(a late) Three Paragraph Stories: Be Careful What You Wish For

John, Lucy and Morgan sat, bored might I add, on a lonely park bench in front of the local drug store, the only one, might I add, in the lonely, boring town of Passington, Iowa. Despite their adolescent hopes, nothing exciting ever happened to John, Lucy and Morgan until one day when the threesome approached the all too familiar bench and found a penny. And this penny, might I add, had Lincoln's glittering copper teeth face up.
Passington's large clock tower chimed 12 noon just as Lucy chuckled and announced that she was going to make a wish. She held her eyes closed and looked up to the sky. Well, it was more of the overhang that hovered above the drug store bench but none the less, Lucy pictured the white, fluffy clouds and wished aloud to be remembered in the Passington history books. Just then, a mysterious tub of ice cream fell upon Lucy's head as the photographer from the local newspaper was passing by. John laughed at Lucy and plucked the penny out of her hand. He proclaimed that his wish would be substantially more practical and he wished for a sum of money to just fall into his lap and for him to never worry about anyone taking it away from him. Suddenly, a sack with five hundred one dollar coins fell through the overhang onto John's lap. Later in life, Lucy's picture would be reprinted as a campaign for the drug store's new ice cream flavor, Lucy In The Sky with Almonds and John would find out that the incident with the coin bag would leave him sterile.
Morgan swelled with fear and, not wanting to offend the powers that governed the penny, Morgan wished for something safe. Instead of hoping for immortal fame or money, Morgan wished to be able to grant the wishes of others. Morgan's tightly clenched eyes opened to the sight of the drug store roof with a mysterious tub of ice cream and a hefty sack of coins sitting on the brick rim. Passington's large clock tower chimed 12 noon and Morgan could hear the echo of Lucy's aspiration for domestic fame. Morgan shrugged. "Be careful what you wish for."

Poetic Waste Wednesday: My Curdling Blood

My Curdling Blood

My curdling blood
At the sight of his face
My veins pump with motive
I'm stung by disgrace

My curdling blood
With him and his ilk
My curdling blood
Oh, wait, no, that's my milk!

Terribly Told Tuesdays: Menial Task

Monday Movies: A Haunting of Ex-Girlfriends

Politics, the human condition and a discourse on semiotics: not what you’d expect from a Mathew McConaughey film. But then again, when dealing with ghost films, what you expect is never what you get.

Loveable beach-bum Mathew McConaughey plays loveable suburban-bum Mathew McConahow, a 30-something bachelor who is still reeling from the loss of first (and up until now, only) girlfriend, Janet Walkin (played by Megan Fox). The film begins with McConahow and Walkin’s last date. They eat a nice Thai dinner, go out dancing, and go on a carriage ride. But the sweet moment turns sour when Walkin collapses into a vomit-induced coma. McConahow wakes in a cold sweat and we see how truly haunted our protagonist is.

“I wanted McConahow to be really traumatized, he is my allegory for our traumatized nation,” admits writer/director Steven Soderbergh as he sipped on his macchiato. “McConahow is our voice, one that howls in the night.”

McConahow deals with his loss by visiting Dr Lisa Madow (played by Jennifer Garner), together they work through the trauma and slowly form a romantic bond. Just as McConahow has found love again, we see Walkin’s ghastly image appear in a background mirror.

“It’s an argument against teleological history, you know,” chuckles McConaughey, also billed as executive producer. “Most horror films are cheap thrills, but we wanted to shake the foundation of American education. Janet represents a crisis, a human ‘death instinct’ if we’re going to go from the Freud angle, and she doesn’t appear in one point in history. She reoccurs, she is a continuous struggle. It’s pretty chill.”

Walkin doesn’t just return to peer menacingly, she is out to exact vengeance. After the usual floating vases and broken windows, Walkin reaches out from the mist and posses the body of Dr. Madow.

“It’s all about Lacan,” laughs Garner. “It’s about discovering past trauma and limit in a ‘big’ other, the other that Lacan puts a bar through. Lacan ascribes the bar through the other because for him it does not exist. We are not dealing with syntax and semiotics so instead of placing a bar through the other, we put a ghost in her.”

McConahow must make the ultimate decision that every love-struck bachelor must make at some point: keep the animated body of their lover despite his ex-girlfriend feeding off of her soul or banish both body and souls into the hellmouth.

“You think you know what’s coming but you don’t,” smiles Fox. “It’s very Foucault, in the sense of sentence syntax. You don’t know what the sentence’s context and content is until you get to the end. What’s the argument, what’s the meaning? You read ‘This Is Not A Pipe’? Well, this is not a horror film.”

A Haunting of Ex-Girlfriends is to premier in art-house cinemas around the nation in July.

“I’d d some reading before you see this film”, again chuckles McConaughey, “it’s gonna blow your dome.”