“For your last request, how do you want to die?” she asked.
I considered her and the question. “Kill me with chocolate.”
Smiling, she began to pour. “As you wish.”
The Strike
Wild as tornadoes,
flashy as lightning,
wondrous as magic and technology,
the Moon and the Grand Canyon,
the Great Wall and Angel Falls,
majestic as rolling ocean swells,
enigmatic as love and death,
dreams strike,
jolting you into confusion and fear,
surprise and excitement,
and contemplation and searching.
At A Certain Point
At a certain point, there are no more Mondays in your life, no more Saturdays, no more weekends. There are just days of the sun rising and climbing, dimming and setting. Even the years lessen in importance, becoming more moot, except for those matters like taxes and voting. And you learn you can treat every day as you want.
Carpe diem, brothers and sisters. Treat this day as you want it.
Spirituality For The Day: Never
Rob has come up with the perfect rallying cry for just about every day, every week, every month, every year, and every event.
Lessons Learned; First 30 Days of Self-Publishing — Joynell Schultz
I could just about add this to my blog intact as my experience, save I haven’t gone the paperback route and my parents don’t have a zoo selling my novel. But the rest stays true to my experience. It’s been a learning experience. After learning for a while, you reset, or as Bob Mustin posted, you go back to Square One.
My three biggest takeaways from Joynell’s post:
1. The digital marketplace is a swamp.
2. Not one single good source exists out there.
3. Despite the body of knowledge about publishing (self, traditional, e-publishing, etc), you end up doing a lot of trail and error to find what works.
Bonus fourth: it’s hard work. Far easier to write a book than to publish one, even if you publish it yourself.
Reasons
There’s a reason for the man you hate,
and another for the one you embrace.
There’re reasons for where the sun shines,
reasons for why the blind man’s blind.
Reasons for getting drunk as a skunk,
reasons for staying chaste as a nun.
There’s a reason for why that man lies,
and another reason for why that woman dies.
There’s reasons for hoarding gold,
and reasons for selling your soul.
Just remember reasons always abound,
and try to find reasons that remain morally sound.
Hell Or High Water
This contains spoilers about the movie, ‘Hell Or High Water’. If you’re planning to see the movie, don’t read further, unless you’re okay knowing some important matters.
My wife and I watched the Academy Award nominated movie, ‘Hell Or High Water’. It stares Ben Foster, Chris Pine, Gil Birmingham and Jeff Bridges. There are women in this movie but this is about men, men and their relationships to one another, life, and women.
It’s a harsh movie, mournful and painful. Watching it, you think, “Jesus, people in Texas are really angry and (or) mean.” And you know, almost from the beginning, what will happen. If, after watching five minutes, you asked me to write down what events will take place, I would have written this down.
Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) will be alive. His partner, Alberto Parker (Birmingham) will be dead.
Tanner (Ben Foster) will be dead. Marcus will kill him. Tanner will nobly sacrifice himself for his brother, Toby (Chris Pine). Pine will be shot but he’ll live. Pine will get away with the robberies.
Toby will not reconcile with his wife. He’ll remain estranged with his boys. Hamilton will visit Toby after ‘it’s all over’ to try to confirm Toby was part of the robberies.
All this happened. Yet, expecting them to happen didn’t detract from the movie. This film was about relationships and the nuances their existences create, and how relationships continue to live and drive behavior even after some of those involved in the relationships are dead.
The movie, while about Texans Rangers and bank robbers, law and society, men and their women, and brothers and their family, is ultimately about love and betrayal. The largest betrayal is their belief in the land and the country, and how their expectations of what to believe betrayed them.
When the movie ended, after Toby and Hamilton have their conversation, and Toby invites Hamilton to come by and finish it, my wife commented, “That was an odd ending.”
“No, it wasn’t.” It was exactly about the title to me. Although the line, “Hell or High Water,” is used in reference to getting some money to a bank on Friday regardless of hell or high water, it’s clearer to me that the title is about relationships and life.
They are the hell or high water that’s endured.
Inspirational Quote # 552
I laughed when I saw this just now, because that’s exactly what I realized that I’d done – tensed up, closing off my creative power. It took a few days to recover the lessons I’d learned before — and before, and before, and before. Maybe, learning it with repetition, it’ll start to stay in my mind.
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Michael Seidel, writer 