2023 & 2024 have not been the best years for my family.

My stepfather passed away back in May of 2023. My father-in-law passed away on Feb 1st.

Between visiting my mother in another state, and having to pull triple-duty taking care of my father-in-law’s place, my time has been even more taxed.

My job with the state has been another pickle. Management decided it was a good idea to merge my department with an adjoining one. This caused a number of the old-guard with the other unit to jump-ship by filing for early retirement. What is left from the other unit isn’t as well-versed and has led to a deficiency in training those of us that are still there.

Today was the second week of school for my kids. Last week didn’t really count as it was a partial week and my mother had come down to visit. Today, with my kids back in school, gave me a free day off. I dropped them off and found myself getting excited thinking What am I going to do with myself today?

I called up my wife to ask if there was anything pressingly due today that I might have forgotten or overlooked. She said there wasn’t anything she could think of and so, I said, “Well then I’m heading up to Lake Tahoe for the day.”

That caught her off guard and her response was something akin to “But I can come up with something for you to do”

I laughed and quickly hung up.

Then that stupid morality thing kicked in.

I called up my father, who was spending the day with his own mother. He does that every Friday. He’s a good boy, unlike myself.

She is 96 and he is 76.

She is half blind and deaf as a doorknob. I know, that sounds cruel, but she can’t hear me and can’t see well enough to read this so what does it matter?

I punched up my dad’s phone number and called him.

It went something like “Hey Dad, do you mind if I come up and make an impromptu visit?”

Two and a half hours later I was at her house.

We talked for a bit before he had to get back into the car and pick her up from her Friday beauty salon appointment. Much was said and much was agreed upon. And yes we didn’t dip our toes in the political folly which separates him from me. He is along the lines of “I dislike Trump but at least he isn’t one of those socialist weirdos that want to make it legal for staplers to get gender reassignment surgery. I didn’t want to point out that staplers already have this built-in.

I’m more along the lines of “I’ll take a fresh stuttering corpse over anything remotely related to a liar-cheat-convict-juvinile-liar-rapist-fraudster-liar-narcissist… did I forget to include ‘liar’?

Anywho… so it’s time to go pick her up and together drive out to get her. We drive her home and it doesn’t take long for the reality of how blind and deaf she is to fully sink in. My throat is getting hoarse from having to shout out anything I say. Much of the time she interrupts my shouts by verbalizing her thoughts. It felt like I was dealing with a child around three years old.

I can’t but help look to my father and wonder if life will do to him what it’s doing to her. Will my children have to endure this fate with me? Nothing in life is safe. Nothing is guaranteed. I could die driving home. I could die choking on a french fry. I could have one of my children killed in some freak accident. Nothing is safe.

It’s depressing.

Some small voice in the back of my mind reminds me I wasn’t born in a starving country and have lived a good life.

What is that called? Survivors guilt?

I am lucky. Not everyone is. You never know how long your luck is going to hold out. It could that very next french fry.

So a few days back, I was surfing the internet and ran across a video with Hugh Jackman. It’s some weird dancing video where he talks to a chair and asks if it wants to dance. The song is a cover of the Safety Dance originally done by Men Without Hats.

I don’t know what it was, but that struck a cord in me.

That song has earwormed its way into my being. It is upbeat and punchy and all in a good way. I’ve played it about 50 times so far since then and each time its left more of a smile on my face.

No, I’m not starving to death and the bulk of everyone I care about is doing well (enough).

If my mood can be lifted by a simple stupid video, my life is all the better for it.

It is currently Friday night and I’m about done with this blog posting as I need to start walking the 2.5 miles back home again. I’m going to listen to that song a few more times in between chapters of the audiobook I’m currently listening to by Bob Odenkirk.

https://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Drama-Memoir/dp/0399180516

Now I just need to find the time enough to dive back into writing my book again. :/

[Verse 1]
We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
‘Cause your friends don’t dance
And if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine

[Verse 2]
I say, we can go where we want to
A place where they’ll never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind
We can dance (Danser!)

