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Sunday, October 20, 2013

My Weekends are Long and Delicious

            My weekends are long and delicious. This Sunday morning, my five year old opened the door and saw the snow lilt down from the sky. His eyes opened wide and he said, “Oh, wow.”
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            If you hadn’t noticed, my blogging has been sparse. Okay, non-existent. People have asked me how graduate school is going. I have consistently lied: “Awesome, easy, fun.” One of my friends who recently graduated with her Master’s in German responded to me: “Well then, you are doing grad school wrong!”
            The truth is mid-terms have shown their ugly faces. I don’t have tests in any of my classes. I have lots of reading and papers. Did I say I have lots of reading and papers? I have lots of reading and papers. And I have work in the IT department on campus and one-on-one consultations at the University Writing Center. I have kids and a wife. This blog, my own personal writing, and a balancing act with my schedule. Indeed, moving from a second-shift food service schedule to the first-shift meanderings of academia, the first half of the semester has been figuring out this new routine. I felt overwhelmed and disconnected from my cohorts and professors—at a loss for how to organize my life. Always behind in all of my work.
            Breath, Steve, breath, I keep telling myself that.
            In my teens, I was enthralled with essayist Robert Fulghum. In one untitled essay, I continue to remember, Fulghum says he is a professional breather.
            That’s cool, right?
            We all breath. But so seldom do we think about the therapeutic nature of deliberate, concentrated breathing. Don’t classify me as a creature born of 1990’s New Age metaphysical thinking. I was never into the power of crystals. Yoga always looked painful to me, and meditation was conducive to extended fits of snoring. My point, life has gotten crazy, busy, random, wild, beautiful.
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            Yesterday my wife told me I seemed more relaxed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten angry. Oh yeah, that anger stemmed from the food service industry. I enjoyed food service. I particularly enjoyed the pizza niche. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed all my pizza tweets because October is National Pizza Month. Thirty-one days of pizza tweets. I know more about pizza than you’ll ever probably care. But my heart was always just half-way in the pizza industry. I am forty years old, quickly staring down hard at fifty because ten years melt away so fast, slip through the fingers like ice in June. And finally, I am only beginning.
            Meine Wochenenden sind lang und lecker.
            I opened my eyes wide and said, “Oh, wow.”
 

WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER

“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon
Christine and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.
 
 
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Steve Bargdill writes “literary stuff” with the occasional foray into speculative fiction. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton, Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Muncie, Indiana; and currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Bargdill is the author of The Wasteland Series available on Amazon. He’s written for several newspapers and is currently a first year English graduate student at the University of Wyoming. You can read his short stories for free on Wattpad. You can also like him on Facebook where he posts a daily poem, Monday evening writing prompts, hump day videos and more nonsense!