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description=Welcome to WordBowl! How it works: Folks like you send word suggestions (look below for link, or submit to wordbowl@gmail.com). I draw one at random and have my essayish-or-fictional way with it (handwriting in bars & coffee shops all over NYC). Let the word games begin!;

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share, this, you, for, wordbowl, thank, your, response, recent, posts, comments, to, it, word, or, rad, synapse, ameliorate, pleroma, satiate, fabulous, elixir, thanksgiving, reparation, brouhaha, navigation, follow, blog, via, email, reader, favorites, archives, categories, meta, tags, mscharlies, instagram, welcome, how, works, folks, like, send, suggestions, look, below, link, submit, gmail, com, draw, one, at, random, and, have, my, essayish, fictional, way, with, handwriting, in, bars, coffee, shops, all, over, nyc, let, the, games, begin,

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Text of the page (random words):
onos soft berets with crayon colored pom poms ivory inlaid chess set and stories stories i conflated with those of sinbad christopher columbus marco polo jules verne and the myths of poseidon neptune i wholeheartedly believed his a hero s journey nyc view as i started to scribble nomadic baseball years came to an abrupt 1970 s recession restricted end my father settling us into a landlocked southern town i prayed was mere prelude to exalted destiny i missed the seasonal rhythms of my mother and i trailing my father bus highway ballpark airport motel our once epic road trips reduced to day long visits to the nearby beach towns along the mississippi gulf biloxi bay st louis gulfport where battered buildings residents still testified to the horrors of hurricane camille i stared at the desultory dishwater colored waves dragging detritus upon silt that passed for sand doubting these same waters could be capable of either destruction adventure wondering if perhaps i had misunderstood the stories miami view story shaping adulthood peak of what we did not yet know would be the first dot com boom living on the edge of an ocean my 24 7 job crisscrossing the country hardly afforded me time to see i hopped a last minute flight to join friends in thailand ferried to koh phi phi an island in the andaman sea determined to avail myself of the advertised too good to be legal temporary padi vacation certification the waters my pawpaw sailed upon i would dive below despite my utter lack of preparation and propensity to hold my breath while thinking after some minutes of basic scuba instruction and much flirtatious banter i slid a fan of rainbow hued bhat to the aussie dive master instructor pitchman who announced with a wink i passed the qualification test with flying colors recommended i get a good night sleep unless i cared to join him for happy hour miami view story shaping dockside dawn streaking over limestone peaks jutting up from the sea like a maritime stonehenge a surly american female dive master subbing for the aussie charmer who broke both wrists toppling off a barstool un amused by a newbie among experienced divers to keep me occupied while she led the real divers on their initial descent she suggested commanded i snorkel around our anchored boat was even less amused upon return to learn a jellyfish had wrapped itself around my arm leaving swollen henna bright tattoos trailing from shoulder to fingertips a novice s scarlet letter shadow edged clouds billowed across a storybook sky holding promises of relentless sunshine or possibly a brief burst of rain like summers in louisiana a quick cry followed by a laugh of relief on deck divers jockeying joking rival comrades telling tall tales of exotic locales rare specimen sightings daring feats of diving do two men a danish diving duo took pity drew me into the circle as i cast about for an underwater tale of my own miami view story shaping and i did years before a friend appalled by my never having taken a day off much less a vacation dragged me her family home on oahu we drank beachside mai tais sampled spam sushi visited a volcano pilgrimaged to hanauma bay a snorkeling paradise known for sea turtles emphatic signs posted along sinewy path from parking lot to beach no touching no touching no touching inaugural snorkel i spied a moray eel instinctively backed away bumped into something behind me turned face to face with a massive sea turtle i mimed apologies he assumed he patted my gesticulating arm pushed me along fin gentle but insistent guided us around dense formations of coral and fauna between crevices and underneath reefs past swaying seaweed fields further and further further than i would have dared on my own my exclaims muffled by silicone mouthpiece after some time hours i later discovered my turtle steered us to shore patted my back glided away desktop view editing on airplane danish diving duo appeared if not impressed suitably appreciative surly substitute dive master roused herself called to me readied us for our tandem dive i tried not to think of wombs umbilical cords as i acclimated to ambulating