Whew! Submitted to Montgomery County Community College Writer's Contest

I guess napping with Scott every day allows me to stay up late at night.

And so it was that I finished up several submissions last nite. The most difficult is to the Montco Contest because you must mail it in.

For each poem and short story, you need a title page. My eyes are blurry from exhaustion - I'm chomping on my chewing gum - and trying to read from the paper.

B 1
B 2

last four digits of your phone number

And what works do I choose?

I finally settled on the story, "The Unlikely Psychiatrist," about Naomi Lynn Weinstein and the poem "Death of a Tree."


This is the tree in the middle of Terwood Road just down the street.

I also submitted to Breath and Shadow, a journal of disability produced in Maine.

We had to list our disabilities, which I did not enjoy doing at all. But it's required and if your work is published you get paid.

The editor, I read, was a former chemical engineer who went blind from diabetic retinopathy. He's very young.

As a person w/diabetes myself, I do not like to be reminded of all the horrors of this insidious disease.

When you submit online, there are often a host of Rules you must follow, making it exceedingly difficult, or, so it is with me.

I was awake until 4 am, curled up under the covers on that frigid night. Will my water pipes freeze, I wondered.

I kept reviewing all the work I sent in, my mind in a whirl.

Knowing that I had a 'blood draw' in the morning at Quest Diagnox for my diabetes, I knew I had to fall asleep.

So I went downstairs, lay on the living room couch, and watched "Hamlet 2000," a modern version of Hamlet that is excellent, moreso for its ability to have me snoozing for five or ten minutes at a time.


Edwin Hawkes delivers the To Be or Not to Be scene in the stacks of the now defunct Blockbuster videos.

I leave home in the freezing cold - double layers on top and bottom - for Quest. B/c I had to fast, I felt very vulnerable, this, again, b/c I have diabetes.

Jane, the phlebotomist, was very good.

Afterward I decided to treat myself with the above omelet and bacon.

When I went into the Wawa in Jenkintown, I had no idea how to order on their screen. "Tyler," the woman behind the counter came out and helped me.

The place was throbbing..... your morning stop before you go to work.

Work! What's that? As I pushed thru the doors going to the parking lot, I thought, I could never work at a Wawa. Too hard. 

The food was still warm when I got home. I gnawed on the meaty part of the bacon and ate half of the overly salted eggs and then threw them into the compost heap while talking to Charlie. He's at his sister's house babysitting for her cat.