tiny, translucent dress.

This never happened to me.

A bunch of soccer ball boys,
Too young to go on a date,
Stand together in a jagged circle
On a grass-dirt field
While their parents lie to each other
About nothing in particular,
Waiting for the game to begin.

Back on the boulevard
Commuters swim upstream,
Fighting their way back
To the suburban spawning grounds
For a few hours of fun
Before it all shuts down in sleep,
And regret.

~ Poem and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

# 61:

My Father Among The Chinese

The Chinese children watched the funny fat American in the ridiculous sport coat try to blow up the balloons.

H e was a tourist in his late 60s, wearing a gray floppy hat. His face was a fleshy sagging caricature of itself, accented by an unkempt bushy salt-and-pepper mustache intended to disguise the steady loss of masculinity from his features.

Someone back home had told him that Chinese children love balloons. But what really caught the attention of the children was the exuberant vaudeville of this short-winded man in the funny clothing who was having a terribly difficult time inflating the balloons which were too small and thin for such an amateur. Each balloon he attempted to inflate flew from his lips into the air with the sound of a small fart, prompting laughter and applause from the children gathered around him.

My father, a man who once made deals with some of the most influential businessmen in America, had successfully transformed himself into an amusing street monkey.

Later that day he would show a group of Chinese university students how to peel an orange.

Writing My Mind.com

# 102:

Twenty Dollars

# 273:

Suburban Twilight

# 61:

My Father Among The Chinese

# 129:

Happiness Has Wings

Mindings

My Writing