Oxalis.

Spider silk

Spun around

Sorrel.

Scarlet stems

Swaying from

Sunlight to

Shadow.

Shrooms.

I wouldn’t advise using any of the mushrooms pictured here for your bread-and-mushroom stuffing this Thanksgiving.

That is, unless you and yours are thankful for things like intestinal distress and / or liver failure. Then, by all means…

This amanita muscaria is what Lewis Carroll supposedly took before composing some of his more psychedelic prose in Alice in Wonderland.

Don’t you eat it, though. It could kill you. And the high isn’t that great, either.

Or so I’ve been told.

“Who are you?” asks the caterpillar’s breath of smoke.

Are you large?

Or are you small?

Or are you both?

Being small, something larger contains you.

Being large, you contain multitudes.

Being a wisp of smoke, you materialize out of nothing, do your beautiful thing, then disappear without a trace.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Feed your head.

Girl Fort.

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant…

At second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.

But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved...

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems…

When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - one cannot hope to tell the truth…

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact...

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping...

If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste-paper basket and forget all about it.

From A Room Of One’s Own

By Virginia Woolf

War And Peace.

Okay, so, don't tell anybody, but I TOTALLY plagiarized my blog title.

These are the Veterans for Peace.

They stand out on Highway One on holidays, rain or shine, to make sure that none of us forget that war comes with great sacrifice - that no soldier returns from war uninjured.

Heroes in war.

Heroes in peace.

I love these guys.

Happy Veterans Day.

The Rooster And The Fox.

Aesop. As interpreted by me. And this rooster. Who is really more of a Bulfinch's Mythology buff, but he's trying to branch out.

One evening, a rooster flew up into the branches of his favorite tree to roost for the night.

Just as the rooster was getting settled in, a fox materialized from out of the shadows and sat down under the tree, staring up at the rooster and licking her chops.

"Good evening, Rooster," she said.

"Evening Fox," he replied, fluffing his bright feathers and looking wary.

"Say, Rooster," said Fox, glancing around her with her yellow eyes. "Have you heard the good news? All of the creatures of the Earth have agreed to love each other and live in peace and harmony."

"You don't say?" said Rooster.

"It's true!" replied Fox. "Representatives for man, beast, fish, and fowl have all gathered at a summit, and have signed an agreement that each will treat the other with nothing but love and kindness."

"Well!" exclaimed Rooster. "That is news!"

"It is indeed!" agreed Fox. "Wonderful news! And I wanted to share it with you first, my dear Rooster. We have been enemies for so long, and now our kinds are finally at peace with one another. Isn't it grand? Won't you come down here and embrace me, my newfound brother?"

"It is indeed grand, dear Fox. I will come down and we'll share a forgiving, peaceful embrace!"

Rooster looked across the field behind Fox.

"And ho! Here comes the farmer and his dogs, running towards where we sit, no doubt anxious to share in our newfound relationship of compassion and love. Will it not be wonderful, Fox, to embrace them as brothers as well?"

"Fox?"

"Fox?"

GlamPirate.

On Attending A Party With A Vampire Theme -

- a limerick about a creature of the night.

There once was a soulless VamPirate

Whose unslaked thirst left her irate.

She wandered the sea

Until she found me…

…and this is where I get stuck.

Some options:

“And forced me to be her new shipmate?”

Sigh. No.

“Too soused for her to exsanguinate?”

Good word. Clunky rhyme. No.

“And with my sweet blood she did hydrate?”

Ew. No.

“Now I am VamPirate incarnate?”

That one's not too bad. Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have liked it. I don't know if there exists a mariner more ancient than the VamPirate, after all...

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

And some in dreams assured were

Of the spirit that plagued us so:

Nine fathom deep he had followed us

From the land of mist and snow.

And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root;

We could not speak, no more than if

We had been choked with soot.

"Very pirate-y," you're probably thinking. "but today's reader wants vampires. Besides all of that stuff about those zombie sailors being so very, very thirsty, does Coleridge give me anything in this poem that relates to the blood sucking minions of the undead?"

Does he!

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

We could not laugh nor wail;

Through utter drought all dumb we stood!

I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,

And cried, A sail! a sail!

My Halloween was happy and filled with delights. Not the least of which was a World Series win for the Giants. Their tricks were my treats.

And to he who imagined the VamPirate into existence? Yeah, um, she did quite a bit of damage, dude. I’m gonna need an address where I can send the bill. And you should probably just forget about your security deposit...