New Book On the Open Market

Well, I finally got around to harvesting a few trees and published "A Space, A Period, and A Capital" at this location, here.

As I mentioned previously, I dedicate this book to those for whom silence forever bears grave witness, people who took the next bus stop, the next train station and exited life early. I have delved into their thought processes, read many books upon the subject and present to you my view of what such people face. To look into the abyss takes courage, to step off the edge and fall in takes but one step. Although death meets us at the bottom of the abyss into which we all must fall one day, I'm not ready for death. After covering this subject, I prefer the view from the top or even from the dangling end of a bungee cord, ready to be pulled back up. There's too much to see and too much to laugh at to take the plunge prematurely.

Have I posted the reviews I received of the novel excerpt I submitted for the last Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award? I don't remember. If not, here they are:

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Reviews

ABNA Expert Reviewer

This is well written. The excerpt jumps around a lot, and there is a touch of paranoia, but in light of who the main character is, that fits well with the reality of what is going on in this story. Lee seems like a nice enough guy. A hard worker, has a loving wife, it sounds as if he has a nice home, but something is going on. Some sort of internal struggle. From what is written it could be an affair, perhaps he knows something about someone having an affair, or maybe he is just tired of keeping everyone's secret. Whatever it is, Lee is not happy. In fact Lee is so unhappy Lee wants to die.

If we weren't told that Lee was checking himself into an inpatient Psych ward, this excerpt would have seemed scattered, messy, and rambling. However, because we are given that information right from the start we are given a small idea of how Lee's mind works. We don't know what is torturing him, but we know it is something big. Or perhaps it is just a lot of small things that are eating away at him. What exactly it is, we don't know, but because of the care the author took to set the scene, I sure want to find out.

I want Karen to get her husband back. I want Lee to give up the gun and let the pain go. But most of all, I want to know what the big secret it. I want the answer to the riddle.

ABNA Expert Reviewer

"A Space, A Period, and A Capital" starts with Lee, the protagonist, and his wife sitting in a hospital waiting room, where they are waiting for Lee to be admitted to the psychiatric ward. Lee has just tried to commit suicide again, so he's checking in. Lee then proceeds to take the reader on a roundabout assessment of his life, his job, and why he is suicidal. The excerpt ends with Lee being admitted, and him being paranoid that the hospital is already watching him.

"A Space, A Period, and A Capital" is too jumpy for a non-crazy reader. I realize that the narrative style is trying to imitate the world of a mentally ill person, but I really had a hard time getting into the story because it shifted gears so fast and so often. I would suggest that the author tone down the random stream of consciousness style. I think some stream of consciousness would be okay, but the author just needs to stay with one topic a little bit longer.

This story could be really interesting if the narrative quirk is worked out, particularly since "The Big Layoff" at Lee's firm is a relevant topic with the current state of the economy and the massive layoffs. I think examining what a layoff does to the psyche is interesting, and this narrative has an interesting perspective on it.

Sunlight

Taught class last night - Linux, or rather, Unix-based CLI entry is tough on the students but helps them see what a computer is all about, not just GUIs, games and pretty pictures, but also job control, gaim, and data flow.

Stopped at Bella Beads this morning and bought the string of fire opals for my wife as an early wedding anniversary present. Shopped at The Booklegger used book store and bought the following:

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now by Maya Angelou
• Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
• A Certain World: A Commonplace Book by W.H. Auden

I bought "Little Women" so I could slip the fire opals in as a surprise for my wife at lunch, making her think the string of opals was a bookmark. The surprise worked! We further enjoyed lunch with our friends Neal, Tricia and Ginger at Beauregard's restaurant. Hard to believe Ginger has three children now, or that Neal's children are grown and Tricia is a grandmother.

The Maya Angelou book is my introduction to her writing, not having read much more than excerpts of Maya's work in book review form.

The Mitch Albom novel is a revisit to the story, having seen a play at the Seattle Repertory Theater a few years ago based on Mitch's novel.

The Auden book is a reminder to me that all that's old is new again and the blogging world is really just a reenactment or living version of a commonplace book.

Ate a delicious, sweet BBQ sandwich and bowl of pinto beans at Big Cove BBQ a couple of days ago, seeing Chris Kelly, a former radio DJ who used to host Monday Night Football parties at a bar/pool hall called the Hard Rack Cafe. We reminisced with him about the old call, "Quarterback sack, drink a shot of Jack," that he yelled out during the NFL football games on Monday nights. Those were the days...seems like the Broncos and the Packers were the hot teams back then.

Today's the last official day of work for the director of the local facility of the technical institute, Jamie - hope she enjoys her term of office at the Knoxville facility. My old stomping grounds...hmm... okay, enough with the reminiscing. I'm not in an old folks' home just yet!

Time to enjoy a little afternoon delight - sunshine, that is - and see if there's any turkey BBQ left in the icebox. Can't wait to see the fire opals around my wife's neck, the kind of sparkle in sunlight that really gets me going. Hey, I'm a guy, not a robot. Food's not the only thing I get an appetite for. Deal with it.

Happiness is Commercial Exploitation of the Masses

All,

Just to let you know that my author pages are now available on amazon.com, consolidating my books into two spots, including:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0TA5A, and

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0UPPE

Thanks for your continued support and encouragement!

More books in the pipeline...

Regards,
Rick

Free Pain

Today, I joined two-thousand, one hundred persons and ran/jogged/walked/shuffled 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). I guess the fastest runner covered the event in about 30 minutes, which means that as I was crossing the two-mile mark, the finish line was in sight for the front group. When I crossed the three-mile mark, the winners were cooled off and deciding whether to stay for the awards ceremony or leave. When I crossed the four-mile mark, the organizers were getting ready to start the awards ceremony. When I crossed the finish line, the official time read one hour, nineteen minutes and some seconds.

I beat my goal of one hour and 20 minutes. I would even have celebrated one hour and 30 minutes since I had not trained and only decided at the last minute to register for the race last night. Thus, my late race entry means I don't have a posted race time this year because they had run out of "ChampionChip" timing devices - as I told the person at the registration table, my competition days are over and I'm just glad to have feet that can carry me 6.2 miles.

I weigh 30 pounds more than I did when I ran a marathon a few years ago. Where did the time go and how did I find all this weight? "Teacher! Teacher! I know the answer! You spent too much time in front of the computer screen!" Indeed, I did. Lifting weights for a few minutes every other day will not help you lose weight - in fact, I think it added a few pounds.

Last year my wife and I played spectators and cheered the runners. I snapped photos and shot some video of the event and posted a small tribute on YouTube. This year, I was the overweight runner and let others cheer me on.

In the running crowd, I saw a neighbor of mine, Linda Christian, a former coworker, Pete Engler (?), and a few familiar faces such as a fellow season ticket holder for a football team. She and I stood around a while and talked about the new head coach and what this season might be like. She also told me she planned to finish the 10k course between 40 and 50 minutes. A coworker of mine from my GE days, Bob Gustafson, sang a song before the start of the race. The new mayor spoke a few words and a local politician, Parker Griffith, stood at the halfway point and waved. I also saw a trumpet player who teaches music at UAHuntsville, Carolyn Sanders.

I saw thousands of happy, smiling faces, on shouting sidewalk supporters and even on those of us who dragged ourselves across the finish line after the throngs of supporters had thinned out.

Along the way, I was offered water by Boy Scout troops, frozen tubes of flavored ice by neighbors, beer and mixed drinks from some holiday revelers (who also offered to let me sit with them and drink a while - now why am I here, instead? hmm...) and cool sprays from water sprinklers. Members of the police department and medical emergency units stood in traffic intersections to keep civilian vehicles out of our way so I made sure I waved and thanked every one of them for using their holiday to secure the road for serious runners and casual joggers alike.

I spoke with a few runners, enjoying the roving party atmosphere, like moving from room to room at a social gathering, never spending more than a few minutes with any one person and sometimes running into the same person again 30 minutes later. I would have talked longer with a few guys and gals I met but our jogging/walking paces rarely matched up. One woman said many things to me but my tinnitus blocked much of what she said - life is full of missed opportunities and deafness cut out anything I could have learned from her. Oh well.

One nice thing about road races in town - I finished the race at 8:20, returned to the car at 8:25, walked into my house at 8:45, and showered, ate a snack, played with the cats, kissed my wife and got here by 9:15.

= = =

I ordered five copies of my book, Are You With The Program?, to give to the five best students/customers in the spring quarter course I taught, Strategies for the Technical Professional. All the students/customers in my classes need to know they can do anything they set their minds to accomplish but I don't have unlimited funds so I've selected the top five in one class to plant the seed of success in them and hope they grow and share their successes with others.

= = =

Time to rest, relax, drink a beer and enjoy this holiday with my wife! Adios, amigos!

What Have You Learned?

The light streaming in through my window lessens as an atmospheric disturbance passes by. I hear the thunder and am just another animal subjected to the demonstrative strength of this planet. I have no effect on a storm. I need not ask the perennial question - I know who I am today, defined by my relationship to the massive body that holds me near its surface through gravitational pull. I am not an island - I belong solely to this place, despite any thoughts of independence I think I have.

Soon, my classroom, faculty office, and hallway observations will end. When the school term ends, I will go about my business and wonder what effect the people in an institute of learning have on my future actions.

