Rated X For Excellence

By Robin Xavier Fontaine

The twelve pieces published by me thus far in 2013 are brought together under one cover, with the hope that the reader sees both variety and harmony in my approach to the short work. I chose the word excellence in the title of the anthology primarily because the writing is capable, the spirit is philanthropic, and the meanings are discreetly and engagingly pointed to.

The reader will find my poetry: A Great Notion, This Love Is; Diamonds From The Void; Gonna Gotta Let My Hair Down; Spectacles Of Love; and Horizons Around Us. All are selections of my personal favorites, and chosen for their capacity to entertain.

My lone foray into essay writing is here in Cosmogony's Riddle, an entertaining contemplation of existence, modern dilemmas, leprechauns, and ironic coincidence.

I also have a collection of fifty proposed word origins that haven't occurred to the linguists until now: The Thinking Human's Etymologies. You'll find in it my most aggressive commentaries as well as my taste for puns.

My short stories are I Had Always Been So, How I Became Insane (An Insomniac's Tale), and Brainwash. The second and third are humorous tales, and the first is the abridged account of life for one woman who lives through the times of repression into the contemporary world of marriage equality.

The aptly titled Passion's Energies gives you eleven vignettes to stimulate your love of living.

Finally, a story that I think is more apocryphal than fictional: The supernatural-themed Beyond Her Curtain.

All these works are adult reading material, not for explicit content, but for mature themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Xavier Fontaine
• Release date: Jun 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301964802

Robin Xavier Fontaine

I was born and raised near Montreal, Quebec, midway through the baby-boom, the second of three daughters. (How I got the middle name Xavier is a story in itself.)I started out with a disability, and eventually became a differently-abled person. I have learned in my life that with the three H's, Hope, Humor, and Humility, life offers more than enough rewards.The branches of a tree grow upward and outward, yet in life, our branches can all come back together again in a great knot, and a new tree begins growing upwards - awkward picture, isn't it? Recently I have found tranquility, love, and inspiration, and so it's as though life is beginning all over again. I hope to share my optimistic disposition with my readers; to know your limits, yet hope and strive for your dreams, is what brings out our truest humanity.I now share a Twitter account with my old ex, Robert E Vonne - check out our tweets. @robinrobin55Peace and cheers!

Book preview

Rated X For Excellence

By Robin Xavier Fontaine

Copyright © 2013 by Robin Xavier Fontaine

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you wish to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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All twelve works in this anthology have been previously published in 2013.

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For SS: Heroic people surround me, but of them all, you are my greatest inspiration.

Table of Contents

Author's Notes

A Great Notion, This Love Is

Cosmogony's Riddle

Diamonds From The Void

Gonna Gotta Let My Hair Down

The Thinking Human's Etymologies

Spectacles Of Love

How I Became Insane (An Insomniac's Tale)

Brainwash

I Had Always Been So

Passion's Energies

Horizons Around Us

Beyond Her Curtain

Connecting with Robin Xavier Fontaine

Author's Notes

There are five volumes of poetry that follow. They are A Great Notion, This Love Is; Diamonds From The Void; Gonna Gotta Let My Hair Down; Spectacles Of Love; and Horizons Around Us. Cosmogony's Riddle is a series of three related essays. The Thinking Human's Etymologies is a collection of fifty fictional word origins – some humorous and some simply satirical or pointed. How I Became Insane (An Insomniac's Tale) and Brainwash are humorous stories. I Had Always Been So is a short account of a person's experience of living through times of homosexual repression to a contemporary environment of marriage equality. I offer eleven vignettes in the aptly titled Passion's Energies, and the book concludes with the longest piece, Beyond Her Curtain. It is an apocryphal story about the redemption of a cynical, corrupt man who believes he has met God and his wife.

Read, and enjoy.

A Great Notion, This Love Is

The apple, cleft from its bough, wrongly rises;

Satisfied, yet always yearning,

I find myself in whirlpools of love.

Not to be cherished for a season,

Then limply cast asunder

As the common beauty of the butterfly

Or the rose.

