Killing With a Hint of Death

Shoes

Their leathery tongues languish in the heat,
poking limp
from their abandoned forms strewn careless in the street
waiting for the fire to fade
the building shells to stop their flickering, shifting, shadow-show
so they can be dragged away,
the dirt scrubbed off their faces
before they're boxed up and sold back
to the unsuspecting Americans.

Poem:
The prompt I used for today was: describe a pair of shoes in a way that a reader will think of death. I have no idea whether I succeeded or not, but it was a fun exercise. I tried to make it about soldiers, but I'm not sure how much that comes through. I also tried some subtle rhyming, because I fondly recall my high school days when rhyming was a fun challenge and didn't sound stupid. Now it just seems too singsong-y.

Observation:
In one of my philosophy classes we were talking about moral ignorance. One philosopher (J.L.A. Garcia) holds that there is an innate nature to morality, and even though we might be raised poorly, we all have some instinct we must disobey in order to commit immoral action. He uses this idea to say that this makes it impossible to kill a person in order to "save their soul," and then claim that this is not an immoral action, since it was done with good intentions. I disagree. I think this is a part of what makes religion so scary. I really think that it is possible for a person to think in this way legitimately. That is to say, there isn't a part of their brain thinking, "this is wrong" as they are committing what we take to be an immoral action. And the weird part is that we then have a hard time evaluating how much blame to attribute. Because if they really weren't acting maliciously, they still might be a basically good person, just with a few mistaken beliefs about what being a good person entails. In actuality, they are striving to be good, and it seems that if one does believe in many of the major religions, he or she would be justified in committing many such actions while operating under that belief.

Exercise:
Opening a piece with "At least" is to open in medias res, that is, in the middle of the action. For example:
At least the cake was white. Or:
At least they approved of the groom's gerbil.
The exercise is this: Pick one of these lines (or one of your own, beginning with "at least") and continue writing.

At least they approved of the groom's gerbil. It didn't say much for the personal qualities of the groom himself (other than his decent taste in rodents), but it was better than nothing. Clara had the irritating habit of bringing back the least interesting guys to meet her family. Thanksgiving hadn't been a pleasant affair in more than four years, what with Gerald, Claude, and Jarome (and then Claude again, briefly) taking up space at the table. And that's all they seemed to do. When conversation was effort-fully directed their way, they had wasted no time in not only killing the current topic, but eliminating any further areas of inquiry. But at least Wallace had his gerbil. From what anyone could tell, that's all he had. It was impressive how he managed to relate it to every conversation. And it was by all accounts better than nothing. Until he requested that it be the ring-bearer.


Me:
My hip hurts. And I feel like complaining about it. And my headache. With that out of the way, I figured I'd thank all of the people kind (or silly) enough to click on my blog yesterday. I was confident that my lack of self-promotion on Facebook was detrimental to getting people to read, but I was not expecting so many people to read more than the post I put up. So it was, by far, my most views in a day. Which makes me wonder whether or not I should put a link there whenever I update. I think that's going a little too far, though. Maybe once a month or something, just to remind people that I'm incredibly important and not to forget it. (I'm really against the idea of having a Facebook.) All of this is getting in the way of what I wanted to say, though, which is: thanks. The idea that people might be reading this is a large part of my motivation for writing. Like right now. It's way too late to be doing this. I'm probably not thinking or writing coherently, but I know I need to post. So I'm doing it. For the family members that read this daily because they have to, the random people who get linked here, and the people I just tricked by posting on Facebook. Thanks.