Category: Information

A Writing Camp Dream

I was at a drama and writing camp. Maybe forty others were present. I didn’t know anyone else. Some of them knew one another. Ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-sixties. Though I’m a RL 68, I’m around 40 here. It’s a rustic sort of setting.

One of the more popular people is a younger, dramatic person. A large black dog accompanies her everywhere. While we’re at one of our outdoor gatherings milling around, her dog eyes me, and then cuts through the crowd to visit with me. So does a cat. The dog’s actions surprises everyone. After a friendly visit with him, he returns to his person. The cat rolls around and is given affection.

The oldest person there comes to me with a sword. I’m not a sword expert but it reminds me of a US Civil War calvary officer saber. He points it at me at first, talking about it a while, and then presents it to me for my inspection. I’m mystified and leery by what he’s doing. It seems a little off center and nutty. He sort of brusquely pouts and asks for me to give him back his sword. Naturally, I do and he walks away. Okay, fine.

Well, sometime during the night (in the dream), I then write a long short-story about the woman with the dog and the man with the sword. I don’t know how but others come to me, explaining that they’d heard I’d written a short story. They wrote something too, and they think that we can combine the work. The woman with the dog knows about it, too, although she only knows me as the guy who dog went to. But, since her dog likes and trusts me, she wants to work with me.

So I agree, and then sit and edit, rewrite, and revise, adding more, and breaking the story up into four parts. Four us, including the women with the dog, come together to read and combine what another guy has written. They start reading it aloud, and the rest of the camp comes to listen, including the man with the sword. When he hears it, he comes to me to have his part expanded and reveals some things to me.

With the black dog and the cat beside me, I quickly revise and write more. Everyone is really pleased by the results. People are telling me, “I think you nailed it.” They want to know what else I’ve written, and are giving me other ideas for story, because they think I’d be the best person to write it.

Dream end

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Mood: watchful

Tuesday, September 12, 2023. At the airport. 5:05 AM, bracing myself against the chilly night air. Dawn is haranguing the eastern darkness. We were picked up at 4:20, deposited here at 4:45, waiting for our flight now. Seems to be on time. Travelers trapped in drowsy amber drag bags, watching, listening, killing time, anxiously fidgeting. My wife and I settle and chat. Worries and anxieties are voiced on her end. I do what I can to reassure her. I’ve traveled a lot, usually alone, and just roll as I need to. She tends to work herself up into indignation and irritation.

The Neurons are playing “Leaving on A Jet Plane”. John Denver. Mama Cass. Peter, Paul, and Marry.

Of course The Neurons are playing this. What else would they be playing? Well, they’re The Neurons, so that query is wholly hypothetical. They shift to “Silver Bird”. Mark Lindsay. “Jet Airliner” – Steve Miller – comes up, which is then replaced by Pink Floyd, “Learning to Fly”. “The Letter” by The Four Tops – “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane” – supersedes it, then it’s another “Learning to Fly”, this time by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “Come Fly with Me”, Frank Sinatra follows.

I’m reminded of how it used to be to fly, when friends, relatives, lovers would escort people down to the gate. Can’t do that these days. That’s all left beyond the security’s other side.

Then a woman tells the child with her, “Come here, stand by me.” And that changes where The Neurons are hanging around. Let that, I hear “Stand By Me”, but it’s the version made by “Playing for Change”. Okay, I’ll take that, Neurons. If I can ever harness their energy, I might be able to get more done.

So here we are, and there we go, today’s theme music. I’m looking forward to getting on the aircraft and going back to sleep as we wing down to SFO from southern Oregon. Then, after I board that next flight, I’ll indulge in a cuppa joe. Just a few more minutes and boarding will begin.

Stay pos, test negative, be strong, and remain on course. Time to board. Here’s the tune. See ya. Cheers

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Infloofuation

Infloofuation (floofinition) An intense but brief, highly charged exchange of affection between two animals or between a human and animal.

In use: “When the dog met the cat, serious infloofuation happened, with the dog wagging his entire body and the cat throwing herself, rolling around and purring while the dog licked her exposed belly.”

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WTF, Again

It’s time once again for WTF, Again, also sometimes called WTF, America. This is a New Mexico edition.

A white family experienced an emergency when a speeding car hit their pet dog. Jumping into the car with the injured animal, they raced for the nearest vet in an attempt to save their beloved animal. Enroute, they sped past a police car, who gave pursuit and pulled them over.

