Ralph Pullins

You have painted over everything and now the room is white, a clean slate, a fresh start and you sit in the middle of the floor content, but then it appears, a stain bleeding through, lurid, a violation. You go to the paint store, you buy better paint, different paint, stronger, and you lay it on thick and true. It covers the stain and you are content. And then one day you go into the room and the stain is back, like it never left, like you hadn't painted at all and you go back to the paint store and you get the best paint you can, the most stain resistant, the most sealant, the absolute top of the line, and you bring it to the front and the clerk eyes you nervously.  He says, "You must have something terrible to cover up, huh?" You go back to the room, you paint again with the top of the line stuff, and before you can even feel content this time, before you even get to sit down to rest, the stain, it shows, and you keep painting and it keeps coming back. You realize it&#

 Dude I went to see Dr Strange w the fam this weekend and it was pretty good.  I always liked Sam Raimi's style, and it worked pretty well here, w the incorporated horror-adjacent elements.  I dont know about the MCU gettign involved in multiverse nonsense tho; it removes the stakes a bit, no, like oh shit Spider-Man died.  welp I guess were just gonna have to go and get a different one from an another universe eh?  thats why I bailed on the Flash show; all that time travel nonsense always sucks ass   Yo Man you gotta get back to me and assure me that all gun people arent absolute fucking lunatics, okay?  or are you too busy yanking it to the latest issue of AKs and Hoes?  I bet its that, ya fuckin perv Oh shit I saw a movie called Men tthe other day and it is absolutely batshit bananas.  the dude that did Ex Machina and Annihilation made it.  Alex Garland.  its a bit artsy in spots and absolutely gross in others, but it stayed with me in a way that a lot of other things dont.  I w

So I have been sitting on this one for quite a while, the reason being is that I feel it is publishable in my humble opinion, and if I post it here it is no longer, since most journals and magazines and whathave you make it extremely clear that they only want original unpublished works, and my having posted this on my website counts in a way as publishing.  But I reasoned that since I'm not subbing it anywhere anyway, who cares if I render it unpublishable? I wrote this a while ago, and I quite like it.  I have sent it to a few people, family and friends, and other untrustworthy folk, and have gotten a mixed response, which I am certainly used to by now.   I identify quite a bit with Mr Millar, in that I am not a serious man either, and I tend to sing while I work and make up stories if my mind is left idle too long. Oh, and I named him after my high school principal for no particular reason other than it amused me at the time to do so. Anyway, this is Millar's Song     Millar&

There's this to be said about fighting: while you're doing it, you don't have room in your head for anything else, not your busted ass car or your worries about your family, not the leak under your bathroom sink, or how you're going to pay your bills.  There's only breathe one two, step out of range, shift off the center line, move breathe one three two slip the jab level change three to the body check the low kick counter one two...  it is a better escape than most, and I've tried most of them, believe me. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. I get humbled and beat up at every session, I don't understand why I even go. I'm feeling defeated; everything is so fucking hard for me, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I should just quit, right? Fuck you.  I'll show you motherfuckers what I am capable of. I'll show you-  And then I go and I try and my knees give and I get pummeled and twisted and what the fuck man how humble do I

You painted my hands with violence, painted them to be bludgeons, crude and scarred. You painted my heart the color of despair, the sickly yellow of self loathing. I was untouched at first, Tabula Rasa, waiting for the artist's hands to tell me who I was, to tell me what I will be, but I didn't get an artist, I didn't get a saint. You showed me who I was, who I would be.  You did this, and then you handed me the brush and told me to keep painting.  My hands are not an artist's hands, they are thick and blunt, the hands of a fighter, of a brute, of a monster, I took the brush and slopped paint over everything you showed me, layer over layer, tried to cover the worst, hide it from view, and sometimes I could convince myself that it wasn't there at all, but in vino veritas , and some things cannot be hidden, some stains cannot be washed away. You painted my hands with violence, black and red with rage, you painted my face into a leering jack o lantern and now what can

So as many of you must know, November is National Novel Writing Month and writers everywhere get all wound up and try to knock out a novel in a month.  It is abbreviated as NaNoWriMo or something stupid, presumably an event created by and intended for writers and that's the best thing that they could come up with?  The world's most garbage portmanteau?  Writing circles generally call it Nano, which is only marginally better, but at least its shorter.  I never do it because November is a terrible month to attempt to do anything other than watch football and dream of turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot.  Who has time to sit down at the keys in November? I don't know about y'all, but I haven't been able to do jack shit creatively in the last year, what with the pandemic and the election and protests and civil unrest and the many and varied other goddamn attacks on my peace and sanity and holy shit it was all I could do to hold it together and not run screaming out o