Category: BADAT

Part One: Slow Rise

Alert hours after awakening.

Part Two: Basement Work

Fixing things others broke.

Part Three: Clean clothes

Wash and rinse again.

Part Four: Online

People unmet move me.

Kevin, on Day 5, retell a fairy tale as a sitcom.

“Illuminate the world”? I’m not sure I know what that means.

I mean, I can dig into the bare meaning of the words. Perhaps there’s inspiration in that.

Illuminate – light up, brighten. From “lumen” which is (probably) Latin for “light”. Or a special typographic calligraphic technique especially used in Bibles. An illuminated text is one with amazing large first letters on a page, decorated and painted in intricate detail.

The world? Does that mean the globe? The Earth? The ~8000 mile diameter pear-shaped mass of nickel and iron and various trace elements on which we live? A speck of rock and dirt and water and air, and not much of those last two in comparison to the rest of it. I mean, check out this picture, showing the relative size of all the water on Earth, and all the air on Earth, compared to the planet as a whole. Seems like such a tiny amount to me.

Or maybe just my world. The world in which I live. Sellwood, Portland. The #70 bus. The dark black and red smoke-filled booze-enhanced party that is Devil’s Point. The beige basement in which my work desk sits. My friends, my family. The dark apartment I live in. The warm soft bed in which I sleep. My world.

Light up the Earth? That’s the Sun on the dayside, and the Sun reflected off the Moon (along with a tiny amount of light from distant stars) on the nightside. And all that artificial light, of course.

Illuminate the Earth? That’d be like gilding the lily.

Illuminate my world? My day-to-day work-a-day world, apartment to work to apartment again. That’s what I try to do by going to the strip club, or going out with my friends to coffee shops or music stores or live music or bookstores… I try to brighten my life every day. I try to smile at people, talk to pretty women, make people laugh.

I’m just rambling here. I’ve been thinking about this post idea for a day and I fear I’m not getting it.

That’s what I’ve got.

Kevin, Day 4: Would you be any different if you had a different name?

I remember two lives, my first small and humble
my second quite important and consequential.
It all started one day when quite on a whim
I slipped from one to another potential.

At my computer surfing the world wide web
I Googled my own name. Is that a sin?
Clicked the “I feel lucky” button
And watched as the page faded in.

First up was a headline in flashing purple
Followed by pictures of me, in my hat,
“Moon man modestly maintains Mankind”
and descriptions of my dreams, along with a cat.

The cat and I
Dreamed defenses
against invading
alien races.

This fictional Brian with his fictional feline
Appeared quite familiar and yet didn’t exist
as far as I could determine in my own memory
and all of the reasoning and logic I could enlist.

Trembling, shaking, my eyesight grew dim
and my Sellwood apartment was the last thing I saw
as I slipped into a deep and encompassing rest
Until, gently, gingerly, tenderly, my face felt a paw.

The steady green eyes of my furry friend
Watched me awaken and come to, quite alert.
And I remembered (but didn’t) the advancing armada
who could only be stopped by our minds in concert.

The cat and I
now dream defenses
against invading
alien races.

Kevin, write about truth.

BADAT – 2
Originally uploaded by mooninthehouse

Kevin challenged me to take pictures of my day as it progressed. I’m more of a “do-er” than a “document-er” but I saved the pictures I took today into a Flickr set, which is linked below.

Kevin’s BADAT Idea Day 2: Pick up some object, hold it in your hand, examine it with all of your senses, and describe it as fully as you can without actually naming what it is.

Kevin and I are doing something special this month, as a way to challenge each other and to reinforce the habit of writing daily about many things. And, also, just because we can. There’s no better reason than that, is there?

We call it the March Blog-A-Day-A-Thon, or BADAT. The rules are as follows:

1. We would send each other ideas for blog posts.
2. The ideas will range from one-word concepts, to entire ideas, to actions we can take that we then must blog about.
3. …leaning more towards the simple end, so as not to overwhelm the other person with too much to do and not enough time to write.
4. We each send and post our ideas the day before.
5. The other person posts their response to the idea, and then (probably in a separate post) their idea for the other.
6. Hmmm… so, really, we’re posting two items a day – the idea, and the post.
7. Cross-linking to each others’ blogs is part of the idea.

I’m going to tag each BADAT post with the tag “BADAT” just for organization’s sake.

Kevin’s BADAT Idea #1: Write a short story in exactly 50 words.

…and Kevin posted his response already!