No matter where I listen to the "news" all I really seem to hear is opinions. So I thought I would get in on the action. For those of you who are going to disagree with me and there are usually plenty of you I respectfully ask that you try to keep your comments somewhat civil. The same goes for those few who may agree with me. Now where should I start?

Let me start with Christians. I have said this before and I say it again. I have all the respect in the world for those true Christians..the ones who do not try to force feed their religion on others but rather live their lives as they believe. They are charitable, forgiving, honest, help those in need, pray for those they believe need it without telling them they do, pray for themselves for they know that they are not perfect and respect the rights of others to believe in different ideas and religions. But the other so called Chrisitians that use God's name and words as a reason for their hatred, bigotry and actions are in my view despicable human beings and that is not something I say lightly. For anyone to use their religion as a front for wars, for the murder of another human, to harrass or degrade another person's way of life, or to shout from the rafters that theirs is the only true way and that only they know what God wants is a sure way to hell if you believe in it.

  Gay rights. I am tired of hearing that we want "special" rights or privilages. All we want is the same rights that anyone NOT gay has. The right to marry who we love, to raise our children in a loving and secure home without them being ridiculed or told that their parents are sinful wicked creatures, to have the same rights when it comes to serving our country, taxes, medical decisions for our spouses, acceptance in our chosen religions, the right to walk down the street holding hands without being hassled or worse, and the right to the respect that most show to their fellow man. 

 Moving on to other rights. If you do not want a union fight the good fight to keep it out of your workplace but if the majority votes it in then deal with it. But our state governments should not have the power to take the right of the people to decide that away from them. States  should not have the power to overturn the peoples vote on anyone or anything unless fraud is proven beyond doubt.

 Women's rights..we have come along waybaby. But there is still discrimination but the biggest thing that I see is the abortion issue. Don't agree with it? Don't have one. But no one should be able to tell a woman what to do with her own body. And to go so far as to make it almost impossible to get one is to send us back to the days of backstreet abortions and clothes hangers. This issue( along with union busting) for many states has been the number one priority instead of the real needs of their citizens like jobs, debt, education and foreclosures. They would rather spend their time and their taxpayers money on it then show that they have no idea how to solve the real problems. And as far as I am concerned if you believe in the equal rights set out in our constitution then all these things would not even need to be debated or have laws passed because they would just be accepted as rights for all.

  And since I am speaking of politicians  and the problems facing so many these days lets go there next.I do not believe that the government has the right to interfere in all parts of our lives but I do believe that there are some things that they should oversee or regulate..banks, interest rates and consumer rights to just name a few. My own opinion on a few ways to save money goes like this. First let all if a politician works at the state level ( that includes the governor) let him furnish his own transportation for everything except state emergencies ..ok they can have a travel allowance but it should not be outrageous... we pay our own way to work so why shouldn't they do the same. Next we need to take a long hard look at term limits, pensions and salaries. Does anyone here have the right to vote for their own pay raises? If they miss a vote for anything except illness or family emergencies they should be docked pay, they shouldn't get more time off then teachers ( and a lot of teachers work summer jobs to pay the bills) or more than a fireman or policeman. We pay their salaries and I for one am tired of them not doing their jobs. Then of course there are the ones at the federal level. If American workers can tighten our belts and take pay and benefit cuts then why aren't they doing it too?  Just think what a one to three percent pay cut across the board ( state and federal level) could save the taxpayer. And I do not even want to start on how much time they take off. Next of course comes the rich and their tax liabilities. Why do we let our politicians get away with giving them all tax breaks they can come up with? If I can pay my fair share then surely they can afford to. Then of course there are the large corporations. They should not have all the loopholes they do to get around paying taxes. They should not be rewarded for shipping jobs overseas, banking out of the country, or for using the old tired excuse of "we will have to lay off workers" if they are made to pay what they should be paying. And they should not be able to buy and pay for politicians to get their wishlists fulfilled. Two more things the first being..  the money we spend on losing the "war on drugs" is ridiculous and many changes should be made to this so called policy the first being..just legalize marijuana and tax it and the second being..I support the Dream Act because it makes sense both morally and financially. This country was built on the backs, blood and lives of immigrants. I am not saying do away with all the immigration laws but some are absurd and children should not have to pay for what their parents did or did not do to get here.

 I believe the supreme court should be made to prove that their decisions are based on law, the constitution and not anyone's personal beliefs, they should be held to a higher of level of scrutiny when it comes to conflict of interests or participation in anything (right, left or middle) that could be perceived as supporting one group over another. Being on the highest court in the land should require complete partisan judgement. And I do not believe that they should hold those positions for life.

  Last but only because I am tired of typing is medicaid,medicare and social security. My opinion is if you want to do away with these things there needs to be better ideas then the ones I have heard. Instead of getting rid of the things that help the poor and old why not find a better way to root out fraud, have a one payer healthcare system( oh man am I going to hear about thatone), quit letting the drug companies have it all their way if they want the business, and let those who make over a certain amount opt out of social security if they want to or pay in more if they don't. All I am saying is find ideas that work and quit wasting time and money trying to get rid of social programs that so many need and are forced to rely on.

 Ok I had my rant for the day. Don't bother to tell me I can't use speel( that was on purpose) check correctly or need to learn how to punctuate.;'!?  And now I end with this ... I did not write this as a gay, right, left, moderate, liberal, conservative, female, male, Christian, non-Christian (need I go on?)but as an ordinary everyday person who has a right to voice their opinion.

We were sitting round the fire on a hard cold winter night

when screamed in wind blew the door open just bout right

our cards flew out among us

the dice they just hit the wall

and we were left to look at Death and then the Diel's pall,

He strod as shape shifter then

a stallion, a wolf, a big black hen

the shadows wept round him

he lumber walked on in

 and said

"Me name is Ben"

we picked up all the cards

the dice just hugged the wall

because the Diel he was so tall

there was quite a quiet lull

but then

he bowed his head

and then just said

"I came on here to win"

and then the door just shut on in,

he took the cards and held them close

upon a blackened

soundless heart

his silent smile it did not boast

it just told a master of slight of art

We checked all of our cufflinks, our purses we did touch

This Diel was ready to take us

and take us with deadly fuss,

We poured our drinks and passed them round

and passed each to other's burial ground

his just went a smoking and making sound

it was then that it caused fire 

with a lot of sparks that hit the skin like wire

he dealt the planks shame faced down

He held us in his eyes of old grey wedding gown

we all then looked right back at him

 and gave him our biggest frown,

The drinks re-filled

our wigs all pilled

we picked up all our cards

The Diel just sat all stiff and dead

and smiling at us hard

and then we smelled a whiff

and he then said a quiff

"lets see ye cards me wee ones

It's time I go to bed

me wife is dark on out there

awaiting on my sled",

We played that hand as dead men would

our brains all working fast

if we did not win this

this time would be our last

We played the queens and then our kings

the Deils cards just flew on down

covering all our white dove things

with smutty raven wings,

The game now done the cards all dead

and then he stood and he just said

"you'll kill all yon people

across that mountain top

When me and the missus come calling

we like a good reaped crop".

I was notified recently by Sarcophagus that I was made an administrator to the Word Play group and I quickly accepted and then moved on over to take a check of the home page. It all looked cool, no real spam or stuff with the little time I looked and then I looked down and saw 9 pages of members, WOWOWOW. And then I settled down and thought hard about the group.

So here are some thoughts of mine. I would like to make this a large concern to my over all group administrative duties. It may become the top at my group list with the right kind of vine interaction.

I will be implementing two Weirdness of WORDS DAYS where I will introduce us to the history of a few of our words. We will see how they developed, who used them first and the underlying definitions of the word. WWsD will be on Mondays and Thursdays. Two days that I think are really drag ass on the vine. I am an early viners so you will see them usually first thing in the morning so you can learn something before or during work and use it in a conversation, flip out your fellow workers and become a vine word smythe at the same time.

I would like to also make Word Game Day, perhaps a sunday morning suppliment with coffee and the donuts you will all be sending me to work harder at WGD.

Also, this group is for creative writers, poets, dramatists, nutty satirists, simple home stories of love, friendship and fiction and reality of all kinds. It is for people who like words and like using them. We all came here for that, didn't we? Synonyms, antonyms, rhyme, meter, word twist, double entendres, simile, visual connection, symbol and meaning drive us to use words artfully. Let's all share our word art and learn more together.

 I want to think about what kind of seed would be acceptable at Word Play, I really don't want this to be a dumping ground for political word play, unless it adds a new word to our lexicon, that seems a good thing to me right now. Since seeds are accepeted I will continue to practice that while watching each one carefully.

Now, I have a small group that never really took off for many reasons 'koikeepers' for just koi, goldfish and pond people I thought. It seems a little too compartmentalized now and I will be re-building it as a group for anything FISH related. Keeping fish as pets, eating fish as food, catching them, releasing them, funny fish stories and seeds, real 'FISH STORIES', Fish recipes, fish science, fish politics, it just has to do with fish. I wil re-name it-Everything Fish.

I think this could create a better and more vibrant group about an important issue for many, FISH, we love em and we eat em, we want to pet them and swim with them and then we want to all have fish dream when we are not flying like birds (the distant cousins to the fish).

So here is what will now take more of my vine time. See you all around the Wrd Play table. The Game is afoot!

I think this is my longest headline ever. I am going for my 555 article soon. Wait to you see that one. tehehehehe

Well this weekend has shot by pretty fast. Left work Saturday morning 6/11/11 at 7am and headed to Blytheville to play a show for the classic car show/relay for life. It was hot and humid, I was like a water faucet but we put on a good show and gained a few new followers. There were close to 300 classic cars there and they raised a lot of money for cancer research.

Grabbed about a 1 hour and a half nap, then our band promoter had a BBQ for us and we all meet at his private club. Then that night we played at the American Legion #33 in Blytheville. After the show I drove home and got into bed about 3am and up 7am getting things done around the house. Then at 7PM I headed into to work for a 12 hour shift, but it has been a productive weekend. My singing partner Cheryl called this afternoon and I told I love playing the legion, she said she did also but I told no she didn't understand. Every time I play there I seem to come home in the song writing mood. So at 1:30am I was up writing and recording instead of sleeping.....So I will share the latest with everyone. No you may thing why write a song and call it old dog. I think once you read the words you will get the picture. I hope that I have painted a good story.

OLD DOG

Written by Jeff Knowlton 6/12/11

Intro in C major...........(talk) As I was walking down an ole alley of my little home town

Not doing much just bumming around..(2 beat pause)(sing)

I saw an old dog digging in a trash can

got me thinking he's not much different than a man

He was looking for some scraps to carry him through

and I'm walking the streets trying to forget you

chorus:

I guess I'm just an ole dog trying to find something else

To fill the emptiness I find in myself.

I guess I'm an old dog it's sad but true

I'll search these gutters till I find something to take the place of you.

Instrumental break

He moseyed down the street till he came to a bar and grill

Hungry inside he was searching still.

Till he met a pretty young waitress who brought him scraps from inside

Just like that ole dog I'll take what she gives just to get me by.

chorus:

I guess I'm just an ole dog trying to find something else

To fill the emptiness I find in myself.

I guess I'm an old dog it's sad but true

I'll search these gutters till I find something to take the place of you.

 After joining the Newsvine Summer Writer's Club, my mind was filled with words, thoughts, ideas, re-forming old ideas and making new ones from the old. Viki's Club again stirred that writing muse that really bites at me now. So, is this a project for me, a challenge, a whim or fancy, something to add to my repetoire or is it more?

When I was young, a stub of pencil and a blue lined notebook were like Christmas gifts for me. We had very little to amuse ourselves as children back then, but if I could sit down at the aluminum and formica table in the kitchen and write a story, I was happy and with-in a world of my own choosing. I spent rainy hours, nights and mornings sitting at that table teaching myself how to write stories, poems and plots. Then I discovered drawing and painting and soon lost time to even write a short poem. I was hooked on the visual world and it took me, and shook me and created the life I soon followed. I have not looked back since I made my choice and followed that path.

I have always combined the two art forms I dabble with, I write thoughts, ideas for paintings, sketch out diagrams with very descriptive notes and I would even sit and try automatic writing once in a while (which is not as easy as it would seem). Words and images are the two things that we use to develop understand, survival techniques, lessons are learned and new thoughts arrise, life goes on and we watch and record. Since all humans do this, I wonder if it is a need for all humans to try and do this, record thoughts, write words, paint pictures and carve sculptures to form images and thoughts for others to see. What makes us do this?

I cannot wait to see and read the other members work, this interchange and sharing is so important for us all. It gives us 'other eyes' that analyze different things than our eyes do. That is so re-freshing and 'eye opening' that the discovery process becomes exilerating. But there is a small aspect to this I would like to bring up, Critical analysis or Critiques from others. Critiscism and critical analysis is not easy. we all know we are our own worst critics, it is our nature to do that I think. As an art teacher, this has been the rockiest road I traveled on, art is personal, so personal that people get emotional about it.

Learning to critique another person's work is very tricky so I wanted to mention this and suggest we think about this issue. Good insight is important for us so we can develop our skills of communication. We want others to enjoy our work so outside critique is important then. So here are some ideas I use when I have to critique another person's work.

1. Try to be objective when writing a critical analysis of the art. Be clear with your thoughts and talk about what is working first. Build the positive first. Show how some parts may not be helping the stronger parts. The idea is to talk about the whole of the work while looking at the pieces.

2. When trying to point out a structural problem give a good example to show the artist or writer what you mean. Example- "Your descriptive words do not seem to make your character a likable fellow, Is that what you are going for?"

3. If you ask a question after your statement you then engage them in dialogue. This is the most important part of the critique, you are creating dialogue, that is where the analysis comes into play, it is not just criticism you are doing, you are creating dialogue.

4. Be less forceful in your thoughts, instead of just saying "this doesn't work right", say something like "What if you tried it this way", this again is engagment and not forceful submission for either party.

5. Both sides are trying to communcate so in order for that to go well we need to think about what is being said, take the time to really do that. Time is an important factor and we do have that here more than a face to face critique. If you want to critique a work don't just read and start picking it apart, take your time, read it, walk away and think, read it again and see if you still feel the same way about it, then write your thoughts. All art is not fast food, it is a gourmet dinner with courses to digest, take your time, have a glass of wine and think about it more. :)

One of the projects I want to do is combine my writing with my photo images. I want to create a specific image for each written piece. See what you got started Viki! LOL

Ghost fish words

go swimming through the trees

they branch out

and about

and I see the writing in the leaves

Cryptic calligraphy

gossamer weaves.

Joining Newsvine has opened up my writing demon again. It is not just a whim or fancy for me, it is another art form  to play with, to delve into the world and my mind. I hope to meet many more and new writers here this summer. Happy Summer Of Writing gang.

This is Spring Training of sorts for Newsviner Viki Babbles Gonia's Newsvine Summer Writer's Club Challenge. If I'm gonna do this, I might as well start now and figure out what idea I'm going to chisel away at. And see if I can post every day. I figure I'll go by week and update the post every day. So, week minus-1. Feedback welcome, fellow participation - in part or in full - encouraged.

5/17/2011 entry

I hate Darien’s door. It’s medieval. I stomp at it four or five times.

‘Darien!’

I wait another half-minute and he opens up. The door is four inches thick or so, huge hinges, no peephole. I don’t know what it’s made out of, and if I ask him I’m sure I’ll get a ten-minute answer.

‘Long time,’ Darien says, cuffing me like a mama lioness. I give him a hug. ‘Howsit?’ he says, pointing at a coat rack and heading back to his computer.

‘I’m good,’ I say, looking around his place. The guy is nothing if not consistent. Swords, shields, globes, magnifying glasses. And the huge flatscreen monitor on the white wall. Every other wall is a rich royal blue. I go to sit on the couch with him as he taps away at a keyboard that’s folded up in the middle. The shot from the camera above that damn door zooms offscreen and code comes up. He’s gonna make me ask.

‘I need a favor.’

Darien turns and squints at me through glasses that may have inspired the door and turns back to the screen.

‘Shoot.’

‘I need a background check.’ I really do. And I’m not handing my money to goddamn Intelius when I know Darien.

‘Who?’

I pull the driver’s license out of my hoodie and he pulls a magnifying glass off a side table. I watch his face. He doesn’t know her.

‘Bettye Cooke’. He pronounces it bet-yee. Maybe that’s how it’s pronounced. ‘This name could be more efficient, y’know? You don’t need the ‘e’s’. He’s typing.

I want to mention that maybe it’s pronounced the way he said it, but he’s typing and I’m dead tired. I look up at the screen and then look away. This house was built for one person.

‘Couple bank accounts, lots of addresses…she’s got a degree, no kids…you tryna ask her out?’ He eschews the magnifying glass and holds the license up to his face.

‘Gimme everything,’ I say, heaving myself up. ‘Can I fix myself something?’

‘If you make two’, Darien says. A minute later, after I’ve found his cheese grater, he yells, ‘Roddy! Everything everything?’

‘Sure,’ I holler.

‘Come look at this.’

I poke my head out of the kitchen. The screen looks much better from a distance, and my eyes have adjusted.

It’s a forum. I recognize the alternating grey-and-white rows, but it takes me a second to see what I’m looking at. I think I get it.

‘What am I looking at?’

I can see half of Darien’s smirk, which is plenty. ‘You are looking at a stalker or an impression of one. This is a local discussion board where Bettye Cooke is mentioned…174 times by one member. Usually it’s about how pretty she is.’ He looks at the license again, juts his chin out as he looks through his glasses at the screen. He looks like a kid at the movies. ‘I don’t get it. She is pretty…but this member's got a serious thing for her as far as individual postings. And no one else seems to be piling on.’

‘Give me everything on him, too.’ Darien’s fridge is abysmal. There’s no guacamole.

‘It might not be a him,’ he says, normal volume. I don’t know if I’m supposed to hear that or not. ‘It’s the Internet, man. Nobody is who they say they are.’

‘I don’t see how that’s any different than real life,’ I yell.

Ten minutes later, he’s got another name for me: Del Gardner. He recognizes this one. Between bites of quesadilla, he yells: ‘Del Gardner’s your man.’ After he explains how he tracked ol’ Del down, I’m done with my quesadilla.

‘What’s the connection?’

‘Not everything’s online, man. You can read through the board posts just as well as I can. I don’t have any overlap for you.’

‘Where’s my printout?’

Darien would look over his glasses at me, I sense, but there’s no way those things come off easy.

‘It has been a long time. What use do I have for paper? I’ll send it to you.’

‘You know I don’t check my email.’

‘Jesus. Got a pen?’

I do.

Word count: 660

Man, I'm going to have trouble with this every day thing. Especially if it's going to be 70 degrees in Seattle this regularly.

