Withering Flats, Episode Two, part 1

Withering Flats
Episode Two

Yes, Folks, it’s time once again to pull up a chair and gather ‘round the virtual radio screen because we’re off to take a trip to the Heartland of Truth, Justice and the Tongue-in-Cheek Way, out where men are men, women are women and the cows come home for supper (they wouldn’t want to miss the show) in Withering Flats, USA.

Last time we were introduced to our All-American Boy Hero and self-made man (just like his mother is still raising him to be), Clem Clump, and to his best (8 out of 10 on the Hussel Magazine scale) girl and light of his life, Sweet Janee Trubloo, and to Clem’s arch-rival and evil foil, the ever-unpleasant and despicably heartless, Nasty Nick Nak. We left off with Clem telling the punch line to a joke that Nick did not understand and Janee had thought so funny that she laughed uncontrollably as she fell into a pit of hungry alligators.

So let’s head back to the simple pleasures and travails of yestertimes in Withering Flats and see what is happening back then right now...


A dark, late October night wraps its chilly fingers around the corners of the small town society as sweet Janee is just getting back home after a hard day at Jack Rackem’s Chiropractic Bar and Grille Emporium where she is employed as secretary and bouncer. She is carrying her stylish new alligator skin purse (and wearing matching shoes, hat, gloves and coat) and is looking tired after a rough day at the office.

“All I wanna do,” she is thinking to herself, “is take a hot mudbath, slip into my canvas nightie, curl up in front of the gas grill with a glass of port and read the latest issue of Soap Opera Indigestion.” She fumbles for her keys in her oversized purse, stops and digs deeper, pulling out various items and placing them in her pockets, under her arm and between her legs in search of the errant keychain. Out comes lipstick, compact, hairbrush, a pipe wrench (all of which go in various pockets of her coat), a leather truncheon (gripped awkwardly between her legs), a well thumbed copy of Farm Animal Monthly (stuck under the arm not holding the purse), an opened, large, economy sized brand name box of Hector Horse’s one-size fits all ‘Lubricated and Individually Wrapped for the Prevention of Disease Only’ foil packets (which she stuck in her mouth), a fat, half smoked cigar (“Aha,” she garbled excitedly to herself, “I thought I still had a bit of this left,” as she stuck it behind her ear) and, finally, a large, yellow plastic, squeaking rubber ducky that had a chain attached to it which held her keys. With her feet spread, knees locked together to hold her truncheon, arms tight to her body to hold magazine and purse respectively, she fumbled at the door lock until she was able to insert (choosing from several dozen) the correct key into the lock and pushed open the door. She waddled forward into the front hall of her warehouse bungalow, stuck her butt out to catch the door and swing it shut and was ready to drop everything in a sigh of relief when a voice suddenly cried out from behind the door, “Baby, I love it when you do that!”

With a croak of surprise through the box clamped between her teeth, Janee dropped everything (but the box, with her purse now dangling from the strap looped over her wrist) in panic, spun around and was confronted with the evil leer of that no-good despoiler of virtue, that slick and sly corrupter of innocence, that foul-mouthed cad (Mr. Bad Breath of 1937), Nasty Nick Nak himself. He quickly looped a ready coil of copper wire over and around her, pulled it tight to pin her arms to her sides, then looped it around over and over, many more times, trussing her up into immobility. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an oily rag that he raised to her face to stuff into her mouth. He paused in confusion as he noticed the box that was already occupying that space, frowned, shrugged, took the box out with his other hand and smoothly stuffed the rag in its place. He read the label on the box, raised his eyebrows in further surprise, smiled and put the box in his coat pocket for later attentions. He turned back to Janee, who was occupied in chewing on the rag and making pleased, “Mmm-mmmm,” sounds, twirled his well waxed moustache in anticipatory glee, grabbed and shuffled her back a few steps against the bright magenta painted brick wall, then grabbed the purse off of her wrist, reached into it, pulled out a piece of paper and exclaimed, “Aha! I have it at last!” brandishing it in front of Janee’s face.


Oh dear! Whatever does nasty Nick have? What does he want to do with it? What will happen to poor Janee?
Be sure to tune in again tomorrow night for the next installment of episode two of Withering Flats!
(end of part 1)

A World of Questions

What to say:
It’s Poetry Day:
So here you go:
On with the show:


World Of Questions


Standing on a world of questions

Looking toward a sky of answers

We reach up for knowledge

Trying to grasp the contentment there

Not realizing that the sky is made of air

And has been in our hands the whole time.



Michael Steven Platt 1971, Posted 5-07-09

A Random Rambling Digression

In keeping with my random postings I haven’t yet decided what to put up here for tonight, but I’m fairly certain that I will come up with something. I’m working on the second installment of Withering Flats, which I originally called “The Hi-Ho Funnies” in my journal when I wrote them over thirty years ago, but I wanted to give the series a less trite title. I wrote three ‘episodes’, each about two years apart and have decided to rewrite, refine and update them for presentation here. I hope to have the next one ready and posted over the upcoming weekend. I have a couple ideas for more Zlodt Bardo, Spaceman episodes, but I do not have one already worked out. The first one, Zlodt Bardo and the Space Pirate, I made up the day I posted the first half, about three weeks ago. The story turned out quite well and there will be more adventures in the future!