I see a cyclist pass by my window every few minutes as he uses a small circle of roads, including mine, to strengthen his body. He does this sort of thing every once in a while, maybe once a week or once a month. I'm not sure. Or at least someone like him passes by, wearing a bike helmet, a set of "professional" bike clothes covered with corporate logos, a pair of sunglasses, and other gear that obscure his singularity, his individuality. He may be a "she," for all I really know.

My experience as an instructor is the same. I have looked for individuality in my students/customers, the faculty/staff and others I've encountered for the last 10 or 12 weeks. In some cases, I have encountered cardboard cutouts, images that represent people but ones with little to offer me other than physical appearance.

Atmospheric anomalies are the same thing. I call some of them clouds, some of them thunderstorms and some of them tornadoes but such words are only my conventional use of word-pictures.

At 47 years of age, I ask myself, "What have you learned?" Or from another perspective, what have others taught me?

You cannot see my actions so I will describe to you what is going on right now. Other than taking a moment to write these words, I look at nothing in particular, noting the tree limbs outside my window swaying with passing wind currents, the privet and honeysuckle bushes in full bloom, and the bird that hovered over the window screen while snatching moths but I am not contemplating them as specific entities - they are merely window dressings. I am meditating upon my thoughts for a few minutes.

What have I learned?

I have learned that:

• I can get comfortable speaking in front of a group of people, despite remnants of stage fright.
• I have a set of personal thoughts that have no elements of controversy I can share with others.
• I can encourage others to engage one another civilly about controversial topics.
• I don't have to open myself up and expose all my intricate set of thoughts, as mixed up as they are at times (scattered, non-sequential, incoherent, in conflict, not thought out, etc.), in order to get an idea across from my point of view.
• I am not universally appealing.
• I cannot teach everyone because of my lack of patience and subtle intellectual snobbery (pretentiousness, really, because I am not as intelligent as I'd like to think I am).

In what do you excel? I excel at nothing. I have taken the survey course of life, choosing to audit rather than receive an actual grade or pass/fail option. I am satisfied with my observing position rather than giving in to society's expectation that each of us become a specialist at something.

That's why I hesitated so long to complete a bachelor's degree. I do not want a specialty. I need no title. I am happy being the body I was born into/as/with.

After tonight's class, the only classes I have left involve administering final exams and grading homework/lab assignments for students/customers who desire a specialty in their names.

However, twenty-four years ago next month I received an associate's degree: Associate of Science - General Option, Magna Cum Laude (with an emphasis on CAD). Eight years ago I received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (Major: MIS; Minor: Math).

I started my professional office career in 1986 so I have been a desk jockey on or off for 21 years (the last two years don't count because they mainly consisted of my mid-life retirement with a few consulting jobs in between).

A professor of mine, Dr. Jones (yes, that was his real name), recommended that I follow his path in a career of Operations Research. He understood that I had a mathemathical/logical mind that I liked to apply to business problems. I think he taught me Business Statistics, if I remember correctly. Of course, he was right. That is my natural inclination when dropped into the corporate world - I tend to analyze people and the methods they use to achieve their personal goals while under the direction of an organization that wants people to achieve corporate goals - it's like breathing to me. It's part of the reason that people management and teaching are relatively easy to me because I like to look at people's faces and hear their life stories so I can help/motivate them to perform activities that satisfy their sense of self.

I am an observer, a diarist, a journalist, and an analyst who dreams of being a writer/author well-known for his insights. I am oblivious to the aspects of living that lead to monetary riches with a wealthy lifestyle. I am not a spendthrift but I am not a big dreamer, either. I am most happy when I am left to think out my thoughts in words.

This spring quarter, I taught two classes with strictly technical contents and one class with a mix of personal and technical content. I am glad to be rid of the two technical courses because the content did not interest me so I tried to make the classes interesting to both the students/customers and me by showing the practical applications of dry technical material. The last class, "Strategies for the Technical Professional," was more interesting in that it helps show incoming students/customers how their personalities tie into potential careers, which I know how to do. However, it bordered on the touchy/feely, which does not appeal to me.

What am I trying to say? Well, what I AM saying is that I'd like to design my own teaching material. In fact, all my books have been about the course content I've developed to describe the ideal life for a person like me - that's why I posted them for free for a while, to give others who may have some personality traits similar to mine the understanding that in the mind-numbing rush of humans toward the mindless future, there is space to be you, even if you carry conflicting ideas in your thoughts like being concerned about preserving unpolluted environmental spaces free of humans that will be overrun by polluting humans anyway, including so-called ecotourists.

Last night, a person in the hallway asked if my first name is Richard. I told him yes and asked him why. He said he was told an instructor with that name also fit the description of me someone had told him went with the name that he then saw in front of him, "older, distinguished and well-dressed." He said that meant he'd be in my class next quarter. I told him if that's true, then I'd be ready to teach him. I didn't tell him that I thought I wasn't teaching during the summer term.

By coincidence, the candle beside me just burned out and it's 12:35 p.m., time to see if the fixative I poured into cracks has sealed the broken flooring of the fiberglass bathtub in the master bathroom. I'll double-seal the crack and then get a bite to eat for lunch. I'll also think more about my future participation in human society and if, as others have observed, including elders like Dr. Jones and my father, my destiny lies in the realm of post-graduate degree work. Or should I follow my nose and continue on the path I see before me, which means I'll continue writing about the meandering path through the woods I walk in my thoughts and with my feet, sometimes leading, sometimes following, sometimes teaching (always learning!), sometimes walking with others and sometimes alone?

Alternative Plans

According to all the information that bombards my senses, this moment is Monday, the 4th of May 2009, at approximately 15:07. Today was going to be the day I wrote the epilogue wrapping up the serialized novel about the bored rich man with two childhoods. I decided to follow my whims, instead, and subjected myself to viewing a moving picture about a comic book character named "Logan" a/k/a Wolverine. Now, I feel like I'm a testosterone-adrenaline teenage junkie again, ready to race cars on the road and have a street fight against some wimp to make me feel superior. After the movie, I lost a street race with a driver on Cecil Ashburn Drive, whose car, an Oldsmobile Aurora, is in better shape than my '95 BMW 325i with its shot shocks, broken motor mounts and untuned engine. Alas, I admit defeat -- I am too cheap to fix my automobile. No more pretending to be a saloon racer!

I am opinionless, my ears rattled by a loud sound system that projects the audio accompanying the moving picture. When did we start believing that talkies are better than silent moving pictures that were accompanied by a piano, organ or small orchestra? Maybe that's why I have tinnitus.

I have spent more money lately than I should have, including a costly Waterford candy dish made in Ireland and sold at Belk's to me by Mary Jo Nash on the 1st of May. Another day of instructing on the 2nd. On the 3rd, finished reading "Bobbed Hair..." with another day of pretending this is my last day on Earth. Lots of rain lately - saved earthworms from drowning on my driveway during a heavy thunderstorm and/or dying a dry death in my driveway by throwing them in the red clay next to the house yesterday. Ate dinner at Beauregard's - fried strips of chicken breast covered in orange-habanero sauce - server's name was London Churchil (no kidding). Today, the ticket tearer and popcorn seller at the Rave Motion Pictures offered to find me a dogtag bearing the rip marks of Wolverine. Walked out of the theater the wrong way and couldn't get back to retrieve the movie souvenir.

Forget who I am. Keep thinking I'm the paranoid character from my book, a problem with getting into my stories too much. I'm not the character, which means I'm not planning to meet the future mother of my child and her best friend at a hotel near a teaching institute, when the main character would make the decision to leave his former life behind and start over, buying a fifth-wheel trailer and traveling around the country for a while with his new cohabitation partner and child, divorcing his wife and getting a fat check later on to make a down payment on a house in Marmouth, North Dakota, where he and his new family would help Dr. Bill Garstka from UAH with dinosaur digs in the summer while selling bead necklaces over the Internet the rest of the year. That's what my epilogue would have said had I taken time to write out a good one.

That's not who I am. Who am I? Still the wondering wanderer a/k/a the wandering wonderer. No special powers, no stash of millions in "merchandise" in the trunk of my car that fattens my offshore accounts. Just a regular guy with a habit of writing words. Time to detox and get my recent novel character(s) out of my thoughts so I can concentrate on new one(s).

Thinking about taking a regular job at a regular company, an 8-to-5 gig where I can forget about myself for a while and pretend I don't exist anymore, gathering material for another story in the process, if I'm lucky.

Munster lost to Leinster this past weekend, which tells the fortune of southwest Ireland, along with recent job redundancies, predicting that the Celtic Tiger will take a while to regain its strength. In the meantime, I want to find a job that gets me to Scotland in the next year or so. Ireland was the land of my second-to-last novel - time to pack away those memories and move forward, further east toward the land of my unknown beginnings. There'll be writing in there, too, if my luck holds out.

Still consulting for the small startup company. Getting them assistance in this economy is not quite like pulling hen's teeth. Thank goodness advice is still available and more importantly, useful!

The teaching gig is real, despite trying to pawn it off on my storybook character(s). Need to figure out how real I want to keep it. No telling, today. I have no business standing up in front of students/customers if I have no interest in the future, my thoughts drifting off in the middle of class like the absent-minded student I used to be, constantly asking myself who I am and what I'm doing here and why are some of those people looking at me as if I have something important to tell them? Gotta have a certain level of self-importance to stand up in front of a group and be the subject matter expert for a few hours at a time. Easy to do. Too easy, perhaps?