with flippered feet surly substitute pointing at underwater landmarks a perfunctory tourist guide philly view story editing i had yet to acclimate to the weighty weightlessness the suspension of time and gravity while reminding myself to breathe 1 2 3 when a thresher shark darted between us slipping underneath our tether surly substitute motioned up up up back to boat her announcement sent group scrabbling for gear a rare sighting worthy of future tales still leashed we descended again i watched the other divers moving as if in a dream a buoyant ballet accompanied by breathy darth vader symphony echoing in my helmet in an ungainly attempt to dodge a school of fish speeding towards some unseen goal i backed up flippered furiously to avoid touching the living coral felt a pressure on my back humiliated surly substitute would surely use my near manhandling of precious precarious nature as excuse to terminate our dive i turned found myself face to face with a sea turtle surely not the same one greeting me at the las vegas mccarran international airport he again presumption placed flipper between my shoulder blades nudged me along we undulated together surly substitute trailing behind tugging at leash hand signals incomprehensible as my turtle guide uninterested in her continued to prod look here and at that and that returned me to boat patted my rump swam away ride back to koh pi pi no longer the outcast divers and crew gathered around for me to tell the tale again and again dreams that night vivid peaceful rose before dawn departure for bangkok imminent i sat solo on the soft sand watching waves lap shore water reflecting refracting sunrise of fairytale hues magic and myth shimmering not only beyond the horizon but thrumming below the surface raùl aktanov domingo share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading synapse s february 27 2016 july 7 2025 mscharlies leave a comment this is a wordbowl first a retelling of a story originally posted in 2014 i recently participated in a literary event at nyc s legendary kgb bar and in preparation for my reading of tech related stories i reworked the original synapse as my opening piece let me know what you think happy reading would you like to play wordbowl click here the point at which electrical signals move from one nerve cell to another origin new latin synapsis from greek synapten to fasten together word credit to chis brake of the eponymous entertainment talk radio show and podcast streaming from indianapolis http chrisbrakeshow com going old school sazerac with an absinthe sidecar first flirtation with technology began with a suggestive note wedged into my locker by a heretofore casual buddy m followed by an illicit rendezvous in the computer lab known to be empty between first period m s class and last period mine fumbling initial attempt to access what m called a mainframe and once in copy m s program tweak save under my name day s assignment complete before i slid into my seat for roll call we snuck glances at each other suddenly shy smiled bonded by this audacious act we needed no words still m leaned in breath tangy whispered so now could you write my great gatsby paper for me we slipped surreptitious from the room first m then after counting to sixty to avoid suspicion me face flushed hacker not yet in our lexicon hack a term for the talentless people who produced low quality work or quit because they lacked the right stuff we had given computing class a shot playing it straight but weeks of basic basic instruction resulted only in dot matrix printouts of numerical patterns boxes circles ghosts it appeared we would go no further than to make not so pretty pictures although when spring hit just shy of graduation we learned to create computations write programs that calculated actual mathematical results which hinted at some powerful if not exactly profound alchemy mechanics behind the magic toby s estate coffee this trade of access to his programming for access to my writing which may have been frowned upon had school administrators caught wind was in today s business parlance a savvy practice of maximizing our resources or leveraging our respective core strengths we were ahead of our time we were living the future in retrospect i might have chosen more wisely become the lead technologist made him the english lit guru had i known what those 1s and 0s would wreak i was bewitched by this computing backdoor a function that bent time and space allowed me to explore the landscape of a novel while my classmates tippytippytapped on their keyboards i escaped the classroom confines for nearly an hour returned to reality as the bell rang a weekday tesseract the worlds conjured by coders still decades in the future the future which is now our society s past our ever iterating present it was beyond my ken to envision worlds erected out of numbers instead of letters fabricated not by authors but by engineers and profiteers serious coffee serious edit flash forward bay area early 1990s the emerging tech wave cresting to boom me at a magazine start up covering all that emerged from apple s campus on 1 infinite loop we