Category Archives: Humor

Simplicity

18 Replies

Simplicity

Simplicity is something that I rarely do.
Why have only one of something when you could have two?
It takes a lot of veggies to come up with a stew,
and we’d do a lot of limping if confined to just one shoe.

Multiples are awesome. Multiples are grand.
Look how many fingers we have upon each hand.
One finger could not do the job. Neither could two or three.
Simple cannot form a hand, did not form you or me.

Simplicity’s much touted but I think it is absurd.
Who ever heard of stories comprised of just one word?
With a single raindrop, the world could not get wetter.
Sparsity may be more chic, but I like clutter better.

I don’t get minimalism. I’m a hoarder to the core.
When I ran out of wall room, I put art upon my door.
There are no piles in hallways. Hoarding need not be a sin.
I’ve built three rooms onto my house just to store things in.

With so many lovely things in life, collecting is a joy.
With life’s manifold choices, why be niggardly or coy?
At the ice cream parlor, why does one have to choose?
You need not always limit yourself just to ones and twos.

Have a scoop of strawberry and pineapple and mint.
Green tea is delicious and tequila’s heaven sent.
Load your dish with raspberry and coconut and mango.
Why do the simple two step when you could do the fandango?

In short, I am a gatherer. I have too many things.
I like to make the choices that a complex lifestyle brings.
When it comes to writing, a stuffed-full mind is fine!
Reach into words and shake them out and string them on a line.

A solitary animal will never make a zoo.
One grain of dirt, one drop of water cannot create goo.
A single cannon fired will not execute a coup.
The world just is not simple, nor am I and nor are you!

*

I’m having a yard sale of left-over words.  Below is the “free box.” Take what you will (please note that some of these items have been recently used, but all have been laundered and are ready for a new user):

coy ploy toy bore core 
simplicity complicity duplicity felicity
ooze booze cruise who’s whose choose lose blues news pews poos cues ruse sues twos views woos youse 
doozie floozie twozie
boo  goo hue loo moo new poo queue rue sue soo sioux too to you view woo you

*

Right in line with the theme of the poem, below are way too many photos.  If you want to see the details, you know what to do, right?  If you don’t, I’ll tell you.  Just click on the first photo and click on arrows to proceed through the photo gallery.  To come back here afterwards, click on the X in the upper left corner. 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/simplicity/

Death by Wonton

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I’m not quite sure whether people really consider reality shows to be real or not.  Hard for me to believe they would, although taking the present presidential elections into account, I have lowered my expectations of people a good deal.  In my house, however, there is no need for the diversion of viewing other people’s lives, be it Honey Boo Boo or the Kardashians.  There is plenty of unexpected activity from day-to-day to keep me as entertained as I care to be.

Take yesterday, for example. I was all ready for my masseuse to arrive for my massage when I realized I had the time wrong and he wouldn’t be there for three more hours. Too long to wait for  lunch as I was already hungry, so I put a bit of hot and sour soup on the stove that was left over from dinner with a friend the night before.  It was meant to have wontons added and I thought instead of boiling them in the broth as I usually did, I’d prepare them as my friend had advised–browning them in a bit of oil, then adding a small bit of water and putting the lid on to steam them.  The problem was that once they were browned, they were so nice and crispy that I didn’t want to limp them up again, so I put them on paper towels to drain the grease off and poured the soup into a bowl.  I’d float a few in the soup and put the remainder of the wontons on a dish to the side.

I tasted  one.  Yum!  As I moved the others to the plate, however, one rolled off the large slotted spoon and landed on the floor.  No problem, I thought, as the floor had just been washed. Perhaps I’d just dust it off and eat it anyway, but as I leaned down to pick it up, I saw a slight movement. It took a minute to register that lying as close as possible to the wonton  was a cockroach, now on it’s back with feet up in the air.  It was then that I realized that when the wonton had fallen, it had fallen directly on the cockroach, knocking it for a loop.  It was just now that it was starting to regain consciousness and its legs waved a bit in the air before I administered final rites by stepping on it.  I then picked up bug and wonton for simultaneous entombment in the garbage can.

It was then that the utter absurdity of death by wonton hit me.  Did it seem an appropriate death?  It was not usual for a roach to venture out into the light of day.  This one must have been led to its sad demise by an overwhelming love of wonton–its aroma as it bubbled in the hot grease just so irresistible that it overrode the roach’s usual schedule of secretive midnight meanderings.  It died considering doing something it loved to do––namely, to mount and have its way with any food it might find in its path, making it useless for human consumption.  What irony that in its final act of culinary terrorism, for once the food got the better of it.

Death by wonton.  Not a bad way to go.