[Verse 3]
We can go where we want to
The night is young and so am I
And we can dress real neat
From our hats to our feet
And surprise ’em with a victory cry

[Verse 4]
I say, we can act if we want to
If we don’t nobody will
And you can act real rude
And totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile
See Men Without Hats Live
Get tickets as low as $73

[Chorus]
I say, we can dance, we can dance
Everything is out of control
We can dance, we can dance
We’re doing it from pole to pole
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody look at your hands
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody’s taking the chance

Safe to dance
Well it’s safe to dance
Yes, it’s safe to dance

[Verse 5]
We can dance if we want to
We’ve got all your life and mine
As long as we abuse it
Never gonna lose it
Everything will work out right

[Verse 1]
I say, We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
‘Cause your friends don’t dance
And if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine

[Chorus]
I say, we can dance, we can dance
Everything is out of control
We can dance, we can dance
We’re doing it from pole to pole
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody look at your hands
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody’s taking the chance

[Outro]
Well, it’s safe to dance
Yes, it’s safe to dance
Well, it’s safe to dance
Well, it’s safe to dance
Yes it’s safe to dance
It’s safe to dance
Well, it’s safe to dance
It’s a safety dance
It’s a safety dance
It’s a safety dance
It’s a safety dance
It’s a safety dance

Tootles all

😛

Oh, and FU Dwight

I don’t know what to say. It’s been seven months since my last post.

My head is swirling with thoughts. How about I just spit it out.

Okay, here we go…

We’ve had two more deaths in the family.

I’ve been working at trying to clear out a house of memorabilia so we can sell it.
Can you guess where my time has gone?

I’m still working on “A New Day” but my pace has slowed significantly.

Rambling transition here…

Last week I caught a video by Neil deGrasse Tyson about peer review. Ya know, what he said is also true about peer review groups.

It’s probably not all that interesting unless you are into him, or self-awareness, or things that happened 8 years ago. If that is not you, move along, there is nothing to see.

What else.

I’ve stopped working on my book’s epilogue as it is no longer what it was intended to be. It will now be merged into the rest of the book as another section. This of course caused a new idea to bloom in my mind which will now be the true epilogue. That I have yet to start but the idea is dangling there in my mind’s eye.

Alright then, I got nothing else to say right now.

Tootles all.

LEAVE ME ALONE

Please… just leave me alone.

My kids…

my wife…

my parents…

leave me alone…

I’ve not been able to get any real writing done in the past few weeks.

I went up to see my mom in Oregon and burned off a week of vacation. My mom appreciated the visit but I didn’t get any “dave time”. My kids are sick and so I’m spending time working with them on their homework instead of them being in school. They are BEYOND FRUSTRATING.

My son is screaming right now because the cat is using the litterbox in the next room too loudly. Never mind the sounds he’s making slapping his thigh against the table leg. Never mind his grinding his pencil into the dining room table. Shall I go on?

Come my next day at work, I might very well call in sick for a mental day as I need the time to recharge. Just hide in my home office and turn off the lights. Sounds so nice…

The war in Ukraine is still going on.

The war in Israel is still going on.

Yeah, I got first world problems, I get it.

I wake up at 5am in order to get my four-mile walk in before my day starts. It’s almost impossible to get in a walk at any other time, at least consistently. Someone is always going fu… ahhh, never mind.

Yeah, I know, 1st world issues. Still, I feel like I’m drowning in the feces of incompetence. I’m feeling like I need some sort of change, some lifeline. Like I’m looking for words of wisdom…

I guess that’s it for now.

I mean how hard is the distributive property to remember? You take the value outside the parenthesis and apply that to all groups within it.

pem-dat-ass or ‘pemdas’ for short.

Tootles all

I finally penned the “The End” to A New Day but after letting it sit for about two weeks, I went back and began tweaking and fixing things that didn’t sit right with me.

Guess what?

It’s still not sitting right with me. I’ve got to expand on some of its elements, which means the last chapter is going through a bit of a rewrite.

Whatcha going to do?

Heed the muse.

What else…

Today I snuck off to go watch a movie, the Equalizer 3. I actually liked this movie. Granted the idea has been done before, namely the part 1 & part 2 of the series. Still, there are some parts that resonated with me more than I thought it would have going into it. Resonated? Like I’m a closeted killer? Ha… or at least that is what I’m going to say should the police ever show up. I mean it’s not like I have a pig pen on my farm and drop comments to my “INSUBORDINATE” coworkers about them consuming anything and everyone that is thrown into their pen.

