Archive for the ‘Best’ Category
January 19th, 2014 by Corey A. Edwards
This collection of vignettes, observances, and rants accumulated over a four day period in Charleston, South Carolina where I was employed as a vendor at a trade show.
I don’t travel much. This is my first trip in that direction: approximately six hours in the air, southeast with a connection in Atlanta. It’s the farthest south I’ve been on the east coast, maybe on the continent.
Anyway: stuck on a plane, stuck in a hotel room, stuck in a booth, and stuck in my head, the urge to document and rant came. Short of screaming to the heavens, I felt the need to express myself, so into my phone and computer the impressions and observances went – mostly as they happened or shortly thereafter.
Now, with only the slightest of apologies, I present them to you.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Charleston, Mr. K's Used Books, Seatac to Atlanta, Seattle to Charleston, South Carolina
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
October 7th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
Outside a rarely-used side-door in our basement, there is a concrete stairwell that spends a good part of the year damp and mossy. It gets afternoon sun, if there is any, and because of this, it dries up and stays that way throughout the bulk of the summer months but, autumn to spring, it’s a pretty moist environment.
There is a drain in the bottom landing of this stairway: a hole covered by a round, metal grate tucked halfway under the concrete facade of one wall. Our neighbors live here: Taricha granulosa – rough-skinned newts.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Animated Gif, endangered newts, newts Olympic Peninsula, newts pacific northwest, newts WA, poisonous newts, rough skinned newts, Taricha granulosa
Posted in Best, Nature | No Comments »
September 12th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
[*note – this story was originally called “Ants and Hornets” – I have since realized these are yellow jackets, not hornets – very likely Vespula pennsylvanica – the ants look to be Formica obscuripes]
The other day I was out on the property with my daughter, hanging out beneath the arch of a tree and the hollow of some bushes: a little hideout where I keep a chair for quiet, measured snippets of novel now and again.
Anyway, I was there as I said, chatting with my daughter, when she pointed out a dark hole in the ground.
“Yellow jacket’s nest,” she said. “I wont sit in here, they’re all over.”
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: ants, Formica obscuripes, insects, Vespula pennsylvanica, yellow jackets, yellowjackets
Posted in Best, Nature | No Comments »
August 26th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
Big Dam Falls at Chasteen’s Grove
In the summer of 1976, when I was 7 years old, the river I lived near – The Big Thompson – suffered a flash flood of unheard of proportions. 143 people lost their lives in the rushing waters, five of whom were never found. My family, though living in the affected area, suffered little but inconvenience and shock as the human world around us reeled from one of nature’s little hiccups.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Big Thompson Canyon, Big Thompson Flood 1976, Colorado, Dam Store, Loveland, Loveland Big Dam, Loveland Small Dam
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 6 Comments »
July 18th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
You never stop and
though I love you greatly
it seems that it’s always
what have I done with you lately?
Read the rest of this page »
Posted in Best, Poetry, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
July 1st, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
It must have been the summer of 1974 or so, I would have been five or six. My maternal grandparents hadn’t seen me since I was a baby, so my mom decided it would be a good time for a visit. We didn’t have a lot of money, though, so it would just be mom and I making the trip, my father and older brother would stay home. As a further expression of our finances, mom and I wouldn’t be flying from Northern Colorado to Southern California but busing.
Being wee, I knew none of the reasons behind why we were going. All I knew was, I was going on a big trip for the first time and I couldn’t wait.
You know you’re young when the prospect of taking a bus from Northern Colorado to Los Angeles with your mom sounds like an exciting adventure.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: 1970's, Bus, Denver, Greyhound, Harvey Comics, Hippies, Hitchhikers, Los Angeles, Mass Transit, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Trailways
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
June 24th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
“What happens when you send an atheist to interview a faith healer? You tell me – I can’t watch.”
The house bearing the address I was given is a drab, neglected ranch, the yard littered with assorted dingy vehicles, tarp draped filing cabinets, and abandoned appliances in various states of repair. It is the kind of yard from which vicious dogs leap, not the manicured, peaceful zen garden of a new-age professional.
I exit my vehicle tentative with caution.
What the hell am I doing here? I hate this kind of thing; meeting new people is bad enough but interviewing them for an article in a spiritual newsletter is even worse. When I took the job as webmaster for the local, new-age bookstore, I never intended to have to pay this much lip service to the dizzying array of beliefs that are the store’s bread and butter. I’m a total skeptic, an unrepentant atheist, yet here I am, about to interview what amounts to a new-age faith healer.
Read the rest of this page »
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
“Esther discovers a worm on an old, hated quilt … and then the world.”
The Worms first entered into what you and I would think of as reality through a quasar catalogued as 3C 279. Quasar 3C 279 does not exist for this purpose nor had it been used so prior; it was just handy at the time.
A mere handful of pinkish-gray, banded, larval forms, no more than two centimeters in length, The Worms are more appropriately referred to in the singular for, despite the apparent lack of connection between bodies, “they” are “it” far more than “it” is “they”.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: science-fiction, worms from space
Posted in Best, Fiction | No Comments »
May 27th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
(Part 1 of “Lost and Foundry” can be found here)
The longer I worked at the foundry, the farther I rose up in ranks – whether I wanted to or not – and it wasn’t just because of my abilities.
First there was the appointment to head of Monument Sprue, a change that mainly involved me going to lots of pointless meetings and wandering around the foundry with a clipboard, talking to friends – not because it was part of the job but because the position and clipboard gave me the excuse and camouflage to do so. Then they allowed me to move to patina and, in short order, made me head of that department.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Art Casting, Bronze Art, Foundry, French Brown, Lost Wax Process, Metal Casting, Metal Chasing, Pat Kipper, Patina, Patineur, Sculpting, Sculpture, Silicon Bronze, Victory Brown, Wax Sprue
Posted in Art, Autobiography, Best | 4 Comments »
May 20th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
In the mid 90’s I found myself in a very precarious position: the husband in a married team of new parents, unexpectedly locked out of their business by their silent partners for suspicion of embezzlement.
While this presents a story all on its own, suffice it to say that our business partner’s accusations were eventually discovered to be unfounded (the butler did it) but the damage was done and, in the meantime, I needed work!
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Art Casting, Bronze Art, Foundry, Life Casting, Lost Wax Process, Metal Casting, Patina, Sculpting, Sculpture, Silicon Bronze, Victory Brown, Wax Sprue
Posted in Art, Autobiography, Best | 2 Comments »
May 6th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
Poking about my “writings” folder, I discovered this piece entitled “for after the divorce,” written circa 2006. Intrigued I read it and was stunned by both its honesty and darkness. I knew I wanted to share it but I wasn’t sure why and so I mothballed it again until I understood the urge. There are some uncomfortable moments here and so much has changed in my life – all for the better! – why dredge up the clotted ichor of the past?
I eventually realized that the urge to share it had to do with the realization that we are so often capable of pulling ourselves out of the deepest and darkest places. Very shortly after this was written – a few months or more – I started that elusive career and, though my marriage did fall apart and even harder times were to come, it was an adventure that has led me to the amazing place I am now.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Blood, Divorce, Failure, Rebirth
Posted in Autobiography, Best, Writing | No Comments »
April 29th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
Gregg discovers it’s what’s inside that matters … but it’s up to Emmy to clean up the mess.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Bizarre, Blood, Fantasy, Food
Posted in Best, Fiction | 1 Comment »
February 18th, 2013 by Corey A. Edwards
Retail records, Jewish guilt, and Russians from Sequim
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Heavy Metal, Incompetence, Music, Records, Retail, Russians, Sequim
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
August 9th, 2012 by Corey A. Edwards
A while back I purchased a great little book of Japanese monsters, shown in cross-section, in an attempt to shed a little light upon just what it is that makes them tick.
Great concept. Hours of fun.
The only problem is, the darned thing is all in Japanese! The nerve of these people! (they also made a mistake and printed the whole thing backwards – someone lost his job at the printing house that day, I can tell you)
Anyway, I took it upon myself to decipher those inscrutable little squigglies that littered the page and present to you here the few I manged to get through before passing out with exertion. Phew. My brain. (be sure to click on them for a closer view)
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Anatomical, Cut-Away, Gamakujira, Garamon, Guts, Innards, Japan, Kaiju, Killazee, Pigmon, Satan Beetle, Sofubi, Ultraman, Viira, Viras
Posted in Best, Graphic Design | 2 Comments »
January 31st, 2012 by Corey A. Edwards
Chapter 12
in which we find our heroes on a precarious ledge over the clown pit
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Clowns, Fantasy, magic
Posted in Best, Fiction | No Comments »
October 9th, 2011 by Corey A. Edwards
I’m toying with putting a calendar together of composites/distortions I’ve done and, coming up a bit short of the 12 images I need, I started playing with a few of my existing photos.
One of them made an almost immediate impression on me as a surreal scene of biblical, industrial horror. A couple of hours later and we have the scene above: fantastic, unrealistic, yet somehow evoking in me that sense of ecological nightmare.
Vast stretches of steel, concrete and stone, dimly illuminated by artificial light under a toxic sky, with only a few, meager regions left for poorly maintained agriculture to limp along, almost as an afterthought, on the tortured remnants of dry, scratched earth that remain.
Beautiful, aint it? =)
Tags: Fantasy, Illustration
Posted in Best, Graphic Design | No Comments »
June 29th, 2011 by Corey A. Edwards
Summer days stung
with sweet leaf chewing tobacco
the bitter blood of choke cherries
and crisp stalked asparagus purloined
like the shade we find and eat it in
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: 70's, Childhood
Posted in Best, Poetry | 3 Comments »
June 25th, 2011 by Corey A. Edwards
“Are you a racist?”
The question comes from the back of the bus. It is not inflected in the way you might expect: no anger, no indignation, no shock; just a loud, open question that hangs in the air like a heavy curtain pulled between those of us in earshot and our lives of careful make-believe.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Public Transit, Racism
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
May 16th, 2011 by Corey A. Edwards
I come in from weed-whacking the lawn when I hear the scream. It exits the wall to my right and crawls into my ear, ringing there like the buzzing of a little, lost fly.
It is my teenage daughter in the shower.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Parenthood
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
July 5th, 2010 by Corey A. Edwards
He wasn’t sure when it began but it seemed that now, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t escape it.
It was everywhere. In the chrome of the toaster, rippling up at him from the surface of his morning’s coffee, in the smear of color playing across the glassed face of a clock. He’d lean forward to turn off the TV and, if the light was right, there it was, staring back at him from the grey of the still dying tube: the face.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Painting
Posted in Art, Best, Fiction | 2 Comments »
June 5th, 2010 by Corey A. Edwards
Myrna-Joe was a large woman with bad skin, dimpled joints, and bright orange hair. Not red, mind you: orange. Truth be told it was a wispy, ghost gray, having long since lost its original, dish-water dinginess but she’d colored it with one of those cheap preparations you can find for half-off on aisle 12 and now it was like that of a doll or some character from a 1960’s Rankin/Bass animation.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Abuse, Drugs, Neglect, Trailer
Posted in Best, Fiction | 5 Comments »
October 28th, 2009 by Corey A. Edwards
Nobody shouted it at me but somebody should have.
