Tag: books

Thirstdaz Theme Music

Through the fog creeps Thirstda, November 11, 2025. 52/57/48 are the numbers for the day: present, high, low. It’s a remarkably narrow range, with fog and clouds gaining the lower hand over the sun’s position as an influencer.

Mom continues to improve and impress, according to sis. Had her first PT session today and did great! Wife, on the other hand, is not doing well, in her words. Not surprising for me. She and stress aren’t good friends. Her anxiety climbs and she becomes physically challenged with a great deal of pain. She’s working through her protocols to cope. As for me, other than physical limitations and restricted diet, I feel fab. Didn’t do much yesterday except nibble on crackers and binge on a series called “Suspicions” with short naps. Found I wasn’t comfortable sitting at the desk, as that strained my abs, so the planned typing didn’t come about. Tried other places and positions but all felt wrong and I didn’t have enough to push through. Part of this is because my wife gave a steady stream of reminders not to do too much. I didn’t want to add to her stress, so I backed off.

I also ate too many crackers, I think. I had some vegan, gluten-free vegetarian broth. No flavor, at all. Really disappointing, so I went back to the crackers. We had picked up some TJ’s garlic-flavored naan crackers, water wafers, and something from Costco, potato crackers seasoned with seaweed. I didn’t think much of the water wafers, but my taste buds highly rated the other two.

Plans today are to catch up on writing, reading, and blogging. I finished reading my last two books, both fiction on my travels. Gravity’s Rainbow is available at long last. Yes, I confess, I haven’t read the classic. Found it in the library system and put it on hold back in July. I began reading a terrific (so far) historical fiction book by Amy Stewart called Woman Waits with Gun. Ironically, I’d purchased it at Half-Priced Books in Monroeville on the 2023 visit to attend my nephew’s marriage in Pittsburgh. I know this because the receipt was inside. It sat in the TBR stack by the bed until I came back from Pittsburgh. I’d just finished a romantasy and a crime thriller and needed a read, and ‘lo, there it was.

Over on streaming land, we are into the latest season of “Slow Horses” and “Down Cemetery Road” and are ready to begin “King and Conqueror” and the latest season of “Diplomat”. This is augmented by “The Graham Norton Show” and rewatching “Would I Lie to You”. I cut the last short because laughing and coughing really rile my incisions.

Today’s music is out of dreamland again. The Neurons, looking over my shoulder as I reviewed my strange and amusing dream, came up with “Rocket” by the Smashing Pumpkins, in the morning mental music stream. That was sort of funny on their part, as I’d been dreaming about being on a spaceship. I’ve gone through this before, dreaming of being traveling in space, then awakening to bafflement about where I am.

Another of my dreams was very short. This was about kittens gamboling on me, mewing until I got up to feed them. I thought there were two kittens but when I put out the food, four more appeared with sharp cries, “Me, too!” I rhetorically responded, “How many kittens do we have,” as one more little grey fluff of floof waddled in. That was all the dream offered.

I’ve been looking at news but don’t have many thoughts on it at this point. Trump is being Trump, as far as I can tell, with all the mendacity, greed, and arrogance that implies.

Hope peace and grace find their way out of the fog to you. My body is suggesting it’s time to lay down again. Think I’ll do as it says. Cheers

2

Twozdaz Theme Music

Twozda, November 4, 2025, has pounced on us like a kitten hunting a leaf. 51 F in Ashlandia, rain clouds hide the sun. Rain is expected to visit off and on throughout the day. More leaves are surrendering to time, filling the ground with fading, decaying colors.

Mom continues to be lively back in Pennsylvania, according to sis. Which is thought by all of us to be good. Thought I’d share this photo of her from her 90th birthday. Yes, that’s a kitchen knife in her hand.

Mom, 90 birthday celebration, October, 2025

Today’s music is owed to a dream. This was one of those long, movie-like dreams my mind spins to entertain me while I slip. In this one, I was part of a group of young people. We’d found some books, then realized there was significance to the books, and then, ‘lo, a book was missing. We knew who collected the books, so we thought we’d recreate the journey he took to collect the books. Maybe that would reveal the missing book. We were traveling by train and car mostly, and yes, the travel took us behind the old ‘Iron Curtain’ into previous nations controlled by the Soviet Union. There was romance and comedy along with suspense. It reminded me of the 1980s Dabney Coleman film, Cloak & Dagger.

Anyway, my amused reflection of the dream triggered The Neurons into offering songs about spies in the morning mental music stream. After considering different music, The Neurons concluded that Carly Simon and “Nobody Does It Better” is the best choice.

