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.
Pages
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Thursday, July 4, 2024
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.
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Science fiction – or is it?
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
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!!!!