Need a topic for my next novel. In other words, who do I want to pretend to be for a while? Sometimes, I worry that I'm really a paranoid schizophrenic borderline personality type who thinks he's a writer. Oh wait, I am a paranoid schizophrenic borderline personality type who thinks he's a writer. I believe I'm what's called a chameleon - only now, with 40+ years of training, I've learned to wear my camouflage for longer periods of time. Let's see, I've been a sewer worker who was also a private investigator, a lesbian who went on a college spring break, a college student on an LSD trip, an office worker who attracted a group of people believing in multinational conspiracies, an adult guy being hunted by a vengeful childhood friend, a dead guy on the run from characters who've escaped from my other novels, a blogger disguised as a novelist...what else? I'm starting to lose track.

A long time ago, I tried group therapy because I didn't have any friends I felt I could be honest with about my feelings. One of the members of the group was the sports radio voice of a local traditionally black college, a guy named Ike who retired a while back. The other members of the group I can barely remember, including a neurotic woman who was always afraid someone in the group was going to commit suicide and set her therapy back to the beginning. Ike just wanted a group of people to talk with who didn't have a hidden agenda (he felt inferior and worried about his job, not wanting to give people a reason to blab about his mundane family secrets).

The man who led the therapy, Dr. Sim C. Liddon, told me that I didn't really need therapy. I was a normal guy who didn't know he was normal. All I needed to do was decide that I wanted to live a normal life and I'd be very successful. But normal is boring. I don't want to be a successful, boring person. In recent years, however, I gave in to Dr. Liddon's suggestion and succeeded in a boring job, traveling around the world doing boring things with other boring people, building a successfully boring financial portfolio. I proved he was right (and made my family happy because they like "normal" things to talk about and brag about, regardless of how boring it seems to me).

I suppose that's why I am who I am. I'm afraid of being normal and boring. But surprise, surprise! We're all boring to someone else. If you want to be exciting and fun, do as many different things in your life that you can so you're bound to make everyone you meet find you more than boring. They may hate you or love you but at least they're feeling something when your name is mentioned!

And so, back to the possible subjects for my next personality transformation. The character in my last novel showed a mean and hateful side - I wonder if I can build on those emotions. I've got a bunch of scenes I've built around the shenanigans of my primary/secondary schoolmates, including their sexcapades, poor school skills and police records. I've thought about furthering that line of thoughts into a character who digs up facts about schoolmates, writes a research paper / dissertation about the human thought process and proves that we never fully ditch the personalities we say we left behind after we grew up and became "decent" public citizens. The main character goes on international television (e.g., YouTube) with stories about the character's research, tearing apart the lives of schoolmates who, for instance, say they've found God but in reality cheat on their taxes and perform petty crimes, like taking office supplies, displaying traits of their childhood school cheating and thievery. The YouTube crew will have secretly followed the main character's schoolmates using hidden cameras and Internet-tracking software to build a profile of the schoolmates' adulthood. The YouTube exposé series will also track the schoolmates' children to show how the next generation displays the propensity for misbehavior they got from their parents' DNA, including, by now, college-level cheating and partying.

Naw, too easy. The main character has no personal conflict, unless its one of facing the psychological horror of messed-up adults he thought were truly innocent schoolmates, including former girlfriends he wishes he'd married. Again, this is boring stuff. Been done before from too many angles.

Okay, gloves off. What emotional/psychological issues do I want myself to face as the main character? Let's say I'm facing the grim reaper right now. I have 24 hours to live. I will be able to dictate my last set of thoughts that could constitute a novel, conventionally or nonconventionally, doesn't matter. You can't see it so I'll let you know that I am meditating and becoming a new character. Omm...

As always, I am like myself. I am a 47-year old man. I am...let's see. I don't have a regular mirror in front of me, only a small mirror that mounts on a computer monitor to show a person what's going on behind him. My skin droops off my face, with tiny folds of skin that show below my jaw when I turn my head.

I, as this new book character, have a set of friends, one group with children and one group without children. I have work colleagues with the same categories - DINKs and non-DINKs (Dual Income No Kids). I find out that some of my childless friends/colleagues chose their lives because they lead lives in which they don't want children to interfere. I am invited by those with interesting lives to join them. I accept their invitation.

The conflict? Some of their lives clash with the main character's set of beliefs. Some act as if their lives are interesting but they're completely boring to the main character. In other words, real life.

The hook that holds the readers' interest? Good question.

Some of the boring people's lives will include professional gambler, drug dealer, state politician, drag racer, and Internet scam artist. Some of the interesting people's lives will include housewife, accountant, waiter, toll booth operator, teacher, and midlevel manager. At the start of the story, some people from both groups will be sexual deviants, some will be celibate or lone masturbators, some will have severe psychological problems, and some will be as plain as water.

The story will be told from the perspective of a sexually communicable or transmitted disease (STD) but not in the sense of a voiceover or third party narrator. The STD will be the character who's not in the room, whose presence is told in hints, such as changes in people's behavior or physical appearance. Characters will have clashes with each other, not knowing that the real conflict between them is a microscopic organism that is simply trying to replicate itself.

Now you know my next story. I'll be a character in the novel but not the main character this time. I may or may not figure out who (or what) the main character is by the time is novel is over. I'm not even sure if I'll be one of the characters who dies or goes completely crazy along the way of the telling. But you'll be along for the ride. Starting with the next blog entry. Hope you enjoy it.

Catching Up With Comments

Just to let y'all know who had wondered what happened to the free downloads of my books on createspace, I took them down. I had received enough comments to let me know what I needed to do to clean up unclear passages and rearrange chapters that'll help me further obfuscate the plot.

BTW, I got bored with WNCW and changed over to my favorite public radio station, WETS, that broadcasts from the campus of East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, where in the early 1980s I took a few journalism and broadcasting classes when I thought I'd enjoy being a low-paid journalist. Why don't I listen to my local public radio station? The local public radio station in my area, WLRH, is a pretentious, fine-arts, classical radio station that long ago gave up its roots and appeals to those I wouldn't want to hang out with (not for lack of trying, I can tell you). I prefer WETS for its sticking to the songs of my youth such as those played during the "roots and branches" song segment. Apparently, WNCW has very little of the roots music programming I used to enjoy there - from their playlist, it appears all that's left is on Sunday afternoons.

I'm thinking about taking a break from blogging. Sitting here is okay when the weather's ducky or cold - now that spring's sprung and summer's around the corner, think I'll enjoy the great outdoors once again and get away from this box of electronic parts for a while. Talk to y'all soon!

Vernacular, Vehicular, Ventricular

Interesting to read that the world leaders officially announced today that a permanent committee of centralized planners is going to run the world from now on. I was really surprised that they would make such a bold and obvious statement. I expected them to ease into it, first going to a truly global currency by way of necessity and then moving to centralized planning as the final solution to fix the global crisis. At first, I thought I was watching the movie, "1984," and although I flipped past it, I confirmed that it was the regular world news I was watching (and followed up with reading about it on the Internet). The scary part was seeing the parallels continue in that the major world governments had announced a set of border zones where wars are to be officially conducted for the next five to twenty years, depending on public opinion. The wars have themes, too, such as the war on drugs, the war on global terrorism and the war on rogue leaders.

Meanwhile, activists are officially being allowed to ransack businesses, letting them wage their personal peace on war and vent their frustration publicly so the covert activist trackers can keep tabs on them, and by indirect route, sending a message to capitalists that governments want to reassert their control of the world. And all of this before I finished my first cup of tea this morning! I was surprised that we didn't get the usual dose of Greenpeace battling the Somalians for control of the high seas but maybe that broadcast is being saved for tomorrow's news.

I spoke to an Indian friend of mine who had just finished blessing the purchase of his new Nano (the car AND the iPod, a cool pair of geek gadgets for a high-tech, middle-class Indian). He talked of the promise of the future, when Indians will control the finances (a/k/a purse strings) of most major political groups in many parts of the world and will have to face the economic strength of China in control of the world economy. The question of whether Gandhi or Confucius wins the hearts and minds of the people will finally be answered. I wonder.

A student of mine from the U.S./Mexico border expressed concern about his relatives literally caught in the crossfire of the cartel drug trade war. He wishes that the U.S. would legalize illicit drugs. I assured him that the illegal drug business lines the pockets of too many politicians who like high profit and high risk - until a good replacement comes along that funnels greenbacks into the money laundering business, nothing will be done except the show of big guns on the border, making life worse for his friends and relatives. The only choice they have is to move further north, like he did.

A Brazilian colleague recently emailed me and asked me how the job market here is going. He was contemplating joining an organization to unite the poor and show solidarity with his compadres in Venezuela, but didn't want to get too carried away with the idea if he could get his high-paying technical job back with the American distributor. I reminded him that this recession is giving people many opportunities for changing their lives. Only he could decide what was better for him. We cracked jokes that the Brazilian rain forest might be a great place for many of us to wander in the wilderness for a few years until all this blows over.

I haven't heard from my Australian friends lately. I assume that the fires didn't wipe them out but I can't remember which suburbs they lived in. I reckon they're eating cane toad and kangaroo about now, if nothing else.

Oh well, I can't control the rest of the world. All I can do is enjoy my part of it. The air is full of flying insects today, the sun is shining, and birds flit from tree to tree getting their supply of free energy. Think I'll put aside writing today and soak up some rays for myself.