Dick Cheney died. I was surprised. Thought he’d died in the 1990s. I knew he’d been re-animated to be Veep under Dubya, but I thought that spell wore off once he was removed from office. He was only 84, which also surprised me because he often seemed very old. The tributes will pour in for him. They’ll gloss over what he did to help forge a path to our current mess and speak of his service to the nation. Few will mention how extremely wealthy and powerful he became as part of that service. He did speak out against Trump in the 2024 elections and endorsed Kamela Harris. Just noting that.

Speaking of Trump, the Trump created Epstein Government Shutdown of 2025 rolls on. As someone else predicted, Trump became TACO and yielded somewhat on SNAP. Judges ruled that he must pay it but I think it’s most likely he’s doing it due to voters turning against MAGA politicians who worried about losing their seats, which might lead to the House flipping in 2026. Like others, I think Stephen Miller strongly influences Trump, and that having people die from starvation, even if in red states, is okay with the Regime. Death from starvation will make people more desperate and pliable, is their reasoning. That reasoning then goes, those folks will be willing to work for lower wages and can probably be pressed into service doing jobs that migrant workers used to do. Yes, the Trump Regime is trying to create a class of low-wage slave labor, like we had in ‘the good old days’, and thus help ‘make Amurica great again’. Sickening. Bet Epstein is smirking down on Trump, or up on him, depending on your thoughts about the afterlife.

Breaking News:

Trump Says He’ll Defy Court Order And Won’t Give Out SNAP Benefits

In a Truth Social post, Trump said Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

There’s the TACO we know! Breaking the law, breaking the law. Not taking responsibility. Blaming someone else, as he always does. And screwing We the People.

Analysis I’ve read said that not paying SNAP will disproportionately affect his beloved MAGA base. Of course, in Trump’s altered reality, SNAP recipients are all scammers, people illegally in the United States, or people on drugs. The Trump Regime dismisses the idea that income-challenged families and individuals, the disabled, and children depend on SNAP. That administration is deliberately, maliciously, and dangerously warped.

Off I go. Hope grace and peace spring out from their hiding places and embrace us all. Till then, I’ll coffee up. Cheers

9

Sundaz Wandering Political Thoughts

I’m not reposting it or linking to it. Trump released an AI video of himself as a king and a fighter pilot.

Trump weaseled out of serving his nation five times when he was young.

Whined about having bone spurs.

Now he pretends to be a fighter pilot, a specimen of individual who is highly trained and extremely fight, 180 from what he is. There it is again, the alternate Trump reality, where facts, truth, history, and logic are completely disengaged. Not a good place for someone in his position. He needs to be removed. If this isn’t 25th Amendment material, what is?

The other part…where he projects himself as king. Well, that’s exactly what we’re protesting in the No Kings rallies. As a POTUS pretending to be a king, acting like he’s a king, above We the People, and not serving us, he should be impeached.

Worse, though, he fantasizes about bombing American citizens. Dropping sewage on them. How horrible is that for anyone who occupies the Oval Office?

And those deep, deep, double standards are fully in play here. Listen to the crickets as the GOP say nothing. Recall their fervent outrage against President Joe Biden. How they bleated about him being unfit. He, who never released a video fantasy about being a king, being a fighter pilot, and bombing our people.

Imagine the uproar if this had been President Obama. My, oh, my, the shockwaves would have felt like major earthquakes across the continent.

But here we have it, signs of a demented, detached individual fantasizing about being a fighter pilot and king, bombing his citizens.

And they say nothing.

Their silence speaks as loudly as Trump’s video fantasy. They are as corrupt and complicit as him.

And this is why we march and protest.

No kings. Not in 1776. Not in 2025.

Not. Ever.

2

Another Book Dream

I was sitting somewhere, familiar to me in the dream, but unfamiliar to me in real life. Several acquaintances came up and chatted with me. On a white wall to my left were six pieces of art. One woman asked, “What are those.”

I explained that they were books in progress with a smile, that needed to be finished. She selected one, took it down, and started flipping through it. Suddenly she started. “That character has my name.”

Yes, I acknowledged. “You were in mind when I named the character.”

She continued through the pages. “I like this. You should finish it.”

I nodded. “That’s the plan.”

She passed the piece to another person who asked for it. The second person went through it and said, “I like this, too.”

She handed it to me. I flipped it open and began going through it, then stopped. “I know how this ends. It just came to me.”

Both stared at me. “It just came to you?” one asked. “Just like that?”

“Yes. I’m going to finish this now.”

I spent the rest of the dream writing and rewriting that book. It took some weird turns. At one point, I stopped to watch golfers. Green, brown, and orange golf balls were in use, and they were playing on a mountain, hitting the balls down toward greens in valleys far below. After one teed off, the watching gallery emitted a long and low moan of appreciation and then began hitting golf balls down into the valley.

