The Dhammapada - sayings of the Buddha

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you,
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.
Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you,
As your shadow, unshakeable.

Dürrenmatt’s 21 Points to the Physicists

1. I don’t start out with a thesis but with a story.
2. If you start out with a story you must think it through to its conclusion.
3. A story has been thought out to its conclusion when it has taken its worst possible turn.
4. The worst possible turn is not foreseeable. It occurs by accident.
5. The art of the playwright consists in employing, to the most effective degree possible, accident within the action.
6. The carriers of dramatic action are human beings.
7. Accident in dramatic action consists in when and where who happens to meet whom.
8. The more human beings proceed by plan the more effectively they may be hit by accident.
9. Human beings proceeding by plan wish to reach a specific goal. They are most severely hit by accident when through it they reach the opposite of their goal: the very thing they feared, they sought to avoid (i.e. Oedipus).
10. Such a story, though it is grotesque, is not absurd (contrary to meaning).
11. It is paradoxical.
12. Playwrights, no less than logicians, are unable to avoid the paradoxical.
13. Physicists, no less than logicians, are unable to avoid the paradoxical.
14. A drama about physicists must be paradoxical.
15. It cannot have as its goal the content of physics, but its effect.
16. The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.
17. What concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone.
18. Each attempt of an individual to resolve for himself what is the concern of everyone is doomed to fail.
19. Within the paradoxical appears reality.
20. He who confronts the paradoxical exposes himself to reality.
21. Drama can dupe the spectator into exposing himself to reality, but cannot compel him to withstand it or even to master it.

Writing Topics

Shaving wounds
Distortion
Straight backed chairs
Grabbing at straws
Going Greyhound
Dealing with bacon grease
The third opinion that thoroughly confuses you
Half-baked people
Half-baked ideas
Half-baked pie
Melting snow that makes impassable streams
Midnight phone calls
Wrong numbers
Exit wounds
Falling asleep on the lawn
The day that slips away
Insomnia
The absence of waves
Best laid plans
The best planned lays
Non-dairy spreads
Turkey roll
Recipes for disaster
45 consecutive days of rain
Wet lawn furniture
O'Hare Airport
Low fat cheese
Fruit
Emotional tidiness
Family-size Velveeta
Wet wool
Hollow chocolate bunnies
Sex on a metal bed frame
Typewriters I have known and...
Tuneless whistling
Dirty city snow
Threading correction ribbon
Library fines
Carelessness

Live

By Tim Etchells (forced entertainment)

Give space. Be confident. Take time.
Don’t lose heart. There is an
audience that does not want old
kinds of dramatic bullshit.
To stand in front of other people.
To be there. To be present. To be
visible. From the top of my head to
the tips of my feet. Perhaps what
we did was not so new, exciting or
innovative. Those were the favored
words of PR people and the press
and the favored modalities of late
capitalism in all its destructive,
hysterical and hyperbolic excesses.
No. No thanks. Maybe what we
did was not so new and exciting.
But old. And simple.
To stand in front of other people.

Process for writing a first draft

Certainly a writer with serious visionary ambitions must embrace worthlessness, childishness, psychopathology, and shame. - Wayne Koestenbaum

• Inspiration strikes.
• Inspiration peters out.
• Work begins.
• Fear and panic set in.
• Story lays itself out plank by plank like a wood floor
• Who am I kidding?
• Keep adding up the page numbers
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Read the story out loud
• Run a spell check
• Exchange one word for another
• Surf the web
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Nurse the child x times a day
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Re-read the story x times
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Change the tot’s diapers x times a day
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Take a bath, a walk, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
• Watch Survivor
• Eat a bowl of cereal
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Rewrite the step outline
• Drink a cup of tea
• Drive to the City
• Listen to a conversation between my friends
• Realize that clever and abstract won’t carry a story
• Answer emails
• Do phone (friends, business, life maintenance)
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Take the tot for a drive and pray she goes to sleep, listen to Miles Davis
• Play with the tot
• Clear off the desk in the kitchen
• Update my blog
• Make some brownies
• Read a play for possible production
• I am not writing at this point
• The tot is asleep, it’s 1am
• Cruise Craigslist
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Find freedom in structure
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Admit I don’t know where the fuck this story is going
• Buy more cereal
• Compose a grocery list (at least I can finish that)
• Go out for coffee and a stroller walk with the tot (who is not sleeping)
• Sift through past work to remind myself I have indeed finished things
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky
• Focus on the details
• Introduce another character
• Grasp at straws
• Sweep the floor
• Do the dishes
• Offer to do the laundry
• There is no substitute for doing the work
• Write a sentence or maybe a paragraph if I’m lucky

Funeral Pie: Hunter S. Thompson

The Requiem Shark
—For A by Stuart Friebert
Said to exist chiefly
in tropical waters, where,
contrary to belief, depths
can be gloomy, full of
unnerving sadness, as if
a geological error and
diving down Neitzsche comes
to mind: not how one soul
comes closer to another,
but how it moves away,
tells about kinship.
We merely expect
a wallowing pleasure
when it turns a cold shoulder,
on the born side of creation,
as beside it human swimmers
do not seem to have matured:
it is the most alarming
of our qualities, while
the shark’s bloodless gaze
calls forth piety, then nausea.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not the inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Chocolate & Bourbon Nut Pig
1 stick butter
1 c. sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 c. flour
Pinch of salt
2 - 3 tbsp. bourbon and/or 1 tsp. vanilla
1 c. chopped pecans
1 c. chopped semi-sweet chips
1 (9 inch) pie shell, partially baked (prick crust with a fork)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugar. Add beaten eggs, flour, salt and bourbon (or vanilla). Add chocolate chips and nuts. Stir well. Pour into partially baked pie shell and bake for 30 minutes or until center is set. Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Pie Defined

"Pie just may be the Madonna-whore of the dessert world."
Pascale le Draoulec, American Pie

From Merriam and Webster
2: a dessert consisting of a filling (as of fruit or custard) in a pastry shell or topped with pastry or both

An article of food consisting of paste baked with something in it or under it; as, chicken pie; venison pie; mince pie; apple pie; pumpkin pie.

TV Gun and Pie Fights

Just the Pie-Lights

Moonpies