I'll be glad when September's over

Written on the Fall Equinox 2024: Lately I have come to fear September. It goes like this. During or close to September 2022 three women who had been close friends over the years died within weeks of each other: Lael Morgan, Nancy Lethcoe and Sue Whittom. I have written about them in the Memorials section of this bog. Individually and as a group those deaths hit me hard. A year later, in 2023, I had barely recovered when two men I felt close with died within that same month, Jimmy Buffett, though I had not known him personally,  I felt like a kindred spirit with. The other, Joe May and I had become close friends in his and (well, if I acknowledge it) in my last years. And I learned today I missed the Memorial for another woman important in my life, Mary Helen Stephens. All of these losses along with several others that occurred at other times of other years led to sometimes these days I wonder why I am not corresponding with many people online any more and today it hit me why; my circle of friends has tightened, as the song goes "people just aren't around anymore." And there are almost two weeks left in the month.

Memorials

As we used to say on boats, it's time to get savage

Rally round people: Maybe this is what's wrong with the Democrat Party. Their leader stumbles a little and instead of circling the wagons around him, some of them stand off to the side loudly sniping, raising and questioning about whether he could or should or they want him to quit the campaign altogether. They're encouraged by the punditry who go on and on looking at polls and imagining authoritatively what will or won't happen if this or that happens. For crying out loud the opponent here is a felon 34 times over and he lied at least 30 times in an hour and a half debate. That's one every three minutes. Don't whimper on the sidelines about quitting, show some backbone and join for the real battle here. Maybe President Biden ought to test the new rulings and disqualify Trump from running and holding any office because he is a convicted felon, an in-your-face action to show some of that backbone. Our democracy is at stake.

Science fiction – or is it?

July 13, 2015

I've never been very interested in science fiction. Of course there's "Star Wars" and, oh yeah, "Firefly," oh, and can't leave out "Hunger Games," and then, well, you get the picture. Let's say I've never been much interested in writing science fiction although I did dabble with it once upon a time.

The inspiration came in a supermarket of all places. To begin with I can not stand the odor of the universal coverup scent, Febreze. A friend from the old days would have said it smells like a Dutch whore on a Saturday night. However I know lots of people stand by it. It's called an air freshener and is designed to eliminate odors. All I can see that it does is overload the olfactory lobes with a heavy scent only slightly less obnoxious than one might like to mask.

What happened in the supermarket was I was picking out trash bags when one box I looked at smelled different. Sure enough, it had the Febreze logo on the box. Somebody decided more garbage bags could be sold if they smelled like that obnoxious spray. I quickly put that one back on the shelf and picked out an unscented variety. But it didn't stop there; whether that scent was stuck in my nose or whether I passed another product I wasn't sure, but when I looked, there was some laundry detergent with the foul stuff included. There's usually enough perfume in laundry soap without including that crap, but there it was.

Then I saw it on toilet paper and again on wet wipes. In time I came to peruse products to make sure Febreze wasn't in them and was surprised how many included it.

That's when the science fiction story came along. Think about all the super-villain plots in all the science fiction that were aimed at taking over the world. Not one succeeded largely because of some clever intervention or simply overwhelming force from a super hero.

Now, suppose someone mixed some odorless toxic goop with whatever the concoction is that makes up Febreze. Worldwide as people put out the garbage, sprayed behind a cigarette smoker, wiped their asses, washed their clothes. used the little units in their cars, and performed any of a myriad of  domestic chores they got one good whiff of this odor eliminator and were eliminated themselves, along with their families, pets and plants. Double your pleasure because the widespread use of it would also mask the stench of decaying bodies.

Before long clouds of the lethal gas would be hovering everywhere (if they aren't already) spreading the deadly air freshener.

Or it could go another way. I once discovered some mold in a tent I owned and asked a friend how you get rid of it. She suggested Febreze. That was my introduction. I fired one shot of the stuff at the mold, got a whiff of the perfumey junk and thought about sleeping in a tent with that sweet smell in bear country. No thanks. We all know the odors that can collect inside a closed tent, so picture a tent manufacturer infusing the fabric with Febreze to cover them up. In my fictional world over time the powers that be trying to figure out why there were increased numbers of bear attacks in camp grounds.

Years ago the town where I lived started spreading a de-icer on the streets. That de-icer when splashed up on car finishes attached itself with the tenacity and color of road tar. Someone discovered Febreze was the only thing that would take that junk off the paint. That ought to have been a warming for reals.

My journey into science fiction ended with those thoughts, at least until a couple of days ago when a story showed up on Facebook called "The Dangers of Febreze – A real eye-opener." The article confirms the product does not remove odors, it simply gives you a stronger odor to cover them. The article goes on to list 16 of the chemicals in the soup, many of them carcinogens, allergens, irritants to eyes, lungs, skin and ears among others. It holds dangers for just about all living things. It's one of the scariest lists of ingredients I've ever read and I am glad now that I've avoided its use all these years.

But it sure does make the case for a good super villain to take over the world in a cloud of sweet-smelling carcinogenic goop. Who would notice one more lethal ingredient in that concoction?

Here's the article. It lists those 16 ingredients and their dangers and also offers some natural alternatives. All about wellness solutions   

Posted by Tim Jones at 3:08 PM No comments:  Links to this post

The Writing Life

It’s come to this: The last time?

 Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

Journey into a new novel

1.    Inspiration

2.    Hurriedly write opening grafs

Fred? tucked a Ziploc bag under the windshield wiper of his truck. It contained an envelope and he could only hope new snow would cover it until it was found. (This could be too obvious foreshadowing)

He slipped the straps to a small backpack over his shoulders and turned to trudge through a thin layer of newly fallen snow to the beginning of a trail cut up a hill into a deep boreal forest in its climax stage. Huge spruce and birch trees stood tall in the woods, many of them so old they were rotting upward from their roots through their trunks until those trunks and their roots failed to support them and a windstorm or until those roots and trunks could not support the weight any more causing the trees to collapse onto the forest floor answering an old philosophical question if someone is there to hear. Branches from the trees still standing reached high over the trail creating in summer something of a canopy, a tunnel even, but in winter an eerie tangle of skeletal remains.

As Fred stepped onto the main trail he felt its reassuring firm base packed solid my numerous snowmachines, beneath his boots. He stood for a moment focused on that trail and a question came into his mind, one he'd tried several times to answer in the previous year or so. Is this the last time I am going to do this? He'd asked it several times as he began to feel the differing signs of oncoming age, but never could come up with an answer. He didn't have an answer for it this time either. As he contemplated it again his mind wandered to recollections of other times on this trail to a day when he sang out loud. He couldn't remember the song he sang that day. Only one time? He searched for other times a song had entertained him on the trail but none came to mind. A song did, however come up as he took the first steps onto the trail and it took his full concentration to stifle his voice. In his head, the Rolling Stones sang "This could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don't know owo…"

With the Stones shouting in his head he began walking along the trail, leaving the civilization of the trailhead parking lot behind as he progressed deeper into the woods. He paced himself knowing shortly he would encounter one of the toughest parts of the trail. That would be the steepest hill he'd have to climb; there were others along the way but this one rose quickly several hundred feet. He planned to stop and rest during the climb. He saw no sense in wearing himself out in the first mile, a concession to the age that worried him.

3.    Racing into notes and more ideas

LATER BEATLES LONG AND WINDING ROAD AND MAYBE CHARLIE DANIELS                         LONG HAIRED COUNTRY BOY

4.  Goes off in several directions

Under foot packed by machines.

Segments and thoughts

work between reality and thought process.

Last time you do something

Wondering if you will ever do this again

5.    Becomes a confusing tangle too complex to control, ideas flying fast and furious, jumping days, months, years. even decades, backward and forward, wild thoughts, like a lifetime love that never really existed or a questionable course change on a long ocean voyage and on and on crashing into each other creating such confusion nothing made any sense and it scared me. Was this one of those signs as aging declines into  malfunction? Suddenly it stops in a sweeping clarity and falls away with a realization:

6.    The whole concept is derivative

7.    Realize the literary masterpiece it's derived from

8.    Slide the whole piece into the false-starts folder

9.    Pour a glass of wine, lift the glass to Hemingway with a nod to Jack London, Then:

10.  Never mind! Next!!!!

 The writing life

Prince William and the Blueberry Queen

 

PRINCE WILLIAM AND THE

BLUEBERRY QUEEN

Prince William Sound is the body of water in Alaska where I used to live.  It was named for the second son of King George III of

The was the theater.

England by Captain James Cook.  A lot a blueberries grow in the sound, and the inspiration for this story came from a woman I spent time with in the sound who was always picking them and making pies. The was rewritten into a play that was put on using 3-foot tall marionettes and performed by a group of Valdez Alaska kids in the summer of 1989

--Tim

 A sound is a noise like waves crashing on a beach.  A sound also can be a large, protected body of water, a place where waves don't crash against a beach.  This is a story about the second kind of sound, only one so long ago and so far away, you can't hear it any more. 

In its beginning, this sound was not protected.  It presented a wide-open mouth to an expanse of northern ocean whose weather drove storm after storm over the water against the mountains that rimmed the sound.  Darks clouds stopped by the mountains always hung over the sound and precipitated a constant shower of rain into the bays and coves.  The mountains around the sound always stood dark, black with trees that were bent by the constant winds that failed to blow away the clouds that delivered the rain.  No one ever saw the tops of those mountains because they were always hidden by the clouds.  As a matter of fact no one ever saw much of the sound at all for it was a dark and cold forbidding place.  How cold and how dark no one knew for even the bravest of mariners avoided the sound.  The sailors who plied the northern waters stayed away from it for it was said an evil giant inhabited the sound and those unfortunate ships that entered seeking shelter from a storm were never heard from again.  Few did enter, for besides the stories of the giant, the sound offered little in the way of shelter without some land mass to cover the opening as a buffer to the weather.

To the east and west of this sound lay two small kingdoms.  These kingdoms existed peacefully with each other, but the sailors from each competed in the ocean for the same fish and there were occasions when one king would send an angry reprimand to the other over conflicts on the fishing grounds.  With no shelter between the kingdoms when the great northern storms blew, often the fishermen from one kingdom would seek safe anchorage in the harbors of the other.  Although the harboring would be allowed, the outland mariners would be made to feel they were unwanted and their welcome ended with the storm they were hiding from.  There were too many arguments over the fishing for the fishermen to be welcomed into the other's port.

The kings, seeing the conflicts growing and fearing their subjects would make more trouble, began sending emissaries back and forth with suggestions for resolving the issue. Eventually, as they neared agreement, the court of the Eastern king made plans to journey to the west to complete the accord and celebrate with a feast.

The Eastern king took with him many of his advisors and in an attempt to broaden the world of his son, William, took him as well.  In three ships they sailed for the Western kingdom.  It was an easy voyage for no storms blew and their passage was a safe one.  As they crossed the mouth of the dark sound, Prince William asked his father about the forbidding wilderness.  His father told him about the sound and when he'd finished, as if to prove what the king had said, way off deep within the sound they heard roars and loud splashes.

"They say the rain drives the giant insane," said old king Hinchinbrook, "and he goes into a bay and rips massive boulders from the cliffs and hurls them far out into the water or, sometimes, back into the mountains."