It’d been an eyeblink. He’d been writing like crazy. He swears that he felt like he just sat down and opened the docs, delving into the novel, picking up the pieces of where he is and where he was going.
Coffee remains in his cup, but it is cold. This is an icy day, and the cold coffee doesn’t entice him. His rear end resents the chair’s hard seat. He has no idea how much he wrote and revised. Three more chapters were added and edited, other sections put under the editing grinder and polished, ensuring these new pieces fit smoothly as possible for this draft.
Time to stand up, stretch, and breathe. Back to life.
Back to reality.
He smiled as The Neurons remembered that song and stuck in his music stream. Fortunately, coffee shop music flowed in and overpowered the Soul II Soul song.
He wondered, though, will it show up in tomorrow’s morning mental music stream?
News came that a man has successfully removed over one hundred books from school libraries. This is in Florida. He’d moved there earlier in the year and then began challenging books. See, he didn’t want them in the school’s library. Either they offended his reading tastes or they included sex, and he didn’t approve, and didn’t want his child to be able to pick one up. This one man is dictating, through Florida’s ridiculous laws regarding books and their zany laws about sexual preferences or genders other than straight up between one man and one woman — and they should be married and in a stable relationship, I infer from his comments and news reports — then they shouldn’t be in his school library. Because, you know, his child might pick it up and read it, and then, flash, OMG, what will they become?
Oh, yeah, he hasn’t totally read those books which he demands to have removed. He knows enough, see? No need to read the entire book. Could there be any redeeming reasons beyond sex to read a book? Why, of course not. That offending sex ruins the ret of the book.
I guess that’s what he’s thinking, as it’s solely on that one aspect that this fine Christian is having books challenged and removed.
One of the books that he hasn’t read which he wants to have removed is a YA graphic novel, The Girl from the Sea, by Molly Knox Ostertag. Curious about it, I went searching for more and found an excellent Advocate story about Ostertag and her graphic novel. Besides comments from Ostertag, Advocate includes several pages of The Girl from the Sea. It is funny and sweet, and I want to read more. Fortunately, it’s available at my county’s library. I’ve joined the waiting list of people wishing to read it.
Here’s a link to the Advocate so you can check it out.
A winter Wednesday morning to you. No snow here in the lower levels, but the temperatures and air quality has us singing that winter is upon us. No surprise, it being December 14, 2022, a nose hair short of mid-month. -2 C and foggy out there. The fog will grumble and fuss around the trees and houses for most of the morning but burn off and permit sunshine’s entrance. Daylight crept through the valley’s fog at 7:32 this morning. By the time the sun lowers its from our presence, the air temp is supposed to jump up to 46 degrees F. It may do so but yesterday’s 42 degrees felt like 34, as they say.
After perusing some morning news headlines, I pulled an early cup of coffee, and wrote the dream journal up. Les Neurons then then pulled me down a ‘where are they now’ path about a one-time neighbor and co-worker. We were serving the Air Force together at Onizuka AFB in the mid-nineties last century. Before Onizuka was renamed to honor an astronaut killed in t he Challenger disaster, it was Sunnyvale Air Station. It went from Air Station to Air Force Base to Air Base after being renamed Onizuka.
That has nothing to do with my friend. Last which I heard of him, he’d gone to Turkey on an unaccompanied assignment, returned to Florida, divorced, and retired. He and I ‘connected’ on Facebook but little was ever there of him except for annual birthday greetings from people I don’t know. He’d quit responding to those a decade ago. Alive or dead, The Neurons wonder.
Today’s song, brought to you by The Neurons and their ‘where are they now’ tour, is “Cut Like A Knife” by Bryan Adams from 1983. This is because the tour subject loved this song. Midway through a party, he’d request it. If he’d imbibed enough and it was late enough, he’d sing and play air guitar to the song. Thinking of him, I think of that song, and cigarettes and beer.
Hope you enjoy it. Stay pos and test neg. I gather from reading digital news papiers that a growing body of folks eschews such quaint measures as masking, testing, etc. “It’s nothing,” you read more often online even as rates of flu and COVID climb. Certainly, local store experiences find my wife and I in a tiny minority when we’re masked while shopping. Oh well, live and learn.
Here’s the tunes. I need to wrap up morning activities, and head to the coffee house for writing activities. Hope your day is safe but enjoyable. Let’s go on a limb and say, productive, too, right?
Michael Seidel, writer 