Jodi BarnesYour time is not up. But I wanted to let you know that I know you are not the villain. You are a container of time. A time begat from all past time. You are the year that gets tossed the hot potato when the buzzer goes off. Not a malicious creator of chaotic crimes […]
Embracing Art as Meta-Metaphor I’ve always loved color. I have no other perspective than mine, about 61 years in the making, changing. So I’ve no idea, for example, how many people in this world would be out-of-their-minds happy to sit down with a Pantone color book for two hours, sipping coffee, as light streams through […]
You can have good intentions, a great education and a progressive plan. But if you can’t humble yourself, if you won’t listen or ask, if you’re not ready to be wrong, to take off your game face and face your self as others see you? You will fail. Hard. I’m trying to find my notes […]
It’s simple. I don’t have to be afraid anymore. Everyone is dead or dying. Even two million ova of the unborn entombed inside my 3-month-old granddaughter. We’re simple. Predictably falling for procreation, raising a middle-finger to decay, begging not to be unfooled. I hold this tiny human whose birth was not a rage against death […]
It’s 2:47 a.m. I have this overwhelming urge to write my hate list: things I tell myself shouldn’t bother me, but they do. The dog (above) is not my dog, but I’d like to pretend she is transcribing my thoughts and will curl up beside me on the bed, soon. a few of my least […]
Help us end this tired fiction. Invoke an arc to leap the page. The boorish villain all fume and rant cannot be saved. Salve our radiant burns. Spare us petulant rage. Graft hope into our pores dying to breathe again. Free our plot past states of hate and fears he will grab everything left and […]
A cockroach chows down on a shard of Mar’s bar stuck to a wrapper. My toes a few feet from the object of my phobia. My brain struggles to access the file on exposure therapy, to transform a feared object into a subject worth studying. This dreaded one is animated. And like me it’s striving […]
A plea to Nora Ephron Dear Nora, So far, 2020 is more harrowing than The Handmaid’s Tale, which became all the rage as a web TV series for reasons that will become clear. I limit my news intake and when I don’t, I take to an unmade bed, pull the comforter up to my chin. […]
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash Shawshank Redemption beckons us; the Big Book gives us a path “And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further.” That one line Andy writes to Red at the end of Shawshank has a lot of resonance for me, right now, as a white person. […]
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash Seek the questions. There is no right answer. James Thurber once said, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” I believe in this 14-word philosophy as much as I believe in the Golden Rule, gravity, and, as Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking […]
Jodi Barnes 