The Pick Up Line

Here's a snippet of my latest publication.  It's one of my favorite short stories.  Please visit RoadsideFiction.com and check it out and the rest of the awesome stories published there.

Here's a snippet:

The Pick Up Line’ by T.L. Gray


Sidney couldn’t get her Mustang to go fast enough around the twisting, winding, and lonely back roads. She did all she could to avoid the traffic of interstates frequented by worker bees and corporate zombies, choosing instead to take the long route. Lost in thought of the life she’d fled, the roadside bar suddenly appeared like a ghost in the misty rain.

She turned off the car’s engine and gazed blankly at the dilapidated building. Her body ached all over as she climbed out of the car and walked toward the entrance. Sidney reached for the rusted knob on the ramshackled door. Just before she touched it, she hesitated, took a deep breath, and wrapped her fingers around the knob.

The name Jake’s splayed in cracked, faded red paint across the face of the muddied panes. It wasn’t a hip or happening place judging from the lack of cars in the graveled parking lot, but it looked the way she felt – neglected, forgotten, and run down. She opened the door and stepped into darkness.

As her eyes adjusted to the surroundings, Sidney cast a glance over the place, pleased to find it almost deserted. A middle-aged, fat, bald, brawny brute stood behind the bar staring up at a flat monitor on the wall. He threw a quick glance at her, but immediately returned his attention back to the basketball game. Another man, younger than the bartender, sat at the far end, his fingers tapping his beer bottle in tandem with this right leg bobbing up and down. He seemed consumed with the game playing across the screen.- See more at:

http://roadsidefiction.com/index.php/the-pick-up-line-by-t-l-gray/#sthash.ThOZiqcy.dpuf

Perception

I've always heard that if you wanted to change the world, your environment, or your situation, you have to start with how you think; change your perception.

With a new year, new goals, new resolutions, and entering a new phase in my life, I'm focusing on changing my perception.  I choose to look at the beauty around me, hope for it, desire it, and want it.  I'm talking about the beauty of love, the beauty of life. 

I have a choice: I can remain in the shadows and let the cold continue to seep into my bones, causing me to huddle into a tight ball, shutting out the world around me - or else look up and let the sun warm my face and melt the ice in my heart. 

The world sucks.  People suck.  Life, on most days, suck.  It's one struggle on top of the other.  It sucked when I lived in the perception of safety and security busy fulfilling the American dream - the picture-perfect life; it sucks now when that dream has shattered into a million tiny pieces.  The prospects of tomorrow and the next day suck too.  BUT, it doesn't have to be ugly. 

I choose to see the beauty in every day.  I choose to see a single red flower growing amongst a concrete jungle.  I choose to see a simple smile amongst a world of zombies.  I choose to sing as I toil, labor, and struggle.  Will singing magically make my troubles go away? No, but at least my ears will hear something pleasant and my heart feel a little lighter. 

Today I change my perception.  Let the world be damned and the pessimists be fools.  The sun has risen and beyond the gray clouds, the falling snow, the bitter winds, and I know she burns brightly.  With my mind's eye I see her, and in seeing her, the clouds break.

Don’t want to take my word on perception, here are few words concerning the power of perception from other writers:

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow stronger." - W.B. Yeats 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” -  Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” - Aldous Huxley

“Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.” - Albert Einstein

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."  - Charles Bukowski

"I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."  - Jack Kerouac

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray

Dr. Sax, Jack and Old Bull - And Let Me Tell You It's Full ...