“What are they doing?” a woman seated with me asked.

I smiled. “They’re hitting golf balls down. I think they’re supposed to help locate the original ball.”

“How?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I went back to work on the book. Sometimes as I worked on it, the print on the page was purple. Other times, the pages flared in bright purple. Yes, purple prose came to me in the dream, to giggles.

By the dream’s end, the novel was finished. I awoke very satisfied.

0

The Writing Moment

I’m still working on a novel. Finished one earlier this year and edit and revise it when free time gestures, do it. Meanwhile, I’m writing another. Thought I’d have it finished by September’s middle. Did. Not. Happen. I wrote an ending but it didn’t work. Yet it did work.

Why it didn’t work… Well, it wasn’t satisfying. None of the characters liked it. Especially the protagonist. You wouldn’t believe her reaction. The Writing Neurons were also pissed by the ending, and also let me know.

Hush, hush, I told them all. That was just the climax. Now I’ll write a denouement and all will be well. You’ll see.

Snorting, the Writing Neurons muttered, “Bullshit.” The Muses were more restrained, expressing their WTF doubts with a smirk.

Ignoring them, I pressed on. That’s when I realized why the ending did work. It did work because I had to get it out of me. It also worked because I saw that I was aiming toward the end of one story line, involving the main person, but there was a larger story line that needed an ending. I’d become so focused on my main person, I overlooked that other story line.

When I wrote that ending for the story, I killed one trending direction. Doing so freed the character to take over. Completely unaware of where I was going, like trying to find the bathroom in an unfamiliar, pitch-black house, every new paragraph was a challenge. I often rewrote paragraphs several times, trying to figure out what they meant. Is that how novel writing is supposed to go? I actually think so.

Now, I think I see the real ending. I don’t say that too loudly. Don’t want to piss off the protagonist, Muses, and Writing Neurons. It’s hard enough keeping them all in line and moving in the same direction. Like herding angry feral cats.

Got my coffee and a table. Got my ‘puter. Time to continue writing like crazy, at least one more time.

4

1982

Daily writing prompt
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
View all responses

I’ve lived without a computer before. It actually wasn’t terrible. Yes, I’m now spoiled. Personal computers have been life changing.

But jump back to 1982. I was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, an island that belongs to Japan. Commodore’s VIC 20 had us abuzz about computers. While we could easily see how it would make many things easier, shopping wasn’t yet on the menu. Nor was getting news updates. It was only toward the end of 1983 that I began learning about the concepts of ‘bulletin boards’, the Internet, and the worldwide web.

So back then, we watched television. Movies were watched via VHS tapes. That was the latest, greatest tech move for us, and such devices were still running close to $1,000. But we had one to help us weather the lack of entertainment inherent in being overseas. Remember, this was before satellite TV, too, for all practical purposes. All that stuff was just coming out, as were microwave ovens. They were also huge, bulky, expensive machines, but we purchased on of those, as well.

It’s hard to believe how fast everything changed. In late 1983, I bought my first CD player. It played one CD at a time. Returning to the U.S. from Japan, we gave our VHS player to my wife’s parents, and bought ourselves a new, smaller one with more features, including a remote control. That was the same year that I bought my first computer, a small but heavy Kaypro. Running at 4.77 megahertz, with a tiny green screen, it ran on CP/M and offered minimal RAM and two floppy drives that used 5 1/4 inch disks. It was a wild scene. We learned how to add RAM, make things faster, and double our floppy disks’ storage. Ten megahertz machines were being touted as possibilities, along with 64K of RAM and a 5-meg hard drive and 16 color monitors! Wow!

Back before that, we read. A lot. Books were checked out from the library, and research was done at the library. I subscribed to multiple magazines, such as Writer’s Digest, Autoweek, and Road & Track. Went for walks, played sports, read newspapers, which were delivered daily. When I lived in San Antonio, Texas, I subscribed to both the San Antonio Light and the Wall Street Journal. Even with the computer and VHS player coming along, and the CD player, and DVD players, most of that didn’t change. We still visited malls to shop, and used Sears and Spiegel catalogues to make orders, calling in to toll free numbers to put the order in. Board games like Risk, Life, and Monopoly were popular with us, along with Trivial Pursuit, and card games like Tripoli and King on the Corner, and Solitaire.

No, the big change came when the Internet finally fired up. My experience with it began in 1991, when I came back from Germany. Slow as hell, to be sure. Connections through modems which had to be hooked up. LOL. That changed fast, too, as built-in modems came along. I was both a Compuserve and AOL subscriber. Email was a new, exciting idea.