William Albrecht was driving. According to KRQE’s excellent reporting, he didn’t expect what happened next.

“I imagined if he was going to pull me over for speeding, I’d pull over,” Albrecht told KRQE. “He’d say something to me and then maybe even help us get there. You know, I’ve heard of stories like that before, but that didn’t happen.”

No, that didn’t happen. According to video, the police showed no sympathy and little concern for anything except enforcing their police power. The officer ordered Albrecht out of the car at gunpoint and made him kneel. The officer wasn’t interested in what was going on at all. He just wanted Albrecht to do what he was told, reporting that he felt threatened because Albrecht seemed enraged and had clenched fists in the air.

Note that no video support the officer’s story.

More officers were called to the scene, of course, because this unarmed white man and his wife and son were so damn scary, and Albrecht was handcuffed, of course.

Albrecht was especially distraught because they always ‘support the blue’ and feel that they’d done nothing to warrant this police reaction. It’s easy to imagine that if Albrecht was black, he might have been shot, because it’s happened to so many others. I imagine, too, that the city and police force will stand behind the officer and the wall of blue, and many citizens will support the police, because they support the blue.

According to KRQE, ‘BPD’s policy does call for de-escalation, stating, “the level of force employed must be commensurate with the threat posed by the subject and the seriousness of the situation.”. Yes the BPD police officer was clearly working hard to de-escalate that situation, wasn’t he? His situational awareness was just top notch.

Sadly, the dog passed away, a young boy had a traumatic moment compounded because the officer showed no empathy or concerns, and a family has come to understand why fewer people ‘support the blue’. I’m sorry for the family’s loss.

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The Writing Moment

I’m forced to my secondary coffee ship for my writing day because the primary is too busy. It’s a case of ‘good for them’ but also, ‘damn it’, which results in a ‘c’est le vie’ tie.

In the secondary, I’m reduced to my tertiary favorite spot. I call it ‘The Chilly Corner’ because it’s the chilliest space in the coffee shop. Poor planning on my end means I don’t have a piece of fleece to put on, as I often carry, even on the hottest of days. These places love to chill out, ha-ha.

Whenever I come to the chilly corner, though, The Neurons call up Henry James’s short story, “The Jolly Corner”. In a way, it’s apt; I come here to meet and work with my writing alter ego. There hasn’t been any hauntings yet, beyond what the muses come and tell me. I have had altercations with my alter ego, who sometimes complains he’d like to be out doing something else.

Too bad for him. Fortunately for me, he’s not overpowered me. I suppose I should add, not yet.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Mood:

Good day to you from Ashlandia, where the road construction continues as we move into autumn’s waters.

It’s 9/11, and you know what that means in 2023. It’s also a Monday. Everyone will be looking back on the 9/11 part. We’ve already had 60Minutes do it. No doubt, that brave journalistic effort will be repeated with solemn broadcasts across the country. Some will probably speculate, could 9/11 happen in America today? Others will remember how the tragedy ‘brought the country together’. More will point out that many of the security measures installed after 9/11 were kneejerk reactions that created the cumbersome Homeland Security. Another faction will discuss the intelligence failures and whether we’ve fixed that while more pundits will write that, noting how Americans reacted to fear, the GOP has seized on fear as their Big Tool for getting voters’ attention and scaring them into supporting the GOP. The GOP will blow things out of proportion and flat lie to that end in these days. We have the videos.

So, first, a correction; I’d seen a weather report that said we were going to be climbing into the upper nineties in our area. I don’t know if I imagined that or if they changed it, but that’s all gone. We’re going to stay mostly in the 80s F. Today we’re at 60 F and we’ll hit 82 F. It’s good tedium to have these manageable, predictable temps.

Sirens are going by down on the main road. I listen and wonder about the story behind them. They stop abruptly; I listen and watch to see if they come up our street. Muses in me automatically created a speculative vignette about what’s going on. My rational mind wonders, what type of vehicle is driving that siren. Worries about fires and friends butterfly around my head.

Flying out tomorrow, so we have prep work underway today. Packing, final cleaning, final coordination with the house/floof sitter. She’s a good friend and good person who enjoys floofs. We’re lucky to have her. It’ll be a day of traveling tomorrow, beginning pre-dawn thirty, flying across the nation from left coast to where the three rivers meet in western Pennsylvania. We’ll be there a while with a wedding in the middle of the visit this weekend.

