Archive for the ‘Best’ Category
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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Tags: Blood, Divorce, Failure, Rebirth
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 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.
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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
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Tags: Heavy Metal, Incompetence, Music, Records, Retail, Russians, Sequim
Posted in Autobiography, Best | No Comments »
October 19th, 2012 by Corey A. Edwards
Numerous letters in the alphabet are so often used together that I believe it would be wise to quit mucking about and simply merge them.
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Tags: Alphabet, English, Letters, ough
Posted in Best, Humor | 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)
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tags: Depression, Divorce, SIngle Parent, Survival
Posted in Autobiography, Best | 4 Comments »