Then, suddenly we went to 256 colors and beyond on our monitors. The mouse became popular. 100 megahertz machines were being sold. I remembered buying and installing a 100-meg hard drive, and laughing. How was I ever going to use that much storage? It seemed so excessive. By then, our floppy drives were down to three-inch little colorful things. Now, we’re like, floppy drive? What the heck is that?

Going online was a wild scene back in the mid 1990s. Weren’t many websites in those early days. The games were something else. Research, news, and sports all became much more accessible. Then, boom…social media. That’s when things really flipped.

I’ve gone a few days in 2025 without my computer and without the Internet. Like before, we read, played games, and went for walks.

Just like it was 1982, just forty years ago, when I was younger, and so was the personal computer.

9

Sundaz Theme Music

So we have come to another Sunda. This is September 14, 2025. Thirty days hath September (just checked in my head), so tomorrow reaches the month’s halfway point. With the month’s end, we dip into 2025’s final quarter. It’s 65 F. Rain is in the clouds competing with the sunshine. Wind and trees are into a brisk dance.

Autumn is making solid inroads into our Pacific Northwest outlook. Today’s high will drift toward the mid seventies. My wife said, “I don’t mind it if the temperature drops but I dislike it when it’s so dark in the morning. I miss the morning light.” I totally get that and agree. As she went on to point out, the daylight savings situation doesn’t help, with us facing longer hours of early darkness as we begin our days.

My wife and I are trying to plan a trip back home for Mom’s 90th birthday do. However, my spouse said she experienced flashes of light in her eyes the other day as we went around Crater Lake and descended. She wants to have our eyes checked for problems before committing to flying. She’s not had incidents since that day, a week ago yesterday, and it was storming that day, with thunder and lightning. But she’s quite risk adverse. Having her eyes checked is the prudent thing to do.

I read a Politico piece titled, Trump loves AI, and the MAGA world is getting worried. It’s an interesting topic. I’m not surprised MAGA is generally against AI, as they tend to be people who dislike change and are slow to embrace technology. AI promises both fast change, and it’s advanced technology. Of course, Hollywood and television has fed us a dystopian diet of dire developments from AI. We have fears laced with worries baked into our cultural soul.

Other than that, I turned away from the news. It’s Sunda, a slow news day by design in the digital age. It’s more of a day of recap and reflection. I decided I’d do the same. I don’t know how the rest of the world does these things, but I’ll do it with a cuppa coffee, do some writing, read a book, clean, and converse with my wife. It feels like a good chillin’ day.

I dreamed of many cats last night. As I was digesting all that nocturnal churn, Papi and I went out for an early dose of sunshine and deep breathing. That ginger floof acted kittenish, galloping about, tail swishing, and then bounding into the house and across the rooms as I walked in behind him and laughed at his antics. With the sunshine and Papi’s attitude affecting them, The Neurons burst into the morning mental music stream with “Beautiful Day”. This is a U2 song from 2000, before this mess in America flared to its aggravating proportions. I played a U2 melody yesterday. Normally, I don’t present music from the same group two days in a row but this one worked for the moment, and I let Der Neurons’ choice stand.

Coffee has made incursions into my body. May grace and peace be with you and me and the world today and always. Cheers

0

The Writing Moment

I’ve been pursuing another novel’s completion. Been writing that puppy as I can while navigating the usual life interruptions. They don’t need counted down on two hands for you to understand all the life junk happening, right? Employ memory and imagination, and you’ll probably get it.

I’ve been sort of stymied. I’m not a plotter. I don’t outline a jot. I’m a solid pantser, leaping from slippery point to slippery point, following whims and impulses like they’re magic winds carrying me toward my destination. Except, suddenly the winds dropped me into a place I didn’t recognize. Not sure where to go, I did some editing, revising, and rewriting while muttering darkly to myself about being misled by mean muses and wondering what the hell had happened to the Writing Neurons. Besides those activities, I made some assumptions and conclusions about what I thought was wrong, how some things lacked enough substance and understanding to build upon, and conducted some writing exercises to stimulate me, myself, and I. I refer to these exercises as snapshots. They’re all just focus exercises to help me have greater understanding of whatever needs more understanding: setting, history, concept, characters, motivations, relationships, whatever you might find in a novel.

After four days of that, grappling with where I was, unsure where I was to go, I said to myself, “Come on, man. Pitter patter. Get ‘er at ‘er.” And miraculously, the muses and the Writing Neurons emerged today and ordered, “Start typing.” And then they guided me through story twists which I never saw. Well, I partly saw some of ’em. But some of the twists involved twists I’d come up with but didn’t know how to put into the story. Suddenly, click, yea! All came together.

Most satisfying writing day, it was. Sometimes it does pay just to sit down and write like crazy. Who do I need to bribe to get more of these?

1

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