Na, I’m not that evil.

Or at least that is what I keep trying to convince myself.

Today, aside from catching a movie, I got to spend some quiet time doing a bunch of nothing. Yeah, I spent some of it tweaking my story here and there, but for the most part, I didn’t have any responsibilities.

IT WAS NICE

On that note, I’m a firm believer that in order to recharge, one must be truly left alone. One needs to become relaxed to the point of becoming bored. Then and only then will you reach a level of saturation that reignites your passions and drives, which will in effect, make you a better more capable, and productive person.

Yes, you read that right, doing nothing can help you do more.

I also noticed that it’s been almost a month since I last posted to my blog. Where does the time go?

Yesterday was my entering/leaving the military anniversary.

I’m getting old.

Today, I got in about 2,200+ new words in my “A New Day” story. I’m now literally at the 99% story mark. I’m working on tying up all the loose ends and it’s kinda slow.

Tonight I’m going with the wife and her sister and a friend to see Duran Duran at the Golden 1 Center in downtown Sacto. I haven’t been to a concert in… push the goats and carry the stone tablets up Mount Sinai… a very long time.

That is all.

🙂

So it’s Thursday again.

I’m back in the councilors office again today. She is having trouble getting my son to engage with her. Yeah, that’s why I’m bringing him here.

Yeah…

So what else is new?

I got a paragraph in on my New Day story and was interrupted again.

I’ve been trying to clean out one of the walls in my garage. Since moving into my house, almost 19 years ago. I’ve not done a whole lot with my backpacking/camping gear. I’ve been going through some of it and chunking the ruined stuff. Apparently, some of the MREs and foodstuffs I kept, decided to express themselves over much of my gear. And I thought Twinkies and Spam would last forever. 😛

In all honesty, I had forgotten that I had them in there in the first place.

I did buy myself a new light daypack.

This guy below.

It’s listed as having a 13-liter capacity, which I thought would have been enough. Upon getting it, I loaded it up and quickly discovered it didn’t hold as much as I had hoped.

My solution? I took it to an alterations place and had two straps sewn into its underbelly. These would be long enough to carry my tarp(s), helikon-tex swagman roll, and sleeping pad, which will all be wound up in a 6″ diameter sausage-like roll. With that, I now have plenty of room inside the thing for food and other small amenities. Now I just need to find a way of escaping the zoo that is my life.

Easy peasy.

===

Insert a time jump here

>>>

It’s days later now.

I’m now sitting in the lobby of a beauty salon as my 16-year-old daughter is getting her hair done. We arrived early and so walked down the street to an ice cream shop to “kill some time” and to “kill off all the good my walk did earlier this morning”. I get to the counter and order what I want and then my daughter flips out and gets stage fright and can’t place her order. I didn’t think ordering an ice cream was something that warranted locking up.

Do I eat her too? Isn’t that what the ice cream is for?

Arrgghhh…

Not everything in life has to be stupid!

What happened to… (old grumpy man is boiling just below the surface)… people getting off my lawn?

This society with its “needs” and “feelings” and “shoes” and “intolerance of walking through the snow” is really starting to be a tick in my “backpack”.

😛

Tootles all

Both are sad options.

Paul Reubens died a few days ago.

My stepfather died back in May.

David *Moo-ma died a few years ago.

*(not his real last name)

I don’t know why, age, boredom, morbidity, who knows, I googled a one-time friend from first grade. He was something of a hot heat. Being a hothead, he decided he wanted to fight me, so after I got my first bloody nose, he became an enemy.

I changed schools the next year, so I didn’t have to deal with him again. That is until I was about 20 years old. I was waiting in line outside the El Dorado Saloon in the Carmichael area of Sacramento. He was in line ahead of me and I recognized him. I was about a foot taller than him but that didn’t matter, as he didn’t recognize me. I watched him however and noted the same hotheaded attitude was still there.

2023 has been something of a strange year for me.

In googling David, I found out he was married and had at least one child. It is for them that I’m not using his real name.

So am I glad he’s gone? No.

