Scenes from Al-Veddy Suicide: The Movie (a poem)

I had this bizarre dream the other night.

In the first part, I was watching previews for this wacky animated movie called Al-Veddy Suicide, created by these guys working under the name New Light City. (Imagine South Park taken to bizarre, illogical extremes, with even more tasteless jokes and inappropriate scenarios.) The previews were showing on this glass trunk-like thing in the lobby of a movie theater; the top of the thing was the actual screen, approximately three feet by six feet in size. On the side (end), a rectangular opening provided a glimpse at the segments of the previews, each of which displayed a still from the movie. Most of the poem below describes what I saw during this part of the dream.

In the second part, I was hanging out with the guys from New Light City in their studios, while episodes of their show were playing over the P.A. system (instead of Muzak®). One of the sketches imagined what news broadcasts might sound like if the news were being read by very unqualified anchormen—for example, someone who had failed the test to become certified in some completely unrelated occupation or profession. A loop of a scene showing a plane crash played on an editing workstation. One of their worktables had drafts of posters for the movie: one poster showed a sleek Darth Vader-like figure; the poster next to it showed the setting for the scene that was looping on the workstation.

Normally, I would try to write a very detailed description of what I remember from the night’s dreams (more detailed than what you have just read); instead, I attempted to put it into a poem—as a nice change from the more introspective stuff I usually write.

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Meatloaf and crackers (a poem)

I was trying to follow the January 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell-Agodon and Martha Silano, which says to use fifteen words that you don’t normally use in your poems. I opted to grab several books and pick random words. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results I was getting, probably because I was still choosing the words—and they tended to be the kinds of words I would choose, whether or not I had used them before. So, I ended up with a tanka.

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12/31/2014: Where I’m at

I’ve already done a year-in-review post, so I’m going to skip re-hashing 2014 again. Instead, I’ll just attempt to summarize where things stand right now.

I spent the first part of this last day of the year 2014 at the nearest VW dealership, getting my car serviced. The engine had been idling a bit rough for a couple of weeks, and then one of the indicator lights in the dash came on a couple of times, so I figured I had better get it looked at while it was still a minor problem. It was a relatively minor problem, but I still had to get a new ignition coil and spark plug wires, setting me back almost a thousand bucks. Ouch. Fortunately, the long-ish wait (almost three hours) gave me a chance to read one of the many books that have been sitting in my to-read pile for a while, Ksenia Anske’s Rosehead.

Anyway, where am I now compared to one year ago?

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