I’ve heard it a million times before; not when it was relevant, mind you, but rather as simple and hackneyed hyperbole intended to ready me for something often not worth the effort of the cliché.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Boating, Button, Fate, Hat, Possessions, Wind
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
October 10th, 2009 by Corey A. Edwards
When I moved from my home of Larimer County, Colorado to Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula in 1999, I did so with an optimism built on the spine of my young family and a sense that I had an opportunity to reinvent myself.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my young family’s spine was broken even then and that you cannot reinvent what was never completed in the first place.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Depression, Divorce, SIngle Parent, Survival
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 4 Comments »
December 22nd, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
I feel like I am in a time warp.
A little more than 12 months ago, I was starting out as the creative director for a perfect-bound, glossy-paper magazine; a salaried professional.
Sure, the magazine was ridiculously small but we produced a product that made people think we were a lot larger than we were. The quality of the paper, the pictures, the subject matter, the clean layout; surely it was upward for both myself and the magazine.
Heh heh … right.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Christmas, Corporations, The Bellamy Brothers
Posted in Best, Music | 3 Comments »
December 7th, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
According to various news sources, a sign has been put up near a nativity scene in Seattle by the Freedom From Religion folks reading:
“At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”
Now I may wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments of this sign (and I do) but I find it to be tantamount to, and thus as offensive as, any of the unasked for religious proselytizing the group claims to be protesting.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Atheism, Christmas, Religion, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Spirituality
Posted in Best, Editorial | 1 Comment »
November 19th, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
When I was growing up there weren’t a lot of snacks in the house and what there were we weren’t to eat. We didn’t have much money and my father didn’t hold with snacks. You ate at mealtimes and that was that.
Unfortunately, when you’re growing, there are times of nearly constant hunger. You’re satiated for so little of the time and then the gnawing comes back, a sympathetic vibration of your metabolism stretching your bones and tissue to fill your DNA’s incontrovertible requisition form.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Eating Dog Food
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 13 Comments »
November 17th, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
One cold, January day in the early 80’s, with eyes on an expedition into the iced-over irrigation ditch behind our house, I decide a pair of black, rubber overshoes would be my best choice of foot gear. I’ve not worn such a thing in forever, a combination of woolen stockings, waterproofed boots, and diligently avoiding standing water having replaced the cumbersome, black and, truth be told, hated rubber overshoes of my youth.
Sometimes, however, they’re just the thing.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Closets, fear
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 6 Comments »
November 13th, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
It is a pleasant summer day, the sun radiating down to heat our pleasant and bustling tourist destination of a town. I am on my knees behind the counter, busy taking inventory of a shipment of pseudo-prayer flags; squares of cloth emblazoned with brightly colored, new age motifs, strung together with black, cotton string, and selling for $41.50 apiece, retail.
The store is only moderately busy; tourists and regulars milling about the crystals, books, and tarot cards like lazy bees in a somnolent flower garden.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Common sense, Retail, Sex, Work
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 2 Comments »
October 22nd, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
It is difficult to say what the exact cause of random stupidity in young men is but a good, general suspect is boredom. More windows have been broken out of boredom than hate, revenge, or any other reason.
In the early 90’s, I was employed at a mall record store and was frequently confronted by the twin specters of my own boredom and stupidity.
Most of the time our store was active with browsing adults, shoplifting teenagers, whining children, and sarcastic employees but certain times – say around 10:30 am on a Wednesday during the off-season – contrasted sharply with this otherwise boisterous environment.
It was on such a morning that I reached a personal zenith in boredom related stupidity.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: Immaturity, Retail, Violence, Work
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 4 Comments »
October 18th, 2008 by Corey A. Edwards
cae posing as a Security Guard – 1989-1991
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, I worked as a security guard at the Loveland, Colorado Hewlett Packard plant.
A sprawling complex of assembly and R&D, the plant was plagued by random waves of climatically inappropriate creatures inadvertently shipped to it in crates and pallets from places all over North America and the world; it wasn’t uncommon to find a gecko on the wall -in winter.
One year we were infested with the strangest, scariest looking arachnid I’ve ever seen.
Read the rest of this page »
Tags: security guards, spiders, Work
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 2 Comments »