But first, this being the day of fools, I think I'll fool around (not that kind) and post all my novels for free for a few weeks. You can go to the link below only one time and download a copy of the novel(s) of your choice. Be a fool if you want, or choose wisely, but remember to download the novel on your one visit per novel - otherwise, you'll miss out, foolishly:

A Space, A Period, And A Capital: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056261

Are You With The Program?: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056262

Sticks To Lying: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056263

Helen of Kosciusko: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056264

Milk Chocolate: https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056265

Start of a New Book

The last blog entry was the final chapter in the saga of the life of a winner. The book's title, had you not already figured it out for yourself, is, "How to Create Your Own Lottery and Rig The Outcome to Your Favor." If the number of readers who've requested a true novelesque version of the book increases to an annoying rate, then I will work with my staff of highly-trained Happy Buddha figurines to collate the blog entries into a meaningful storyline, such as only they can divine, and provide the book for you, the reader, to stock on your dusty bookshelves at home or store on your electronic textual pacifier.

@}-,-`- @}-,-`- @}-,-`-

THE START OF A NEW BOOK - TITLE: "Red-Hot and Blue"

@}-,-`- @}-,-`- @}-,-`-


Fact: James Sawyers was born in Ireland about 1710. He came to America in the mid to late 1730s.

Fact*: PERSONAL HISTORY OF COL. JOHN SAWYERS.

"John Sawyers was born in Augusta County, Virginia, soon after his parents landed from England, 1745. His parents were English—the name being decidedly English. We suppose that his father was Sampson Sawyers. We find from the Annals of Augusta County, Va., by Waddell, that at the County Court in Staunton, Va., October, 1780, this passage:
'Sampson Sawyers' colored girl Viola sentenced to be hanged on the 1st of March, 1781, for burning her master's residence.'**
"We know but little of this Sawyers family, but we are of the opinion that there were but very few children in the family. Nancy Sawyers, who married James Crawford, and may be found in the Crawford History in this History, is supposed to be a sister, and Ruthie Peterson was another sister who came with him when he located in Knox County, Tennessee, and lived on a part of his farm on Big Flat Creek. Her husband's name was William Peterson, who died in 1818 and is buried in the Washington Church Cemetery.
"In person, Colonel Sawyers was fully six feet in height, weighing in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds. His complexion was fair, had bright red hair and possessed the traditional long red whiskers characteristic of the Sawyers family. Withal, he was a commanding figure."

[* from: Family History of Col. John Sawyers and Simon Harris, and Their Descendants, compiled by Dr. Madison Monroe Harris, a Great Grandson of Col. John Sawyers and a Grandson of Simon Harris]
[** Full passage from Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia, Volume I, AUGUSTA COUNTY COURT RECORDS. ORDER BOOK No. XVII. FEBRUARY 18, 1780: "Called Court on Violet, a negro slave of Sampson Sawyers. for feloniously burning her master's dwelling house on the night of the 4th inst. Guilty--to be hanged by the neck, &c., on 4th of March next at or near town of Staunton at 12 o'clock at noon, and after she is cut down, that her head be severed from her body by the neck and stuck upon a pole in the public place near Staunton. Adjudged value, £1,800."]

Hello there. I'm a real descendant of a pioneer man and a pioneer woman, two people who married, had children and settled more than once on the frontier of the expansion of European settlers on the North American continent. Through my veins flows the desire to explore new territory, and fight for what's rightfully mine, whether by thought of Divine Intervention or a combination of testosterone and peer pressure.

I look a lot like one of my ancestors. No doubt about it. At this point in my life, I don't have immediate plans to expand his heritage. So be it.

In these genes, what of him is actively living and breathing? I did not join my fellow men in battle, kill the previous holders of the land or treat other humans as property. Do any of those desires reside in my thoughts? If so, in what form?

Today, my ears are burning. I am a man. I know that. Testosterone is making me feel like a raging bull today. Although I am an overweight, middle-aged guy, I feel like I'm 30 again. My thoughts at this point are simple: "I want a woman."

Some men have a desire to build empires. Some men have a desire to own big trucks or drive fast cars. Our testosterone-filled grip on life shows itself in many ways.

I was eight or nine the first time I played doctor with a girl. Both of us instinctively knew we had a desire for the other, even though puberty had not caught up with us. We kissed when we were nine.

I have told that story before. Let me tell you a new one.

But first, I'll ask you again, what is monogamy? My previous incarnation told you about how two people can have a lifelong relationship if they put friendship before money. They can even be good lovers.

What about desire? Is there really such a thing as civility when desire is so much more interesting than how to hold your fork at the table or how to greet one another if you're from two different cultures?

I am not civil today. No, fuck that. I am the dreaded bull in a china shop, tired of tiptoeing through stacks of precious ceramic shapes.

I'll put it more plainly. The world is full of so many timid and scared people who have been brainwashed to put civility above all else that the world is truly mine for the taking. I can scatter the sheep with a single roar.

I roar with laughter but others think it's intimidating because they're scared to lose their vested interests, which should be obvious to them is nothing more than the emperor's new sartorial elegance.

What the hell are they thinking?! Were their parents lemmings? Are they living in a cattle yard, ready to be slaughtered?

Why have children if all you're going to do is turn them into well-behaved automatons?

I want a woman. But not just any woman. I want a real woman, one who's not afraid to take a chance on something new. One who's got nothing to lose. Nothing to gain or everything to gain, I don't care. One who's willing to lose it all. Otherwise, why the hell should we keep on living? I sure don't want to be my last incarnation, whose only solution to success was to curl up and die. WTF.

I retired from my last job because I knew where that destiny was leading me. I felt my manliness maturing into a mountain of strength and the only way I wanted to celebrate was to find a good woman (or two or three) with whom I could wallow and enjoy the spoils of victory. However, my misguided youth led me to believe that civility was important above all else. I made myself crazy with desire. I pursued the wrong women. I wooed the timid sheep that I was used to being around when I was younger. You know the ones - the high collars and sweet smiles - because I didn't know any better.

Well, la di fuckin' da. I ain't a shepherd. I don't want no flock of "we're afraid to think for ourselves so we'll follow you around." I want ba-a-a-d. And I want it real good.

My old gang (and yeah, they don't get into all this reincarnation crap - they see me for who I really am), they're always willing to hook me up. But it's not that kind of action I'm after. I'm not the anonymous sex type.

I'm still part of my old self. I'm tired of living this life. But it ain't life itself I'm tired of. I'm tired of timidity. I'm tired of towing the line cause we gotta worry about what the neighbors think. Are you kidding me? Have you seen my neighbors? If they're the ones I've gotta worry about, then I might as well be lobotomized and march to my government job with them. Well, except for that one foxy 30-something single woman down the street who waves at me whenever I take a jog in a sweaty T-shirt and shorts. If I'm appealing to her in that condition, then why am I sitting here in front of this laptop all cleaned up and dressed in nice business clothes? lol

I'm tired of apologizing for being a guy. Men and women can run their own companies that cater to church-goers and conformists all they want. I ain't part of their crowd.

I've paid my dues. I've conformed to my family's dreams and desires. I gave them the first half of my life. Now it's time to be me. Time to look at that beautiful brunette with the icy blue-gray eyes and tell her that yeah, she IS a curvy woman. I can see that from a mile away. So why are we wasting time talking? Time to let the real me out of the bag. Time to put all that goody two shoes Boy Scout crap in the garbage and hit the road where my buddy, Destiny, has been patiently waiting for me to catch up (I admit I'll miss some of this old stuff piled up around me but not all of it, that's for sure).

"The Mind's Aye" -- ready for your preview

To all who have expressed interest in my latest creation, the anti-novel titled "The Mind's Aye," I give you the opportunity to preview the novel for free. I have dried out my eyes going through the paragraphs and pages while looking for unintentional typographic errors and think that now's the time to give readers their chance to join in the editing and refinement process. Therefore, if you want to rest your eyes on a few novel thoughts, I give you the following URL:

https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1055140

DESCRIPTION:

• Deconstructive dadaism. The anti-novel. Saying "NO!" to commercialism. What happens when an author falls into the book s/he is writing? The ennui and repetition of life seep into the story, too.

Feel free to download and read the novel. I'll make the novel free to read for a few days while I solicit feedback from specific friends, family and other less-than-disinterested readers to help me rough out the smoothness and make these words devoid of commercial appeal.

Here's the first part of the book:

The best way to tell the truth is to lie.

You see, that’s why the story starts like this. My name is Max. My full name is Maximilian Esophagus Mize. My childhood friends call me Gus. My enemies know me as Max. E. Mize (yeah, that’s right, the son of an efficiency expert).

And to keep you from wondering where this story is going, let me tell you, I ain’t much of a storyteller. I also call myself Bruce, Lee and any other name I feel like. I know a few tall tales, like this one, for instance...

Here's the last part of the book:

How do I know this? When you’re a ghost, you get to learn a lot of interesting facts otherwise hidden from mere mortals. Haha haha ha!

The rest is up to you to read. I've got to go work on my teaching skills for a while, adding a third class to my list of lectures over the next three months: Introduction to Personal Computers. Time to get out my tap shoes and start dancing! See the rest of you instructors at orientation and in-service tomorrow.

