Tag: half-penny thoughts

  • h…-penny thoughts — 16dec25

    Dropping hints.

    Again, my head is off in the outer limits where the ozone thins and this might be one of those weirdo (I’m a creep/I’m a weirdo) kinds of subjects to try and hold a discussion around, but I have my personal reasons for asking about people and communicating in hints.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 13dec25

    Here’s a question for you. I won’t get much into a preamble because it is an oldie (but goodie) that is rattling around in my fat head for some reason or another and I’ve decided that I’m curious on the current state of affairs with opinions on the subject.

    What are your thoughts on the concept of “love at first sight”? Does such a thing even exist, or is it a romantic notions more akin to fantasy than reality? If it exists (for you), does it require the other party to reciprocate that love? Or does it still exist when the feeling is unilateral? What the heck is “love at first sight” anyway?

    As things are wont to do on these 1/2p posts, feel free to go off on your own tangents with your comments, just stick to the concept of “love at first sight”. I have my own thoughts but I am more interested in what you might have to say about it, no matter how mundane or outlandish those thoughts might be. For science! Or, just to satisfy my curiosity.

    And… Go!

  • Half-penny thoughts — 12dec25

    The only thing they feared more than failure was success.

    – appropriated variant of a common phrase, applied to The Replacements

    There are several variations of the above quote from across time; I’m not sure who said something like it originally. There are several people credited with saying something like it. It has been rattling around in my head since I saw it (again), although I cannot say exactly why.

    There’s something somewhat terribly romantic in that notion, isn’t there? That idea that failure is somehow more desirable than success, even if driven by a fear response.

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  • Half-penny thoughts (pt 2) — 09dec25

    In completely unrelated news…

    Is it my imagination or are a lot of comments on folks’ blogs starting to look like bots/AI wrote them?

    I was scrolling through a few comments on other sites and I’ve noticed that more of them are increasingly sound “off”. Commentors with this flavor of comments don’t dare add value to the conversations; they seem mostly to confirm and affirm. And the truly “weird” ones seem to miss the main topic of discussion entirely, often glomming onto something said in passing.

    Maybe I’m just paranoid? Or a grump? Maybe I need more cigarettes.

    In still other news:

    I’minlovewiththegirlwhoworksatthestorewhereI’mnothingbutacustomer…

  • Half-penny thoughts — 09dec25

    Odd day today: I found out an old bandmate’s spouse was found unresponsive this morning in bed. Cause of death, TBD. He just woke up next to her and she was no longer there. She was in her early 50s with no real history of chronic illness that I am aware of. He certainly seemed surprised by the news.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 02dec25

    Social network “suicide” is a strange kind of experience when you are doing it, not as a reactionary thing, but as a fully thought-out process with a staged approach.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 30nov25

    Sometimes dreams are just dreams. I get it — if all of our dreams were always meaningful, insightful and future-seeing, we’d put all of the oneiromancers out there out of business. Or give them panic attacks when we call them in to join us in the dreaming to help interpret and…

    Whatever.

    But there are dreams and the are Dreams. The proper noun versions demand you pay attention to their contents, which the other ones might linger on the fringes of memory until the morning fog burns off (if your lucky). And that’s only if they are particularly good or bad.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 27nov25

    Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re the kind of folks who celebrate such things. My mother didn’t give an option to decline the festivities and, having grown up in an environment where Catholic Guilt Syndrome was (and is still) employed as the weapon of choice, I’ll be heading out in a bit to do family things.

    But, as Arlo Guthrie sang, “Alice — remember Alice?”… [listening to Alice’s Restaurant Massacree on Thanksgiving is about the only personal tradition worth keeping in my mind, but—]… let’s get on with my weird, cheap thoughts for the day. But first:

    In my shower moments, maybe in those moments leading up to the shower as well, I was thinking (once again) about the nature of crushes.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 24nov25

    Someone over the weekend asked me what I like to do for fun.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 17nov25

    Image of a writing journal and a pencil.
    Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

    Every once in a while the well runs dry for me.

    That’s where I am at the moment with writing: fiction or poetry or what have you. It’s been at a bit of a drip feed for a couple of months now, so I am going to do what I always do when this occurs: continue to write with less poetry and fiction in the mix, let my creative energies either rest or try new things to “break it up”, and let that well recharge.

    It’s not that I don’t have ideas. Rather, it is that they translate in a garbled manner or refuse to come out of hiding. I’ve learned that the best thing to do when that happens is to not force it. When I have forced creative writing, then comes the blocking and I don’t want to do that. It’s kind of like an insomniac trying to force themselves to sleep; the more one thinks about the lack of sleep, the less likely they are going to sleep.

    So, I don’t sweat it, keep in the habit of writing (just not poetry or fiction), and consider other outlets for that kind of energy while the creative writing well fills back up.

    How about you? Does your “well run dry”? If/when it does happen, how do you approach the matter? Do you power through? Or do you give yourself a break? Or does the dry spot break you?

    Sound off below. Please focus your comments on your own experiences rather than commenting on my current state — I’m good, and I’m more interested in how you handle yourself than getting advice on how I should handle me.