VACUUM SUCKS
You know those little things in the carpet that try to hide? When you vacuum “hide and seek” becomes “hide and suck.”
If you have a cheap vacuum, vacuuming becomes a hockey game. The goalie is under the mat. The cheaper the vacuum, the bigger the mat. As a kid I used to shoot marbles. […]
LEARNING TO CRAWL — When I was little, I liked crawling and was able to crawl really fast. All the big people towering over me kept trying to get me to walk and stand up. The only time I would stand up is when no one was around. Crawling was my favorite way to get […]
I was in my boxers enjoying my box turtle while eating my box lunch before the big boxing match on TV. But there was this old TV show “Let’s Make a Deal” and I wanted to know what was in box number 1.
Imagine somebody took away the computers, pens and pencils. The only writing […]
What is fame to you?
How would you know if you were famous?
What would that do for you personally, if you were famous? What would it represent? Mean?
How big an area would you have to be famous in to be satisfied?
Does the itch to be famous ever stop, have boundaries, or just keep going on and […]
Why do we scratch our heads when we can’t figure something out?
Are we simply buying time?
Signalling that we are clueless?
Or, do we think we’ll shake our brains a bit,
and the information we are looking for will fall out?
My sweetheart Daniel Holland in Northern California had a wonderful dream one night and was fortunate enough to remember it. This is an archtypal dream every performer, artist, and writer must know and face before putting work out in the world. –JRG
In the dream I’m in the lion’s den with two lions. They are ferocious: […]
I’ve arrived in the Midwest now and am starting the work of making a new home for myself in St. Louis. My brother Gary Thompson flew out to visit me, fish with Daniel, and escort me back. We slept last night in the house we grew up in, where my father grew up, where he […]
Today on Riehlife I’m featuring two poems that came to me simultaneously from my father, Erwin A. Thompson, and my writing friend Arletta Dawdy. Both, curiously, sound similar chords, perhaps on different instruments, so I wanted to run them together.
Artletta’s poem presents a coming of age story…a searching and a finding that goes beyond the […]
In “White Girl, Black Heart: summer ‘59″ Arletta Dawdy deals with the doubts and misgivings that concerned her going in her first Sunday service at a Black Church. “Believe me it was a “moving” experience as the church rocked! This was LIncoln Avenue Methodist Church in Pasadena and the preacher was a wise man, an […]
Erwin A. Thompson, my father, is the grandson of E. A. Riehl, who helped Sandy Freeman and his wife with the transition of moving from the bonds of slavery to the dignity of free people working for wages, bargaining for specified compensation for certain accomplishments, and becoming property owners.
Pop wrote this poem after Jimmie […]
