The Preemption of Surge: Act III (Life in the Strange Lane: A Camera Goes Bad) by the NO LIMITS 12 Hour Read-A-Thon, Part 6 (Wilser’s)

Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the day. Maybe it was waking up at 3 in the morning and wondering where I would be living in less than two weeks. Maybe it was tired batteries in my camera. Or maybe it was everything under the sun … but the pics I took at Wilser’s (the former Tap Room) in Piper’s Lane (where the all-out massive orgy takes place in Ladies of the Fountain, the dirty story I read at Art+Concepts) came out glumpy. They just didn’t look right. Oh sure, Mark’s picture turned out OK, but his dog, Jack, stood in front of me, teeth bared, while I took it and said, “Fuck up Mark’s picture, Biff, and I’ll bite your balls off.”

I think that was the best picture I took all day.

So … out of fairness to everybody else, though, I put all the pictures into one. Including Jack’s (or at least, what I could see of him as he sniffed around looking for the spot to bite). Here’s the picture …

Here’s what happened … Matte read. Kora read. Kora’s father read. Mihaela read. Jordan read. Dino read. Marc read.

There was a lot of reading going on at Wilser’s to top off the NO LIMITS 12 Hour Read-A-Thon. Dino read an interesting history of the Maliseet Trail that actually had everybody spellbound. Mihaela’s sultry poetry stoked the steam out of the ears of most of the men in the room. And Kora’s father read Scottish haikus. They were pretty cool and had me wondering what the world would have been like if the Japanese had been Scotch. Hmm … I think I’ll stop that thought right there.

And that was it. During the day, over 30 people read and over a hundred people participated as either readers or listeners. Next year, the Read-A-Thon will be back, bigger and better, so start writing something today … a poem, a recipe, a letter to yourself, a memo, a list, a …