Misapplied Misanthropism

Because I write to myself on this planetary piece of electronic paper, do I owe my fellow human beings, the only ones I know of who would bother interpreting each other's cave paintings, any level of responsibility?

Billions of texts and blogs zip across wires and radio waves every minute. This tiny little voice in the wilderness, trying to make itself heard among all the other forest sounds (and yes, a tree does make a sound when it falls in a forest; it'll scare the bejebees out of you when you're standing 50 feet away, hearing the little pop-pop sounds of wood separation before the cracking sounds get your full attention, while limbs tear down neighboring tree limbs during the tree's descent and then the whoosh-THUD as the tree hits the ground and sends you running for no particular reason), a human voice that silences all the birds and sends the squirrels scampering. Although I may be sitting in the forest today, on this warm and sunny morning, breathing in the spores of wet earth and looking at the tree buds reaching for the sky, sneezing and laughing at the thought of the chattering woodpecker above me saying, "Jupiter bless you*," in his own way, I sit here with any number of the billions of electronic mini-billboards saying, "LOOK AT ME! YES, I EXIST!"

[*Ode to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]

According to my notes from last night, this blog entry would have announced the pre-release of my new book, "The Mind's Aye." Of course, now it does, doesn't it? I would have outlined the book's storyline, discussing the deconstructive dadaism of its form. I would have presented an excerpt from the first chapter not yet posted.

Instead, I find myself in reverse, backing up to previous blog entries to clarify statements misunderstood by readers. To you, reader/emailer, as anonymous as you can be in an email to me that contains your IP address (but I won't tell everyone else where your IP address indicates you live), I have already admitted that I believe I'm an intellectual snob but that is not the same as calling myself a misanthrope. To be sure, yes, I did imply that everyone leads a boring life. However, I included myself in that assessment. I was celebrating humanity, not accusing it of something untoward. It was a statement of fact, a recognition that we upright primates, with overdeveloped brains and well-developed vocal cords, keep adding more and more synaptic connections and by doing so, project that neuronic network outward, expecting the historically recent byproduct of neurochemical processing - our collection of thoughts - to have some meaning, despite the nearly opposite up-and-down fluxuation of our equally-influential hormonically pheromonic processes. Thus, in our competition with each other for food and shelter, we create this vastly overbuilt anthill we call civilization to accommodate our contradictory need to be unique while gathering en masse to show solidarity. If we really think we're human beings, then we should act like them -- let's content ourselves with our thoughts (no matter how boring they may be at times; after all, life is repetitious so what's the matter with repetitious thoughts?) and quit feeding our hormonic need for instant gratification.

To the other reader who sent me a rather pornographic email, I thank you for your consideration of my needs. But when I referred to autoerotic thoughts and masturbation, I was making a literary reference, not a literal one. It is my literary writing that gets me excited and wants me to write more, not the erotic writing of others that literally makes me "get off," as you suggested. I thank you, too, for offering to send me photos of yourself, but I will only delete them so save us both the few seconds of Internet time and keep the photos for and to yourself.

Oh boy, this adventure in blogging is not what I expected. I thought blogs allowed me to post my thoughts in virtual space so I could access them anywhere there was a power grid and wired/wireless connection to the Internet. In other words, convenient access to a metaphorical journal. Instead, I'm discovering that the world of experience is not a figurative one. People from all walks of life can and do read what others have blogged about. Not only that, but the readers' view of life filters what writers are trying to say.

The sky is clouding up and I can't decide if I keep shivering or go back to the house... No Internet access from here to my wireless router so I don't know if it's going to rain but this morning's forecast didn't mention wet weather. What do you think, Mr. Gnat? Do you have any clue about atmospheric conditions? No, I didn't think so. Ooh, there's the sun again. Mmm... There it goes away again.

Enough. The wind's picking up. I'm going back to the house to look at my new novel.

===

Okay, I'm back. Let's see. Here are my notes for the blog entry I intended to write:

• Next blog entry - the announcement of my book, "The Mind's Aye"! Post excerpt.
• John Updike
• The Exorcist
• Playboy in the closet
• Swingers down the street

So, as I was thinking last night to say today, my new waste of paper is a tribute to those who see the novel as a means to express literary ideas. Otherwise, any other glued, sewn or stapled stack of paper is pulp, whether fiction or fictionless.

Here's the excerpt of the first chapter I planned to post:

The best way to tell the truth is to lie.

About the rest of my notes. You see, I grew up in a fantasy world called Suburbia that many others before me have praised, including John Updike. Like all fantasies, there's a dark side that looms on the edge of one's view, including the thoughts that despite our suburban fortresses, we're susceptible to the unknown forces of evil perpetuated in this age by religio-moral tales like "The Exorcist." But what is suburbia? Is it reflected in the stack of Playboys that fathers hid in their closets? Is it just for show? After all, down the street from me in my perfectly average, middle-class suburban neighborhood, other kids showed me Polaroids of their parents getting together for swinger parties (group orgies to those of you who aren't familiar with the term "swinger"). I saw children with bruises and bumps that their "loving" parents gave them with curtain rods. I saw upstanding citizens abuse alcohol and drugs (prescription, nonprescription and organic).

Like creating the concept of suburban safety, people read novels to momentarily escape reality - another trick to overcoming the stresses and strains of daily living. I look from the other direction - life is the escape from the stresses, strains and boredom of my daily thoughts.

My latest novel will not provide you an escape. Instead, "The Mind's Aye" shoves daily living in your face, complete with the inane, repetitive thoughts of people. A novel celebrating boredom, lovingly written by me, for me.

Why did I write this novel? Because I understand what this life is all about. I have read all the philosophical and religious dogma spouted by my ancestors and other humans around the world. Sayings by religious figures who were human (or might have been human) like Gandhi, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and Confucius. What did they all tell us? They repeated simple truths:

Have children. Take care of your family.

That's it. Anything else and we turn ourselves away from reaching our full human potential. So all this talk about rescuing our global economy, saving the whales and stopping global warming is a smoke screen covering up what should be plain to see. Many of you already know this and have done a great job, even if your insistence on seeing the truth is biased and skewed toward one religion or another.

No matter when we discover life forms on another planetary body, we are still members of the currently labeled species, Homo sapiens. We can talk about anything else, painting lavish pictures of alternate universes, alien species, and life after death. But each of us is still flesh and blood. Therefore, do yourself a favor. Admit to yourself that you're one human being. Then, celebrate that fact because no one else is you. For instance, I'm celebrating the fact that my boredom is mine and no else's. So, too, your boredom is yours and no one else's. And by extension, it's okay to have boring children and a boring family. We all do, if not to ourselves, then at least to someone else.

And that's how we'll turn this economy around, by having children and taking care of our families. Not by filling our lives with junk to try to make our lives look less boring than our neighbors'.

Well, I said more than I planned to say but that's me. Happy in the wisdom that being myself is boring. I know it sounds odd but I'll say it anyway. Have a boring day - it's the best kind of day you can have!

What is a novel?

While waiting at a local haircut shop this morning, I skimmed through a copy of a popular news magazine that commemorated the recent U.S. Presidential inauguration. I glanced through the articles in the special edition portion of the magazine, getting a feeling of deja vu, knowing that the stories about the new President were nearly identical to the articles from a copy of Life magazine I have that commemorated an equally "maverick" President in the early 1960s. Nothing is new under the sun -- it's just repackaged and sold to the next generation.

As I moved out of the special edition section and into the regular features of the magazine, I found an article about the current state of the "NOVEL," that great and glorious epitome of civilization that proves the right of literacy to call itself the culmination of human evolution. Well, like all evolving things, the jury's out the revolving door on the format of the novel. Seems like the Japanese craze for miniature things electronic, including handheld wireless walkie-talkies (i.e., cell phones), has sparked a new craze for equally-small novels. Thus, literature, instant gratification and attention deficit syndrome have finally mated (in an era where a ménage à trois can, with the aid of genetic manipulation, result in an entirely new species) and created the mini-masterpiece. In the meantime, self-publishing continues to grow in self-respect, joining fan fiction in the need for knowledge to be free.

Thus, as a kid, while reading cartoon stories (oops, I mean classic tales like Ivanhoe that we would now call graphic novels), I saw the advent of the online novel. Hell, that's why I'm here, isn't it, cranking out my own stories in this little mishmash mashup virtual shop of horribly written novels.

I have always kept a copy of Thomas Payne's Common Sense beside my writing desk. He was the pamphleteer who inspired me to care about my writing, infusing it with meaning while using concise language. In him, I saw that the desire to write is truly a manifest destiny wherein that which we call a self is not fully reflected in a mirror but sometimes also reflected in the use of words, the toolset given to us by our forebears to show to ourselves and others that we exist outside time and place. A hall of funhouse mirrors, if you will, with embedded webcams to capture our fleeting facial expressions.

Isn't that what a novel really is, anyway? An exaggeration of our vanity? An image we can laugh at or with, depending on our point of view? Emmett Kelly incarnate, a sad-faced clown looking back at us, with Pathos and Irony leaning against his shoulders?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Therefore, my novels reflect me, a user of mainly Western European languages, who writes outside the mainstream. I do not write specifically for others, although Muses do catch my attention and give me the strength to write when I feel too depressed to move. I write for me. I write to me. I fall in love with the idea of reading my writing everytime I open this blog. I crave the next woid I put down on paper ("woid" = ode to Dorothy Parker). Well, actually, I use paper so little now that paper has become my pocket shorthand, little guideposts I write to myself to remind me what I did on a certain day, in hopes that the zeitgeist will be remembered later on.

