The Oilfield Allegorist: Dorothy Ellis — Drill Daddy Drill (1952) Thirty-six years before Dallas brought us the oil-centric Ewing family, there was Drill Daddy Drill, an ode to oil extraction that’s really an ode to sex, and is also not to be confused with the (Republican, therefore deeply unsexy) slogan Drill Baby Drill!
When she saw him, her heart did all the things a heart must do: it swelled, it leapt, it skipped a beat. She crossed without looking left or right and stopped directly under the ladder – because, of course, it had already happened to them both. The terrible luck.
Mind Old Ginger the gamekeeper. Myths abound where he’s concerned. Famous through the Borderlands, was Old Ginger; a legend to some, a purpling, heather-lurking menace to many more. Pheasants and pleasant folk stopping in their weekend homes feared him equally, as well they should have. For the wee man wasn’t entirely right.
In the spring of 1980, when I was three years old, my father took me to my first Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Our family would be moving to Canada later that year, and my dad wanted my first baseball game to be a Cubs game in Chicago at Wrigley, not a Blue Jays game in Toronto at Exhibition Stadium.
The other day, my mother handed me a pot of yoghurt, cultivated from my great-grandmother’s vagina, across the antique wooden breakfast table, before I had had even the first of my morning coffees. But, of course, I tasted a spoonful out of politeness. It was gloopy and unpleasant.
No piece of famous-girl gossip has ever surprised me less than learning that the night before her Vegas wedding to Jason Alexander, Britney Spears watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In the restless of summer of 2012, I was in a fight with London. My family, my roots, my everything was there, but a new day had dawned in my brain rendering it all nonsensical and claustrophobic. I felt like I was haunting the city I’d grown up in. Meanwhile, people kept intoning: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
Not long before leaving, she’d begun forgetting the words that produced her life. Simple words like saucepan, obelisk, masquerade and most recently, cufflinks, which she’d called wrist links, her mind toddler-fumbling with the picture-sounds till her husband corrected her with an unconcerned look on his face.
I got my first tattoo the weekend before my 22nd birthday. I decided – while sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall that I should’ve been cleaning, at the job I worked full-time when I wasn’t in school – on the word “bluets”. Or the title of Maggie Nelson’s lyrical talisman of a book. It was only later that I found out about its cult-object status.
The Galactic Expressway Resort had been in development for just short of a decade when they celebrated their soft launch "Leave to Remain" on that fateful Friday of June 24th, 2016. The intention had been to establish a viable competitor for Dick Pickle’s Coitus Galactic, a flight service offering unencumbered views of our Earth to its ordinary citizens.