styled ourselves mavericks us macintosh advocates the fashionable underdogs in the great pc wars we evangelized the virtues of our closed operating system a pure play no glitchy underlying dos and we were design smug about our hardware too boilermaker round two we traded tech tips tricks to unlock hidden software easter eggs keystroke shortcuts the talk of tech still about tech itself even as the hedonism of the first ipo era loomed and tech tips became synonymous with wall street trades even before the commercial internet we were plugged in wired connected our rarified air crackled with possibility all possibilities radiating out from our bay area epicenter casual conversations over hoppy ipas sparked sideline projects engineering equivalents of garage bands for the guys that is the programmers the ones who wrote the code we women peripheral people regulated to pr csm marketing until we were needed to write their stories boilermaker has hacked the craft cocktail scene how else to explain their seriously top shelf concoctions served with seriously unpretentious flare bonus points to this east village bar for boasting an entire menu of boilermakers and extending their oh so easily rationalized as the more you drink the more you save happy hour specials til 8pm all that happy hour writing required some serious next day editing so i settled into a widow seat at toby s estate the brooklyn based roaster who has thankfully opened a manhattan outpost in the west village if you d like to revisit the original synapse post click here do you have a word for wordbowl use the form below i look forward to diving into your word world back thank you for your response name required email required website blog tublr twitter etc private comment required wordbowl word required submit δ share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading ameliorate february 17 2016 mscharlies 2 comments wordbowl wednesday reprise ameliorate wordbowl readers in nyc may note that both longstanding west village locations in which this piece was hand scribbled with cocktail and posted with coffee no longer exist make something bad or unsatisfactory better wordbowl word of the day ameliorate submitted by kate taylor she of analytical mind and artistic heart possessor of the world s greatest laugh my parents were mistaken victims of malicious rumor mongering they told me i was too young to understand which i dismissed with a wave of my stubby six going on seven year old hand obviously my grandfather could not be dead as he was in the midst of building me a dollhouse and pawpaw was not a quitter magic hour at bee s knees baking co later in the tight rooms of my father s childhood home i called grandmother marie s because i never saw pawpaw there even though he must have lived there in between restless high seas adventures and unannounced visits to my family i stared at a coverlet covered bed pawpaw presumably shared with my grandmother a fact more incomprehensible than death i wandered into his workshop tools lining one wall gleaming lathe menacing bandsaw bench mounted milling machine pneumatic nailer a single bed so low to the ground it was more seaman s bunk and a massive royal competing with the more manly apparatuses for attention i sidled up to the typewriter half hidden by plywood that upon closer inspection were cutouts for a dollhouse with three neat rows of windows just as i described when he asked what i imagined for my dream home my barstool neighbor s happy hour cocktail and snack festivities at gusto i left the cutouts exactly as he had i hiked up onto the stool sat at the typewriter and felt him close vivid as though he was present working explaining each step as his hands brought life to wood metal i sat at the typewriter and willed him to me i sat at the typewriter as rain hammered like nails i sat at the typewriter as the afternoon thunderburst crashed i sat at the typewriter as the storm softened into afternoon i sat at the typewriter as i heard the drawling murmurs of those people who had attended the funeral arrived i sat at the typewriter as sounds of china clinking and ice tinkling signaled the real moment of paying homage to pawpaw was to begin i sat at the typewriter until my parents returned and drew me away with honeyed bribes of soft shell crab po boys crawfish hushpuppies black bottom pie the dollhouse never materialized my father lacking his father s skills the wood disappeared in a pile of scrap hauled away by the people who profit in death the typewriter king of royals came home with us living in the narrow storage room abutting the carport spacebar hanging over the edge of the metal cart with one sticky wheel it took me and a parent to haul it out cart creaky across carport concrete up the steps to the back door of our house i took over then solo rolling rickety on the harvest gold kitchen linoleum alternately pushing and dragging over the semi shag of the den down the hallway back to my bedroom where i would sit before my prize memorizing the keys hands poised as though i were at piano practice and i would strike hard over and over sometimes actual words but most...