He left a wife and child behind.

I hope he cooled down some and wasn’t an ass to them.

Have I ever been an ass to people, yeah sure, but not in the same ways. I’ve never started a fight. You come at me however and I’ll pound your ass. Granted, the 1st-grade version of me was too scared.

This brings to me another tangent. The fight I had when I was in the seventh grade. A neighborhood kid name Scott Chapstick* (again not his real name) went to the same grade school together and were on good terms. Well upon my leaving my k-6 school, I moved on to a different middle school from him. It was spring break, so almost a full year later, Scott rings my doorbell and calls me out into my front yard to fight. I had no beef with him but he did with me. Why, I’ll never know. Anyway, my dad had stayed home from work that day and so peeked out from the master bedroom as I walked out onto our front lawn where Scott tried taking some swings at me. I was a good four inches taller than Scott at the time and so ducked and leaned so Scott never landed a solid hit on me. I would reach out and slap the side of his head now and again and tell him to stop as I wasn’t looking to fight him. This went on and the angrier he soon became. In hindsight I guess I shouldn’t have been slapping him, what can I say, I was 13.

He then bum-rushed me and started punching and kicking my chest and face. I reached out and wrapped my arms around him and began squeezing. I squeezed the shit out of him. I heard things popping as whatever air he had in his lungs wheezed out. I then squeezed some more. I then lifted him up off his feet, raising him a good foot up, and then spun him onto his side before throwing him down. He landed against his rips in a crumbled mass upon my lawn. Even then I wasn’t going to throw him on his head, that’s just mean and things could go wrong real quick in the worst sort of way.

It took him about ten seconds to collect himself and pop back up and take another swing at me. I ducked and this time lunged towards him with another bear hug. I applied another squeeze and after another thirty seconds threw him back down onto his side again.

He got up once more. He got more of the same. It was after the fifth or sixth crumpling that he finally got the hint. The last of him I ever saw was him scurrying home while crying.

I’m not going to go into the fight I had while I was in the Army. Let’s just say he got the first hit and it took three guys to pull me off from him. That was the fight where he sucker punched me and I wasn’t too pleased about it.

I don’t wish harm upon any of them. We all make mistakes. Did they learn from their mistakes? Did they do the Dwight thing and own their mistakes?

I can only hope they found friends, lived good lives, and tried to make right with other people. Being a pig and chewing the bones of your enemies is not a way to live.

I’m rambling, I know it.

I just… don’t like death.

I don’t like narcissists.

I don’t like bullies.

I also don’t like Dwight-holes.

Is it wrong to have the darker part of me smile knowing I’ve outlasted them? Is it any darker than them being a Dwight-hole? Hard to say.

Was David Moo-ma a hero to his wife? Did Scott learn a lesson that day? Did he become a person for someone else to look up to? Paul Reubens was one of my heroes in that he shined through the darkness in a way that made so many of us smile. Thank you Paul. I’m trying to make people smile too, even the Dwight-holes.

What is the fun of having those you want to smile leave early?

That’s it for now.

Mootles all

Someone from my writing critique group emailed me the following after reviewing my last chunk submission…

In regards to the Confederacy, they are protecting something, what is that something? 22 planets in 8 solar systems? I have no idea how the universe is parsed out, but clearly it is per your book.

And this is what I’m emailing back.

(Know your audience Dave, know your audience…)

+-

Hi, I’m just getting back to this.

People see what they want to see.

I’m guilty of doing it.

Take for instance the year when Hitler, at the height of his power, invaded the Soviet Union in 1492.

The problem is that when you interpret words, letters, or numbers, you aren’t always seeing what’s there.

Whose fault is that?

Was the author at fault for not breaking it down correctly? Or is it the readers for seeing something that isn’t there?

In conversations, people take turns speaking and hopefully listening. Often times when somebody is supposed to be listening to what is being said, they are instead envisioning or crafting their version from what is being presented to them.

Take for instance… “This one time driving, I got pulled over…”

Did your mind immediately fill in the blanks to that time you got pulled over?

We all do it.

The trick is to acknowledge you do it and do your best not to fall down that wabbit hole.

As in my last post, I’m still a little ticked off by how people don’t “OWN” their blindness.

