My Cardboard Balcony

There's something delightfully bizarre about passcodes, the way they confuse someone made of skin and bones rather than circuits or wires or bot -ness, for lack of a better word. It's the result of an off-chance prediction that maybe we are simply the face of a monitor smirking at the possibility of selling Viagra or crowning ourselves Nigerian Princes on someone's Facebook account. It's reasonable enough, a passcode, but the words themselves could be so much like a convoluted stream of water mixed with salt. Not like the sea, though. That's too generic. So I decided it'd be best to string together these brain bubbling phrases like beads of different sizes and shapes on a gold thread. The end product may be a bit... strange. But experimentation, if done with a good heart, can create...well, a chaotic mess of language. But isn't that what poetry is, anyway? Because you call Geedei by his proper name. And you are unegic (not) when you...

"So you're twenty-two now?" "Twenty-three." He passed me another bottle of Full Moon. We sat alone together on the blunter edge of a fence overlooking the lot. The grocery store sat empty on our left. The Jack in the Box was on our right. "You could've gone out with other people, you know," he said to me. "I know," I replied, taking a sip of beer. "I didn't want to."

There was a lot of time for me to think in my last year of university. Everything became an anxiety during those months, when textbooks grew heavier on my shoulders and essays grew longer. I began to wonder about things...strange things. Like whether or not I'd grow horns from my head. Or if the Soviet Union would return. I've heard from my grandfather, when he's drunk, that those are the beginning signs that you're a conspiracy theorist.

by Belinda Roddie "A one legged Jedi walks into a bar..." "Oh, no." "He comes up to the bar and he asks the barkeep for a hot chocolate..." "No, stop. Drake, shut him up before it's too late." "Why, is it that serious?" asks Drake, his smile glowing silver behind his glass of amber. I can't help chuckling at my friends' typical antics. Peter has been trying to tell a "timeless" joke of his to the gang while the tired-eyed bartender passes me another pint of Smithwick's. The froth is still sparkling on my lips as I cast my vision on the gorgeous Áine, who's feigning utmost panic while clutching her Heineken bottle to her chest. "I'm telling you, it's a disaster. This pub will crumble from the sheer dreadfulness of his joke. Thousands will cower amid the rubble! The punchline uses bone humor, for God's sake! Bone humor!" "Hey, I didn't make it up," Peter mu...

How many were dead? I didn't know. They all seemed to become one mass on the television screen. The way the camera hovered over them was like the cameraman was expecting someone to jump up and go, "KIDDING!" But no one did. It wasn't a game show. It wasn't a reality show. This was real. And we were watching it like a poor kid's entertainment while the gunman laughed his ass off.

Tonight, it's time for me as a writer to (what else?) be a bit reflective and just a little bit mopey. Don't worry, this is just a little thing I'll do now and again to give you updates on my life as well as my current thoughts on writing and the literary/artistic world. And I'll also be recommending things for tonight such as a book, a poet, a type of music, etc. It'll be fun!  So being a recent college graduate, I've been struggling to find work in California. Big shocker, I know, but I've been job hunting for nearly three months now, and I've been searching for everything from classified education jobs to retail to office support to even an amusement train driver job at the mall. Yep...you read that right...I said an amusement train driver. Thank you, Craigslist. To tell you the truth, in August, I had high hopes. I was able to snag six interviews in a week and a half. That was pretty intense. And most of the interviews seemed to go really well. T...

Breakfast Ninja by Belinda Roddie Brace yourself! It's speeding toward you At ninety miles per hour Spinning three hundred sixty degrees. Toast between your teeth. You turn the corner and you're immediately assaulted by two flying waffles shaped like stars. This would be a lot more tolerable if you were armed with a fork. There's the table. Sit down. Now. Katana slices butter for you. Strawberry jam makes for a less gory meal. You let the dust settle quite literally on the kitchen floor with morning's casualties bleeding on your plate. "Don't forget," a disconnected voice resounds as if from every wall. "I'll be back in time to make you lunch." The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since October 21st, 2010.