My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie If you stare at the ceiling for long enough, it looks like it's moving. Like a cracked, white ocean, undulating without moonlight. Pulsing without an actual pulse. I remember sailing across a white ocean once. My skiff took me to four countries, and everyone spoke the same language, but never a language that I understood. Their tribes collected stones and pocketed seashells to use as currency, and their councils ruled that I was inferior to them. I was not a god, they decreed, but a fragment of a civilization that had fallen due to buffoons and warmongers. I listened to their judgment and decided to accept it. Their punishment was to live with the guilt. Sometimes, that's worse than prison or execution. I've been lying on this same bed in the same room for seventeen days. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. The last thing I drank was a bad margarita at a joint where my ex-girlfriend worked as a bartender. She told me that if she weren...

Here we are again, on my cardboard balcony, overlooking an ocean of paper and words. I'd offer you champagne, but I don't have much extra cash for good bubbly, so here's a hard cider served in a flute instead. A toast to the poets, the crazy people with too many sentences forming narratives in their heads. I hope you find comfort on a balcony that somehow withstands the rare California rain.

Second to last week at Fusion: Done. Crazy week of politics: Over. Current mood: You guys like puppies?! HAVE SOME PUPPIES!!! Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies My work here is done. Have a great night and a great weekend, everyone!

High Tea At The Embassy by Belinda Roddie Both diplomats loved to smash teacups as a bonding exercise.

No update on the OneWord website today. Oh, well!

This Dream Has Legs by Belinda Roddie This dream has legs, and it knows how to run and jump over the hills, all of them bronzed with warm light from an unfamiliar sun that does not sleep and stifles all its yawns behind a glowing hand. This dream has eyes that see more colors than we'd ever paint on melting canvasses, dissolving skies and screaming sunsets, showing no restraint as faces tilt toward unexpected hues and rainbows made of stained glass. This dream has a mouth, and yet, I know that it will choose not to speak, for its words no longer pass for substance. Still, the images are there, 'til I wake up to God's still vacant stare.

I no longer hope. I am incapable of hope. I see the decline and fall of a country that tried so hard to be an empire without the emperor part. And now that the emperor struts around in orange wearing a toupee crown, I guess we can safely say that this experiment is over. Forget norms. Forget institutions. At least I happen to be living in an area where maybe we can raise the flag for independence if the rest of the nation falls apart like stale chocolate left too long on a grocery store shelf.