5/19/2011 entry

Character sketch:
Roderick ‘Roddy’ Lauder. Close to 30, born in a small town in San Mateo County to parents who still live there that are a lot older than him – he was a surprise only child. Father is Scottish, mother is Filipino. Left home after high school, moved to Seattle, became a cabbie. Through a series of favors, has a job waiting for him at the Greentop Cab Company. No partner yet. Returned to Seattle after traveling alone for a few years, getting cabbie jobs and detecting for money, spending most of it on the East Coast. Story begins as he returns to Seattle.
Motivations: Isn’t a licensed detective, but fell into the practice ‘following that car’ as a cabbie. Enjoys detective work because it’s long-form problem solving. Intensely self-sufficient. Not a whiteknighter, but not heartless. Is a very good liar, but values truth. The reason he’s a detective of sorts is that not much bothers him but when he can’t track down or figure out something, that really bothers him.
Appearance: Unassuming. 5’8”, 150, light brown skin, red-brown hair, which is occasionally observed as unusual. Dresses like an adult, but doesn’t have a lot of clothes – he’s been traveling! Carries a taser but no gun. Fights dirty and not exceptionally.
Base: Let’s have him settle somewhere near downtown in sailor housing, nothing too permanent.
Idiosyncrasies: Technophobe, anti-materialist except for a few things – CDs and candy. The type of guy who doesn’t put pictures on walls. Neat freak. Loves driving. Acquired a taste for terrible lager while traveling the country – National Bohemian, Rainier, etc.

Why do we care? The idea of a cabbie-as-detective is compelling to me. After reading so much Spenser - who's rarely motivated by the money and doesn't take jobs that don't appeal to him - removing any obligation of client-employee rules is something to play with. Plus, in big cities, no one notices cabs much. Presumably this can be used to his advantage during surveillance - it could also be amusing when people try to hail him.

As constructed, Roddy's kind of a vessel, so the story will have to be good enough for me to knead him around until I figure him out more. Maybe I'll use some of the days to come back and re-sketch him.

Next scene:

It's a digital world. Cabs have touchscreens now.

I drive a cab. No touchscreen in mine, thank you. A barfly in Maryland told me I had an 'analog soul' a few months ago. Funny, then, that this feels like returning home. Darien lives in South Seattle. I don't know quite where I'm going to live. I've got three duffel bags under the bed at a hostel in Pioneer Square, the oldest part of the city, the way the wind didn't blow when it caught on fire so long ago.

I fill up and return the cab to the lot in the Industrial District, which is just south of the stadiums, which are just south of Pioneer Square. I give my key to Mitchell at the desk, a young guy with his cap on backwards looking at his cell phone.

'Boss said you can keep yours,' he says, not looking up. 'Said yer back for a while.'

'Hold on to it for me,' I say. 'I don't know if I want my name screwed into the side yet.'

He shrugs with his face - bent his eyebrows and pursed his lips - and takes the key.

'Have a good one.'

I begin the walk to the hostel. The Industrial District gets less industrial as it approaches the two stadiums, one peeking behind the other, like two spaceships that landed on the edge of town proper. Behind me are shipping crates and cranes reaching out into the Sound. Bars and restaurants begin to cluster as I near the stadia. I think stadia is technically the correct term.

It's May. It's beginning to get beautiful, and the sunset will last a long time, slowly shifting from red to pink to orange. I pass a girl with her hair tucked back into her sweatshirt, earbuds in, intent on her phone.

Back in the hostel, I sit on the bed and think about the paper before I get it out of my jacket. It's not even paper, really. Darien ripped one of the first pages out of a book, with just the publisher on it. I should really carry a notebook. Some detective I am, not carrying anything to write clues down on.

Word count: 752

Writing in bed is not just about convenience or comfort. I think there's a psychological advantage, too. If you write in bed in the early morning (as I do occasionally) you occupy an intriguing part of consciousness, somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness. Part of you is still in the shadowy cave of dream world; part of you is adjusting to the sharp brightness of reality. The mixture is fruitful and often suggestive.

Earlier the small objects near the ground had seemed to glow with an eerie luminescence of their own, but as the darkness of predawn slowly changed to the dull gray of imminent sunrise, they were revealed to be nothing more ominous than toadstools growing on the stump of a rotte …

I used the analogy of the knife drawer - we all know which is the sharpest knife in our kitchen and invariably reach for it, bypassing the duller blades.  Writers should reach for the sharpest words possible - precision, focus, tone are the writer's sharp blades.

Good tips in here.

Zone 3 Press, housed at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, is accepting entries for a new book competition "open to anyone who can carve an artful exposition, drive a factual narrative, or strum a lyric sentence." One creative nonfiction manuscript will be selected for publication by the press, and the winning writer will receive one thousand dollars.

Shade of a man

Time degrades our body,

In every way it can,

And life takes it’s toll,

On each and every man.

Perception of who we were,

Seems to never be,

What we’ve become,

In this sick reality.

We become what we fear,

And wonder why,

We are born to suffer,

To ultimately die.

To die repeatedly,

In one way or another,

To lose friends, family,

To lose your brothers.

We live in the past,

Where happiness dwells,

With a grim future,

Suffering, it swells.

We don’t realize now,

The enjoyment of today,

And soon it’ll be to late,

We live lives of disarray.

Tomorrow we will live,

Today’s happiness and joy,

Today we suffer,

Living yesterdays Ploy.

We try to break free,

In everyway we can,

To end up becoming,

A shade of a man.

3-21-11

Kyle Craig

Dreadspydr

The green creep flex and bounce that tickles my skin and shapes my rest holds fast to the morning soak and chills me like a bath. I awake feeling the warmth of day rising like the theater curtain, slow and heavy, wrinkling in the shadows. She's been in my dreams, and I expect to see her here, momentarily, before she disappears into the sunrise glaze. But she's already gone even as my senses gel, and I'm only left with lonely the memory of something distant and soft and gone—a feather I never felt.

But: the memory embraces me, refusing to let go, and I hold back into it, unaware of its detail but not wanting to think too much for fear of filtering it away through cloudy groping futile semantic expectation. I know better than to think when I feel this strong. So we embrace.

When the boy comes over to me I'm awake in this dream, but instead of startling me, he makes me somehow smile, and threatens to give physical meaning to my perfect drifting muse. I look at him and sigh. He stares back, making up his own story for me, getting stuck somewhere for sure, and for a moment we dance together in each our own dream, me clinging to love given sudden innocent breathing presence and him testing quick and fantastically the possibilities of childhood comic book adventure—there is a stranger in the grass of his field—then he remembers his kite.

"Did you see anything red here?" he asks me.

"Pardon?"

"I think my kite is around here."

I get up on my elbows and look over the near green horizon. "I havent seen anything. I've been sleeping," and I catch his eye again.

"Did you come from the train?"

"Not exactly; not directly."

"Are you sick?"

"I feel okay."

"Do you want to help me look for my kite?"

"Yeah, let's do that. What happened to it?" I'm up, wiping lightly the dew from the back of me. He starts walking towards the distant broken fence.

"I lost it last Saturday when the storm came. The wind took it this way," and he pointed, walking slowly and scanning the ground. "I had to go inside because it got dark fast. Mom freaked out again."

"Storms are scary."

"I'm not scared of storms. It's just rain and noise. Mom is scared because of tornadoes. She always says," he said, pausing to roll his eyes, "'I was seven and a tornado took our house away.' She's scared of storms because of that. So I have to go inside every time it gets dark."

"I used to be scared of storms," I said, trying to identify with him.

"I'm not scared of storms. It's my mom."

I have no idea how to talk to a kid. "You should listen to your mom."

"I do," he said, me not getting the point. "Now I can't find my kite."

"It's red?"

"Yeah."

"We'll find it."

We shuffle slowly through the high wet grass. The sun is coming up behind us and we are following our shadows, their edges flickering on the bright grass. I turn and look back; the house, a low ranch surrounded by a low mowed lawn and a brown fence.

I remember my dream. The fence is a ways away, still.

"We shouldn’t go too far," I say. "Where were you when it blew away?"

"Up there," and he nodded way off. "But who knows where the wind blew it."

"That’s true." Anything could be anywhere.

I felt my fingertips and realized I had been biting my nails in my sleep again. Likely grinding my teeth again, too, although they didn’t ache. My back hurt. I didn’t want to walk all the way to that fence. At least not before we found the kite.

It was red and ripped, lying back up against a ditch, still and thin. The string was short broke torn close to the dowel in the middle, which had poked through the fabric, tearing it away from the seam.

"It broke," he said, and bent down at it.

"You can patch it. Right here, from there to there," I showed him. "Throw a knot on there and it'll be perfect. Better—it'll be stronger once you patch it." He watched my hands. "Actually you should patch both ends of the dowel, on the kite, here—just like where it's torn. That way, it won't happen again."

He nodded.

I stood up. "My back is killing me."

"I have to go fix this."

"Yeah—your mom and dad can help you."

"Thanks, sir."

"Hey." I looked at him and then I was back there, opening my eyes for the first time that day and feeling wet and blinded. "No problem. Just next time go inside before the clouds get over your head. Roll up the kite and give your mom a hug, 'cause she's scared of silly storms."

"Yeah."

I touched his shoulder and headed back towards the fence, following the tramped-down grass I left from the night before.

I'm agnostic about the benefits of creative-writing classes, but would-be fictioneers could do worse than emulate the greats

According to duotrope's digest, it's getting to be that time of year again, when writers of all stripes do their very best to write their very worst.

Sponsored annually since 1982 by the English Department of San Jose State University, the annual writing contest honors - in a manner of speaking - the memory of Victorian writer and prose windbag Edward George Lord Bulwer-Lytton, who left us what is often regarded as the worst opening line of an English novel ever penned. Beginning with the words made famous by literary icon Snoopy, the line begins, "It was a dark and stormy night..." It then shambles on for more than another 50 words before finally coming to rest somewhere in 19th century London, miles away from where it started.

This satirical contest challenges writers to compose a similarly bad opening sentence to an imaginary, awful novel.

This year's contest deadline for entries is April 15, 2011.

The contest's website, with links to past winners and directions for submitting entries, is: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

So come on, people. Get writing. Badly. :)

THE concept for establishing a collaborative enclave for writers is not new, but Marmaduke Writing Factory, a recently formed collective of professional writers here, has expanded that idea to include interaction with the general public.

He was the hard-living, fast-driving, pill-popping womaniser who was immortalised in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But what was it like to be married to Neal Cassady? As the Beats revival gathers pace, his wife explodes a few myths.

When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous '49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don't think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that's what you get in Bracknell and it's in Bracknell, near Windsor, that one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation lives.

Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it."

Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).

Thank you, Farhad.

Addendum: Two-spacers really are everywhere!
References if you like: MLA.
Proportional vs. Monospaced @ Grammar Girl [really good read].
Wikipedia's surprisingly thorough article on sentence spacing.

And here's a very good rebuttal I just seeded.

To the Georgia Department of Corrections he is inmate No. 544319, in prison on a five-year sentence for drug possession. But to the editors of Maxim, he is Mike Bolick, a faithful reader and regular letter writer who has loopy penmanship and an eye for beautiful cover models.

Mr. Bolick has become known at Maxim over the years for sending cover girls letters through the magazine with the hope that they will agree to be his pen pals. He is gracious and self-effacing, complimenting their beauty while asking them to please excuse his poor spelling and punctuation. He has plans to get his G.E.D. to remedy that, he explained in a recent letter to the pin-up girl Rachelle Leah.

"A figure of speech is a rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in distinctive ways. Though there are hundreds of figures of speech (many of them included in our Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis), here we'll focus on just 20 of the most common figures."

Oh bird! Why dost thou sit on yonder tree? Everyday that comes forth, Everyday You're sitting on yonder tree, never flitting Day after day, The bird still is sitting Sitting on yonder pear tree Morning come, singing, are you not?

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the labNot a creature was stirring, it was too dark and drab.The plans were laid by the workbench with care,In hopes that evilness soon would I share.

On or about January 5, 2011 the Authors' Challenges resumes. Here's how the Challenge works ... 1) An article will be posted announcing each new Challenge 2) Each Challenge will be based on an IMAGE posted with the Challenge rules

30 days hath November, you lousy jerks...

Yet more reasons to love the writing of John Scalzi.

I got in to a big tussle over this issue when I wrote a letter to the editor of the largest local paper here. My basic argument was "All information was and is a form of manipulation"!

Well, open for discussion. The big question series.

It's National Novel Writing Month! Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren't going to be worth the paper they're printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

5,000 word maximum, submissions are open from now until Nov. 20, 2010.

Entry fees are $3 for non-critiqued work, or $5 for entries that will be critiqued by Black Heart editor Laura Roberts.

The dusk can shatter a day

like a glass falling to the floor

With light so harsh

to blind

fools that look that way,

Dusk can be the carnaval of clouds

that drown

out the blues of the day

and dance across your view

with a glare and flare

of loud skirts,

Dusk can sing you to sleep

like a soft blanket of night

wrapped in slow time

lay down

on the soft moonlit grass

a bed of dreams as quiet

as a field of young sheep,

Dusk gives us all the time to stop

a chance

in Fall

to see the warmth of the end of the day

and the feel cool breeze

that calls to our winter

to come

and make dusk

have a shorter stay,

dusk says goobye

and then it goes away

and returns

after a long

and hard

day.

This is a story I wrote and illustrated for a "Reluctant Dragon" of a boy that rarely went to bed without diversions first.

The Dark Man lifted his barreled eyes from the page. He spoke through me, to reach an ear yet to open fully.

“There is no music in these words.”

My arms rested on cool Formica while my head rang to the beat of the swinging clapper within. His arms floated, supporting the leaves of bonded rag containing my darkest remembrance, honed to an evil shine. He held my best light and spoke the words that dimmed its glow, repeating himself for the benefit of my deaf mind.

“There is no music in these words.”

My hearing improved on the second try and the space between us grew longer as the air drew closer. I felt the horizon recede with his eyes, sunk so deeply into his head, disappearing behind a tilted brow. Having made his judgment, he now awaited mine. I began –

“This is supposed to be a story, not a song.”

He presented the pages back toward me, as if to reject my spoken words along with those written.

“Every song is a story. Every story is a song.”

I reached out for my forsaken tale, but he pulled it back, offering a forceful gaze in its place.

“You have written lyrics without a point of reference. Words without an inner harmony cannot reach deeply into any conscious soul.”

I did not understand and said so. Holding the papers out once more, the Dark Man at last allowed me to accept delivery. He paused to take in what air was left us, and then ordered me to select a passage, any passage.

“Sing the words to me. Perhaps your music is too subtle for this reader.”

I complied, or tried to; the effort left me red and sweating. The ensuing silence shrunk me to a period on a page. Another lifetime passed before he spoke.

“Either you are a bad singer, or this is a bad song.”

“Or both,” said I.

“Or both.”

That left nothing more to say and nothing more was said. I arose from the table, seeking air and light, and abandoned the pile of words, the tangled ball of punctuated strings, to the vacuum of dead night.

• As we travel the path before us, sometimes running & jumping in the light of a noon day, & at other times we are groping & sensing our way to the next small step, terrified about what the next turn will bring....

• There is one thing for certain. We are traveling our own path. Where are the footsteps in the dirt ahead to show the way? Are the fairy-tales & myths we were told as a child just that, fairy-tales & myths?

• Even if we travel with a guide of some sort, there are moments, unavoidable & cruel...when even that guide has left us to wander. Alone, with the decisions of where to plant our next step. Right or Wrong it is our path and ours alone to bare.

• There are those about us, that will remember us when we are gone. They will however move on. What do we leave on this little rock in space, that will stand true, and make some change?

• I will never know all the answers as to why or how, we all end up in the same moment with that last breath of life, & look around and wonder, were we right or wrong....?

-Maddad

First let me thank dmlane for reminding me of this poet and his book.

Rainer Maria Rilke started writing his Letters to a Young Poet in 1903. It was later published as a book.

In Graduate school one of my professors saw I was struggling with my work and suggested I get Letters to a Young Poet and read it and then come back and talk to her. After reading it I went back to her and told her there was no reason to discuss anything now, I was OK. Rilke's book opend up a lot for me and answered many questions about my art, why I make it and what to do with my life. I wish to leave just a little of his writing for you, the artist, the writer, the poet the actor or any person struggling to ask "WHY".

RANIER MARIA RILKE- first letter Paris, Feb. 1903 "You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now, (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all--ask yourself in the stillness of your hour of night; must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must", then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it."

This is just one passage from one letter. it continues and goes beyond this into all the questions creative people have about what they do. My copy stayed in my back pocket for almost two years and is now rounded and formed like my rear end. I pulled it out of the bookcase and it simply curved into my shape.

I believe this book can help those who struggle with many aspects of their life, it is a small book but its message is large and timeless.

I must read it more often.

I speak to you good friend

sharp eyed and finger

nimble

Painter of sin

and symbol,

shade caster of

HELL

you are

seated just so

in black hat

and

blood red

winding sheet,

I see you as you

sketch

the village

of the doomed

all

mutifaced and

faceted

like demonic

jewels,

You place yourself in Hades

in oils

on the wood

did you see

or hear something

that said

you should?

A few weeks ago, we published an article on the Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook. For that piece, we dug through old books to find references to how pocket notebooks had been used this past century by men in different walks of life. In the process of compiling those excerpts, we came across intriguing references to how some of the famous men of history used their pocket notebooks and decided to put together a whole post exploring that subject.

The result is this look at how 20 famous men used their pocket notebooks.

All of a sudden I hear a scream from the kitchen, it was my mother's sister, yeah my aunt, now she a bit old but damn can she give a whale of a scream. She was in the kitchen and I in my room, I was a firecracker as I ran to the kitchen from my room, ok it is not a huge house so it was a short trip, but I found myself out of breath. I know I should do some exercises. Ok, OK lots of them. Anyways, my mother's sister, dang, yes I know my aunt was making some pupusas and anybody that knows what those Salvadorian delicacies are would know that they have cheese and someone had forgotten to buy the cheese. I swear that is when I started calling my aunt my mother's sister. That scream was like if someone was being skinned alive.

Since I got there so fast they thought I could get the cheese fast but what happened to me on the way to El Mercado was so crazy that I still can't believe it. Now I am not of those that believe everything I read on signs but when I read "an enchilada a day keeps the dr. away," I immediately thought it must be a new kind of discovery cause it was just too out there to be a lie, and the last time I took a sings message to heart it really helped me get rid of my embarrassing dilemma. You see I suffered of sasquacherietis, hey don;t make fun, I was like the missing links long lost cousin, ok damn it, I hate it when people drag it out, a near brother, hell the way I looked I might have been the missing link's son, but enough! That sing advertised electrolysis and it really did the job. Yup I believed it and went in to eat a few, hey if one a day keeps the dr. away I thought 3 a day would give me superpowers and well get rid of my problem. They sure kept the dr. away and they sure gave me super human powers, I swear I almost took off like a rocket off the toilet, it seem the cheese was a bit too aged and guess what I found out, it was bought at the same Mercado I bought the cheese for my mother's sister's pupusas. Sorry but I have a vengeful heart or should a say a good for one is good for all heart, so I failed to mentioned it to the rest of my family before they ate the pupusas, but for some reason I was the only ass taking off that night. I wonder. This will be the last time I take a sing's message to hear....oh gosh, 5...4....3...2..........

A dead suit talks

while lying on the satin bed

A voice is there

but I don't see a head

It creeps me out

but I don't pout

its in my head.

.....

.....

A dead flower lies

on side the suit,

it was dropped

with sobs

that were, at best,

astute,

.....

.....

The box lay on gold

my, that was so

bold,

the ghost that was inside all our

heads

was just a man who never

went to bed.

Images and words together paint a larger story. They are an addition to the words as the words are used describe the photo which is chosen to match the symbolism, or to enrich the texture.

We connect words to image, article to photo but we sometimes forget the smallest detail. The detail that was once used in books to enhance the our pleasure and knowledge.

Captions are as important to the whole experience you present as the words, sentences and structure of your article. The photos are wonderful additions but think about the addition of a caption to enhance our experience even more.

I had a teacher who thought that titles for paintings were simplistic and unnecessary. I disagreed and still do today. Each small detail is a part of the whole. The wheels are just a part of the bike.

The hope of plurality is made up by the single thought of each individualist. A presence in the tribe looking for the balance in everything in the social web. The singular source of blood looking to make the body move, chained together with all the others that make up the whole system.

A country is a body, a large entity that lumbers along at a slower pace than the parts that make the whole. Speed is the individualist, thought and action that activates and makes the energy flow. When all the parts are active and fired up, the body starts to move. All the parts must work together, timing, the combination of momentum, of decision and will.

Our country and every other country is a living force made up of many. Each looks for survival in a dangerous world.

Working together takes perseverance, trust, and truth in purpose, which road to look to, which way to travel, step forward, left or right, stop, turn, go back, sit, wait, breath and look again, stand and move that way.

A body that has multiple messages thrown at it has multiple duties, listen, speak, ignore, laugh at, agree with, to follow or revolt against.

Complexity in life is as rich as complexity in politics. The life is not simple, the life of one, the individualist is complex and rich. The lives of all Americans is more than that one. the rope begins to knot.

The lives of the many running the country are rich with depth, intertwined with our lives and life itself.

The Gordian knot that is bigger than the largest sword.

We only have penknives as individuals, we only cut the knot a little, a veerrryyyy little as individuals.

The bigger the knife, the bigger the cut, simple, helllll no.

Parties, clients, workers, bosses, industry,supplies, money, members, ideologies, religions, affiliations, media moguls, channels, unions, associations and associates, families, races, social elevation or de-elevation, oil, profits, loses ..........

Need I go on?

You can make your little cuts that seal before you finish. no blood, no scab, no hurt that will makes the body stop or change.

You can ask others to work with you to change that direction.

You don't yell, demand or force. You ask.

The mass makes the body move, the mass of grey matter in the head. We are that mass, each a small nueron. The president, each senator, each representative and government worker are moved to relay messages from the millions of individuals and make the body move. We snap together and it listens, we snap out of sink then the body takes over and makes choices, listen, ignore etc.....

Some believe this is the signs of entropy, the end of empire,the fall after the rise, the last century.

Some believe that we are diseased, and medications and rest are not needed, quick, painless surgery is called for, you know surgeons, always ready to cut.

I am one that believes that we need a personal, inner voice that asks ourselves what and who we are. The individual is the first place to start the body moving. It is the real spark of the universe.

Don't labor over it.

Find what works and get it done.

Then ask.

Everyday on the numerous news shows there is a politician, a wanna be politician, a stratigist or someone blaming the "other side" for what ever the political hot potato for the day is. Some of that blame is justified and some of it is bull and most of it is just plain old politics. But unfortunately it is a much more dangerous political game these days. I am just waiting for the riots to start. Christian values? Seriously? Since when is hating thy neighbor a Christian value? When did inciting violence become a Christian value? How did hate and bigotry become acceptable to so many people who call themselves Christians? If you believe in God then do you really think he would agree any of this? I have talked to and heard many people use the bible and quotes from it to try and justify their actions and words so I thought I would try it myself and see if it helps make my point.

" The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy" Psalm 103:8

"A soft answer turneth away wrath:
but grievous words stir up anger."
Proverbs 15:1

"A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension,
but a patient man calms a quarrel."
Proverbs 15:18 "The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger,
And his glory is to overlook a transgression."
Proverbs 19:11 "Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry:
for anger resteth in the bosom of fools"
Ecclesiastes 7:9 "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour,
and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:"
Ephesians 4:31

So I ask once more ...if you consider yourself a Christian do you believe that God would agree with all the hateful words and deeds that are being said and done by people who say they are Christian. Do you believe that He would be out there protesting the community center (that is what it is) in New York? Do you think that He would approve of signs that promote bigotry, of politicians using Christianity as a means to incite fear and anger so that they can get elected, of the threats of violence that comes from bringing guns to public meetings or the killing of doctors and nurses in the name of life? When the killings of innocent American Muslims begin do you think God will say ...."it is the right thing to do"? Do you believe he thinks it is okay to burn down someones house of worship no matter what faith is practised there?

We are being told that we need to return to the "Christian" values that formed our country. Correct me if I am wrong but I always thought that many came here to be free from religious persecution, to be free to practice any religion they wanted, to be free from those who would tell them who to worship or how to live their lives. The far far far right reminds me of the those they sought to escape from. Basically they want to tell me that if I do not believe in the things they do, if I do not agree with everything that they want, if I do not practice their version of Christianity then I am unamerican, a terrorist, a Nazi or worse. They do not want anyone telling them they are wrong, they do not want the government in their lives( except when they need it for such things as money for education, social security, medicare, disaster relief,ect), they use fear to raise the anger level in their followers, and worse yet they use the name of God as if He is the leader of their movement, as if they alone can know what He wants. Glenn Beck is an excellent example. I do not care if he wants to hold a rally. He can have a hundred of them. But do not tell me that God is speaking through him or through anyone who has an agenda other than God's. And please do not try and convince me that God is guiding them down this path that will only divide our country even more than it is. The ones who are leading this only crave money, fame, and power. And among the ones who follow them there may be a few that actually believe, some who are just plain scared of change, and more that just see this as a way to promote their own bigoted ideas and beliefs.

So who will you blame when the signs, the name calling, the hate filled rhetoric, the bigotry, and the fear drive some person to believe that killing a politician,an American Muslim, a protester on the "other" side, their neighbor because they voted for Obama or bombs a Mosque. Who will you blame when our country starts to resemble other ones whose citizens fight each other over whose religion is the true one? And where will it end? With the killing of all the Muslims in America, with the deaths of any non-believer no matter what color they are, with the deportation or worse of all immigrants, with women and girls carrying the babies of rape and incest, with the segregation of schools once more, with militias having the right to shoot on sight, with Christianity as the only religion in our country and what will happen if they decide that Jews, Catholics, Mormons and others do not have the right to practice their religions either?

I believe that we all need a healthy dose of common sense and a history lesson.

A new biography of Marcus Aurelius finds the great thinker's philosophy no fun at all. But a good dose of stoicism might be just what we need.

Soft screen scratches

night passage

a single

then a pair

fragile planes catch the page,

Fox fire fair

street lights that stare

they mix

while some expire,

Mist to mire

then to fragrance

and spire

dancing like a summer sail,

Soft wings higher

in spooky attire

woolen with

soft eyes that never cry,

Wind swept quiet

flew right by it

a flashing pilot

hides before the dawn begins.

What am I?

"I was standing in the cafeteria line, and this boy who I don't even know poked me in the back and said, 'I know what your mom does. She writes about S-E-X!' " She started crying harder. "And he was singing it like it was a dirty song, and I wanted to slap him so hard that his head would fly off because it's none of his business, and it was so humiliating, and now Ms. Stein is making us write a paper about what our parents do for a living, and--"

"Times may be tough for book sellers, but for Stephen King, James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, the money keeps rolling in.

from CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The most immediate glamour of New York City is certainly vertical—that happy and gleaming and aggressive concrete and glass phenomenon. The statue out in the harbor seemed smaller than I had expected, further away, but she was still there. Lower Manhattan formed a towering semi-circle of glowing glass around and above us. Walking down Broadway, as my route took me to work, even relatively low buildings formed that canyon—a deep gorge cut into the concrete evidence of this our great capitalism. Trinity Church launched into the sky unafraid, sharp and mean. And beyond the church, beyond the Broadway gorge, stood the stark, bright, vertical sprawl of the World Trade Center towers. Each of the two buildings filled with legends and haunts and even new energies, and though I knew none of them, I felt them inside. It wasn’t yet a relationship, perhaps, but it was a familiarity, and a comfortable, welcome one, and it was exactly what I wanted.

And that’s what I was thinking, sitting on that bench, feeling and seeing those objects of strength all around me, those great architectural dreams like elevators to God and money.

I don’t remember when the visions started, when I started imagining them falling—and at first I giggled at the truth I thought was behind them—a blind guy trying to blow up the once tallest buildings in America. My memory images of that event are of weeping female office workers gagging through handkerchiefs, and the shady robed ringleader in court—we saw the Gotham tabloid headlines on the local television news upstate. It was a laughable attempt on mighty America, but it did thrust my imagination toward very bad things.

Now there, seeing them, I imagined something deadly and sharp, something hacking at the towers from just above the foundation, and both buildings then toppling like thin, once sturdy trees into the underbrush below. First they came down south. Maybe while I sat there that day, eating my lunch, considering my new place in the world, maybe some time vaguely “later,” I saw them possibly reaching the park, spreading a shaking rumble for blocks upon impact, scattering debris like torn leaves and dirt on the faces of stunned onlookers.

Imagining the geometry of triangles, I tracked them down—if they fell east, it would be onto Wall Street, north into Tribeca, bringing down studios, art lofts, men in black, women in heels and sunglasses and scarves. Sometimes, just for the splash, I’d crash them into the Hudson River.

Can you imagine those things coming down like that? Barely like trees—more like telephone poles, perfectly straight and true, the sky blackening over us, the shadow quickly growing, like a fresh blood spill, to encompass everything in sight, and then a thunderous stomp.

And then a silence.

What was it that brought my imagination to that horror, benign as it was, lacking in blood and death and stink? How did I get there? First I saw myself as an integral and necessary part of the reality of historic and forever Manhattan and then I was destroying people like ants under the weight of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the world. Was this my humanity? My shared humanity? Or was it an anomaly in me, a sociopathic flaw? Or fear?

Of course, it was none of that.

Was I @!$%#ing kidding? It had nothing to do with reality—towers don’t fall like that—towers don’t fall at all—it was just their striking and lopsided height that, to my eyes and to my brain, all untrained in even simple physics, made them seem unstable, like objects as fleeting as a tower of baby blocks on the floor or a straw standing on your fingertip. Those things fall because they’re supposed to fall, but skyscrapers don’t fall like that—I was being stupid. And since it wasn’t a real threat, it became a daydream, a fantasy, a musing, a meaningless photograph in the mind repeated so often that its very repetition becomes the familiar stuff we need to find comfort in the kind of chaos that won’t fit in a frame.

But it wouldn’t go away. It didn’t take long to run through all the terrible possibilities, and even though my twisted curiosity had been satisfied, I couldn’t keep the image from coming back. And then came all the guilt, fear, sadness and rage about what happened later, and nothing in my head worked the same anymore. After being harassed by my own daydreams for so many years, all I wanted was for them to come back.

______________________________________

This is the eighth in the series of excerpts from my new novel, currently being shopped to agents, called "The Light That We Can See." The series can be found here.

Check my column or follow my Twitter page for regular updates, and very soon I'll be releasing CHAPTER ONE for download, as well as a new ebook collection of brutally honest essays about sports & politics, titled "It's Not Just a Ballgame Anymore."

So stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

5. Where it's at—Setting the scene

6. Some Good Ol-Fashioned American Truth

7. The Return of Freddy the Fetus

Big Sur is not the book to be reading in my condition. But it's not like you wake up one morning suddenly capable of making all the right decisions, no matter what happened the night before.

I've been cleaning up roadkill in front of the house all summer. It's always just another opossum or groundhog with compromised depth perception or a bad sense of hearing, or maybe a few of 'em just stumbled over themselves on the way across. Imagine tripping over your own two feet on the way back from the bathroom in the middle of the night and careening into the front wheel well of a monstrous semi that wasnt supposed to be there, in the night, in the hallway between you and your lover.

Do sleepy-eyed groundhogs startle when they hear the distant dull thud of skull on steel and worry that their whole life is about to be turned upside down? Or do they just keep digging?

The first sign that things were going wrong was the dead bunny near the fence in the backyard. I was pulling weeds and there it was, legs reaching, ears limp, just lying there. It was so small I didnt even need the flat-bottomed shovel I bought last year at the hardware store when I realized part of my responsibility as the alpha-male tenant in our lonely old farmhouse was going to be cleaning up every dead animal from the side of the road before the stink sets in. I just grabbed a garbage bag, scooped the thing up, tied it off, and dropped it in the trash can.

More disturbing was when, a few weeks later, one of the boys found the pink remains of a baby mouse in front of the shed. That we had mice was nothing new—you can hear them scurrying away every time you go in for the lawn mower. But to find one so recently alive and still so skeletal, and so far from whatever hole or tit it must have just been clinging to, could only be a bad sign.

After a while, you stop paying attention to the night sounds. Moths that dont look like much as they're fluttering around like idiots near the flame become big as a truck when they bang headlong into the plate glass window, and if you're not used to it, that alone can be enough to make you drop your banana. But you've also got the rose bushes scraping unpruned along the bottom of the aluminum siding on the back porch, which really gets going in the wind, and the mature cornfield hissing at you, and the angry pops of seven-fingered-Sheldon firing off M-80s down the hill next to the pond, not to mention the rumble scream of overnight truckers and low-rent tweakers in their refurbished Jettas shooting this one last straightaway before the road turns to village, where the cops like to hide.

So the screaming I heard last night wasnt enough to move me from the keyboard. I know I dont have much time left, so it's been late nights out here in the void, trying my good goddamndest to find a final gambit to play, which requires plenty of attention to craft, not to mention long stretches of uninterrupted self-editing and proofreading, which is no small task when you're sitting in the middle of a low-pressure zone like this 24 hours a day, protected by the most imaginary warm front.

In the morning, out in the back, though, there were signs of a struggle. Barely covering a fresh patch of raw dirt ripped up in the grass were a few handfuls of black feathers, but no meat.

It couldnt have been the farm cat, which hasnt been seen alive since that smear of orange fur showed up one morning lining the narrow part of the shoulder near the bend in the road. Foxes dont go after birds unless it's personal, but maybe the bird went after more than it could keep down. At times like this, it's not uncommon to become too greedy for your own good.

Meanwhile, what's really starting to gnaw at me is the guppies overbreeding in the fish tank. Maybe they'd be better off if I dumped them in the pond—

—though, if Sheldon sees me compromising his ecosystem I might be in for it...

But I cant afford to be throwing food at them every morning if they're going to keep going at it like that. Every few days I let them skip a meal, but all they do is eat their young and @!$%# for more. At some point, I'm going to have to start killing things myself—and it's going to be more than just the tiny flies that come in through the screens. One of the breaking points for ol Jack in Big Sur was when he accidentally let the goldfish die. But at some point, it's going to come down to either me or the fish, and it's tough to stand up to superstition when even the rabid midnight chaos keeps repeating the same stories over and over again.

What is wrong with this country? We seem to have developed selective memory loss. Any lessons we learned from past mistakes have gone right out with the dish water. There are many examples of our failure to retain those lessons.

Immimgration? Where did your family originally come from? Unless you are one hundred percent Native American then your roots sure did not start here. Why did our ancestors come here? Some of them were forced to, some were the worst of the worst. Sent into exile for their crimes so that many of us have a few ancestors we would rather not know about. But most came to start a new life, full of hopes for a better future for themselves and their children. Free to worship as they pleased, able to own property, free from a life of indenture or worse. Many came to escape debtor prisons or workhouses. It seems to me that the only ones who have a right to scream about immigration is the Native Americans. The rest of us got where we are by basically stealing this country from them and now we are screaming that other immigrants are trying to "take over our country."

We want to pretend that we are so much better than we really are. Some want to rewrite history. Slavery was just that... slavery... no matter what you call that shameful part of our history. The KKK was and is just a bunch of white supremacists. Most homegrown militias are just groups of bigots with guns. We scream about our "rights"then turn around and deny or try to deny a woman's right to decide whether or not to have a baby, to deny gays the right to marry the person they love, we use and abuse the right of freedom of speech, and we definitely do not want any one to have the right to practice a religion we do not approve of. There are others who are so concerned with criminals rights that many in jail have a better place to live, tvs, gyms, and more to eat than our poor who live in cardboard boxes and under bridges ( who by the way are not all drug addicts, drunks or crazies). We have forgotten what we learned or should have learned from the race riots, from the days of back street abortionists, from the women's movement, from Viet Nam, from slavery, and from the days when guns were used as the law of the land.

When I listen to the never ending barrage of "news" I am constantly aware of how little of it has any substance to it. We have become slaves to the latest headlines. It does not seem to matter if it is true or not. The slightest rumor has us running to the blogs, twitter and facebook. Yesterday there was a man on one of the many news programs who wants to bring back prohibition and seems to believe that it would solve many of our problems. Then there are those who believe that less laws pertaining to guns will be better. Or those who seem to think that all the unemployed are just a bunch of lazy people who do not want to work or maybe they think we should try the debtor prisons and workhouses that worked so well for Europe all those hundreds of years ago. When did it become acceptable for news stories to be twisted to fit a person's or station's political agenda? Get real..death panels, a test for voting rights, firing someone because of something a blogger says, or getting the governments hands off our medicare ..really? Where has all our common sense gone? When did we become so indifferent to the truth and so willing to believe out and out lies if it fits into what we want to believe? When did it become acceptable for our politicians to call for and encourage violence and bigotry? When did we quit thinking for ourselves?

I admit I lean more left than right but that does not mean that I am blind to the sins and faults of that side nor do I believe that there is no merit to anything the right has to say. What I do believe is that the division in this country is going to be our downfall if we do not learn ( again) to listen to each other, to find the middle ground, to stop the hate-filled rhetoric, to not go backwards instead of forward and above all take religion out of politics. Since when is it okay to use religious beliefs to spread hate and fear? The mood of our country is becoming more dangerous daily. The election of a African American president has certainly shown the true colors of many and never in my lifetime have I ever seen the level of resistance in Congress to get anything done just for the sake of political gain as I do today.

We have much to be proud of and I still get chills when I sing God Bless America or our national anthem. We can support our troops and not the wars. We can disagree with our President and still respect the office he holds. We can have a political debate without name calling or threatening violence. But those of us who understand this do not get the air time that the screamers and the far fringes of both sides do. On the other hand we have had many shameful episodes in our history and it seems to me that if we do not start remembering past lessons learned we are heading for another one.

What follows is the new and never-before-seen Introduction to my upcoming ebook, "It's Not Just a Ballgame Anymore," which will be available at an online retailer near you very soon (as soon as I get a permissions thing covered). It is comprised of a collection of articles originally published here at Newsvine between October 2006 and February 2008, about sports, politics and family, with a dash of hedonism and recklessness.

______________________

By the fall of 2006, I had already spent a year and a half of my life without the comforting words of Hunter S. Thompson, and I was obviously feeling the pain. We were two years deep into the despair that set in after George W. Bush was elected for the second (first) time, just a year out from Katrina, and more mired in the Middle Eastern conflicts than we’d ever been.

On the upside, the Buffalo Sabres were about to embark on one of the most exciting seasons in their history, the Mets were looking good, and the football season—well, the football season was sinking into unprecedented violence, but that was nothing new. I had a cushy corporate job in an air-conditioned office, my custody situation had settled to the point where I could enjoy my two young sons without worrying too much about being stalked by crazy ex-in-laws, and just that August my girlfriend and I were married in an intimate setting at a shady bed and breakfast in a little village near the Susquehanna River. Things were looking up. I had even started writing again.

And maybe that was my mistake.

But the story really started in Buffalo, NY. That’s where I was born, went to college, and began my career. My family spent all our holidays in Buffalo, where grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins lived. Even though I didn’t spend all my childhood in Buffalo, the city’s history got through to me. It was packed with the schools all my elders attended. My uncle worked at Bethlehem Steel. My cousin grew up to work at the Ford plant (which, by the way, is misplaced in the scene in Buffalo 66, which is nevertheless a terrific film about the pain of being a Buffalo sports fan). I loved the time I lived there as an adult and, to be honest, I probably would have stayed there forever—with my friends and family—had my first wife not so despised the place. Because I loved it. And I went to a lot of games.

During my last years of college and into my “regular life,” the Bills were losing their four straight Super Bowls. And not in random fashion, either. People remember those games. Most of all, I remember the first one and the last one—the only two the Bills could have—should have—won.

Meanwhile, the Sabres were mired in mediocrity. I was too young to remember the 1975 Finals loss to the Flyers, but I rooted for the Sabres for just as long I could, and back then it wasn’t a complete failure to make it to the second or third round of the playoffs.

Then came 1999. It was enough to make us forget about the half-assed best of times of the past twenty years, even those things which made us proud—Pat LaFontaine, Clint Malarchuk, Alex Mogilny, Brad May. In 1999 it was different. They even opened the Finals series with a road victory, and that is something that is supposed to be a good sign. After four games, the series was tied—still great news for a scrappy blue-collar team with the best goalie in the world.

But then it happened, just like it happened to the Bills against the Giants, except this was worse.

Three overtimes into Game 6 on Buffalo ice, Dallas Stars forward Brett Hull placed his skate inside the goal crease and then shot the puck into the net, which was as categorically illegal a goal as the NHL had at the time. The two-word mantra that came next, “No Goal,” is the only justice that remains from that night, but bumper stickers and whining don’t put the Stanley Cup in your hands.

It had been a reckless ride as a Buffalo sports fan. I can’t explain it, other than it’s there, just like most of my family is still there.

On October 9, 2006, an earthquake was detected in southeast Asia that was actually North Korea’s first nuclear test, and the Sabres were three games into a ten-game undefeated stretch to open a brand-new season that promised to be even more exciting than the year they lost the Cup without giving up a game-winning goal. I watched nearly every minute of it, but I wrote about it less frequently—afraid to jinx up the works. But as the season became the playoffs and the playoffs grew more tense and exciting, and as we almost started to taste it, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it was my writing that finally caused them to lose again. That’s the kind of superstition that Buffalo fans don’t forget, even well after they’ve thrown all their saints and crosses out in the trash.

I don’t know if there will ever be redemption for Buffalo fans. It’s no consolation to point out to naysayers that the Bills won the last two AFL Championship games, just before the merger. It’s no consolation to insist, rightly so, that the goal was, let's be clear: No Goal at all.

And having a little package of essays is no consolation, either. But I don’t have to ask myself if I would trade them for a Stanley Cup, because when and if that Cup finally comes, part of the joy I feel will be a result of many of the things I explored during their run. They didn’t all have to do with hockey, but being a tortured but optimistic fan inspired them all.

This is a road diary of sorts—the scribblings of scenery and prose sketches from a writer who happens to be a huge Sabres fan but who was so far from home that the only remaining connection was on the page. It’s also the notes of a disillusioned American. Because amidst the sad and chaotic decline of the Bush administration, the anguish after the Sabres’ fall from grace came just as this country was preparing its one shot to grab control of the swirling wreckage. And we failed at that, too.

But there’s always hope, as long as there’s another game to play. And, while the helicopters may loom, and the poor become poorer and keep dying in our streets, and Congress keeps cashing its payroll checks from Wall Street, it’s not over until you hear the whistles. I’ve seen enough Holocaust films to know that that’s when you’re really @!$%#ed, and we’re not there yet. The evil empire may keep punching us in the gut, but even the Red Sox won eventually, and so will we.

The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics.

from CHAPTER TWO

Gene had it all, and he could keep it. Pampered—finely groomed and tuned, living in Westchester with a third wife and a pair of out-of-control twins in elementary school. He had college-aged children with one of his two previous wives, too. Sometimes one of them called the office during a meeting and he’d take fifteen or twenty minutes to cover some matter of no importance to me—money or vacations or grades or cars or shopping lists.

If it wasn’t one of his kids, it was his stock broker calling about massive quantities of cash that had to be moved right away, but only if a quick decisions could be made, or it was his wife, or one of his ex-wives, or some old brother-in-law looking for a loan. Everything about his conversations reminded me of something I didn’t have—money or children or relationships that meant something—good or bad alike. Even if I didn’t want them, I knew I didn’t have them. And I didn’t want to be sitting there thinking about someone else’s @!$%# going on when I had my own @!$%# going on, while I had my own reasons for being there—trying to fill all the gaping voids in my own life.

He kept a digital voice recorder going in his desk drawer at all times, compelled by a past attempt by a malcontent to make false sexual harassment claims. He confided in me deep resentments for others. He was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, a former wannabe rock star, an aging hippie, something of a madman out of place in the corporate world. He had to surround himself with trusted subordinates, but he still didn’t trust anyone. If I tried anything with him, I tried to be trustworthy. Some people made fun of his paranoia but I was cool with it. He might have been a little skittish, but he was methodical, and, even with all the interruptions and annoyances, I knew what to expect, and it made sense to me, even though his personal life made me anxious. Plus, he taught me everything I knew.

_____________________________________

If anyone in my family happens upon this article, they'll know immediately what the headline refers to, and they'll get a good giggle.

But they probably won't know what it means, any more than you know why the character of Gene is named Gene, or why thats important to the story, but I can help with that, even though I have no intention of giving anything away.

See, a lot of what fills the pages of novels is backstory that never makes the cut, or was never intended to. "Freddy the Fetus" actually doesnt mean anything to the main character, Addie, either, but thats okay.

Before I was born (the real me, not the fictional, excerpted narrator from the selection above), my grandfather built me a dresser from solid wood scraps he found in a junkyard. I was the first grandchild, and he was a carpenter, so there you go. My parents took it home and painted it a rich blue and white. They knew I was a boy, but they hadnt yet picked out a name.

My dad's family was (and still is) very close. His Uncle Gene, who never married, was a pretty popular guy, and family names were a big deal—my father's first name came from his grandfather and his middle name from his great-grandfather. So Dad's plan was to name me Eugene.

But there was still some disagreement, and thank @!$%# for my mom, who stepped in and, simply because she liked the way they sounded, established an Irish tradition for her children's names (even though my father is only half Irish, if that, and my mom is Hungarian). Not that I dont love people named Eugene, but, well—lets just say it's yet to make a comeback as a popular boy's name.

So, in the indecision of the moment, on the back, in bright white paint that still remains, even as the big old thing sits, otherwise several times refinished (but always in blue and white), in my sons' bedroom, is the dedication my dad wrote to his future son: DEDICATED TO FREDDY THE FETUS, 6-12-70.

Now, "Freddy" was never my nickname or anything, and neither was "Gene," but when it came time for me to try to figure out the role that Addie's boss has in this book, what kept jumping out at me was that my boss, in real life, always seemed like he represented exactly who I was going to end up becoming if I stayed with the company long enough.

While that made me uncomfortable, I didnt see much of a way out of it. Like me, he was hard-working, brutally honest, socially awkward, and sometimes too abrasive for his own good, and we both had a knack for print production. We werent identical twins, by any means—he got manicures, I chewed my nails. He lived to work, while I worked to live (or so I told myself). He could betray you on a whim, while I was fiercely loyal to a fault. He was savvy and perceptive about other people, and I was little more than a confused misanthrope who could only guess at what people were really thinking.

On the other hand, I certainly envied his income, and, even though I wouldnt have spent my money on frosted hair, gold jewelry or expensive electric guitars, it would have been nice to spend it on something. (Addie does have a few things on the shopping list of his dreams, but we're not going to get into that here.)

Of course, the events in "The Light That We Can See" dramatize my experiences drifting further from, not closer to, the corporate role model my boss played for me. As we all know, thats not where I ended up. 9/11 changed things for a lot of people, and it changed them for Gene, too, but I promised there wouldnt be any spoilers, and I have to keep my promises.

But I named him Gene because, despite all the other aspects of his character, of which some made the cut, some did not, and some were revised for dramatic effect, what was important to the identity Addie attaches to him is that he is who Addie would have become had things turned out a little differently.

And if my mom hadnt objected to naming me Eugene, thats who I would have become. Instead, I got the remnants of both Eugene and Freddy to carry with me as anecdotes and "what might have been."

So, when you fortunate readers of these excerpts and commentary, in advance of the book ever finally making it onto shelves, you'll know that the character of Gene exists as a sort of shadow to Addie, one which follows him around as a harbinger of a future he seems destined for but isnt sure he wants, and which makes him as uncomfortable as the idea of being called Gene once made me.

Now dont you feel lucky?

______________________________________

This is the seventh in the series of excerpts from and commentary about my new novel, currently being shopped to agents, called "The Light That We Can See." The series can be found here.

Check my column or follow my Twitter page for regular updates, and very soon I'll be releasing CHAPTER ONE for download, as well as a new ebook collection of brutally honest essays about sports & politics, tentatively titled "It's Not Just a Ballgame Anymore."

So stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

5. Where it's at—Setting the scene

6. Some Good Ol-Fashioned American Truth

Elroy built the place from the ground up with his own two hands, and became a hero in the community.

The trouble started when one of the kids under his care lost a lollipop up her nose, fell off the top of the slide, and impaled herself on a rusty piece of fencing that Elroy was about to screw back into place. The fence had been damaged the night before in the storm, and Elroy was nothing if not diligent about putting things back together.

I was interviewing him for the insurance company. He couldnt understand how it could have happened, and he was clearly distraught.

"All of our children are screened for this kind of thing," he told me. "Their parents, too. We go back to every American generation available to make sure this cant happen."

I asked him how many generations he usually found.

"At least three."

"Wow," I said. "Thats impressive. I couldnt even tell you where my grandfather was born—he always refused to talk about his family back in Ireland. Something about a nun, thats all we ever knew."

"Well, if we cant go back at least three generations, then they go to the waiting list."

"How long do they spend on the waiting list, usually?"

"However long it takes before their parents find them another day care."

Little Wonders Day Care was the most exclusive place in the county. The only place Elroy needed to advertise was in the Catholic school bulletin, because word of mouth is powerful around here. Once it got out that he only accepted 5% of applicants, every parent wanted their kid at Little Wonders.

Plus, it was cheap, and I couldnt figure out how he did it. On the first day of my visit, he and the board—a group of eleven middle-aged men and women from the community—met with me in a huge conference room on the top, third floor of the building, which looked out onto the playground through plate-glass windows that hung all the way from the ceiling to the floor. They walked me through the daily schedule and all the benefits of attending Little Wonders.

"Our children are supervised by the most wonderful guardian angels imaginable," Elroy bragged.

"Those are their teachers—sorry—day care providers?—I'm not sure what to call them."

"However you want to look at it," he said. "They teach, they provide, they guide and nurture—these children are very well prepared not only for school, but for life."

They showed me where the kids spent their time. The basement and entire first floor were lined with classrooms with huge doors covered in the kinds of decorations I would have expected anywhere—fingerpaintings, macaroni artwork, paper animals, cotton-ball portraits, etc. The classrooms themselves were color-coordinated—there was a blue room, a red room, yellow, orange, green, purple, pink, maroon, magenta, @!$%#ing chartreuse for crying out loud. In all, there were 18 classrooms, and they were all filled to capacity for the next three years.

But the biggest room in the whole place was on the second floor, which was a single filing room that had four doors opening into the hallway.

"Fire code," he told me, with a smile. "Otherwise you wouldnt be able to make it out from one end to the other in time!"

I was impressed, though I worried about how long it would take me to check his paperwork. "Is this everything? Taxes, personnel files—how long does it go back?"

"It's all here, forever. I dont believe in throwing things away." At least he was thorough. "We go into great detail in our screening process, and everything is kept here for quick reference. It's very important that the children who attend Little Wonders are the most equipped to take advantage of our services."

The slogans scrawled in big lettering along the hallway walls indicated Elroy's whole approach. Compassion, Charity, Love, Selflessness, etc. The whole thing certainly seemed charitable. For less than the cost of a babysitter, these kids were getting the best day care I could imagine.

Halfway into my second week, I hadnt even had any time to go out and check on the daily activities, I was still going through his documentation. I had found Lucy's thirty-page application quite easily, but the rest of my time was spent uncovering more and more information about her parents; I kept wanting to visit a classroom, and Elroy kept inviting me out, but I couldnt spend all @!$%#ing month there and I still hadnt gotten to her stack of progress reports—"Guiding Lights," they were called—and sitting in a room full of drooling four-year-olds, as interesting as that sounded, kept slipping further and further down my list of priorities.

But I had to go to the town council meeting, because there was a small group of parents who had scheduled time to complain about the circumstances of Lucy's death, and it would look bad for the insurance company not to make an appearance. I arrived with my head full of numbers, reference letters, credit reports (quarterly), performance reviews, grocery receipts, utility bills, criminal checks—boxes and boxes of endless information. The place was the goddamn jackpot for identity thieves, if they could ever manage to get through the justifiably impressive security system.

As the meeting got going, having noticed that the only representatives from Little Wonders were Elroy and the board, half of whom were also sitting on the town council, I leaned over to one of the parents and asked her where all the teachers were—or whatever you're supposed to call them.

"Well," she said. "You're supposed to call them 'Guardian Angels.'"

"Yeah yeah," I said. "So where are they?"

She looked at me funny but didnt answer my question.

Elroy was the only one to get up to speak before I knew my insurance report was going to be easier than I thought. He was also the only one I stuck around to listen to, because even this godless twit knows it's bad form to vomit on a room full of regular people.

He got a pretty good round of applause when he went up to the podium, although I noticed that Lucy's parents were already in tears. I had planned to speak to them, once I made it through the paperwork, but I felt like I already knew them. He worked for the defense industry. She was an accountant. They both commuted more than an hour back and forth to their jobs, and Lucy was one of the "Early Risers"—children at the day care who were dropped off before 7am and picked up after 6. They had to pay a bit more for that privilege, but they certainly had the means.

Elroy began with a prayer, and then made his speech.

"I've never asked for much from this life," he said. "What I have, I built myself, and I am not indebted to any man.

"Little Wonders is a magical place, but you must put into it what you hope to get out of it—hard work, patience, self-determination, self-control, and personal responsibility.

"Some people have accused Little Wonders of neglect!" and here he pointed at the small group of parents surrounding Lucy's weeping mother and father, Jocelyn and Steve, who I knew were nice people because I had seen records of their charitable contributions.

"But you have to have faith," he said. "You all know that we have made every effort to guarantee that these children, and these parents," and here he just glared at them all, "are well-suited and deserving of the independence and sense of well-being that Little Wonders bestows on its charges.

"Our responsibilities are met every day. When something like this happens, you must ask yourself, 'Am I meeting my responsibilities? Have I done all I needed to do to prevent this tragedy? Have I worked hard enough, prayed hard enough, taken a true accounting of my own actions closely enough?'"

Then he opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Ladies and gentlemen, if the love and guidance of the glory of our heavenly father and his legion of angels sent to watch over our little ones as they romp and play through the classrooms and playgrounds of Little Wonders isnt enough to keep them safe, then you must ask yourself, what have I done, what has my child done, to bring the judgment of god upon us with such violence? If you look closely enough, I am sure you will find your own answers.

"But I can assure you of one thing, which is this: No child who has ever stuck anything so big as a lollipop up his or her nose will ever be allowed in Little Wonders Day Care again! Ever!"

I had my answers, that was for sure. But I kept it to myself as I bolted right the @!$%# out of that madhouse—it was turning into the kind of place non-believers dont escape from very easily, and, besides, the sick feeling coming up through my throat wasnt conducive to going off on an angry tirade in public. 

Afterward, I was sort of pissed, I'll admit—I had wasted almost two weeks of my life looking for a paper trail when all I ever needed to do could have been accomplished (and was, that very night) with a single sheet of paper, my signature, and one note scrawled across the top, addressed to my boss, who, like most insurance agents, isnt prone to putting up with bull@!$%#:

CHECK PAYROLL TAX RECORDS TO CONFIRM—NO STAFF ON SITE—PAYMENTS MADE IN PRAYERS TO ANGELS.

Not that Elroy wasnt making a nifty profit. Any moron can get good crafts material cheap at the Dollar Store, and those were his only expenses.

There's still a ton of crosses that gets stuck in the ground every morning around Lucy's grave, which is a huge gray stone carved, also, into the shape of a cross. I know it happens every morning because every night, late, in the dark, at different times, but always on my way home from work, which takes a bit longer these days as I have to go way out of my way, I go back to that graveyard and rip those crosses out of the ground. Then I take them home and burn each and every one. My neighbors think I've become obsessed with bonfires, and I do often invite them over for marshmallows and singalongs. But mostly I sit in front of the fire and cry.

I do have to go way out of my way, and, yes, they keep putting more crosses up. But it's worth it. We dont make any progress without lots of hard work. I learned that from Elroy.

It's not just Kerouac who's drawing more buzz lately. It's Ginsberg, too.

Fifty-five summers after Allen Ginsberg wrote his shocking masterpiece "Howl," the poem still provokes, inspires, sells.

There's a bit of a "Howl" boomlet going on -- books, photographs, an upcoming movie starring James Franco and, most immediately, a "Howl in the City" series of readings and music Friday and Saturday in Washington.

from CHAPTER ELEVEN

Eric checked his wallet for cash. He was still out of breath from running. But as long as one of them made it upstairs to meet the cleaning crew on their way out by 8:45, they’d be fine, and McDonalds was right across the street—that is, down the hall, through the mall, down the other hall, up the stairs and across the street.

There was a line. I don’t think I ever passed that place in the daylight when it wasn’t packed right out the door. After a wait, watching the customers stand there, some talking, some silent, some getting angry, but most accustomed to the routine, Eric got to the front of the line. His order was cut off by a strange extended crunching sound. He heard a few high-pitched screams—shrieks, really—short and loud, almost exaggerated, the same kind of shrieks he heard while his daughter played with her friends. He turned and looked through the windows and saw people running from across the street, and others on the sidewalk craning their heads toward the sky, banked in shadows.

That’s the story leading up to it. I can’t pretend to speculate any further. He saw people running around, tried to get back in the building, couldn’t, and waited in confusion while the next plane showed up and blew everything right to hell. Picture a man, larger than life, panicked and helpless in the streets while the ceilings and floors dozens of floors up, in a building still a five-minute walk from where he was standing, were caving into one another.

Deb put her head in my doorway, “Have a minute?”

__________________________________

The heat sure gets to us old folks. I turned 40 last month and half the time I sound just like my old man on the weekends, hollering at the boys to get the hell outside and play.

But there's none of that this weekend. It's too @!$%#ing hot out there for that. Old people and children alike are being advised to stay indoors. The temperature is only 91, but it's supposed to get worse, and the heat index is already over 100. The only fluttering leaves I can see out through our clamped-down windows are from birds collapsing off their perches.

So as we sit in the breezy cool between the fans and watch Apollo XIII, Ron Howard's masterpiece of fictionalized near-tragedy and the hope it inspired, I figure it's as good a time as any to talk about the whole "truth-fiction" thing contained in my own novel, which is set in the time before, during and after 9/11 in NYC.

Of course, my names have been changed more than they were changed in Apollo XII, or most other films or books of the genre. The truth is that I wanted to study the truth about what happened, but, in this case, part of that truth was the utter confusion of the people involved, which was hardly limited to those in or around NYC or DC at the time. Many people want to forget the way they felt back then, and just as many did or said things they dont deserve to be attached to, simply for the sake of historical perfection, and not when the essence of what happened can be better translated without all that cruel baggage.

Perhaps the best way to describe this, within this so-far relatively small audience, is to point to what might have been the most embarrassing true detail that I intentionally omitted from the whole goddamn thing. The main character, Addie Smith (my alter-ego) works for Art's Cards, which is the alter-ego of a popular trading card company which, in the weeks and months following 9/11, created a product full of patriotic imagery hyping the new war on terror, featuring cards with images of the the 9/11 attacks printed on the front. It wasnt that unusual, once you got down to it—the same company had produced cards during previous wars, and considered them all part of a sort of encyclopedic history of America. Nevertheless, these cards, made as they were within weeks of our staff having evacuated lower Manhattan at around noon that day, were produced in secrecy, even inside the building. There was a sense of shame about them, an already awareness that at least part of what they were doing was enough of a mistake to want to hide.

But it simply wasnt part of a good story, narratively speaking, especially because of its also true connection to prior tradition, and it would have compromised the other mistakes, as well as the sometimes compassion, that truly resonates today. So, I used enough creative license to keep it out, just like I changed the details about the person at work who eventually went on a vindictive rampage through the office, taking out as many people as she could, in order to strengthen her own standing with the VP.

One thing supposedly heightened into pure fiction in Apollo XIII was the friendly interaction between the astronauts. But that was also important to the story of the film, and actually served to more successfully tell the emotional (and thematic, yes) story that everyone fell in love with—a story that, as far as any of us need to be concerned, is entirely true.

It may have been a great film, but would it have been as great, even in your mind, if it hadnt been based on a true story? What about Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic? What about On The Road, for that matter (which is soon about to add yet another plot-adoring layer to its own in-between-the-actual-lines truth), or The Things They Carried or Angela's Ashes?

One of the most difficult things to do these days is get a novel published. Based on recent trends, and writers like Augusten Burroughs or Sloane Crosley, mostly straight-up though wittily presented nonfiction is enormously popular. But when you tell people in the industry that you took compelling true events and tweaked things just enough to create an even more compelling story, dont be surprised if you get blank stares intended to make you want to think that you're the one who's confused.

I cant possibly get into the heads of anyone else who was there with me or who experienced so much worse than I can ever truly imagine, nor anyone who was there on the other shore, or there in front of a tv in San Francisco. To pose an ability to tell a "nonfiction" account of 9/11, if it's going to have any sense of character or plot, would be absurd to the point of corruption. But if the really important things were made up, it would be even worse.

So, to give something of an answer to the questions about what this is and which parts are true, and while I want to emphasize that this is a novel, it's important to make it clear that all the important parts are true, because that was kinda the whole point.

__________________________________

This is the sixth in the series of excerpts from and commentary about my new novel, currently being shopped to agents, called "The Light That We Can See." The series can be found here.

Check my column or follow my Twitter page for regular updates, and very soon I'll be releasing CHAPTER ONE for download, as well as a new ebook collection of misanthropic essays about sports & politics, tentatively titled "It's Not Just a Ballgame Anymore."

So stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

5. Where it's at—Setting the scene

It was July 27, 1962 When I took my first breath in Belflower California at Bellview hospital. I came out pissed as hell why? I should have been born in Arkansas, that is where I was conceived but mom and dad were in California with my moms parents that were working in the fields picking oranges and my grandfather worked at the peach cannery. being the humorous person I am I decide to come two weeks early. My life has been full these 48 years, I can't touch on everything in this thread but I wanted to share a few things with my viner friends seeing that I haven't completed my bio on my column.

At the age of two weeks old I had since enough to leave California and move back to the state I love Arkansas. Besides everyone in California owes their life and prosperity to me because I am sure that God is waiting for the last crazy person to get to California before he slides her off into the ocean so I left so they would be safe....Yyyoooooooouuuuurrrrrrr welcome Cali.

I grew up in a small town Manila Arkansas my dad did farm work and at one point was a cobbler, well actually two times but every time he owned a shoe repair shop mom got pregnant. The standing joke was after two children dad got out of the business as a form of birth control. I have one younger brother who is five years younger. My mom picked cotton, I never did but remember riding on the pick sack. When I was old enough I got to tromp cotton, then when I could swing a hoe I chopped cotton. My parents taught me to not be afraid of work and always give the man I was working for a 110% for a decent days pay.

My first memory of music was my dad sitting on the front porch with me in his lap in a cane bottom chair and he was singing "The battle of New Orleans". I think I was around 4 or 5 at the time. I fell in love with music as a young toddler and have made it a big part of my career and life, I am very proud that all four of my children have taken music as a love and artistic outlet for them as well. My grandfather Knowlton played the French harp or some call it a harmonica.

I broke my arm when I was 7 from riding or should I say trying to ride a Shetland pony, after getting my arm out of the cast mom and dad bought me my first guitar a 12 Dollar sears and Roebuck by the time I was ten I had learned the guitar and moved on to have the fiddle down pretty well. I joined a jamboree in Monette Arkansas called "The Buffalo Island Jamboree" we had a two hour show on KBBI AM 1610. I played with some very good local musicians that had literally over a hundred of years of experience but even though I was only ten they treated me as a musician and not a kid. One of the last remaining musicians I played with at the Jamboree passed away a few months back Mr. Dvayne Baldrige He is the one that started me on banjo, I will truly miss Mr. Baldrige R.I.P.

I played music shows as a kid, I got to be on stage with Teddy and Doyle Wilburn when they came to do a show in Blytheville. I got to fiddle with Dusty Rhodes, Speck Rhodes brother from the Porter Wagnor show. Benny Martin a fiddler famous back in the 40's and 50'sI performed with, Dale Potter who was a awesome fiddler. Jumpin Bill Carlise who did the classic "to old to cut the mustard and no help wanted" and many more pioneers of country and bluegrass music.

I was a normal kid growing up and had many influences in my life I was an average student. It was not until my senior year In high school that I became popular.....Thank God for John Travolta and Urban Cowboy.....lol.... Country music hit the scene with this movie and I went to the top withthe rest of the students, because I had been playing this type of music all the time, but no one at school really paid any attention until "Urban Cowboy". I took one of the prettiest girls to the senior prom that year. I might have been a little mean, because I had plenty of Manila girls that wanted to go with me that year to the prom but I thought paybacks are a b!tch. I took a girl from another town. She was very pretty and we dated close to a year her name was Susan. She was just a little taller than I was, dark complected with long brown curly hair that hung to the middle of her back and the prettiest blue eyes. When I walked into the prom with her all the guys that were dating the popular girls in Manila were amazed and it wasn't long before they were coming to our table and talking to me like we had been best friends since 1st grade.....Hell I wasn't a dummy they were coming to look at Susan...lol After the prom oh by the way the theme was Bob Seger "We've got tonight" ;we had an after party at the country club with the "Urban Cowboy" theme. Complete with Mechanical bull. It was a great prom and to think that was 29 years ago.

Now I have to go back to ninth grade for a minute before I can go on. Ninth grade I met my what I can call my first love. I was playing with the Buffalo Island Jamboree band for a senior citizens party in Leachville Arkansas and the site directors daughter was there helping serve refreshments her name was Linda. We both fell at the same time, and our hearts were in love with each other. We dated up to the later part of my junior year and then we had a ......what I thought was a minor disagreement and two weeks later she was dating my best friend....OH God my life has been full of best friend stories.. They went on to marry and I ran into her about 4 years ago and they are still married, good for them.

After graduation, I attended college for one semester but I knew that music was where my heart was. I called mom and talked to her about dropping out......that didn't go to well. I was home for the weekend after talking to her and the phone rang, It was a manager for an agency in Nashville that had heard of my playing ability and wanted to know if I would like to do a short tour. He said that Loretta Lynn was doing a small tour and needed a fiddle player, well I was 18 but felt like a child when I told him I would have to ask my mother. (I respect my mother and she wanted me to get a college degree) He said to let him know by that Monday and told him I would. I called mom in and set down with her and explained the phone call. She said "son I am a big fan of Loretta's there is nothing more I would love to see, than you play fiddle in her band but there is time for that after you get your degree." I called the agent back and told him that I would have to decline, man I was heart broke but I loved my mom and didn't want to let her down. I knew in my heart that mom was right but it sure didn't make it any easier to turn an opportunity like that down.

About half way through the second semester of college I received a phone call from my mom telling me I needed to come home right away. My dad had, a heart attack and it was a pretty bad one(he was 41). I rushed home and headed to Memphis where my dad was in the hospital they had life flighted him down. It was just one of many that my dad would have until his passing in 2000. It took him several weeks to recover and I had missed so many classes that I did drop out of college. I helped mom with dad until he got back on his feet then I headed to Nashville.

From 1982 to 1984 I had a good run with my music I did several shows with the Hager twins (those are the two gentlemen on each side of me in my avatar) Moe Bandy, Charlie Louvin and a few others. I was with the Bob Neal agency in Nashville until he passed away in the later part of 83 then my contract went to Glory Roads productions out of Black falls Wisconsin..... That lead me up north and out west with an Arkansas band named "The Marty Colburn band". In April of 84 we got snowed in at Gillette Wyoming for a whole week, 48 inches of snow fell in a two day period. (I will tell some band stories in another article). After Gillette Wyoming we headed to Sheridan Wyoming to do a week of shows at the Wells Fargo, That is where I meet my first wife. She came to listen to the band play and we hit if off and hung out the week I was there. We exchanged phone numbers, we called each other and she wrote me a few letters. I told her that we were leaving and headed to Oak Creek Colorado and then from there to Idaho with a few other towns along the way but I would be back through Sheridan the 21st of June.

I did make it back to Sheridan on the 21st of June and on the 23rd I proposed....She said your drunk ask me tomorrow(by the way that is a line in a song that I wrote for her after we got married. It is called South of the border, If you would like to listen to it check out youtube. cherokee762 and search for south of the border.) Well I asked her the next day and she said yes so we got married on her birthday June 28th 1984. I knew the road was not they way for a married man to live so I gave it up I turned in my two week notice to the band and started a life with my new bride.

I took my new wife back to Arkansas to meet my parents because they didn't know until I called them that I had any plans to get married. Mom was alright with it if I was happy. My dad on the other hand was pissed, not that he didn't get to attend the wedding but because I married a Yankee......Sh!t dad Wyoming wasn't even in the civil war. We had planned to stay in Arkansas for a few months and then go back to Wyoming to work. We had been down for a couple a weeks when my mom started feeling ill. She went to the hospital in Jonesboro where we found out that she had cancer and only 6 months to live so we decided to stay and take care of my mom. My oldest boy was born October 22, 1984 I know the months don't add up. I chose him to be my Son, I am the only father he has known. My mother got to hold her first grandchild two times before she passed away in 1984.

My mothers birthday was December 6th she had just turned 39 and on the 29th of December she walked hand in hand with her savior through the pearly gates, no more suffering. I will tell you it is a life changing experience to watch a loved one go through the dying process for six months.

Through that six month period, I had gotten back to my faith and my bride and I started going to church. I knew at a younger age that God had a calling for me, and now I knew what it was so I surrendered to preach. I was ordained in the Southern Baptist Church and spent 1985 to 1991 pastoring several small country churchs. The first church I pastored was Childress Baptist Church North of Monette Arkansas, The second Church was Blackwater Baptist Church south of Manila. The third church was Crossroads Baptist Church south of Dell Arkansas. Why am I not a Southern Baptist pastor any more and why do I not have faith in established churches. I found out that most is not about taking care of those in need but about the dollar. Let me explain.

In 1991 I had two weeks vacation coming from the church, my wife had decided to go back to see her family in Wyoming. We had our sons Jeffery Jacob and Gabriel Dwayne who were very young. My wife Deb was pregnant with our third child about 5 months if I remember correctly. The vacation went well until three days before we were to return. She woke one morning and told me she thought there was something wrong, that she hadn't felt the baby move in a couple of days. It took us two days to get a doctor to see her. I called and told the elders of the church that we may be running late, that there were some problems with the baby. Well after the test the doctor told us that the baby was dead and Deb would need to go to the hospital and have the baby removed. I called the church again and told them that we were going to have to take an extra week so Deb could recover before we made the 1700 mile trip. Not a problem I was told, now mind you I wasn't expecting an extra weeks salary that was not covered in the vacation clause. We got back and that night one of my deacons Mr. R and his wife come over and gave me a check for that extra week I had missed. I said thank you but I wasn't here and wasn't expecting a check. He said that the church had decided to help us anyway. We were very grateful.

The next business meeting we had at the church we had concluded all the business and I asked if there was anything else that needed to be brought up. My deacon Mr. B's wife punched him in the rib and told him to stand up and present their case. I was shocked because I had no idea what was going on. He stood up and asked why I received a check for the week I was not here. My other deacon Mr. R (don't want to use names here) stood up and said that the church had discussed it the Sunday night that I was suppose to return. The deacon Mr. R also informed the other deacon and his wife were not at church that evening when the church brought up giving me the extra check. I called order and told the deacon Mr. B and his wife that after the meeting to follow me over to the house and I would write him a check to repay the church. I did write them the check back, I was crushed here we had lost a child traveled 1700 miles and have a blessing dropped in our lap only to be cut to the bone from some members greed over money.

I insisted that deacon Mr. B take the money and put it back in the church account. One morning after that I got out of bed and looked at my wife and said "let's move back to Wyoming, your grandmother had been wanting us to move back for years and take care of here. It would be a great way for us to start missions and then turn them over to a pastor." So we decided to go into the mission field in Wyoming. The last sermon I preached at Crossroads was called "The land of milk and honey". The main point was Just as Moses could not cross over to the land of milk and honey so he turned it over to Joshua. I as their pastor had brought them as far as I could go, I couldn't take them any further and would turn it over to someone else that could help them grow. I will say we had a good increase in attendance while I was their.

We moved to Wyoming and started two missions just to find out that greed and struggle for power was pretty much all over. I left the ministry about 1994. I still believe and know whom I believe in but I don't put my faith in the man made churches anymore. I do not believe that any denomination has the exclusive on getting to heaven, I attend different churches for this reason now. I feel most comfortable in the Catholic church I can worship freely there.

My first wife and I were blessed with four great children Jeffery J. born in 1984, Gabe D. born in 1987, Kayla Jo born in 1992 and Thomas A. born 1994. We also had a good run at our marriage. 2001 December 28th the wife informed me she was leaving me and was in love with my best friend.....OH God another best friend story...(They did marry after the divorce was final but here is the kicker they got married on June 28th that was our old wedding day)....This crushed my world it took me close to two years to really start to function again. I had spent 9 years in the medical field while I was in Wyoming, but after the divorce I decided I wanted to do something different. Because of my love for music and creative writing I went in to radio advertisement. I worked for a station in Gillette Wyoming actual one of the viners on here Dylan worked there also. We did the RockinRoadhouse tour opening in Gillette with a local group. I was surprised to meet him on here. I work for the radio station until 2004 then took a job at a radio station in Blytheville Arkansas and moved back to my hometown.

I stayed in radio until 2006 then in 2007 I went into security and private investigations, I enjoy it and I think with my recording studio that I run as a business I am satisfied. In 2005 I meet a woman and we hit it off well. I had just finished playing a show in Manila and gotten dressed for a Halloween party at the Fisherman'sInn I went dressed as a Christmas elf complete with red tights and green shorts with bells. Pointed ears and pointed shoes and if there were any pretty ladies around pointed.....*ahem* got off track. I grabbed a mug of draft beer and noticed there were 4 women sitting at the bar...God the place was packed....so I am making my way behind the women none of them were bad looking when I heard one say. " The hell if she will she knows better than that, I like dick." I f()ckin stopped in my tracks, turned around and said "hello my name is Knowlton I like you, if you run for president I will vote for you." then shook her hand. She cracked up we started talking I mean how can you not have questions about a guy dressed in a Christmas elf costume. We talk most of the night went outside talked some more and she was awed by my blue eyes.

We started seeing each other as friends because she said she had a boyfriend. That was alright with me what she didn't tell me till later....a lot later that her boyfriend was married...Anyway we would go fishing and hunting all the time got along great. I treated her like one of the boys until one night we were on the fishing bank and I could tell that something was wrong. She said why don't you try to make a move on me. I told her that because we were friends and you have a boyfriend. She said well maybe I do have a boyfriend but I am still a woman. I told her that I could not in good conscience mess around with a woman who had another man, I had that game played on me and I don't play that. Well a few weeks went by and it was the week before Thanksgiving she called me and asked me to come over so I did. she told me that she wanted me and not her boyfriend I asked her if she was sure and By God she was.......we got married that February 2005 ..........It lasted until 2007. Even after the divorce she and I are good friends we joke that we are the only divorced couple that can go out into the woods with loaded guns and both come out alive. We were just better friends than man and wife. She was very independent ...so much to the point that when she wanted a big ticket items such as a motorcycle she wouldn't talk to me about she would just go get it. I couldn't deal with that.

That brings me up to the present, my children are grown. I have a job I like, I still play music and I guess I will till the day I die. I have a great woman in my life right now her name is Linda we celebrated our first year of dating, July 17. She is very special to me it is funny because I knew her when we were just kids, she was a little younger than me but only by 3 years. We were talking the other night and she said I wonder what would have happened if we had gotten together back then. I told her probably the same thing that happened to our previous relations......We are older now and take the time to make better choices so, I don't think that it would have worked if we had hooked up when we were younger....she agreed. Then she brought another point that I thought was cute to my attention. she said "isn't it funny that your first true love was named Linda and mine was Jeff. Now at last my love is Jeff and yours is Linda." I thought that was sweet It kinda makes me think that we might both be where we need to be in life.

48 years and feeling great I am looking for another 52 years, I want to live to be 100 nothing more. LOL Thanks for listening to a little of my lifes story. Maybe it well shed light on why I am the way I am. Laughter to me had brought me through so dark dreary times. God Is in my heart and not in a building. People are who they are don't try to change them. Keep the sword of faith, the flame of hope, and the shield of neighborly love.

Peace and blessing to all.

Happy birthday to me.

Well friends here is an Update on my 48 years. As I wrote this Article last night things were changing that I didn't expect. So tonight I sit hear with heavy heart, dreams shattered looking like a fool. I guess when you put someone up on a pedestal you better seat belt them in. Only 12 hours after sharing with everyone about the sweetest girl and our love for each other I come home after work this morning to find the "Dear Knowlton letter" so I wish to publish it and you tell me if was just a booty call, or just to dumb to see.

The letter:

Jeffrey

I am so sorry, but we can't see each other anymore. These last few days I have been thinking and I am still in love with XXXX (ex-husband after 3 years of divorce) I just want my family back. I do love you but I can't move on with you if I still have feelinigs for XXXXX I never meant to hurt you, I am so sorry. Please do not try to contact me, this is hard enough to do. I am so sorry.

Linda

end of letter:

I think I deserved to have been told face to face so I could say goodbye. Yes I am hurt but all I want is for her to be happy.

I am still going to have a hell of a Birthday.......I am the best and I will not settle for 2nd best.

Thanks guys " Booty call Knowlton"

Atkinson's book is subtly complex and ambitious. He's not only after his own lost youth. He's fighting to rescue Kerouac's literary reputation from the kitsch and ticky-tacky realm of unliterary adulation, the American attic where he's cheek to jowl with everyone from J.D. Salinger to Marilyn Monroe. Over the years, it has not mattered that Kerouac has had detractors and fans; what has mattered – and this is at the heart of Atkinson's project-that the genius of the artist and the soul of the man has been all but erased. And so, like a skillful and painstaking craftsman seeking to restore a damaged masterpiece, Atkinson sets out on a journey to restore the vibrant colors and forms of an American master.

Well, @!$%#—that sounds good to me.

Honestly I'm sorta bored with all the references to Kerouac as a flippant youthful fad. I really enjoyed the less academic commentary that came in the introductory parts of the recently released "Original Scroll" version of OTR, and I like the idea of Atkinson's approach very much.

from CHAPTER ONE

Hoboken in the late evening has a funny, paused feeling to it—the daytime traffic of people buying clothes and furniture, looking for new apartments, walking the dog, or pushing the stroller slows away, and the clubs and party bars prop open their front doors in the tentative breeze of these almost summer days, but they’re still empty, and there’s only darkness through the doors I pass on the way home. We had a nice apartment now, not the cramped and dim basement space of my two bachelor years. The new place was on the west side of Washington Street, just past Eighth headed uptown, around where the commercial storefronts give way to brownstones and rowhouses and the occasional church, doctor’s office or local bar. Ruth was busy importing furnishings and colors from websites and downtown stores. Walking home a little drunk and intellectually spent was easier than lugging a huge roll of goddamn sisal carpet through Soho and on the train, no matter how stylish it was. It’s quiet up there—nice, but not too too far away. Our second floor flat even had a front porch, so standing on it almost put you right on the street, but it also brought stares, like we were rudely looming over people on the sidewalk who sometimes didn’t notice us until they were within pissing distance. Most porches in Hoboken are just fire escapes. I could never decide if ours made me feel special or guilty.

________________

Addie Smith is stuck between two lives. During the week, he commutes from Hoboken through the World Trade Center to his job in lower Manhattan, just around the corner from both Goldman Sachs and the Nasdaq building. On the weekends, he lets his notebook lead him into darkened New York City bars, looking for inspiration in the fading footprints of the literary heroes he grew up admiring. As he half-heartedly works his way up the corporate ladder and immerses himself in the all-American tradition of getting married, planning children, buying life insurance and saving for a house somewhere further down the commuter rails, it's really his secret dream of becoming a published author that he wishes would come true.

He lives in Hoboken because he only almost found an affordable apartment in Manhattan or Brooklyn, where he really wanted to live. His girlfriend was almost the person he wanted her to be, and she acted like everybody else's girlfriends or wives, so he married her. Proofreading was almost the same as writing copy, so he took the job, and he's not actually sleeping with anyone else, so he figures a bit of harmless flirting is nothing for people to get all pissed off about.

Where is "setting"? Where do we live? Do we live in our homes or in a more imagined place that happens to sometimes be surrounded by the walls our rents or mortgages prop up? Is our home where we spend most of our time, or most of our time avoiding?

Or what if where we choose to call home, no matter where it is, suddenly becomes too dangerous? Katrina survivors know what thats like. So do Gulf Coast fishermen and Iraqi citizens.

Or what if it just becomes completely and forever unrecognizable?

And what if you know in your heart that you never really had any right to call it home to begin with—that imagined, temporary place you escaped to, as part of a dream or just a getaway? What if the proximity to things that you used to think made you special suddenly makes you feel guilty for being so presumptuous in the first place?

It started with an apology, but we've already established that thats not where it ends. And it started with a spontaneous burst of nothing but the truth, but became something else once we started putting the names together.

The setting, on the other hand, is as real as it gets, and that won't change—not for you, not for me, and not for Addie, either. Now we all just have to figure out what the hell to do with that.

___________________________

This is the fifth in the series of excerpts from and commentary about writing my new novel, currently being shopped to literary agents, called "The Light That We Can See." The series can be found here. Thanks for reading.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

I have friends that have degrees from multiple Universities and Colleges that are dumb as rocks. I also have friends with G.E.Ds that have some life experience that are some of the most intelligent people I know.

I always wanted to go to college, but life happens.

I lived a pretty rough childhood, quit school in the 8th grade. Then at 17 I joined the United States Navy. They put me on a very old guided missile destroyer, USS Lynde McCormick DDG8, commissioned in 1961. I jumped on board in 1985 as a storekeeper. They woke me from a drunken coma one morning and said..."wake up sailor! it is time to take your G.E.D." HA HA, I couldn't even see good enough to read through my bifocals. I could see the little bubbles you have to fill in and did it in a pattern. Guess what? I passed the damn thing! I stayed in the Navy another 3 years after that. We served during the Iran-Iraq War in the Persian Gulf escorting oil barges through the war zone, with the Iranians using us for target practice with what thank goodness turned out to be lousy land to sea missiles. Hell of a "Cold War".

I came home and went to work for the state as a correctional officer at several maximum security prisons. After a couple of years of that I went to the Community College and took a couple semesters. I did well, I just couldn't do the student thing.

The next several years were spent managing and bouncing in adult bars.

I read a lot and write, some may not think well, but I enjoy it. I can think fairly objectively and would consider myself minimally intelligent.

So what is best for the development of a mind? Self Education through life experience or a degree from this university or another? Does it depend on the person?

MD

Cars that have to warm up after a good hard rain are not what my impulsive personality signed up for.

But they fit right in with an easily distracted brain, and with the list of things I have to do before I'm bogged down by the new school year, there's always something else I should be doing.

I have about 40,000 words to edit, but not on The Novel for now—I've decided to finally put together that collection of Newsvine articles I published in my early days, for that year and a half or so as we trudged through the last bitter remnants of the Bush administration and the Buffalo Sabres were playing a season for the ages.

They started out undefeated for several weeks and then fell victim to their own history. It wasnt always fun to draw so many connections between my favorite sports teams and this great nation we live in, but it was usually pretty easy.

Several of you have pointed out recently that I shouldnt be so worried about cleaning up my prose. As a true believer in Ti Jean's dream of spontaneous bop prosedy, I can really get on board with that. As an aspiring novelist, though, who's trying to impress over-worked literary agents, that idea makes me kinda nervous.

But I'm doing my best to only correct what needs to be corrected, like spelling errors and whatever technical goofs found their way between the inebriated mind and the clumsy fingers, because, in this case, the urgency and excitement of the moment is whats most important.

This collection is going to be called "It's Not Just a Ball Game Anymore," and it's going to be my test case for publishing an ebook of some kind in anticipation of doing the same with a few chapters of The Novel. It captures a moment in American history when we seemed to want to make a go at fixing things, but got caught up in the moment. Anyone who's ever had to take a clutch slapshot or throw the last Hail Mary knows what I'm talking about.

So the never-ending video loop of this particular shot may end up looking almost as wobbly as it really was, but maybe it hit a few marks along the way. We'll find out soon. Either way, it's more fun than I thought re-living those days, and maybe it will be for a few of you, too.

As long as the idling car hasnt run me out of gas, I'll be off getting some real @!$%# done to ease my mind as it prepares to dip into another round of tedious dream-chasing. Wish me luck on both counts.

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Articles and excerpt from the big project, "The Light That We Can See" can be found here.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

After months of legal wrangling, one of the 10 safe deposit boxes in which documents belonging to the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924 ) and his close friend Max Brod (1884-1968 ) were hidden for 40 years was opened Monday in Tel Aviv.

There was an article yesterday by Roger Friedman at Showbiz411 about Walter Salles' version of Kerouac's "On The Road," which is about to go into production, for a 2011 release.

Apparently the film is already drawing criticism, although Friedman doesnt use any sources for his report other than an unnamed "Beat expert," and a few Google searches didnt find anything other than message board whining.

Here's the essence of the complaints:

For one thing, no one is pleased about the casting. Sam Riley, star of “Control,” the film about Joy Division, has been cast as Sal Paradise aka Kerouac. He’s not American, for one thing. And doesn’t look much like Kerouac. Garreth Hedlund is set to play Dean Moriarity/Neal Cassidy. Kristen Stewart and Kirsen Dunst are signed to play their love interests.

None of this is winning over Kerouac experts. Plus, those who’v eread Jose Rivera’s script are fairly chagrined about it. “On the Road” is very much language and poetry. Reports on the script are that as one Beat expert says, They don’t get it.”

Now, we'll ignore the fact that among the many typos in Friedman's article is the misspelling of Cassady's name. So, okay, yeah—we have these rumors about experts being dissatisfied with a script that doesnt "get it" and actors who dont look the part, but you wonder how accurate the second-hand reporting of rumors can be when the reporter didnt care enough about research to get a main character's name spelled right.

But thats beside the point. The truth is that they've been trying to make an "On The Road" film for decades, and every time Francis Ford Coppola has gotten close (he's owned the rights since 1979), not only has it fallen apart, but oodles of Beat fans have come out of the woodwork to criticize the approach, the director, and mostly the cast.

So while this comes as no surprise, none of it makes any sense. Personally, I always thought Billy Crudup and Woody Harrelson should be cast as the Kerouac/Cassady duo, but I realize they're getting a bit too old. And at first I was admittedly disappointed by the ages of the actors, but we have to remember that Kerouac was in his mid-20s during the action of the novel (which was written over the course of a few years, from 1951 to 1956, by which time Kerouac was already almost 35 and well on his way to the more bloated and exhausted-looking face America came to adore and admonish), and Cassady was only 21 when the adventures began.

Jose Rivera wrote "The Motorcycle Diaries," about the early road trips of Che Guevara (directed by Salles), and all I can say regarding a script about "On The Road" is that if we expect it to be like the published book, we're out of our minds—even the published book is very different from the book Kerouac originally wrote, which has only been in print itself for a few years. And the whole point of the novel was to capture the immediacy of the moment—which is where, in fact, Kerouac's entire literary effort was directed. In other words, the book cant be captured on film, so the only way to remain "true to the book" in any real sense, if you ask me, is to produce something new—so "getting it" is an irrelevant remark.

And many people might forget (or not realize) that Kerouac wasnt all that "American," either. I think it's a great idea to have a Brit play the part, because Kerouac had a slightly-off American accent anyway, like he had to really try. He grew up in the small and insular French-Canadian community of Lowell, Massachusetts and started speaking English at about the age of 6. An early, short version of "On The Road" was actually written in French (or, rather, the version of Quebecois that he spoke as a child). A somewhat clumsy, too-rounded American accent would be perfect for the part.

And it works on a more spiritual level, as well. The reason Kerouac was so obsessed with finding America was because he didnt feel like he was a part of it. In many ways, "On The Road" is a postcolonial novel, about a foreign outsider trying to give this great land a kind of meaning he could identify with, which wasnt easy in the post-war U.S., amidst the traditional expectations and growing paranoia of millions of proud fans of the country. So I absolutely love the idea of casting an Englishman in a role that some "experts" feel is owned by America.

Finally, as the author of an autobiographical novel about the American landscape and the dreams it gives birth to, which has, as one of its key later scenes, a chance encounter with a Beat legend who performed with Kerouac himself, I couldnt be more thrilled with the idea of Kristen Stewart, of "Twilight" fame, being caught up in what might be another resurgence in popularity of Kerouac and the ideals and motifs of Beat literature. It's been hard enough trying to shop this novel at a time when fiction genres are dominated not only by what seems obviously and immediately commercially appealing to millions of people all at once (which introspective, first-person novels about life experiences sometimes arent), but by vampires and other fantasy tales, and it would be nice to be on the good side of a cultural trend for once.

So, damn the rumors—I'm really excited about this film, and if it does actually make it to theaters without becoming another in a long line of failed attempts to bring Kerouac's already too often mis-characterized book to the big screen, I'll be first in line.

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Articles and excerpt from "The Light That We Can See" can be found here.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

4. Un-disconnected Verse

Universal has purchased David Guggenheim's spec Safe House for $600k against $900k, winning out against two other movie studios in a bidding war.

NEW YORK — For anyone who has ever thought Charles Dickens was lurking inside his or her prose, a new website claims it can find your inner author.

The recently launched I Write Like has one simple gimmick: You paste a few paragraphs that exemplify your writing, then click "analyze" and – poof! – you get a badge telling you that you write like Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk.

The site's traffic has soared in recent days and its arrival has lit up the blogosphere. Gawker tried a transcript from one of the leaked Mel Gibson phone calls. The suggested author: Margaret Atwood.

...they told us of lanterns
and flashlights and spotlights
and sometimes the sunshine
—and of lampshades we'd need
to settle the glare—
to keep out the gloom,
but we got broke on the way
looking for a light that we could see

--Author unknown, Bowery Poetry Club reading, NYC, Fall 2002

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Excerpts & commentary from my novel, "The Light That We Can See," can be followed from the novel tag at my column.

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

I found this journal entry from when I was in the middle of my marathon first draft & thought a change of pace might be interesting, as something of a break from this oppressive heat...

Dec 30 — I started the book a few days ago. That pre-Christmas snowstorm got to me. I became preoccupied with the idea of spending time way out in some Walden woods cabin, where nobody could disturb me. I had a month to kill before the start of the spring semester. Those two enormous research papers sucked six weeks of my life and, on top of all that, I had that algebra final. Julie saved Christmas. I had no time—our family holiday with my parents and my brother and sister, and their families, was before Christmas Day and two days after I turned in my last paper. The first dose of a Christmas shopping season came to me at the post office, waiting in line to put postage on the SASE to turn in with my paper.

The first time I was able to really rest was after we had intentionally stranded ourselves at my sister’s house in Mechanicsburg. Saturday night. The storm was all the way in, and we just decided to fight through it to get to her house and then stay there for the night. We brought enough clothes for everyone, the boys included, to last two nights, just in case. I’m used to driving in the snow, after spending so much time in Buffalo, and we made it fine. But the storm mostly missed us, and there wasn’t as much on the ground as I had been secretly hoping for. I like the quiet that lots of snow brings, and, since I don’t have to do the plowing or the rescuing, I think it’s fun to see how much can fall in a given weather event. When I was living on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo with my first wife, we once had almost three feet of snow fall in just a few hours. By afternoon, when it stopped, I piled on the layers, went outside, and walked around the block, just to be in it. It was rough going, and I was out for a while, but it was better than sitting inside and watching television with all that snow just sitting out there. A chance to be in the middle of so much peace doesn’t come along every winter. And right out in public, too.

That was almost two weeks ago. We pulled off the rest of the Christmas holiday with great success, and the boys are spending the next week with their mother. So I have that much time to produce a solid first draft of this thing—this behemoth—this my Great American Novel. It’s been sitting there, right out in front of me, for years, demanding to be written. I’ve made half-assed attempts in the past, and now I’m literally surrounded by them. To get through it, I have to move it from out in front of me to all around me. So I have stacks of notebooks and printed pages lining my makeshift desk, and my laptop opened to a blank screen. I set up the screen to make it look like a typewriter, for inspiration. Or for nostalgia, or at least to get rid of a few distractions. I’ve also ripped the modem from the wall.

This first week—the week in a house missing the normal hectic screams of holidays with little kids—is just to get the project off the ground. I’m determined to draft 12,000 words a day during this week and the next, and I’m already a good 15,000 ahead of pace, about evenly split between editing on the fly as I retype from old pages and original material (which I make a mental note is one draft behind the rest). Once the kids come home, my work will be more segmented, less intense, but it will have to continue. But letting the boys into my world is all I can manage for this month. As far as the rest of the outside world goes, I will be in solitude.

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Note: The comments and visits so far on my novel excerpts & commentary are wonderful, thank you! If you havent read them yet but would like to, here's a list of what has been posted up till now:

1. This is how it starts

2. This time I really mean it

3. Addie in Wonderland

The following is another excerpt from "The Light That We Can See," my novel about Addie Smith, a production manager in lower Manhattan by day and an aspiring novelist by night. Barely a month after finishing his first book, with what he hopes is a new life on the way, the World Trade Center collapses before his eyes.

He doesnt handle it well. As he's sitting in a friend's apartment near Union Square, resting on his way home after the evacuation, he recalls a fever dream he had as a child...

from CHAPTER FIVE

But I was too terrified to close my eyes again. I tried to explain to him what was going on—what it felt like—that I was in a room much too large, but my body still filled it up. My sensations seemed to shift, though, and as soon I felt—really physically touched—the inside surface of the floors, walls and ceiling, all so close, I felt nothing but empty space, and saw that my body was just a speck in the middle of the floor in what seemed like the same sealed box. I tried to ignore it but turning inward I realized that my arms and legs—my arms, especially—were enormous, and long, and they were floating away from the rest of me. Despite having nothing to touch, the reaching heights of the room—a room that was somehow also an endlessly high space opening all the way into the sky—had a tangible form that caused a completely disorienting sensation from somewhere in my jaw to the furthest tips of my fingers—the ridges of my fingertips were miles above their own tiny valleys. Helpless and begging for a rescue, my body floated up to within that endless space, where it watched my strangled mind spin on the floor.

Dad explained that it was just a nightmare.

________________________________________

Addie is actually experiencing an hallucinatory event described as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, named for the changes that appear to be happening to the person's body size and shape.

After she goes into the rabbit hole, Alice undergoes a series of body transformations that mark her travels through Wonderland. She's a curious observer, but once inside, she realizes she really doesnt want to be there at all.

The dream-like condition, also known as Todd's Syndrome, seems to be more common in children than adults, but can sometimes be later triggered by stressful situations. It's also been associated with everything from brain tumors to migraines to seizure disorders, including Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, which has of course been linked to religious or paranormal experiences.

If Addie had had a revelatory experience in the first moments of 9/11, things might have gone better, but the dream-hallucinations dont hit him until later. When the only familiar feeling left is such a disorienting one, it's easy for anyone to lose their grip on things.

There's a lot to admire about Addie, and I have to admit that I didnt exactly make things easy for him. It's a curious thing that happens when you start to transform your past into a thematically interesting plot arc. Curiouser still when a fictional character's skewed perceptions actually start making more sense than they ever did for you.

You can read more excerpts, and follow my ongoing efforts to publish my own first novel, at my Newsvine column.

from CHAPTER EIGHT

...—because if I saw President Bush right now I’d probably try to choke him to death—choke the goddamned arrogance out of him, choke the hopeless stupidity out of him, choke the racism, greed and selfishness out of him. I wouldn’t get far—they’d tackle me and put me away, or just kill me on the spot, because attacks like that can’t go unpunished. Even if I got away they would have to run me down, and I couldn’t blame them. Some people must be willing to go to great lengths to defend and protect the religion of our normal daily lives—normal lives which don’t include choking the President even when he deserves it—not showing up in lower Manhattan for three days and then finally only to sound the battle cry?—that middling little pussy.

The papers were full of more acceptable threats—wholesome, necessary threats, aimed outward—and a lot of “how dare they," which seemed unnecessary, especially if this was really the war they claimed it was. Isn’t terrorism just where we happen to be today in the progression of people bickering? First we’re slapping each other with gloves, then we’re lining up like idiots in barren fields, then hiding behind trees with better guns, and then it’s a race to build the biggest bomb with the longest range—we’ve depersonalized the soldier and there’s no room for the underdog anymore, and I get that—I know that’s where we are—but is the moral outrage really appropriate? How was bringing down the World Trade Center different from dropping uncountable tons of explosives on Dresden and Japan and Cambodia? It just looked like the same old victory to me....

_____________________________

So, if any of that bothers you, now you know how I feel, always asking myself—Who the @!$%# do you think you are? and Where do you get off—? And it’s not like I could just ignore those voices in my head—I had to say something to ease the pain this was going to bring.

The real problem is that, as I’ve already explained, I shouldnt have written this book in the first place, but not for the reasons you might suspect. It’s not exactly meta-fiction (at least not in an obvious, boring and ever-so-cute way), but it should be pointed out that I have been rewriting it as I’ve been querying it, and as I was reading articles like “Where is our best 9/11 fiction?” and “Novels about 9/11 can’t stack up to non-fiction.”

Here are some of the things I read:

Now, their conversation turned to great fiction about 9/11. And the main question, posed by Packer, was: Where is it, anyway? Why are we still waiting?

Various people at the table tossed out the titles of some fine books and short stories. One noted that some of the best fiction about Vietnam came long after the end of that conflict (Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" was published in 1990). So maybe it's just too early...Or perhaps we're looking in entirely the wrong places: Maybe the great 9/11 novel will not be written by an American.

But novels inspired by 9/11 could fit on one shelf. There are only about 30, and none has seized the public imagination.

—and thats why the industry keeps hedging its bets against more 9/11 fiction, and what makes this subject matter, now 9 years after the event, still so potentially toxic to agents and publishers. Of course, the one thing they all have in common is that they were written by people who werent actually there, which is maybe why they "don't stack up" against non-fiction, of which there were, as of 9/11/07, 1036 titles.

Well, excuse the @!$%# out of me, but it would appear the solution to that is fairly obvious.

When I finally had the strength to sit down at the keyboard and collect my stacks of disconnected, incomplete and laughably misguided notes into something that looked like a whole novel, one thing that sustained me was this ridiculous idea that I had a unique story to tell, that my point of view, and my experience, could inform a truly inventive and interesting work of fiction, and that people would want to read it in part for its authenticity. My job, then, was to write it well, which required getting past the first, miserably awkward drafts.

But the more people I encountered who are “in” the industry, whether it was a conversation with an academic book salesperson, any one of many published interviews with literary agents, or some writer’s workshop, the more I kept hearing: It’s going to be very difficult to sell it, because either nobody wants to touch it, or everybody always knows the story.

So, having already written it, all I can say is—I’m sorry.

But, it’s done. One genuine apology is enough. Anyone who tells you otherwise was simply never ready for it in the first place, but their waste of time doesnt need to be mine, and the nice thing about the apology in the opening lines is that it’s always going to be there. So if what's excerpted above, from page 178, bothers you, you can just flip back and read just how sorry I really am—you'll be able to flip back, in fact, from anywhere, like the utterly stupid thing that happens on page 265, or the last cruel kiss-off on page 317, or wherever.

Hangups are one thing, but it's time to move on, no? I’m not claiming to have written the next masterpiece or the “definitive 9/11 novel” (well, not here anyway), but if thats really the standard for publication, it’s time to stop the presses, because lets be honest—a great deal of what we see on the shelves is garbage, and if we cant yet wrestle with the defining moment of our generation in a creative, liberating way, then arent we taking ourselves just a bit too seriously?

So I’m going to start my conclusion here, with a quote from another article from 2007:

“But then we haven't moved far in time from 9/11; the younger generation of American writers has yet to reckon with it. Recent novels may turn out to be only the first draft of a rich literature.”

And, well—my first draft wasnt enough, either. In an upcoming article, I’ll be putting old drafts next to new ones just so you can see how insufficient they were.

So while the views from the desks of established authors like DeLillo, McInerny and Foer are valuable, they were only the first drafts of what was yet to come, and we’re cheating ourselves if we think thats the most we can do.

So, you want cocky? Hows this: What's yet to come is here.

And, dont worry—I’m sure if you look closely you’ll find a real, rich, character-driven, thematically-sound apology for all that crap about Bush and the terrorists somewhere in there, too. But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until you can buy it in stores for that, because I'm done saying I'm sorry for free.

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This is the second in an ongoing series of excerpts from and commentary about my completed manuscript, "The Light That We Can See". You can find the other articles here.

CHAPTER ONE

The only thing I ever wanted to do was write my way through the crowded sidewalks of America. I couldn’t have inherited that, and that I aimed for New York specifically was nothing but chance. My parents were born in the midwest, met in Buffalo, and moved to a nice suburb in central New York to raise a family. The closest, best place to get a gallon of milk where I grew up was the dairy farm at the bottom of the hill. My Uncle Louis bought me a New York Mets pennant when I was eight, and what I liked best was its geometric skyline of the city. I’ve been a Mets fan ever since, but the only part of their logo I could draw with a gun to my head would be those little rectangular buildings, and the orange and blue, and the sky.

I know I shouldn’t have written this book. It’s not supposed to replace anything for you. I’m not doing this for kicks. It’s not easy to tell a story that everyone knows. And it’s not much fun to tell one you’ve told a million times already. What may not be immediately obvious is that as difficult, painful, and stupid as this must seem from where you’re sitting, it remains the only solution to a serious problem. What began as writer’s block has become quite the opposite. I can’t stop writing about it, no matter how much I try. This isn’t an attempt to repeat yet again the same story we’ve all heard before, it’s an attempt to write myself out of the thousands of pages and days of explanations, to try to reframe the confusion that’s been pouring out of me for the past several years. If I don’t stop the momentum of it, it’s going to chew me up or swallow me whole—it wouldn’t matter much either way.

_____________________________________________

...And so it begins. I'm no Kerouac, but on December 26, 2009, I sat down to write the novel that had been stewing in my brain for the previous eight years, and three weeks later I had a first draft ready to go, and I started shopping it.

Now, six months and several drafts later, I'm still shopping it, and, frankly, I'm running out of time, so I'm taking the show on the road, as it were. After all, if there's one thing America promises, it's the open road ahead. And since I cant afford much gas and god knows when my clutch or coils are finally going to give out, the information superhighway is the only road I've got.

So buckle up.

I'm not here to talk about the wreckage I've left behind. Thats a whole other story, and, much like the flattened possum on the roadside with its snarly sharp teeth frozen in anguish, not one fit for public consumption. Suffice it to say, I'm not pitching my personality. I'm pitching my book.

I'm also not here to bitch and complain about how impossible it is to sell a vampire-less, self-deprecating, semi-autobiographical novel about the American dream to a nation full of idiots and the literary agents who love them. Thats the kind of thing that can be accomplished in a single sentence, so it's hardly worthy of this kind of attention.

Nor am I here to reproduce the entertaining but hedonistic crimes of my past that, for so long, kept beautiful readers, sports fans and freewheeling leftists on the edges of their seats. Gone are the chocolate jesuses, the serpent-haired pimps of freedom, and poop sketches. At least for now. Those were for more carefree days, when jobs were plentiful and I had an easy excuse for my madness.

No no—now it's time to grow up and get serious.

So stay tuned for more brilliant commentary about writing, literature, truth-in-fiction, recurring fads, spiritual enlightenment, and—best of all—exclusive excerpts from "The Light That We Can See," a new novel by yours truly, about how our worst nightmares can sometimes fix our most broken dreams, as long as we can keep our eyes on the road, and not the rear-view mirror.

Well folks, it finally happened: I'm writing article number one-hundred. It took me a long time to get to this point, but I'd be disingenuous if I said anything less than that I loved every single moment of it. In more than two years on the Vine, I've done some of what I personally consider to be my very best writing, brought out of me by an excellent community, a relentless news cycle, and my never-ending desire to be involved in political discourse however possible.

Why am I writing an article to mark what some might consider a rather mundane milestone? I'm not a particularly prolific writer -- there are Viners who've literally written and seeded thousands of articles more than me, and quite a few of their works are dramatically better than anything I've ever contributed as a columnist here -- but something remarkable has happened to me in these past hundred articles. I've developed a sense of pride in my own writing, a field I've always considered to be sub-standard compared to my other creative ventures. I'm a musician, a former game developer, and now, I consider myself a writer. I always treated writing more as a hobby than a calling. But in writing these one hundred articles, the Newsvine community embraced me and boosted my confidence through thousands of positive comments. My time at Newsvine has led me to discussions with three famous journalists, two of whom have told me things to the effect of my having "a bright future" ahead of me in this field. I've actually gotten job offers as a result of my writing for Newsvine, though I've thus far turned them down. I was even nominated to be a "Liberal Communications Director," and even President! If these aren't tremendous boons to ones self-esteem, I dare not ask what is. And none of that would have ever happened had it not been for Newsvine and her outstanding community.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Newsvine community for two years' worth of comments. The positive ones have encouraged me to write one hundred articles more, and the negative ones have challenged me to engage my writing with more evidence of my philosophy and standing, and to place emphasis on overwhelmingly making my point on issues that rest within the gray-scale of ideological debate. To all of those who have presented yourselves with the label of being a "fan" of mine, please know that I started my column as a chance to vent, and today, I write my articles in the hopes that I can give you a stronger voice. To the people who absolutely can't stand me, I thank you for bringing your own positions to the front and calling into question my own positions, because each time someone does that, I stop for a moment to try and consider things from your point of view. Next, I'd like to thank the Newsvine organization itself, for giving all of us this tremendous opportunity to be heard. And last but not least, I'd like to thank MSNBC for signing my paychecks and paying for my celebratory pizzas. To those of you who get that joke, yes, I was true to my word: I've thus far used my Newsvine earnings to buy one pizza, and with my earnings from my "The Celebration of Stupidity" article alone, I can probably buy seven or eight more! :)

In short, thank you for making it possible for me to write these one hundred articles. Thank you for inspiring them, one after the other, and for standing behind me when I questioned if this was time well spent. It was, and these two years were inspirational to say the least. I hope my next one hundred articles are as well-received and as well-liked by all of you as my last hundred were, and please know that with every comment, every email, and every friend request you send, you're pushing me to work harder and to apply the best writing I have to offer into everything I publish to this column. Thank you!

Purple Prose is on the rise in literature. This overly descriptive flowery language which detracts from the imagery it is supposed to improve stalks writers of all genres. Even worse most victims of Purple Prose are unaware of the attack until after their writing has been made available to public scrutiny.

L.D. Rucks, a real sounding fictional writer speaks about her encounter with Purple Prose in vivid detail.

" I was stricken thrice with purple prose of a most divinely inspired nature, despite, or perhaps to-wit my Promethean endeavors hath failed to root out the sublimely melancholic demeanor of my intended interest in devilishly decadent descriptions."

Miss Rucks has recently leveled an accusation of Intellectual Rape against her alleged attacker. Purple Prose declined to comment.

The College Of Fictional Authors where Miss Rucks is enrolled recently received a letter from one A. Litteration claiming partial responsibility for the acts of 'creative terrorism' against the young writer.

" Truth to tell twas torturous, my mercenary mission, to tactically terrorize the wordy worldly writings of misguided Miss Rucks." A. Litteration candidly confessed before implicating Purple Prose as an accomplice;

"Purple Prose perfected the plot to precisely pinpoint the pejorative predicate present in the purported prose."

A.S. Sonance and H. Participle have sent similar letters outlining their involvement in the plot to derail the young authors work.

Palin Drome deinied involvement in the fiasco, claiming that the actual terrorists were hiding in Central America;

" A man a plan a canal Panama." he told 'Fictional Fiction Magazine' last Tuesday.

What's an author to do when there are fewer vehicles for gaining that rubber stamp of approval and credibility, getting published, and getting noticed in a world of enormous supply, but diminishing demand?

As many have argued, it's time to focus on the reader (or the community).

Former 'Happy Days' star tells of his reinvention as a children's author.

Millions know him as "the Fonz", the slick-haired, leather-jacketed mechanic whom he played in the hit 1970s sitcom Happy Days.

Now, Henry Winkler is reinventing himself as a best-selling children's author. The 64-year-old American actor has written a set of 17 books featuring a young dyslexic child, Hank Zipzer, which have already sold 2.5 million copies in the US and are now being published in Britain.

Sitting on my niece's deck overlooking the bay as we watched small patches of flat still water topped with an oily sheen, I was once again struck by the enormity of the task before us. Having grown up on the gulf I have helped clean up after storms that had destroyed homes, businesses and beaches. Nothing about those disasters was "easy" but compared to the impact of the oil spill I believe that we will at some point begin to remember them as much less than they seemed at the time. And it is not just the spill it is also the clean up because what we are looking at is not from the spill but rather from cleaning up the boats that are out daily laying booms or being "spotter" boats.

I am waiting for a call that will put me to work cleaning up one of my favorite beaches but while I waited I had been volunteering where I was needed. When I left for Louisiana a couple of weeks ago the beaches where I live in Alabama had yet to see any extreme damage but that is changing daily. I came home last weekend after being accepted into the classes that would qualify me to work for a sub contractor. After taking the OSHA class I am amazed that more people have not been injured or gotten ill from working the clean up. My class was a joke. I have taken this course before in Colorado and I know what the requirements should be. But down here required hours had been cut to almost nothing and some tests were only ten questions out of almost fifty that should be on a Hazwoper test. I am not even sure if I want to work with people who barely know the safety rules and health hazards. I do realize that we need bodies... on the beach and on the boats... but I am afraid that bodies is just what we will have. Just like on the rigs safety seems to be way down on the list of things to do the correct way. I have been a safety first responder and a second class fire control team member in two different companies and this is the most ridicoulous thing I have ever seen. One company doing it this way and one doing it another and none of them doing it properly.

A few minutes ago I heard that a federal judge has ruled against the moratorium on drilling. Now I realize that oil is a big employer in the gulf and I have friends and relations whose jobs depend upon drilling but even they do not believe that we should continue to do so until it is determined exactly how and why this happened. I know that they definitly want the oil companies to spend more money and effort on learning how to avoid this kind of disaster as well as developing better ways to control such spills. Safety should be more of a concern than getting a new rig up and running in as short as time as possible but I fear that such a hope is a ( excuse the pun) pipe dream. Money is and always has been the driving force. there are those who seem to believe that we should just keep letting the oil companies do as they damn well please as long as the jobs are there. What good is a paycheck if it gets you killed ? In the meantime we are going to lose more and more jobs as our beaches get oil soaked and our seafood industries go down in a sea of black crude. Tourism is on the downhill slide and that will affect many other businesses as well. As people lose their jobs because of these things others will lose theirs because there will be no money to shop at the local stores or eat out once in a while or go to the movies and the list goes on. How many disasters like this will it take before we realize as a country that we must find other ways to get at least some of our energy needs? How many other people will die before the oil companies realize that they can not cut corners when it comes to safety and the technology needed to avert such disasters? How much of our wetlands can we afford to lose before the rest of the country and even too many that live here realize that it can and will affect our lives as well as our enviorment?

Our lives may never be the same at least in my lifetime. I wonder how many people who just see this on tv really get how bad it really is or how long it will actually take to clean up or the fact that we will never get back much of what we losing daily to this spill. They do not know how bad it smells or how sad it it is to see the wild life covered in and dying from oil. How seafood prices will soar because it will be years before so many of the shrimp and oyster beds recover if ever. How many lives will affected because of these facts. They do not know how hot and dangerous it is to work this clean up or how many are forced to in order to put food on the table or how many will move because they can no longer afford to stay where they have lived and fished for generations. My family has been here since long before the civil war. We have fished, shrimped, played, and swam in the waters as some of the first settlers in this region. I have a deep and abiding love and respect for the water. I have long been an avid supporter of conservation and enviromental issues but I am also a realist. I know that we needed the influx of jobs and money the rigs have brought over the years but I have also protested the abuses. And these have only gotten worse as this spill proves. Whenever money becomes more important than human lives then we are truly lost. When we do not care enough about species other than human that affects our ecological makeup or the land and water that supports our life on this planet we have forgotten every lesson that every man made disaster should have taught us. The whole world should stop and take some time to reevaluate just what "progress" can and has cost us. I am all for progress but we need to be so much smarter how we go about obtaining our goals. We have done so much damage to our planet it is a wonder we still survive as well as we do.