I write long tales that will not sell in Books-A-Billion or Barns of Novels. I write to the reader in me. I'm just as likely to write nonsense as common sense. One of my favorite poems has no purposefully-written English words but tells the story of a desert prince whose object of his affection he can never marry so they meet one last night at an oasis, where, unbeknownst to them, an alien spaceship is dumping some toxic waste from its sewer receptacle and accidentally blinds and disfigures the two Persians, giving a whole new meaning to "star-crossed lovers":

Sounds In The Night

Onaki som
Vrimurnika
Ola, mifrind, ola
Cizurpi, Ta
Omal jamal
Amarki ti nipur
Solonga long
Ananika
Aloki fanipa
Apar tipar
Avert aumur
Nipusi ti amour

- 7 October 1985

As we completely pave over this planet with homogeneous neighborhoods and shopping districts, let's recognize that life is Chaos ruled by Entropy. Anything is possible and anything can happen. Shouldn't a novel be the same way?

Who Do You Work For?

I don't believe in international conspiracies. I don't see spies around every corner. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't exist.

As I once said, I rarely have dealt with the underworld of crime. But then, what exactly is the underworld? And what is crime but the violation of someone else's definition of correct behavior?

I grew up in a small town in the United States in the 1970s. I joined a youth gang when I was nine or ten years old. In the gang, we stole cigarettes, candy, magazines, over-the-counter drugs, and other items from local stores. We also snitched cigarettes, cigars, liquor, and prescription drugs from our parents. We broke into other people's homes to steal the same items, which we would consume in houses under construction as we vandalized them. Sure, we had a clubhouse but the core members of the gang never fully trusted it because it was an open secret among all the neighborhood kids. We terrorized little kids to keep them from telling on us but inevitably a kid would tell a sibling who would inform his or her parents about one of our activities, getting us in trouble.

Once you join a gang, you never really get out. Even though I left the gang after my parents found out about a house I vandalized, my gang buddies never forgot about me. Throughout my teenage life as the perfect Boy Scout, which included earning an Eagle Scout Award, I always had the old neighborhood bullies on my back, so to speak. My later "crimes" with them, such as they were, included cheating on tests, ratting out rival gang members to teachers, terrorizing younger kids and generally protecting my former fifth grade band of brothers whenever they got in trouble (diverting a teacher's attention is just too plain easy when you have an angelic face like mine).

After high school, I lost touch with my buddies. Their criminal lives had taken some of them in and out of juvenile delinquent detention centers and later county jails. One of them served time in a federal penitentiary, from what I heard. Overall, our lives had taken tracks in two different directions.

Or so I thought.

A couple of years ago, after accumulating a large stock portfolio, I decided to retire in midlife. I looked forward to a life of leisure, doing whatever I wanted to do. And for the most part, I have. Except for this one small thing.

You see, just about the time I retired, I got a call from a woman named Melissa Wu. Ms. Wu claimed she had seen my CV (or resume, if you will) posted on a website called monster.com. Now, I don't exactly remember posting my CV on the Internet but sure enough, there it was. Anyway, Ms. Wu mentioned that I had been highly recommended by a colleague named Litho. Litho? Wow, I hadn't heard a name like that since...well, since fifth or sixth grade.

Ms. Wu told me that the job she was interested in my taking involved a software development project between a firm in China and one in the United States. She told me that both firms wished to remain anonymous in exchange for a hefty bonus and a exclusive contract for my services for the next two years.

Smelled fishy to me, doesn't it to you, too? Like a really bad movie plot. But, unfortunately, life is like that sometimes. I told Ms. Wu that I had retired and wasn't interested in a job. She told me that she or someone from her recruiting firm would call me back.

A few weeks later, I got a call with no identity on the Caller ID. The caller's voice sounded familiar.

"Litho?"

"Gus! Hey, how's it going?"

"Pretty good. Yourself?"

"Can't complain! Hey, I understand you're available for hire?"

"Well..."

"Hey, come on, man. Do me a favor here, will you?"

"You in trouble?"

"Not at all. It's just that I've got this Web business thing going on and I need someone who can help me get the whole system all tested out. We're using worldwide connections to computers tied to a Microsoft Home Server and thought maybe your software testing skills and management skills could get this thing finalized."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Say, I tell you what. We were hoping to get you or someone from back home involved in this. But, thing is, we need you to move to Shanghai."

"Shanghai?"

"Yeah, pretty cool, huh? Look, I know you ain't working right now and could use a little spare pocket change. What say you come over to China and check us out?"

To cut the story short, I told Litho I'd think about it. He called me back a time or two and when I was still hesitant, he got Ms. Wu back involved.

Melissa was more convincing than I thought. She walked me through the technical details of the setup, which intrigued me. We finally worked out a deal where I didn't have to travel out of country. Instead, using a simple VPN connection, I communicated with a test team in Shanghai, one in the U.S. and one in Bangalore to organize a complete test team.

We finished our task last October.

I felt like I was in the movie, "Paycheck." As soon as I received confirmation of a deposit of my bonus check in my account in UBS in Switzerland, I started getting odd vibes, especially since my deposit occurred the day the stock market took a dive. In a panic, I checked my account and it had actually grown.

Litho had told me that the system I had tested would truly be a global network. Sure enough, I and my team had shown how a small network of home servers strategically placed in homes, offices, universities, government facilities, convenience stores and just about any out-of-the-way places could control untold number of computers, no matter whether the computers had so-called secure antivirus and firewall software installed, by taking advantage of a backdoor method I had developed in testing KVM switches. A KVM switch is a device that lets you hook up a computer to a box and extend the length of cable of the Keyboard, Video, and Mouse devices (as well as USB devices like flash drives and MP3 players) -- extending the cable included a virtual cable connection across the Internet. Thus, while theoretically you could not directly download files from the computer through the KVM cables, you could take "pictures" of what was going on across the KVM cables and process them realtime, meaning you could duplicate the exact actions of your home computer or a computer in a government lab and send those actions to a bank of servers halfway across the globe. Litho was impressed that my test team not only worked out all the bugs but had made excellent suggestions for improving the system's robustness, transparency and scalability. He promised that my work would not go unnoticed.

Today, while the global stock markets are plunging, my private accounts are growing. BTW, I no longer have an account at UBS. Seeing the attention that UBS was getting a few weeks ago at a quiet government office near Washington D.C. that my own private home server network alerted me to, I just as quietly split my UBS account into deposits at other remote locations under companies, accounts and names that Litho highly suggested I use to protect my investments.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, you see, everything I've done in the past two years is completely legitimate. I have contracts, paycheck stubs, IRS tax payments and other documentation to clearly show my work is on the "up and up." But I still smell a fish, don't you? So, when you think you're working for a U.S.-based company, take a look at the list of U.S. companies that are foreign owned, like Holiday Inn, compiled in the book, "The United States of Europe" by T.R. Reid.

Think about it. Who do you work for? Don't lean in too closely or you might smell a fish, too. Sometimes it's better not to know. Hey, if the IRS thinks it's legit, it's legit. Take my word for it.

Means and Meanings

I should not be here, putting words on patches of global paper, scratching my thoughts with found fonts, carving my name on lumps of coal or in swirls of oil.

I meditate on words, all the same....ommmm....I cannot escape the past and I never live in the future...the present moment leads to the next...that's all...ommmm.

Quote: [of Aldous Huxley:] "You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he's been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes, and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."
-- Bertrand Russell, Letter to R. W. Clark, July 1965, from the Yale Book of Quotations

Hahaha. Today I look at the world I live in and marvel at the provincialism inherent in my being. I see that others, including Barthelme and Ballard, wrote their fictional best often while wrapped in the cocoon of suburbia, so provincial living is not a crutch upon which to lean my limits.

I'm granting myself some patience here. My blood pressure is up because I am still distraught about giving up the future of running a company and while I'm writing this, I'm converting my pop albums to MP3 that I once bought to impress some forgotten girls (The Moody Blues, Loverboy, Peter Schilling, The Rolling Stones, and Lionel Richie). The time and money we waste on the false sense of romanticism!!! I love my wife but the women I chased until they started telling me all I wanted to talk about was my wife...ironic, isn't it? Pay for dates with other women so they can tell me who I love. That's okay. I can forgive the indiscretions of my youth. It's the boring albums that still clutter my house that make me shake my head. For a person who shuns materialism, I sure am a pack rat. To quote Tracy Daugherty, who paraphrased Henri F. Ellenberger from the piece called "The Psychology of Destiny," published by Donald Barthelme in Forum:

the individual is free to choose from among the traits he has inherited from his family to shape an elected destiny.

In other words, I have elected to accept my pack rat attitude from various family members. No excuses.

