Author: Vic Socotra

A Way to Break the Day

A Way to Break the Day

So, Arrias stops by with a load of poems dispatched by his Muse. There is some agitation in the circle around the picnic table. The annual meeting of the Old Spooks organization is later, over at the Country Club our grandfather’s generation built on the old farms in Arlington. So, the Production Meeting turned into […]

Bear Three-Ninety-Nine

Bear Three-Ninety-Nine

The Chairman directed extra attention be placed on things while the Election and Surprises are Looming. That means someone is supposed to prep for the morning Production Meeting, which produces some scrawls of unintelligible phrases. This morning’s list started without identification of region. The strike at Boeing just re-ignited and it just had another satellite […]

Arrias and His Muse: The Plan

Author’s Note: After reading some more miserable accounts of life in the trenches, they all want to push the Russians out, but they keep looking around asking “WT…?” Then my Muse dictated this to me: The President has a victory plan, How he’s gonna win the war, Just another year of fighting, That’s all he’s […]

Just Three Things

Just Three Things

Melissa had not come back from the El Paso café over on Pershing when the rest of the morning crew finally appeared sequentially on The Patio in the last clear inviting morning of a season waning like the moon above. Splash had scrawled “Small S’esses Rising?” on his tablet before doing something else and she […]

Requiescat in Pace

Requiescat in Pace

(Rest in peace, LCDR Evans and LT Whileman, lost in an EA-18G Growler mishap near Mr. Ranier). A confused morning at Big Pink. Splash had the Big Surprise watch last night and when it appeared there was not going to be an unexpected Big One, he just started looking at the moon’s arc over the […]

A Smokey Sunrise

A Smokey Sunrise

(Waning moon here in DC greets a smokey dawn Out West on an anniversary of victory & expansion. Fifteen more on the Calendar until something else). It is the Holy Day on the calendar, and Splash had the night-watch on alert for Big Surprises. He had a bottle of Old Crow to fortify himself until […]

Blowing Up the House

Blowing Up the House

These days, we just start with guidance from the Legal Intern, since Creative Section Leader DeMille is frankly fed up with starting the meeting and assigning some tag lines for the groggy individuals at The Picnic Table only to have legal say there is potential liability in pursuing any of them through a lovely clear […]

Alaska Day

Alaska Day

No Big Surprise overnight, though a bunch of smaller ones to keep things boiling. The more surprising one is the news from Gaza, where much of this foreign trouble is possibly linked directly to things in our election. Timing is everything, you know? The news of the apparently inadvertent killing of the most wanted man […]

Arrias & His Muse: First Frost

A brilliant full Moon o’er the forest, The dogs give me the eye, Mighty cold for an October night, Under a cloudless lapis sky. Dawn still two hours away, But no deer to be seen, Already have their winter coats, Gray shapes in a gray woodland scene. The leaves are all quite brittle, Quietly crunching […]

What’s Next? And When?

Yep. All that stuff in the slide is going on and we are prepared to talk about any part you would like to explore. The big hanging question is about the Big Surprise, we have been expecting, since all the little ones seem a little played out. Mr. Trump’s health is one of the issues, […]