Morning Blues Saga

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DSC08356Morning Blues 

Another day is dawning. The birds are full of tweet.
So I decide to take a little stroll out on the street.
I have no need for makeup. I prefer my features bare.
I choose my clothes most carefully, but do not brush my hair.
With my new haircut, tousled’s in. I’m told to leave it there.
“Just run your fingers though your mop as though you do not care!”
The trees are bursting verdant, dry grass the hue of wheat.
Smiles stretch across the face of every man I meet.
I find their moods infectious, so I smile back at them.
I’m sporting a new haircut, so I feel very femme.

Corner after corner I round to see what’s there.
I straighten out my collar and toss my brand new hair
as I stroll by the house the new guy’s living in.
I check my watch and see it’s only eight-oh-ten.
Perhaps he’s a late riser, so I walk right on by.
If he had been in evidence, I might have murmured, “Hi!”
and maybe he’d have talked to me and asked me for a date.
Perhaps I’m not too early. Perhaps I am too late!
One day I’m sure I’ll meet him, but I am wondering when.
It’s not that I’m accustomed to running after men,

but it’s especially pretty, this block where I’ve just been.
I turn around so I can stroll through it once again.
The second time I pass his door, I see it opening.
As he comes out my spirits soar. My heart begins to ping.
I know this is the man for me. He’s pleasant, handsome, tall.
I’d go and introduce myself if only I’d the gall.
When his eyes light on my face, he smiles like all the rest.
Of all the smiles I’ve seen today, this smile is the best.
I croon hello and smile back and yes, I flirt a bit—
his grin so wide I know that I must have scored a hit.

I pass on by but I am sure we’ll meet another day,
and judging by his smile, he’ll have much more to say.
As I retrace my steps again, I’m feeling very pert.
Perhaps I’ll lose a few more pounds.  It surely wouldn’t hurt.
I climb the hill to my house and open up the door.
The perking of the coffee pot drowns out my roommate’s snore.
I pour a cup and take it back to work upon my blog,
and all this time my roomie is sleeping like a log.
An hour passes, she awakes and stumbles by my door.
Until she has her first cup, she’s grouchy to the core.

Five minutes pass and she comes in and plops into a chair,
her grin so wide, I wonder if she’s going to diss my hair.
“I took a walk,” I tell her, and her eyes go really wide.
“Like that?” she said, “You mean that you have really been outside?”
“My hair’s supposed to look this way. The natural look is in!”
I said to her most huffily, my patience wearing thin.
“I finally saw the new guy, and he’s really cute.”
I told her, and I saw her look, because I’m so astute.
“What,” I asked her, “is your problem? Don’t you like my hair?”
I met her answering guffaw with an angry glare.

“Your hair is not your problem,” she said and grabbed my hand,
pushing me into her room, where she made me stand
before a full length mirror, where finally I could see
perhaps why all my neighbors had deigned to smile at me.
For my whole face was covered with last night’s facial goo—
dried upon my face to form a vivid shade of blue!
Not quite the statement I had hoped to make that fateful day,
and since that time I fear my confidence began to fray.
I’ve given up long walks for neighborhoods much nearer,
and I never leave my house without checking out the mirror!

For other sagas, check out this URL:https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/saga/

Bare Necessities

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Bare Necessities

I scream, I cry, I moan, I curse.
My pleas for help are curt and terse.
I look around for something worse,
then lift the sofa just to rehearse.
I quote  the Bible–both psalm and verse,
request a doctor, request a nurse,
predict they’ll need to call a hearse.
Why must its contents be so diverse?
I grit my teeth.  Then lift my purse!

Version 3

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/diverse/

Hope

3 Replies

IMG_5964Hope wears a white apron and a pensive smile!

Hope

I hope life turns out as you wish and is a bowl of cherries.
I hope you find a run of luck and that it never varies.
The whole world would be lucky, if I had my “druthers.”
Every line would catch a fish. All orphans would find mothers.
All endings would be happy.  All lottery tickets win.
But as I stop to think of it, I have to think again.
If all of us were winners, winning would lose its distinction.
Every hunter bagging game would lead to their extinction.
It seems that often one guy’s luck brings bad luck to another.
If you’re the family favorite, then it cannot be your brother!
So if I must express my hopes I guess that I’ll just say
I hope that when it is your turn, good luck will come your way!

Now I have to tell the story about my camera, which showed up missing (oxymoron) the day after I’d met friends in the Ajijic plaza coffee place.  I’d run a number of errands that day, and so after I had searched my house for over an hour, and my car, and my garden, I headed off for town.  Was it at the coffee place?  No.  Either of the stores I’d visited? No.  I headed down the street to Ajijic Tango, where I’d had comida with my friends.  All locked up.  Seeing a door ajar a few yards away from the entrance, I called into it.  It must be the kitchen.  I called and called and fially someone came.  I gave them a note asking the owner to call me.Then I went home.