As far as my tough business decision goes...sigh... A little background here. A work colleague invited me to his church a few weeks ago for a Friday evening get-together. That evening enlightened me about my strengths, weaknesses, desires and dislikes. As I walked among the churchy engineers and their spouses, watching their behavior -- mainly, their range of comfort in a crowd -- I clearly saw that running a company or being involved in any business at all is not what I want to do in life, despite its attractiveness. As my sister pointed out to me recently, at heart I'm a nonsocial nerd. Thus, I know deep down I will always be uncomfortable in crowds and shouldn't be trying to manage a group of people (I learned that lesson at my last job but sometimes forget about it). Rather than keep being involved in a venture that I'm not interested in and pushing my blood pressure up in the process, I feel it's best to step away now and let those get involved who are comfortable taking the lead. Someone like another work colleague who played sports in college and is successful in sales/marketing, or a prominent local attorney who founded a sports team (in other words, guys who are team players and have been involved in organized sports) tend to do a great job talking up a brand-new product line and running a company better than a typical old nerd like me -- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being the notable exceptions to typical nerds, of course.

In that, my father and I are different. I remember when he and I were at a sports function one evening and there was a private reception going on. My father felt no qualms insinuating himself into the crowd whereas I understood that we were walking in uninvited. That uninvited attitude of mine is a clear indication that I am not completely a chip off the old block, as the saying goes, and not cut out to hob-nob with business owners and others who feel comfortable mixing with each other as if they belong together. My father has no problem with the instant feeling of belonging to a group. I, however, do not feel as if I belong to any group, and act like a jovial, laughing clown to hide my discomfort. Like Groucho Marx said, I do not want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.

I am not a loner but I am not a joiner, either. I walk my own path where sometimes others walk with me and sometimes I walk alone. I do not need or want others following me because I don't necessarily know where I'm going but sometimes people follow me, anyway, because it seems that some people have the idea that I'm good for entertaining them for a little while.

Such is my life as I approach 47 years on this planet, not having any clue what I'm doing but about to stand up for eleven weeks of four-hour stretches in a classroom and tell kids how to live their lives. God help the poor kids in my classes. If they only had a clue!!! lol Perhaps in my entertainment, they'll find nuggets of wisdom to call their own.

How can the means justify the end if there is no end in mind? Does one seek the mean? Can one find meaning anyway? If there is no meaning, no means, no end, and no bounds for a meaningful mean, then what? Easy answer: laugh at the questions because they are just the smoke and mirrors of words. That which I call a tree looks like a giant stalk of broccoli to a giraffe, a stack of timber to a lumberjack and a house to a bird. In other words, if you find yourself drawn to my writing, don't take anything I say seriously because I'm just playing with the arrangement of words and offer no concrete advice. I am entertaining myself. Nothing more. All else is just a reflection of the cultural norms, ethics, morals and disjointed commercial advertising upon which I was raised. There is not some coherent whole hidden among the reeds that I am slowly revealing to you like a wise sage. But if there is, then let me know 'cause I haven't seen it yet myself. %^D

Chapter excerpt -- Gus [for mature audiences only]

Hello, my name is Gus. Have I told you that already? I can’t remember. My memory is slipping past me in the checkout aisle. All I’ve got is this grocery cart full of miscellaneous items, like a box of floppy disks, a broken ceramic sculpture of a seated pipe musician, a stone mask from Mexico, a HotWheels Ferrari dealership, half-empty bottle of Stetson cologne, and a purple fish net. In front of me, two books about men whose ideas and writing greatly influenced my life. J.G. Ballard. Donald Barthelme.

“RE/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard” Copyright © 1984
“Hiding Man: a biography of Donald Barthelme” Copyright © 2009

I am alive today because of them. I am dead today because of them.

The “Best of the Doobies” vinyl LP album spins on a record player, the sounds playing quietly through the needle like the thumping of an automobile audio system nearby, flexing my eardrum at the threshold of my thoughts while stopped for a red traffic light.

According to people who grew up with me during our years together attending primary school, my label was “nerd.” Despite my dislike of labels, people label me and each other anyway. I cannot change people’s perception of me from that time period.

I want to die. I did not plan to live this long. I do not plan to live this long. I have had enough of people and their labels. I have had enough of my labeling animals “people” just because they happen to look like me. I have had enough.

I have nothing left to contribute to this world. It will and does exist without me. I am not a megalomaniac. I do not need to rule any part of this world. I do not want to prey upon the fears and desires of others, even though that is essentially what I’ve done my whole life, in my own small way, from baby life onward to other lives and incarnations but never, I think, as a carnation.

I have tried but never succeeded in escaping the world of words. Instead, I perpetuate it.

Tonight, I’ll eat dinner with my wife and two of our friends. After dinner, the four of us will attend the traveling version of the musical, “In Recognition Of Your Achievement,” loosely based on the movie, “As A Member In Good Standing Through The Year.” I saw the Broadway version of the show in NYC back in February 2007. Two years ago this month, as a matter of fact. Tonight, I am reliving my personal private history, adding other humans to the memories of laughter, frowns, and boredom I experienced by myself for a $180 ticket to a Broadway show while on a week-long training session in the “art and nuance of creatively wasting people’s time unknowingly” at the Crowne Plaza during a New York winter, where I also experienced a taping of the ever-popular television show, “Laughing with Llamas,” down the street.

I have relived history my whole life, too. Speech and writing in itself is a reuse of our history of learning to talk, read and write. Damn. I guess there is no social human future that is absent of the past.

I don’t remember how old I was when I realized I was ambivalent and ambiguous but not ambitious about sexual orientation. I first understood the feelings when I was five or six, sensing that I was attracted to no particular person, regardless of gender. Then, as I grew older, when I reached the edge of the slide down into the sensual pool of sexual maturation, I knew what my body was saying even if the thoughts had not sufficiently been trained or developed to understand the chemical attraction I felt for no one. Once, seeing my behavior, my father asked me if I was a homosexual. I honestly answered no. I had no specific attraction to people of the same sex. Instead, I was attracted to neither sex but silently suppressed any personal desires to act upon my chemical needs, knowing that my successful participation in the suburban subculture of my hometown meant that I should maintain a general healthy sexual attitude toward others. Thus, throughout high school, I kissed two people – publicly displaying affection for a couple of months with a woman a year younger than me and privately sharing a kiss with a man a year older than me. Otherwise, I was celibate, sharing the majority of my years in primary school with a woman, Helen, who did not desire sexual relations with me so that I didn’t have to pretend to want to kiss, hug or otherwise feign sexual interest in her, which in turn let me suppress any sexual attention I knew I wanted to pay to no specific gender. I maintained my sanity by adopting a jovial attitude, perpetuated by my schoolmates even to this day.

My sister and others in primary school thus called me a “nerd.” Yeah, that’s right. Me, Gus!

When I started college at the Good Citizenship College, I had only one schoolmate from secondary/primary school upon whom I could depend to help me maintain my sanity and false self – Cambie, who was my roommate at the dorm during my freshman year in college. To shorten that story, I flunked out of school as my persona fell apart. Cambie was too interested in girls and not enough interested in school to pay much attention to his roommate’s sanity.

I returned to the subculture of my youth in an effort to reestablish my connections to a false sense of self, living at home with my parents. In that mode, I completed college-level courses at Flunkin University, left home to attend the Institute of Model Rocketry Appreciation (where I also reconnected with my female friend from primary school, Helen, who helped me once again fully function in a dysfunctional funk for a while, until I started spiraling downward) and finally, after running away from home on a 10-day route from my hometown to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA, and back in late September/early October 1984 and a detox visit to my grandmother at the end of that year, I returned home one more time and graduated from Questionable Character College, where, in the midst of taking classes, my first official mental breakdown occurred in 1985, followed by a short series of psychological counseling sessions. You should have seen the fuss they made over a guy named Gus. I did tell you my name is Gus, didn’t I?

So, by 1985, I had lost myself, found myself, realized myself was not myself and still had not accepted who I was. Well, what’s a guy to do but find the woman with whom he knew would not want children by him and marry her? In 1986, I married the one woman from my childhood who waited patiently on me to “grow up” and become a money-earning man. For many years, we stayed interested in each other sexually, diverting any nonmarital sexual attraction back to one another. Chemically, we were compatible (and still are, as far as I know). In our years of marriage, I have had only one full mental breakdown, in mid-1991, and one partial mental breakdown, in 2006. In the first one, I was able to stay employed with the aid of counseling to keep me within the bounds of my subcultural social upbringing. In the second one, I lost the desire to project my false self any longer. Since then, I have been essentially unemployable from a personal point of view. I leave the house occasionally, always fearful that others can see or have seen the real “me” and will label me incorrectly. I am not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, androgynous, transsexual, or any other label of sexual orientation that I’m aware of. I prefer sex with myself, basic autoerotic notions of masturbation having satisfied my sexual needs my whole life, while I can think about anyone or anything I’ve seen in fantasies as a personal turn-on.

In other words, I do not need contact with others to satisfy me sexually. Is that the definition of a “nerd,” a person who is satisfied by one’s self and no other? If so, then I reached the limit of myself much too long ago. All else, this investigation, a so-called self-discovery, is for naught. But I’ve always known that, haven’t I?

In this cage of words that surrounds me, I limit myself, I know. But I have no other understanding of the world without words. I do not understand infinity although I know how to spell it. I see a rotating mass slowly cooling down and call it a planet, giving names to pieces and parts of it, claiming ownership of a section of thin crust that floats over the roiling magmatic core and call that piece of crust my home.

