Long dark months ago when I started this blog I mentioned that I was writing a new novel. A bit of boffo sci-fi in the near future, end of the world as we know, how will humankind ever survive kind of thing. Well, I am still writing it, but very, very slowly. It is a bit, well, bad. I have fallen into the greatest of all traps and let myself do little more than copy the best bits out of every story I have ever read and paste them together. This is not always a bad thing. The Matrix was…
Category: pondering
Let’s have a Mojito in Dubai
You get a new red car and suddenly you notice that there are a lot of red cars. And not just any red car, but red cars like the one you just bought. So many red cars like the one you bought that you walk up to the wrong car in the Wal-Mart parking lot and try to get inside. Now, I have not bought either a Mojito or a trip to Dubai. But they have captured my attention as I seem to hear them mentioned a hell of a lot. A Mojito is a mixed drink. Dubai is a…
Steak & Ale
Steak and Ale was started in 1966, according to the back of the menu I read the other day, and it looks like they haven’t changed a thing since. Which is a good thing, mostly. I don’t eat here often, as I have never been one of those people that love steaks above all things. I had the Prime Rib and baked potato, and had the general feeling that I could have made them at home and they would have been just as good. Maybe that is my trouble with steaks in general, I want to go to a restaurant…
Zen and Juggling
Zen-doctrine that enlightenment can be attained through direct intuitive insightJuggling-throwing and catching several objects simultaneouslyZen Juggling-Enlightenment through throwing and catching. Ok, not really an original idea, there was a book about enlightenment through juggling that was kind of a fun idea, but ended up being totally silly. Kind of like, well, what did you expect?I’m not sure. Maybe it was just me that was silly. After a while you read enough books on finding wise and important people at gas stations or flying planes or selling robes that you just kind of expect all books to hold some kind of…
Juggling, Magic and The Path Not Taken
In the seventh grade I checked a book out of the school library on juggling. It was an odd little book filled with cartoon diagrams and curved arrows indicating where the balls were to go. I bought a can of tennis balls to juggle with and in three weeks of chasing boucning balls all over the house, I learned to juggle. The book also covered clubs, rings, and fire-all of which I juggled with a fair amount of success. And yet there were still no calls from Ringling Brothers.Not that I really expected there to be. A few years later…
It’s so just a job
I don’t know what I expected, but the new job, new as in less than a year old, is much like all my other jobs. I am good at the job, not that taking portraits is exactly rocket science, but it does take a bit of practice to get it right. I am fast and have a bit of fun and I am making more money than I have ever made before. And yet, that doesn’t really matter as much as I had hoped it would. Before enlightenment, fetch wood and carry water-after enlightenment, fetch wood and carry water. I…
To be a Writer, then Read
I have been reading since about the fifth grade. I know this is kind of late and sad by todays standards of forcing the little ones to read by kindergarten, but those were different times. My first real book was Charlotte’s Web. We all got a laugh out of the farmer putting his knee to Wilber’s behind to get him to move. It was a couple of years before I really started reading a lot of stuff of my own choosing. A teacher gave me a stack of old sci-fi magazines and I was hooked for life. There was everything…
Out of the Nowhere
One of my heroes is a curmudgeonly fellow named Harlan Ellison. He is famous for ranting and raving and occasionally writing some pretty damned good sci fi, or SF as he might prefer it to be called. Once upon a time he was on about Video Games. He called them time sinks, said they were a waste of time, that you could be doing something, anything, better than playing video games. There is that feeling about blogs as well.And yet.Nothing pains the writer so much as never being published. As never seeing a byline or buying up all the copies…