O-Dark-Thirty

In October of 1994 I treated myself to a class on Writing Children’s Fiction by Mary Blount Christian at Rice University.   It was a Continuing Education Class, so I didn’t need to qualify for the University, thank goodness. Although computers were becoming more popular, they were not ubiquitous, so there was a lot of talk about spelling and grammar, things which most writing programs help with nowadays. For instance, MS Word just corrected two typos as I wrote this paragraph. In the days of typewriters I would have gone through hoops to correct the errors. If you didn’t live those years, then just count yourself lucky. We own this one, but we have few ribbons I only have one page of notes from the class, though at the time I had a small notebook with advice and admonitions. I guess I consolidated when I moved the notes to the computer. Aside from a list of grammatical mistakes to watch for, I have a single phrase that I should have expounded upon: vi...

Poetry is lethal because it forces you to use a sharp knife on all your words and a magnifying glass on your thoughts. My daughter wrote me and asked me if I could summarize my life in six words – an exercise from her poetry teacher. My first six-word summed up my feelings about poetry: Born a poet. Lived a shadow. Sometime before eleventh grade I wrote a long poem. I don’t remember when I wrote it, but I think it was fifth or sixth grade. Back then it was typed on a typewriter and only one copy existed. When I was a senior in high school a girl asked to borrow it, promptly losing it when we quit seeing each other. I recall the beginning: One day while I was sitting by The sea, most beautiful, I painted of a sunset sky And of a lonely gull. He does seem lonely Poetry fascinates me. You tell a story, express emotions, seek to inspire feelings and sensations in others, but in a staccato of words, a brief and bright light shining into the heart of the reader. A lot of poetry fails t...

Animals went into the Ark two by two. That's cool. Two can be as bad as one, but the loneliest number is the number one. Me and you is two, and that's cool. Me and my Dog is two, and that's cool also, if I had a dog. Two is a prime number, the first prime, which is cool. Two plus two equals two to the second power. It's the only time that happens. That's cool. Mars has two moons, which is pretty cool. We have two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs. Fortunately, we only have one tongue. That's cool. In English we have three homonyms that sound like the number two: to, too and two. That's cool. Two is just too cool.

The Rules to Live By in this life are pretty simple. I like the Ten Commandments. Follow them and you’re probably going to be okay. I mean really follow them; don’t just pretend. If your heart’s not in these, then you might be in trouble. You could resort to the shortened version of Rules to Live By from Luke 10:27. “And He answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” (KJV) From The Life of Jesus Christ by J.J.Tissot, 1899 That isn’t all that easy either, though. Sometimes it’s all I can do to love myself. For Rules to Live By, though, I was most excited to find Micah 6:8, my favorite verse. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (KJV) The nice thing about that one is that there are three simple things to do and you can fulfill God’s req...

Though I don’t watch the HBO series The Game of Thrones my oldest son persuaded me to read the books. I bought the first four books for the Kindle™ so I can read them on my phone and iPad, anywhere. Each device keeps track of my latest reading location. Fantastic! From Wikipedia, the books so far The novels are collectively referred to as A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. The five available books are A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons . The novels are captivating, and the writing is good, but I find myself wishing it was a tighter story. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought that. From Wikipedia. I loved this cover. In 1990 a book called the Eye of the World captured my imagination. Written by James Oliver Rigney, Jr under the pen name of Robert Jordan, this book catapulted me into The Wheel of Time universe and in the following two years I read the next three books with delight. Then I st...

About a year ago I read an article about Maine. The author, Bob Wasserman, is a fellow Mensan, though we’ve never met. The tagline on the article was “After 25 years of losing himself as an engineer stuck in cubeville, it was time for this Mensan to rediscover the joys of being alive, even if it meant going it alone.” He says he loves to write, that writing is his passion. I was looking in a mirror, darkly. I’ve been working so long now that I know of a lot of people who died before me, though only a few at the workplace. As I listened to the air recirculation motors and squinted my eyes at the fluorescent lights above me, I thought, for just a moment, that I was in the beginning of the movie “ Joe versus the Volcano” and could feel my life sucked out of me. A Volcano freed Tom Hanks When he stated in his article that he had a serious case of Nature Deficit Disorder, I understood exactly what he meant. So I read his article and looked at the dust-colored cube walls that sur...

Over the years I have written a lot of stuff , most of it just bits and pieces. Now that I am committed to a schedule for posting blogs, there will no doubt be some days when I have little to say - I'm out of words. On those days I'll reach back into my archives and pull out something that was salvaged from my past, or partially salvaged. I've done that twice so far, one with a post about Deming and one with a post about the unknown continuation of Jabberwocky (by me). Jabberwocky Creatures, from Wikipedia I have written accounts of most of my school years. They may not interest anyone (except me and possibly my children) but since I'm the only one reading this blog (hello? Anyone there? Anyone? ... Anyone at all?) it doesn't really matter, so they are potential grist on those lean days. This isn't my old schoolhouse in Burnside, MI, but it could be   I won't post any today. Well, except for this. And since it is less than 300 words , it...