Neither the sparkling sky of the white clouds

Nor even the stallion’s sugar cube –

I put this notion you have given me

In a pantheon of the ethereal:

This transformation of my life

Is nothing less than a Great Idea

Like an irresistible play;

Or to live yet another day.

No Phoenix arisen, if not stirred

By the commotion of the great notion;

So it has been with me,

Life sprung from the ash

Of an earlier existence.

A mortality spent in the closet,

Rattling the bones of hesitancy’s regret;

And so I was forsaking new ideas

In the bitter quest to be an old maid.

Not quite like a page that is turned,

Nor appearing to me like a mist-borne spirit,

I found you on my threshold one day

Inspiring in me this embrace:

To always aspire to this Great Idea.

It is neither understood, nor is it

Expressible in my own limpid words;

A great thought leads to a world

Never before seen by human eye;

And you, my Great Idea,

Are my new world this day.

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Cosmogony's Riddle

A Sprite’s Life

The world we live in is quantized; everything changes in discrete jumps. In an instant, the Universe appears – the greatest jump of all, as far as existence is concerned. One moment, you’re single – the next moment, you’re married – another jump. One day, you’re living the daily grind, the next day you’re retired – a jump. At one instant, you’re alive, the next you have passed away – the final personal jump of our lives. And, one moment, there are a dozen oatmeal cookies cooling on a tray on your stove top; the next moment, half of them are gone – a jump that occurs routinely in my kitchen (I live alone, so I blame it on the sprites.)

Some things in the Universe appear to change gradually, but in fact change that seems to take place gradually to our perceptions, is in fact change composed of a multitude of tiny imperceptible jumps. What could be more gradual in the world than the motion of objects? Consider a billiard ball on its table, rolling from one end to another after a player makes a shot. Certainly, our senses inform us, this must be a smooth, gradual change; but it is not. Space itself is quantized, and the billiard ball, in its motion, jumps from one region of three dimensional space to the next, in tiny displacements approximately on the scale of the Planck length (an extraordinarily miniscule distance, it is held to be the smallest meaningful length in the Universe.) And so, the apparent gradual motion of objects is a trick of the eye. Time, as well, is quantized, at intervals known as the Planck time; no span of time shorter than this has any physical meaning whatsoever. So, the apparitions of gradual motion and gradual time are mere illusions – at all levels, change occurs in jumps.

I have a miniature grandfather clock sitting on its own special table in a corner of my living room; it was given to me by my father for my tenth birthday – it has run without interruption since I first put in some batteries and plugged it in that day long ago. It really is a marvellous device, capable of running on three power sources: Batteries, plug-in, or, for a short time, on its internal weight system. I feel an intimate connection with this clock, perhaps because it embodies the memory for me of my much-missed father; but it is also important to me because, somehow, it has taken on the symbolic meaning of my mortality. At times I can feel a little spooked at the thought of it grinding to a halt, and no longer keeping time – it’s as though something else would die as well. Now, I don’t fancy for a moment that I would cease to live if the clock stopped, but something inside of me would die. I think, maybe, what I feel would die is, in some important way, my memory of my father. Keeping the clock he gave me running has been a mission for me since his funeral over ten years ago; I don’t believe I’m being superstitious, although the sensation I have is remarkably like a superstitious feeling. It is my tribute to his memory that I shall, for the remainder of my days, maintain the clock and keep it operating continuously. It is the final thing I can do for a man that I loved and admired so dearly.

I calculated recently during one of the chasms of unfilled time that have appeared on my landscape since I retired, that the pendulum of the miniature grandfather clock swings a full cycle, back and forth, every 2.447 seconds. (You would not be jumping to the wrong conclusion if you presume that I was very bored that particular day – I counted the pendulum’s cycles for a full hour – twice.) A milestone in my life will be when the clock’s pendulum completes its one-billionth cycle, sometime in my eighty-eighth year. It seems like a remarkable coincidence to me that I have long thought that living until the age of eighty-seven would be a good, long life. So, when I finished my calculations, and saw that the clock’s billionth cycle will occur in the year of my wished-for expiration, I had a very superstitious feeling. In a world that seems to have so many astonishing coincidences in it, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see my