The Neurons are feeding “A Day in the Life” by les Beatles (1967) into the morning mental music stream (Trademark in jeopardy). The lyrics also hooked my mind and take me into more introspective places. I’ve always thought it was a telling commentary on different points of view with one enjoying drugs, shaking their head at the endless news stream, and the other just dealing with the mechanics of existing and working, doing little thinking about anything outside of that. To those end, I considered it a yin and yang statement on where we are as a modern civilization. But that’s just me. The more existential question is, what are The Neurons up to, feeding this into me? Well, this time my guess is about watching and reading the news and noting others’ reactions to these cycles. They tune in and tune out; and I do the same.

Off to wage peace on the day. Stay pos, be strong, and keep chill. Coffee mug is warming my hand whenever I pause, sipped and gulped to stir the gray beings populating my brain. There must be billions of them. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Sunday’s Wandering Thought

Conventional wisdom can get it right many times. But sometimes, you just need to flip conventional wisdom the bird and get on with what you think you need to do.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Mood: spirited

Seems like Indian Summer is on its way here in Ashlandia, where the peaches were sweet and juices this year, and the cherries were no-shows. 64 F now, 82 is today’s high, but get ready; we’re heading into the upper nineties this week.

It’s Sunday, September 10, 2023

Technically, if one can say such a thing for an expression like Indian Summer, it can’t be Indian Summer now, as it’s September, and it’s still summer. According to the sages, Indian Summer happens in October or November, and at least after autumn commences. But they’re not sure about the phrase’s origins, and can only make educated guesses about it. Then, they applied those rules about when it is and isn’t.

Horrific news out of Morocco as the death count after the quake rose and rose. At least 2,000, were killed by the ‘strongest quake in 100 years’, and more were injured and displaced. In other news, someone is killing trees in a wealthy enclave around Sidney, Australia. Locals theorize that someone is doing it to improve their view of the water. Sadly, as one person mentions, property values are all about things like views. It seems totally possibly in this age, doesn’t it? And as another interviewee said, they’ll probably get away with it. Another grrr moment in life.

Playing with Whichbook.net, a tool designed to help you find your next read. I’ve never had a problem finding my next book to read. So many books at there waiting to be read, my problem is that I need to make more time to read them. But that then takes away time from other things. Terrible, ugly circle of time and things to do. But I checked out the tool because I was curious. Twenty-four attributes you can look for in a novel are listed. Things like, “Short, Long”, “Happy, Sad”, “Optimistic, Bleak”. You can select four. A slider feature lets you put greater emphasis on one side of the scale over the other. I suppose it can be useful if you’re really in a muddle about to read or at a lost because you’ve tired of a genre and you’re trying to find something different. It’s interesting that it doesn’t address genre or era.

Once again, The Neurons pried a song out of the vault and tossed it into the morning mental music stream (Trademark fishy) without giving any clues about their logic. In this case, the song began while doing various tasks at home under the general umbrella of housekeeping. Then the song started: “When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights, pink curtains drawn in the room downstairs.” Yes, it’s the 1975 Elton John song, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”. Although other songs came and went for a while as I cleaned, this song arose in the MMMS this morning. It could just be that The Neurons started roaming through my mind as I worked, bored with what I was doing, and brought up this and those other old songs to alleviate the tedium. But why’d they put it back in the MMMS? Another question which I can’t answer.

Time to commence things, like drinking coffee. Stay pos, be cool, be strong. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Saturday’s Wandering Thoughts

Had a good night sleep and woke up refreshed. Ate well, had some coffee, but I feel tired.

So the question springs up, what makes that happen? Well, I guess it’s the stress of planning trips, making reservations, and taking care of multiple things — even writing — which amounts to being simultaneously pulled in several directions; picture my wrists and ankles being chained to horses going in four directions.

I’ll breathe deep, stay calm, and carry on. Just another insight into how this vessel of mine works these days.

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Floofpid Shuffle

Floofpid Shuffle (floofinition) Modern dance with floofs which requires a person to jump one way to avoid a floof, and then another, starting in a new direction, then changing directions, followed by hopping, turning, and twisting while the floof does its own dance moves.

In use: “Many people owned by pets can stylishly do the floofpid shuffle, but for a real challenge, some add multiple leashes and pull off some really impressive moves to stay disentangled and in control.”

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