A day or so ago I wrote about a friend in Missouri who tends to straighten out my life for me on a regular basis?  Well, I wrote to him bemoaning the fate of my camera.  Within the hour, he had sent me a link to a local message board and lo and behold–there was a picture of my living room with friends I’d invited to a viewing of the new documentary of another friend all sitting in it!  A picture that had been in my camera!  Turns out the lady pictured above had been approached by a man who tried to sell her a camera.  “He asked too much” she said in her message, which stated that when she’d inspected the camera, she had surreptitiously removed the sd card from the camera as well as three more in the pouch of the carrying case, then posted one of the pictures on the card in hopes of finding the owner.

Did she know the man who had the camera?  She did.  Long story short, she went to his house to ask about the camera.  Sadly, he reported, it had stopped working. (He still didn’t realize she’d taken the sd cards out. Brilliant move on her part.)  Did he still have the camera?  No, he had given it to his son, who, it turned out, worked in the restaurant next to where I must have lost my camera!  After a few more trips to enquire on her part, the next morning I recovered my camera from the son, giving him a good reward, although he didn’t ask.  I then recovered my four sd cards from the angel pictured above and gave her a reward as well, in spite of her protests.  And that is how my Music Man in Missouri once more came to my aid and turned disaster into luck.  (If you regularly read my blog, you might have guessed that I cannot survive without my camera.)  What does this story have to do with hope?  Simply that I hope if you ever lose anything dear to you that you have two angels  looking over you as I did!!!

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/hope/

Earth’s Verdict

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Earth’s Verdict

This is the day we laud our Earth
who, from the first day of her birth
has gathered, to increase her girth

around her core, the fertile soil
that, by our labor and our toil,
helps us retain our mortal coil

by giving sustenance to all
residing on our spinning ball.
Yet, we have spread oil’s deadly pall

over this globe that gives us life
until, I fear, our home is rife
with that which cuts us like a knife,

our umbilical to sever.
Always, we deem ourselves so clever
with our improvements, but we never

seem to see the full effect––
how each gain is a defect.
It’s on this day that we reflect

on how we’ve served our mother ill.
And now we swallow that vile pill
and thereby finally pay our bill––

that fine we’re issued as we wait
for that improbable ending date
when all our poisoning will abate.

Knowing still, down in our heart
that all the evils that we start
are but that fatal stabbing dart

that will eventually bring an end
to each family member and friend
as nature’s laws we seek to bend.

Now as we wait in our human queue
to receive the verdict that we’re due,
there is  one fact that’s sure and true.

As we vanish, here and yon,
and as, eventually, we’re gone,
the Earth will still be going on.

Both NaPoWriMo and WordPress gave “Earth Day” as a prompt today.  I’m also using my illustration to fulfill Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.  Three birds, one stone.

https://ceenphotography.com/2016/04/21/flower-of-the-day-april-22-2016-azalea/

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-two-2/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/earth/

 

“The Gawkey and Flaybottomist—Who Should Have Stopped When First They Kissed”

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The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write a poem using at least ten terms from a specialized dictionary. I guess when I chose to use the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue  from my own bookshelf, I should have realized that at least 1/2 of the terms would involve sexual innuendo. Nonetheless, I decided to proceed. I must warn you that the following poem is a bit risqué, so please avoid reading it if rude language offends thee!

The 16 terms I used and their definitions are given after the poem. If you wish, you might want to read them before the poem, or you can try to follow context clues to discover their meaning on your own:

 

“The Gawkey and Flaybottomist—Who Should Have Stopped When First They Kissed”

I predict the cross patch and the flaybottomist
are the sort of women least likely to be kissed.
The first’s so busy grumbling that the kiss never connected,
while the second merely thinks of how the kiss may be corrected.

Now, there was an awkward village boy excessively unworldly,
that on one occasion had acted most absurdly
by planting a fast buss upon his teacher’s nearby cheek
then since he was both young and shy, he beat a fast retreat.

The following week when mellow, he thought he’d try again—
His amorous nature brought out by much congress with his gin.
He desired a bit of relish, and the gin made him a fool
So he took his gaying instrument up to the village school.

I fear he was a gawkey–the worst that you might meet,
and he tripped over his crab shells as he stumbled up the street.
The roaring boys pursued him, thinking they would later cackle—
leaking all the secrets of where gawkey stowed his tackle.

Upon his knock, the school teacher opened up the door,
attired in her negligee–and I fear nothing more.
She greeted him with Friday-face, but he took little note,
for he was practicing the lines that he had learned by rote.

The teacher was a dumplin and her suitor tall and thin,
yet when she heard his practiced plea, I fear she let him in.
But what he didn’t know then, as he quenched his carnal thirst
was that on that night of visitors, he was not the first.