Did I tell you my name is Gus? I can’t remember. But I remember something. The temporary intransigence of others, who led me to believe one thing while I have led myself to believe another, makes me laugh. We try so hard to give permanence to that which does not exist in perpetuity. We want to save species whose end time may have come due to our population explosion but we cannot accept the inevitable wholesale elimination of creatures that found a way to survive on Earth’s crust for millennia before our species swept all before it. We especially cannot see that no species is permanent, including ours, but the magnification of a few thousand generations of us makes many believe in the concept of “forever.” So be it. Let the masses keep massing. They have and will do so without me. I have found me and now can let myself go on.

As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. Oops, sorry about that. Sometimes, these old records of mine skip a few times before I notice. Did I tell you my name is Gus?

Another taste of spring

Spring in north Alabama arrives in spurts, backtracks and hides in the folds of winter's icy coat, bursts forth out of nowhere with celebratory song, gets slapped around and cut down by Arctic clippers and finally, with an air of confidence that befits spring in a more southerly climate, settles in for a few short weeks before summer stomps in like a bargain-hunting bull in a going-out-of-business Waterford china shop.

Yesterday, as I gazed out the dining room French doors, questioning whether I should step into the chilly sunroom, I saw my next sign of spring (the first being the daffodils, marsh marigold, Star of Bethlehem, Lenten rose and daylilies poking their way up through fallen leaves) -- goldfinches in their winter attire, pecking at the nyjer bird seed feeders.

The birds arrived just in time for a cold snap due to freeze this part of the world over the next few days. Oh well, at least they give me hope that wherever they've been, they still like to stop by my backyard for nourishment in preparation for the rites of spring. Won't be long before hummingbirds come back. And although I like their profiles in the stark naked trees, crows will leave these woods soon, I'm sure, for warmer climes.

Launch Delayed Due to Fog

The woman who doesn’t believe in or have dreams appeared in one of my dreams last night. That one and another dream stand out among the untold REM thoughts I had.

Lately, a few months after seeing people in nursing homes who have no quality of life left ahead of them and just last week, after seeing similar people in the hospital hooked up to a spider web of tubes in their last hours of life, I have wondered if a society should allow self-elimination as a decision to make a major change in the way people live. Needless to say, self-elimination is the choice not to live any longer, but if one has excruciating, unbearable pain in the midst of terminal cancer or faces a fate worse than death, is death of one’s choosing a viable option? Although my life is a happy one, self-elimination is still the a possible decision that looms when I come up on the fear that I might end up a ‘vegetable’ putting costly economic and emotional burdens on family, friends and society.

The first dream I had I can barely remember because the people and their activities in my dream constitute the classic nightmare. They performed acts of unconscionable, deplorable but imaginable violence on people and other animals – murder, torture, cruelty of all sorts – as if their actions had no consequences and they just happened to be torturing and killing that day instead of feeding the poor or attending to the sick. I woke up realizing that if I or someone else chooses self-elimination, then we are no different than those non-conscientious people in my first dream.

The second dream stands out for its theme of hope.

In this part of the world on an early January Saturday morning, fog hangs over the landscape. As I look out on the 270-degree view from the sunroom into the backyard, my eyes wander up the hillside, over the wet leaves, around the big boulders, through the gray and light brown tree stalks and into the fog that obscures a distant view. My dreams will fade away with time like the foggy forest beside me, unless I record all the details while they’re fresh in my mind.

Before I went to sleep last night, I sat up in bed and read “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” The epic tale contains many references to the importance of dreams, just as other ancient texts such as the Talmud and Bible do. Therefore, I am not surprised that my dreams gained more than average importance for me this morning. I attribute the technological aspects of the dream I’m about to recount to the two books I’ve just finished, “Outliers: The Story of Success” and “The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” and the book I’m currently reading, “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal.”

Space exploration serves as a thematic background for me. In last night’s second dream, I found myself sitting with a group of about 70 friends and family, including Gwynn, her husband and children, her parents and other familiar faces. We sat in rows of chairs that were like seats in the cabin of a space shuttle (each row composed of two sets of seven seats divided by a center aisle, with five rows; thus 2 x 5 x 7 = 70). We faced a speaker who pointed at a 3D projection and explained why a particular experimental spacecraft had been built. The space plane he described had two hulls that were like delta wings attached to each other in a hinged manner so that the plane ‘flapped’ to gain momentum. A previous version of the plane used freely sliding weights to cause the hulls to flap up and down but gravity was not sufficient to keep the plane flying so a piston system had been installed to increase the plane’s chance of taking off from the ground and flying into space. The speaker asked for volunteers to ride in the plane during its maiden flight so they could provide weight balance and give a subjective account of the flight.

I sat in the middle of the third row that was in the section on the right side of the aisle facing the speaker. Gwynn sat in the same row but in the middle of the section on the left side of the aisle. She spoke up and joked that all her father’s constant talk about community responsibility (getting good grades in school, having children, chaperoning your kids’ school events, joining social groups, etc.) could be summarized into sending all his offspring onto the plane for the experiment. If the experiment succeeded, Gwynn's father could point proudly to the bravery and honor that his children and grandchildren have shown. If the experiment failed, why couldn’t he exclaim the same thing, Gwynn asked out loud in a mocking voice, even though he would have no surviving representatives of his genetic output left to hear his wisdom and carry it out?

Gwynn's father, who sat ahead of me in the first aisle, started to speak and we all turned to face him. “I believe…,” he said, hesitating before continuing, “I believe that you misunderstand my philosophy. Responsibility to the community includes NOT taking unnecessary chances.”

Gwynn laughed. “Dad, that’s where I disagree. Each generation makes its own decisions, even while taking the advice of previous generations into account. I say we all get on that plane and help test this plane.”

Gwynn's father cleared his throat. “In times of threat such as war, yes, then we must volunteer to protect the community. But this is just a plane, and one limited mainly to space use at that. Our community responsibility does not mean we have to help test a plane of which few citizens will ever use.”

Gwynn laughed again, got up and walked toward the door at the rear of the room.

Her laughter reminded me that I’d had some good times with her when we were in high school together so I followed her to see what she was up to. She slowed down when she saw me so we could walk together.

We walked out of the briefing room and down a corridor that further indicated to me we were inside a vehicle in outer space. Or at least we were in such a vehicle. I had no idea if we were on Earth or in space.

Gwynn motioned us inside a small control room. I could hear the quiet rhythm of hidden machinery, like someone breathing behind me. Gwynn quickly talked me through the uses of the keys and knobs on a panel in front of us, which operated the launch and guidance of a small experimental sphere into the midst of space debris. She then looked at me and laughed again.

“You know what. This experiment is more important than that other one. And for you, even more so, because it involves exactly two people, you and someone else.”

“Really?” I looked back down at the knobs and calculated the risks involved in launching a two-person craft from the space station we were on. I felt someone step in between Gwynn and me and could see out of my peripheral vision the other person was wearing a space suit but no helmet.

I lifted my head and standing next to me was Helen. We smiled at each other with a look of familiarity that spoke of a long time apart and the satisfaction of being back in each other’s company once again.

Helen put her arm around my waist. “Hey.”

“Hello.” I felt a warm glow running up my back from where Helen pressed her hand.

“So you want to go up in this thing with me?”

I smiled even bigger than before, sending signals to Helen that only she and I could interpret, my face saying, ‘There’s no one else I’d want to go out into space on a dangerous mission with.’

She returned the smile, her eyes saying, ‘Of course, what was I thinking?’

I put my arm over her shoulders and looked back at the control panel. “Well, Gwynn, the launch is set for tomorrow night, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Rick, it is.”

I looked at Helen, sighing with the satisfaction of the restoration of my inner peace. “There’s a meteor shower tomorrow…”

“And…” Helen jumped to continue my sentence, as she used to.

“And that means there’s a two in a million chance of our being hit by micrometeors. In other words, of a million meteors of different sizes flying around us, two of them will go undetected and hit our spacecraft, creating untold damage, up to total destruction of the craft. What that means about the rest of them flying around us and their influence on our flight, I don’t know.”

Helen squeezed my waist, telling me she didn’t care.

I pulled her to me, hugging her, leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Do you want to go out there tomorrow night and take the chance of dying with me in space?”

She leaned the side of her head into my face, letting me know that she could die with me and be happy. “But I don’t want to die yet, do you?” she whispered in my ear.

I pulled back and looked down into her eyes. “No.” There was still just too much more life left to live, especially with her.

Helen hugged me tightly, her face buried in my chest.

I nodded at Gwynn. “Some things are more important than advancing technology.”

Gwynn laughed again. “It’s funny hearing you, of all people, saying that. Oh well.” Gwynn shrugged her shoulders and walked out of the room, disappointed that I wouldn’t help her with a technological experiment but happier that she had gotten Helen and me back together.

I woke up, noting that I had slept on my left side, with our oldest Cornish Rex cat asleep under the covers of the bed, leaning against my chest, and our youngest Cornish Rex cat sleeping against the crook of my back. My wife dozed quietly behind me.

I got up, used the bathroom to pee and wash my hands. My wife woke up and requested I bring her the mouthpiece that helps her sleep without snoring. I gave her the mouthpiece, fed the cats who were then begging for food, cooked myself a bowl of oatmeal, fed the fish, heated a mug of Earl Gray tea and walked out to the sunroom to write. I sat next to the copy of National Geographic that detailed the 50 years of humans traveling into space that I had read a couple of days ago. Hmm...

The fog has lifted but full sunshine is still just out of reach. Time to eat my oatmeal and figure out what to do about my dream. My dreams have come true before. Haven't yours?