I do have a variety of short stories contained in my Making Sand collection, and I have posted some of these already (Master Bishu and the Genie, Realization and All in the Mind) but I don’t want to take too many from that source as I would like to publish them all as a complete unit. I also have taken excerpts from my book, Endless Shifting Sand (seeming to have some kind of affinity for sand), but again, I intend on publishing that and I don’t want to give away more than a taste here and there.

I also have random things I have written into the computer over the years, and I will throw some of those up occasionally, but that is a limited resource. My desire is to write more spontaneously and create interesting reads as I go, which was what the Zlodt and the Pirate story was. However, that takes a lot of time and energy and, at this time, I am not able to devote either of those in the quantities I would like. Yet I want to keep posting and keep adding to the collection of literary oddities that will, eventually/hopefully/someday, draw in readers and produce a following of people who enjoy what I write. My ambition is to become a writer/artist as a fulltime occupation and not have my creative talents be just fascinating hobbies, so I write (and draw) and believe that what I produce is good enough to warrant a closer look and thus develop a following. I have two followers so far, Dianne and Stringffellow1, and I am deeply and humbly grateful for their appreciation of my work.

I wasn’t intending to write in the direction that I did, but that’s where my words carried me and so that’s where we went. I will be write back...

Written by Michael Steven Platt 5-05-09 (Fell ease, sink the mayo)

Another Thoughts of the Moment Triple Play

Another set of Thoughts of the Moment...



We are living in tomorrow’s past, so use the memories of that to guide your actions today.


A dollar might have an attractive bottom worth, but it is the pennies that get pinched.


The situation is not all it seems to be, and more.


Written by Michael Steven Platt 4-04-09

All in the Mind

All in the Mind

Two hermit monks were each meditating on adjacent mountain tops. Neither acknowledged the other as they sat for many years. Then suddenly, on a warm, sunny afternoon, one called out to the other, “Are you a product of my imagination or am I a product of yours?”

The second monk called right back, “Neither, we are each the product of our own imagination.”

And so they sat and meditated in silence while the years slipped by, neither realizing that as soon as I stop writing about them, your imagination will soon move on and they will be gone.

Written by Michael Steven Platt Posted 5-03-09

Initiative Redaction

Taken in from the top, everything else looks down and out, but the best way to get here from there is to wait until you catch up with yourself and see who arrives first. Tie goes to the rumor. I surround my ambitions with a yawn and prepare for the next available moment after this current one winds up its down time, pantemporal travel notwithstanding in the rain of my every day dreams for a better tomorrow in spite of yesterday’s misfunctions. The crowding hours keep my hesitation to broach anything more radical than a mid-morning snack, but I bite off the substance of freedom, chew over the implications of lateral intent, ruminate on a better way of strife, swallow my pride, digest what comes to my attention and generally get a belly full of short-changed inspiration just in time for lunch. Close call. Slow day at the okay corral. Round up your posse and ride like the dust that blows through the sweep of your mountain stone mind, like a rock. Here come the good guys and there goes the neighborhood out the back door, down the alley, into the streets of lost and found angels looking for a way to share a smile. All emotion is primal, all opinion is biased.


Writing as fast as you read, the images and words that flow from the fingertips of my every active mind to the walls of your never changing mend (substitutions abound) of the way you would like to see what it is that holds your breath between each and every distraction, come around and eventually trade sense for substance. I offer relief in the form of a cloud, you hold clouds in the arms of your clear blank eye, and between the motion found therein, the weather makes out just find in the loss of something else to lose. All reality is conditional, all perception is subjective.


One thing follows another until there is a whole series of confusion that only makes signs to point and ponder the way back to where you are going in any situational aspect of being lost without realizing it. Here you go there in the sunshine of the clear blue night, holding without touching and feeling without believing. All awareness is current, all actions change your future reality, ad infinitum.


Written by Michael Steven Platt 5-02-09

A Poetry Day Late and A Poem, Short

Okay, okay... I know what you’ll say:
I didn’t come through on Poetry Day.
Apologies, regrets, atonement, amends
My self recriminatory angst forefends…
I guess I’ll ameliorate this loss somehow
And offer a poem… so, how ‘bout right now?

Wrought Write Read

How much Writ
Can a Right Write Write
If a Wrought Write
Wrote Right Writ?


Wrap that around confusion’s find
Then plant it in your fertile mind,
And wonder if you were mislead
And wrote right write was left instead.
So with that read of wrought write fun
This Poetry Day is write right done!

Wrote right write wrought by Michael Steven Platt 5-1-09