The reason our flaybottomist had greeted him ungowned,
clad only in her negligee and with her hair unwound,
was because the French instructor had been there to give instruction—
a fact that I fear later led to misery and destruction.

For her tutor left her Frenchified, which she passed to the gawkey,
who took his French leave quickly, feeling a good deal less cocky.
The moral of this little tale—at least the one you’ll get?
Things are apt to get sticky when you’re the teacher’s pet!

 

Words from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue used in this poem:

*crab shells:  Irish, shoes
*gawkey: a tall, thin, awkward man or woman
*gaying instrument: the penis
*cross patch: a peevish boy or girl, an unsocial or ill-tempered man or woman
*relish: carnal connection with a woman
*cackle or leaky: to blab or reveal secrets
*roaring boy: a noisy, riotous fellow
*flaybottomist: a schoolteacher
*mellow: almost drunk
*dumplin: a short thick man or woman
*tackle:  a man’s genitals
*Friday-face:  a dismal countenance (Friday being a day of abstinence.)
*French leave: to go off without taking leave of the company
*Frenchified: infected with venereal disease.
*Negligee: a woman’s undressed gown,
*buss: a kiss “kissing and bussing differ both in this, We busse our wantons,
but our wives we kisse! (Robert Herrick, “Hesperides,” 1648) from buss, 1570.

To see the NaPoWriMo prompt or to participate, go here: http://www.napowrimo.net/day-seventeen-2/

Although I doubt this poem will prompt much heavy breathing, I’m posting it on the WordPress site as well: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/breath/

Lesson from the Garden of Eden––WP Daily Prompt/Writers Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge

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Version 2

Lesson from the Garden of Eden

When Adam tripped on Eden’s portal,
Eve could not resist a chortle.
She found she loved this new sensation––
her first encounter with jubilation.

Day by day, she watched him jiggle.
Without clothes, he made her sniggle.
Meanwhile, he admired her wiggle
and secretly, he learned to giggle.

Day in, day out, behind their knuckles
they resorted to these chuckles
privately, not knowing the other
also had tee-hees to smother.

Where things before had made her bitter,
now they simply made Eve titter.
And when occasionally they bickered,
instead of shouting, Adam snickered.

Thus did laughter come to save
these first children of the cave,
and when they became ma and pa,
they taught their children to guffaw.

Then each succeeding generation
increased their sense of jubilation––
enjoying each others’ flubs and gaffes
with chuckles, chortles and belly laughs!

As friends and family still use humor
to solve discord and dispel rumor,
would that nations forever after
Replaced their guns and missiles with laughter.

 

smileyslaughing_lol_point_above_100-100030816_1826_writersquot1

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/giggle/

https://silverthreading.com/2016/04/13/writers-quote-wednesday-writing-challenge-laughter/

Drop It!!!

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DSC01484

Drop It!!!

Drop a hint or drop your jeans.
This word sounds like what it means.
A little word both curt and short
that seeks to tell dogs to abort
their plans to hoard the stick we’ve thrown.
“Drop it, boy,” we all intone
when it’s time for them to stop it,
bring the stick to us and drop it!

I’ve dropped a cake and dropped a name
now and then.They’re not the same.
We’ve all dropped––and been dropped as well.
The first? Relief. The second? Hell.
Eye drops soothe an aching eye,
To drop’s to cease, or fall or die.
“Dew Drop Inn” is a timeworn name
for a motel that’s rather lame.

To drop someone a line is nice,
but dropping in on me’s a vice.
So call ahead, if you are able––
Email, Skype or Tweet or cable;
but do not show up at my door
no matter how much I adore
you, for I do not like to drop
what I’m doing to have to stop

to talk or buy or give direction.
“Dropping in” is an infection
endemic to a smaller town
where neighbors given to plopping down
daily might enact the sin
of dropping by or dropping in–
bad habits that when they aren’t stopped
result in those friends being dropped.

In short, I’ve dropped this hint enough.
Enough of subtlety and fluff.
I will state clearly this one set truth.
“Dropping in” is just uncouth.
If my house is on your route,
just wave or give your horn a toot.
That is sufficient for you to do.
If you drop in, I might drop you!

You haven’t had enough?  Here is another sillier poem on the subject of dropping in.

(The one-word prompt today was “Drop.”)

Cee’s Odd Ball Photo Challenge 2016 week 11

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One of my favorite restaurants, Guacamole’s, was damaged by Hurricane Patricia and has not reopened in the two months I’ve been here in La Manzanilla.  For the first few weeks, as men worked on restoring the building, this fellow was viewable through the gate.  Seems like everyone and everything had to buckle up for the reconstruction effort!

Click on first picture and then arrows to enlarge and view.

http://ceenphotography.com/2016/03/13/cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge-2016-week-11/