My post this morning is an example of me having a little fun with some literary humor (as if that’s possible, because we all know that the word ‘literary’ is actually a secret code word for elitist, boring, tedious, humdrum, platitudinous, insipid, prosaic …well, you get the idea… it’s a lot of superficial nonsense of abuse to a word that boring people use to try to make themselves look smart, or at least smarter than what they really are, but I’m getting off topic …where was I …oh, yeah…) by the ever-loving, roaming, philosophical genius known as Jack Kerouac (although I’m not sure everybody loves the writer, poet, artist, as much as I do, but I digress) and his love for the ever-popular, ever-controversial, ever-lovin’ use of the fantastical, humorous, and quite often abuse of the illicit run-on sentence in his off-the-beaten-path, fantasy, quirk (“Kerouac dreams of America in the authentic rolling rhythms of a Whitman or a Thomas Wolfe, drunk with eagerness for life,” so says John K. Hutchens on the cover) of a book titled “Dr. Sax” – I’m rolling in laughter this morning and I hope you will too, but if you don’t then you’ve just got no good laughter in you and your sense of humor is broke and in need of a remedy.

~

Dr. Sax: But I sank the 8-ball! – you can’t shoot now!

Old Bull: Son (patting the flask of Old Granddad in his backpocket with no deprecatory gesture) the law of averages, or the law of supply and demand, says the 8-ball was a goddamn Albino 8-bawl (removing it from pocket and spotting it and lining up white cueball with a flick of his forefinger to speck on the green beside it, simultaneously letting out a loud fart heard by everybody in the poolhall and some at the bar, precipitating various reactions of disgust and wild cheer, as the Proprietor, Joe Boss, throws a wadded paper at Old Bull Balloon’s ass, and Old Bull, position established, whips out a bottle to the light (said flask) and addresses it a short speech before taking a shot – to the effect that alcohol has too much gasoline in it but by God the old Hamp-shire car can go! promptly thereafter re-pocketing it and bending, neatly and briskly, with amazing sudden agility, neat and dexterous, fingertip control of his cuestick, good balance, stand, the forefingers all arranged on the table to hold the cue just so high, just right, pow, the old pots the yellow one-ball into the slot, plock, and everybody settles down for the humor to see a good game of rotation between two good players – and though the laffs and yaks continue into the night, Old Bull Balloon and Doctor Sax never rest, you can’t die without heroes to look after you.)

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray

Letter to an Asshole by Jeff Suwak

Every once in a while a story comes along that really gets me excited, makes me want to jump up and shout into the air, 'damn straight'.  Well, this article is one of those that had me nodding through the whole thing. Author Jeff Suwak writes an illuminating essay that focuses on 'lower class' writers such as Charles Bukowski, Upton Sinclaire and Jack Kerouac as compared to those recommended by the literary elite among the upper class snobs such as Shakespere, Byron and Chaucer.  When I read something, I look for something I can relate to, something that gives me hope to pull me out of the mess I've created, not read a bunch of pretty words that don't mean shit in the real world.  This article speaks to me the way Suwak says that Bukowski speaks to him.

Check it out, folks.

Letter to an Asshole by Jeff Suwak

http://praguerevue.com/ViewArticle?articleId=3427 

"An asshole once told me that Shakespeare wrote predominantly about royals and the like because common people lacked the insight and intellectual subtlety needed to illuminate the human condition. His assessment was not restrained solely to the unwashed masses of Elizabethan England, but was instead used to bolster his point that the works of people like Charles Bukowski were flawed by nature and devoid of any literary or social merit.

His bone of contention was that writers like Bukowski glorified the ignorance of the lower classes, and that they could offer no worthwhile existential perspective. I found the whole conversation to be an absurd crock of horseshit, but the asshole also happened to be my English professor, so I kept my mouth shut and walked away. Just give me my A, Professor Asshole, so that I can get the hell out of here and get into grad school."

To read more, please visit the Prague Revue at http://praguerevue.com/ViewArticle?articleId=3427

If you like the article - please hit the 'like' button and share it with all your friends.

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray

A Place at the Table

Here is a beautiful story written by an author friend of mine, Jeff Suwak, who just released his first book.   I'm a dreamer, and I'm always interested in hearing about other people's dreams, mostly to see if theirs are as crazy as mine.  It seems I'm in good company.

For those of you who are Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick or Hunter S. Thompson fans, you will really enjoy this.

Please visit and subscribe to this author's page, and leave Jeff a comment.  You might just find yourself with a "Place at the Table".

A Place at the Table

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray