It’s late, and for some reason I find myself wading waist deep against a stream flowing away from me. I know I have to keep going, to keep struggling as in the distance is the place I want to be. I’m not sure what it is at this stage I am striving for, but it has to be better than where I have been.

As I continue my efforts, one foot placed in front of the other I feel the current pulling me back as if this is not where I should be but back in some place it thinks I should be.

At times, there are objects in the water, further making my attempts harder by the second. My back is bent, and I am determined to get to where I know I need to be.

Then I wake up.

I can feel my breathing is rapid, the exertion…

Three Line Tales, Week 92

Hosted by  SONYA at https://only100words.xyz/2017/11/02/three-line-tales-week-92/

A MILLIONS CRIES IN THE DARK

photo by gn dim via Unsplash

3LineTales

Neel Anil Panicker

There they stood, lighted candles in their hands, alongside a million others of their ilk, all standing up for once and voicing their opinions, speaking out against what they thought and felt was wrong and went against the tenets of natural order and justice.

All night long they kept vigil, shouting themselves hoarse, alternatively pleaded, cajoled, harangued, insinuated, hurled invectives, threatened, begged…did everything that was in their command to try and convince the powers that be to step down from their high horses, to peep out of their ivory towers and cast a sympathetic eye towards the havoc their life threatening policies have wrecked.

Alas! It was not to be. Centuries of flapping around in the rarefied waters of omnipotent power had made them…

At the start of the end of the heady hippie days
I briefly dipped my toes in the sinking hippie ways.
I floated in long dresses and I jingled as I walked,
I used the hippie lingo every time I talked.
I tried smoking cannabis, but not for very long;
it took all my sense away and made me feel wrong.

I never fancied LSD – I liked to see the world
in its organic gorgeousness, not twisted and unfurled.
I disagreed with half the things the lippy hippies said;
they thought they were original, but their minds half dead.
They told me I was brainwashed because my ideas
were far too well-considered for their dippy hippie ears.

They said that they were breaking out of mediocrity,
they said their way of life was a better way to be,
they said they wanted peace and an end to all the…

Hosted by the ever reliable, ever resourceful Reena at https://reinventionsreena.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/reenas-exploration-challenge-week-10/

REBELS WITHOUT CAUSES

By Neel Anil Panicker

The other day while on my regular walk around the park I happened to bump into a septuagenarian, an ex-Armyman, one who I am privileged to occasionally chat with.

As I sat down beside him in the corner bench after my regular five rounds of brisk walking around the oblong park, the conversation got flowing and then ambled towards the current times that we The retired gent touched his beard and with a far off look in his eyes very soulfully remarked, “I pity you and all others who’ve missed out on the olden golden days of yore. Compared to today’s fractured times, those days were a blessing.”

I nodded my head in acquiescence but much later in the privacy of my room I mulled over what the old man had mentioned.

It dawned…

Kat’s given us a trio of images to work with this week.
https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/60562321/posts/1646725251

I’m going for captions!

Image By PaulBR75 at Pixabay.com

Do you come here often?

Image by Smokefish at Pixabay.com

It was the dog, honest!

Image By Noupload at Pixabay.com

OK children, gather round and I’ll tell you a bedtime story.

106 caption characters

(As this is the last of Reena’s Exploration Challenges, let me say how I have enjoyed being a part of each challenge. Thanks Reena for challenging me the way you have.)

When Horace Skant was given tenure at the local university he put on hold his life’s work, at least temporarily.

Horace had spent much of his life answering the question “Why Is It So?”

So when the Dean of Philosophy, Harvey Ivehadathoughtortwo, summoned him to his office on his first day and laid out the nature of Horace’s tenure Horace saw opportunity long denied him.

Horace Skant had lived a long life, most of it on welfare as no one could stand him working for them for than a half day as Horace had a habit of regaling them with whatever discovery he had made into his life’s work.

Not many people were interested in why a cow is…