There are times, as a parent, when you find yourself ambushed by your kids. You're hosting a dinner party, your guests are sitting around talking, and suddenly your sleep-addled four-year-old angel appears to announce, "Daddy, my penis itches." Or you're sitting at dinner, eating a nice plate of pasta, when your son becomes theologically thoughtful and poses the question, "Daddy, if God wanted to, could He make it so that you eat with your booty?" When things like this happen, as a parent you are completely on your own.

I can claim I come from an artistic family, and here's proof--my younger brother, Randall Darrell Standridge, a band teacher in Northeast Arkansas, has recently been on a tear, publishing several of his original pieces of music through three or four different music publishing houses around the country. I don't know from musical publishing companies, but this latest one, Grand Mesa Music out of Colorado, is according to Randy "pretty big." At any rate, you can go to that website and find an mp3 of Randy's composition, "Fields of Clover," at this link. Or, if they'll allow you, download it directly here.

Give it a listen, and tell me the kid can't write. I dare you.

I just read this consideration of the influence of E. E. Cummings on modern poetry, and I have to admit it has depressed me somewhat. Cummings has always been one of my favorite poets, and while I haven't read poetry seriously for many years, I find it sad that (if this author is to be believed) people are not taking him as seriously as I did, nor idolizing him as much.

So this past Friday, April the 15th, I actually went out and did a reading. As part of the 2nd Annual Arkansas Literary Festival, our local progressive-investigative-journalistically ethical-and in all ways cooler than freon weekly newspaper, The Arkansas Times (not to be confused with that other paper, which is a daily summary of right-wing talking points), I took part in the "Pub or Perish" pub crawl, in which a gaggle of writers and listeners troop to three bars in three hours and read aloud to the mostly appreciative patrons. And, importantly, get drunker than Hemingway.

I can't over-emphasize the importance of being drunk.

K-Y "Gently Warming" UltraGel.

In a recent article on Salon.com entitled ”Abstinence Pledges Suck…Literally” (you have to watch a web-mercial to get a day pass on Salon, unless you know a way around it), comedian and commentator Bill Maher reveals some shocking statistics:

A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids…But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?

More to the point, where were these pledges when I went to church camp?

I'm a lit geek. My two degrees are a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Literature (both of which have of course been instrumental in preparing me for my present career as a computer programmer at an insurance company). As a youth I was one of the only students in my junior high English class who actually enjoyed reading Shakespeare (and understood what the characters were saying); as a sophomore I managed to avoid reading Huckleberry Finn--which for some reason I could never get into--by volunteering for independent study on James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My favorite novel was (and is) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ("Fydo" to his friends).

Needless to say, I was very popular with the ladies. Ahem.

Since I have an insatiable craving for the classics, I was well chuffed recently when I discovered this site: ManyBooks.net. As the domain name implies, there are stored at this site many, MANY books. Classics of literature, history, horror, scifi, philosophy, and more, all (I assume) in the public domain. The books are all in handy dowloadable PDF form or a variety of other PDA-friendly formats. Or you can read them online. Really, it's wonderful, and it allowed me to read a book that I have always meant to get round to but somehow never did: D. H. Lawrence's infamous sex-stravaganza, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

One of the main reasons I bought this domain name was to use as a depository for my writing. Like nearly everybody online, I have dreams of becoming a successful writer--or at least of seeing my name on the spine of a pulpy paperback in Barnes and Noble one day, even if I never see a penny from it. Anyway, pursuant of that goal, I've decided to put my scant few published stories online for anyone to read who has a hankering to. And when I run out of those, I may start in with the unpublished. Because God knows nobody else is posting them.

The first entry in the collected online works of Scott Standridge, "Near the Dark Heart of the Sea," is now online. Comments and critiques are welcome, and they needn't be unqualified praise. Though certainly, at times, that would be nice.

Well, okay, that was random.

I was a little bored at work today waiting for projects to cross my desk. Dry-eyed and slack-jawed from hours of net-surfing, I decided to get up and take a walk. It's rainy and cold in Central Arkansas today, so I had to do my walking inside. I wandered around the floor I work on, down to the elevators and back, in and around the break room, doing a slalom between the cubicles in the IT department. Finally I found myself in a long corridor that goes from the front lobby all the way to the back of the building, perhaps fifty yards of windowless, extending space.

Check it out, I'm everywhere! Well, maybe not everywhere. But I am in more places than one. In addition to sitting perched in front of my computer monitor in Little Rock, Arkansas, I've apparently established a laws-of-space-and-time-defying presence in San Francisco, CA; Mesa, AZ; and Fort Smith, Arkansas, which frankly is a little too close to home for me to be comfortable with. After all, I go to Northwest Arkansas all the time. What if I ran into me? What would I say? Talk about awkward.

Google is a dangerous thing to one's sense of singularity.