Again, I’m guilty of doing it myself.

I guess it’s all part of the human condition.

Sometimes we nix up words and think one world means something else. (misspellings aside – wink wink)

C.Y. is not the same as A.D. (or C.E. Common Era for you sticklers)

Parachutes are not used without there being an atmosphere.

Trap door predators do not jump up and scream at their prey before attacking.

An author has to believe their audience isn’t that stupid.

Do readers have the same obligation to honor the spirit of the source material? (mispkillings aside)

One author has unrealistic behaviors by their creatures. TRAP predators do not jump up and scream at their prey before attacking.

The other author has people assuming a planet has a thin atmosphere because the protagonist is using a parachute.

Whose is right?

So I googled and found this link

where it says… “Professor Gopen began by explaining the key inquiry for good writing is always, “Did the reader get delivery of what the writer was trying to say?” If the answer is yes, the writing was good enough. But if the answer is no, then it does not matter how “dazzling or impressive or sexy” the writing was, it failed. Even worse is a writing where the reader believes he or she has completely understood the writer’s point, but the reader is wrong and proceeds to analyze the issue from the wrong perspective.”

So… that still leaves me wondering. If I write the word BANANA and the reader reads APPLE, who is at fault?

This is so fluggersting

:/

Maybe I should stick with history, at least there nobody gets anything mixed up.

😛

I’m back from vacation and have returned to work.

Can you feel the lack of excitement in the air? I know I can.

Thankfully it’s been a slow day these past few days at work. Between driving up to Oregon and flying out to Hawaii, I was in “other mode” for about 30 days.

Life… it’s another of those infamous four-letter words.

Over the weekend, since it’s been slow, I’ve been catching up on some youtube videos. I’m currently on video 21 of “Hiking with the Codgers.” Watching them has re-ignited my desire to go out and follow in their footsteps. Alas, my time wont be for about another 10 years. The trip takes about 6-months, and there is no way I could take another time out and go “FIND MYSELF” for such a long period without there being major repercussions.

Such is life…

As to writing, I submitted my chunk 1.5 to the group, and with the comments I got back… I really need to find a different group. Some of them were confused between ‘star system’ and ‘star system(s)’ as in how they are different. One is a single body, while the other is plural for more than a single system. The United States has more than a single state, it has at least fifty that I’m aware of. Commonwealths, Federations, Conglomerations, etc, can all have multiple parties/systems which come together, like individual states, to form a larger entity.

They also got confused with the year note I had included in the text. I color code things so you can tell the difference between what is there to be critiqued (normal/unaltered), and what is background FYI stuff (fonted orange, like the year format I’m thinking of using). Apparently, a number of them are color blind and I’m not being respectful of this.

Uuugghhhhhhh

The time scale I was rambling on about was the year 2016 C.Y.

C.Y. as in Confederation Year.

Not A.D. as what is used in our Western Civilization.

“But it’s 2023, so this takes place in the past? We don’t have spaceships zooming around to other planets.”

Hhrrmmm… Maybe the fact that I used a planetary name you are not familiar with would have been a clue.

“Yargooga-booga-fake-name” is not one of our 9 8 planets.

I’m not a professional writer, and neither are they. It’s a hobby for some of them. I’m trying to make it more than a hobby for myself.

They are amateur readers.

I don’t even think they are amateur sci-fi people.

They may not even be amateur followers of calendars.

Am I asking too much?

What is my target audience? Am I asking too much for them to know the 9 8 planets?

Anywho…

So I came up with another story idea. It involves another plot that is M. Night Shyamalan in nature. While I was in Hawaii, I was working on some of the background ideas and since being back, I’ve pounded out about 2,000 words. It’s not a lot but it’s enough for me to rekindle the fire should I decide to pick it up again post “A NEW DAY” ever getting completed.

What else…

I really need a vacation.

Didn’t I just have one?

No, honestly no. What I had was a family trip with two teenage children who went out of their way to make things difficult for my wife and me. They stuck their noses into their phones and didn’t want to leave the hotel any more than necessary.

Oh look, there’s Big Ben!

Such is my life.

Ten years until the Pacific Crest Trail… What year is this again?

😛

Tootles all.