So I sit and wait for a job I hoped to never have and that could last longer than I would have ever wanted it to. And I look at pictures that show the beauty of Gulf Coast and remember the times when the beaches were open to all. A time when casinos and condos did not obsure the views from the roads, when small motels and wayside eateries were all you needed to have a great vacation at the beach. But I would rather have another thousand condos littering up the landscape and privatizing the beaches than the view I now see as I ride down the coast or the view from my niece's deck.

That hole that's inside me, that place with the wall, no chink in the mortar, no entrance at all. Then I discovered, protection or no, the danger is within, and nowhere to go. It fractured, saw daylight, for only a breath.

"Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style."

Now is May Ten. It is MAD APE DEN Day!

We say it is "Mad Ape Den Day" for a way of gab we dub "Mad Ape Den." For Mad Ape Den gab you try to use a vox of 1, 2, or 3... as I am now! If you use 4+, it is a big no no.

E.g., if I use Mad Ape Den to say "The USA is Rad," I may say or hum:

O say can you see,
by the AM sun,
how we did ken we were rad
at the end of the day

Our red-and-not-red set and sky-orb set
in the war so bad
o'er the hut-top we did see,
did fly in a so so rad way

And the red hue of the war gun set
The TNT did go POW in the air
did get us to ken in the eve
our USA-rag yet did fly...

You get it now? Mad Ape Den is fun, no?

So for the NV URL you are on and all on the WWW you can try to say a wee bit on it in 3 or less, and a pal may go "HA HA!" And if you do not, a pal or non pal may go HA HA, too. But if you do it on NV, use the CoH or you may get a mod, OK?

So for the day, gab it up as a Mad Ape to all you see, you lot, til the eve and the day is out!

Funny and true list.

The old man stopped brushing the dog and looked at me, “Hi, I’m Jake Livingston and this here is Goldie.”

“Hi,” I said, “I’m Dale. So, what is this place? I’ve been to animal shelters before but I've never seen anything like this.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t, this is like heaven on earth, the brain-child of Christina Virginia Freeman, she’s the director of this shelter, and feisty as a firecracker. She, her father, Joe, and son, Buddy, are out on the dog sleds right now exercising about 20 dogs, and having fun doing it.”

Jake went back to brushing Goldie then paused and looked out into the side yard. “See that young girl over there working with the pit-bull on the A-Frame, she’s new here and her name is Hannah, she got here a couple weeks ago with the TARP program. She arrived with a whole lot of baggage but she’s doing super now. She‘s a natural with the dogs and as good as anybody I’ve seen. She just needed a pin pricking point in the right direction and a good reason to bloom, I guess.”

He must have seen the confused look on my face cause he laughed and said, “Oh, not the bailout TARP, the Shelter’s TARP, Teen’s At Risk Program. Old Judge Hawthorn got it going with the Universality and some local shrinks. It's an intervention program that runs for six months to help kids in trouble. They come in from all over the country and are kept totally occupied, training and caring for the dogs here at the shelter and out at Martha Gray’s farm, that’s where they live, work, and play.

“WOW!” I said.

“Yep, and it’s all funded by a research grant from the university. Their doing research on how developing empathy towards others has direct effects on developing positive self identity. The kids are teamed up with various mentors, in groups of three, and they experience every aspect there is in life with guidance from us elders and other experienced kids. They learn all the basics, from the Foxfire skills at the farm and their 50 plus acres of vegetable garden which they produce and market, to the vet-tech duties right here at the shelter. It’s a real hands-on life experience and the kids eat it up. They pick up empathy skills with the pet therapy programs at the children‘s hospital and dog training skills like what Hannah’s working on now.”

I watched her work, she had such patience with the dog, in coaxing it up the steep grade.

“She’ll be riding her horse in the barrel race this afternoon, that’s going to be a hoot. Yep,” he said while nodding his head, “it works alright, and it got me and all these other geriatrics around here up and running again. Hell, I was almost as good as dead, sitting in that wheel chair, all day every day at the retirement home, but here, I feel like a kid again. It just feels good to help a kid train a dog, which in turn will help another kid at the hospital, a real win, win way of life and I’m glad to be part of it. And the pet therapy programs, like at the children’s hospital, now that’s what makes this place tick with compassion. The community involvement is such that we have social events every Saturday and dog training programs open to any body that wants to come with their dog. It’s all free too, organized with volunteers and local sponsors.

I was amazed. “How did you get your job here, Jake?”

“This is not a job, by no means what so ever. In a job you perform your work and then you leave and get paid for it, done deal, but here, it’s a way of life. We love what we do here and it has become the only reason for living to many of us, and we have profit sharing too. Having a purpose in life, other than just making money and pursuing self-pleasure is a very important aspect to one’s self identity. I think you have to get old to realize that. When we all get together like this and have fun helping troubled kids and dogs to find a better life, then, the way I see it, life just don’t get any better than that.”

“Grrrrr!” Goldie wanted something and Jake renewed his brush stroking right away and nodded his head again, “Hey, were having a little rodeo and a cookout at the Gray Farm this afternoon and your welcome to come. And bring your dog, if you find one, if not you can borrow one of ours for the day.”

I leaned back and wondered about it all.

I came here looking to find a new dog for my life but I think I just found a new life with the dogs. I was going to become part of this crusade.

Thanks for reading, Dale95

The internet in haiku

omfg!
can't you write a full sentence?
wtf u suk

The strange weather

Dreary clouds of grey
Where is the sun? The blue sky?
Am I in London?

Outside the flock

Birds of a feather
Flock together, so they say
Where do I fit in?

Hi Friend,

Well, last night I found myself at the lowest point ever in my entire life. I am alone now in this world, homeless, and depressed, as yet another marriage bites the dust. Starting my life all over again now, just as soon as the sun comes up, only this time it will be with a dog. The animal shelter is my first step in this new beginning and I know, I know, I should wait till I find a place to live first. But, what if I can’t find a place that allows dogs, then I guess I won’t get a dog, right? Wrong! I’m getting a dog first, then I’ll have to find a place that accepts dogs. Its all in how we prioritize our life, right? Sun’s coming up again, Thank God. I will finish this letter up latter.

Hi again Friend,

You will not believe this! I pulled into the local animal shelter at 6:30 in the morning and there were three cars in the parking lot already. Over in the front yard I saw an old man sitting on an octagon bench built out of plank lumber around this huge Oak tree. He was talking to an old yellow lab and brushing its coat gently during the brief pauses of thought between his sentences. I saw this same scene once in a calendar, a Norman Rockwell painting of a young boy and his puppy. They have aged well my friend, and it is good to see them still together.

I glanced over to the shelter door, which was closed, then to the sign in the window that read: Open Seven till Seven ---Seven Days a Week. I check my watch again, I had another 15 minutes to wait and decided to mosey around a bit and stretch my legs. A movement caught my eye from around the side of the shelter building. There was another dog walking with this old lady near the parameter of the side yard. A big dog too, looked like a Boxer-Shepard mix and totally calm, they too seemed to be having a tranquil conversation about something of importance.

Then I saw something at the far end of the side yard, a Hot Walker, like what they use to cool down race horses. But this one had one, two, three, four, ------eight dogs hitched to it, everyone of them walking in orderly fashion around in this huge circle. There was no barking, hollering or confusion of any kind, it was surreal. I thought maybe I had crossed into the Twilight Zone last night? Then I heard some hollering off in the woods on a path and I saw a dog sled team pulling a cart with a young girl in it, then another, and another.

I walked over to the man on the bench and ask him what was going on and he said, “Oh nothing, just another Dog Day around here.”

I sat down on the bench along side the old man and wondered if maybe this was all just a dream, and I was here in Kansas looking for Toto.

Thanks for reading, Dale

EVER wondered why it is the case that in reading biographies of great and minor figures, the name of the father is almost always mentioned first than that of the mother? Not counting the cases of one of the parents being lopsidedly famous and powerful or influential over the other, the general trend has been that the father is almost always mentioned first. Notwithstanding if the father is a scum and it is the mother who served as major breadwinner. Even in the case of United States President Barack Obama whose father deserted them, his biographical page in the White House website cites his father first: “With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.”

Is such really the natural course to follow? Perhaps, because most human beings carry the surname of the father* it is deemed to be a most natural thing to mention the father first. Or, maybe, it is thought that God of some patriarchal religion decrees it that way. Perhaps in the days of old when outdated thinking and stiff patriarchy ruled the world, citing the father’s name first was understandably standard operating procedure for historians and biographical writers. Today in a world enlightened by science and humanist philosophy, should fathers still come first?

If it is “natural,” we should abide by, is it not logical that the name of the mother–who carried the infant in her womb for 9 months and risked her life giving birth to the child–instead come first in the biographies of noted humans of this planet? Why should the father, whose paternity is not obvious or readily verifiable be mentioned first?

In the olden times when it was exclusively the men who eked out a living and financially supported the wife and child, such practice of crediting the paternal roots first over the maternal can be justified. But even that is arguable from an objective, non-patriarchal viewpoint.

In the modern times when women also work, if not actually serve as the family’s main breadwinner, should it not be fair SOP to mention first the mother over the father. I mean, it is the woman, after all, who is the biological source of the child, notwithstanding the genetic contribution of the man. So long as there’s a (valid) witness to the pregnancy and the delivery, the fact of motherhood is always undeniable. It is the woman who suffers the discomfort and extreme pains of pregnancy/labor, and, usually, the responsibility of nurturing the child in the critical early stages of infancy. So why prioritize giving credit to the father whose paternity cannot be perfectly guaranteed unless the mother was under fool-proof eunuch-guarded house arrest for a few months before the estimated date of conception.

In the Philippines, there is a saying that ‘the grandparents can only be certain that a grandchild is theirs if it is the mother who is their offspring.’ Indeed, the marriage of, say, a son to his wife will not guarantee that any grandchild such a union produces carries the grandparents’ genes. The context of the saying is, of course, the traditional setup where DNA paternal testing was not yet available. However, even such DNA testing does not provide 100% accurate confirmation of paternity. Unless, perhaps, the procedure is repeated multiple times.

I say it is high time that humankind flow with the biological and reverse the patriarchal viewpoint of biography writing. Let the naming of mothers come first before that of the fathers. Mothers not only deserve first credit for all their pregnancy woes but, also, such a practice should provide more accurate, biologically founded biographical information.

*At least one exception is Sweden, as a Swedish friend informed me that couples have the option of choosing which surname (the wife or the husband) they wish to legally carry.

_________

Photo credits

www.filart.com:

Mother and Son – Fruit and Flower Background
by Norma Belleza – 1996

Mag-Inang Nagpipili ng Bigas
by Cesar Amorsolo – 1983

Reference:

President Barack Obama. White House website. http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama

For years, writers in South Africa were constrained and inspired by politics. Now they have been joined by exciting new voices, and the country's literature has never been so free. Its leading novelists and poets discuss the way forward, while Gillian Slovo looks back on the moment when it all began to change

Reality has been proving scifi wrong for decades now -- or, if you prefer, it's been science fiction movies (and their makers) who have been letting down reality: Always promising wonders right around the corner, and yet when the date for those wonders comes to pass, we're still just us, still without the proverbial flying cars or robot butlers. How can movies get the future so wrong for so long?

Well, the answer is that this question assumes something not necessarily in evidence; that is, that science fiction filmmakers are in fact trying to get the future right -- that is, trying to accurately extrapolate from current, existing knowledge, a future in which their stories could come about. It's a nice theory, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. In fact, the formula many scifi movies use for their "futures" is another one entirely, and it goes like this:

My girlfriend and I were lying in bed the other night and I was just about asleep, you know that stage where your fading in and out. As I was about to doze off, I felt her warm hand slowly run across the back of my neck up over my ear to the top of my head. I thought hmmm....as tried to break free from the sand man's slumber.

Then she started running her hand down the middle of my back, till she hit my thigh, then she moved over to the front, and up my chest. I was wide awake by now, and had rolled over from my side to my back as she moved hand across my chest again and started down the other side. Then I felt her reach over to my inner thigh and work her way down the inside of my leg and back up. I am thinking to myself Knowlton must have been a good boy!!!!!Just before she got to the area that causes tax deductions, and the trading off the sports car for a mini van she stopped.

Damn!!! I thought, then said "baby you don't have to stop."

She replied "Oh I found the remote."

NOW THAT WILL P!SS YOU OFF!!!!

After a long day at work, John was ready for a perfectly chilled beer and definitely for a game of pool. He logged-off his work computer, picked his jacket up from the floor and turned off the lights. As he headed towards the elevator he could feel the taste the cold of that beer in his mouth, bottled of course only making his thirst much stronger. John quickly got to the elevator lobby and pressed the elevators’ down button and waited. As he looked at the three elevators he started wondering which would arrive at the seventh floor first. Anticipation was John’s favorite sensation, he relished in the unknown, anything that would send his mind away from the hustle and routine of the workday and life.

            "Ding," rang the middle elevator.

            "Ha," John thought to himself felling a weirdest sensation inside him.

            The whole situation was strange, like seeing a familiar face but not really remembering who the person is or where they could have met. It was a sense of familiarity, déjà vu, perhaps.  John pressed the lobby button and the elevator started moving down. He wanted to put the countless hours at work from the week and get himself to unwind a bit.

            “Relax,” John heard himself say in a whisper.

             He looked at the elevator display and saw that it had only gone down two floors.  Now the elevator was old and slow but he felt like if the elevator should have arrived at the lobby already.  John started scratching his head, like trying to find the first piece of a puzzle, as the elevator rang.  The doors opened at the second floor, odd since the hour was late and there should be no one but John left in the whole building, even the security guards had gone home. He saw no one as the doors slid open, nothing but a few lights were turned off.  Seeing the dark gave him a chill. John was the fearless type, would not take unnecessary risks but never showed he was scared even if inside he was petrified.  He shook off the anxiety and told himself,

            "Running out of time," John murmured as he shook off the anxiety.

            All of a sudden a thought crossed his mind, a scenario played in his mind, what if there’s someone needing help, what is I am their last chance of getting help. It would bother John tremendously if he did not take a minute to check and later found out he could have helped.  He decided to go investigate and the thought of the game of pool crossed his mind.

            “That’ll just have to wait,” he whispered to himself.

            Always thinking of the worst, a trait that played tricks on his on many occasions, but many times helped him figure thing out, laid his jacket across the elevator doors so that they would stay open. He stepped over the elevators’ threshold and looked down the dark hallway.

            "Let me help you," was called out softly.

            Nothing but silence and a slight echo answered. The darkness off the hallway was eerie and made him feel cold and alone, like if he was the only man for miles around. As he continued walking down the main hallway, that feeling of familiarity came back; he wrote it off as all the floors having the same layout.  Although john office had been at this building for years, this was the first time he entered the second floor.  John knew that there was no way of knowing what was up ahead in those dark office suites, and that sensation was like little shocks of electricity all over his body.  That made him feel alive, he proceeded and any feeling of apprehension had disappeared. 

Part 2...

Chapter 15

Robert woke early and went to the field to check his cotton crop. It was standing tall, and the leaves were full and green. Robert stood with pride as looked over the field, and then a warm gust of wind blew passed as Robert watched the wind rustle the cotton leaves. He looked to the west and thunder heads were on the western horizon. He thought a rain shower would settle the dust and give the crop some moisture. Robert went to the barn to start his morning chores; he fed Two Bits and Babe, milked the cow and slopped the hogs. Robert started to the grain bin, when he heard Lucinda call his name. He walked out of the barn with a bucket of corn for the chickens and geese when he noticed something wasn't right.

The wind had picked up and the thunder heads were getting darker, the sky had turned a brownish green as the wind began to whip and spin from different directions. Two Bits and Babe became weary as so did the other animals. Robert could see the lighting a far off as the rolls of thunder began to shake the ground. "Lucinda you need to grab Parmelia and take one of the lanterns and go to the root cellar, looks like we may have a storm coming" Robert yelled. Robert dropped the bucket of corn when he looked up saw a funnel drop from one of the thunder heads. "It’s a tornado, Lucinda get Parmelia and get to the cellar now, I am going to turn the animals loose. He went to the barn and took the mules out of the stalls and they dashed out the door and vanished into the timber.

The sky became darker and the wind was howling as he turned the cows out. Then Robert felt hail pelting him on the back as he looked up he could see the tornado was bearing closer. He made his way to the cellar and locked the door as Lucinda had the lantern lit. The three huddled in the corner holding to each other as the storm grew stronger out side. They could hear the wind pick up and start to roar, then it became very silent and still. Robert could hear a low rumble that soon turned into a loud furious force, the geese and chickens were cackling and honking as the wind howled. Robert could hear something hit the side of the cellar as a chicken or goose would let out a distress call. After the roaring had passed the winds died down and the rain fell hard for about ten minutes then it became silent.

Robert opened the cellar door as beams of sunlight entered into the cellar. The three emerged from the cellar to find several of the chickens and geese had been thrown against the cellar and were lying dead on the ground. Several trees had blown over to the south of the cabin showing the path that the tornado had taken. The tornado had missed the house and the cotton crop but Robert did see the hail had done some damage. Lucinda was worried about the other settlers, Robert told her that he would round up Two Bits and Babe along with the cows then they would go check on the others.

Robert found Two Bits and Babe, unharmed but still very skid-dish to make their way back to the home stead. The cow and calf were near the creek; Robert took the lead ropes and led all of the animals back to the barn.
Robert and Lucinda made the trip in the wagon to Nance's place first; everyone was safe the tornado had struck north of their place. Robert asked Star where Author had gone to, she said he went to check on his still. A few minutes later Author emerged from the timber north of his cabin carrying bits and pieces of copper pipe and tubing. He approached the cabin and Roberts wagon and said “this is all that it left, the rest of it is strode up in the trees like Christmas tree decorations." With both hands on her hips Star turned to him and said “I told you the hand of God was going to come down some day and take that devils water away from you." Author just shook his head as he slowly walked away dragging the copper tubing "I'll be in the barn if anyone needs me" he said sadly.

The Stones, Martha Reed and Ingram’s missed the brunt of the Tornado; Mr. Stacy lost a pole barn and two of his hogs. Eubanks, Harris and the Palmers missed the storm completely but watched as it cut a path across the thick timber and swamps south of Big Lake. The settlers had their first encounter with the force of an Arkansas tornado and realized the importance in keeping an eye on the spring skies. The settlers found that a beautiful day could turn into a disastrous one with in moments.

Author Nance saddled one of his mules early Saturday morning to go to Chickasaba Township. This would be his first visit to the town; he started east toward Ingram’s home stead. Author stopped briefly to talk to Caleb and to see how his crops were doing. Caleb was in the smoke house skinning out an eight point buck he had shot at sunrise that morning. "Well Caleb fine looking buck you got there" Author said. "Yep, caught him in the garden eating the tops off of the carrots" replied Caleb. “I am headed to Chickasaba Caleb, you need anything while I am there" asked Author. "Well I'll tell you I ain't been there before, how would you like some company" stated Caleb as he finished skinning the buck and cleaned off his hunting knife. "Sounds fine to me, it's my first time to go there as well" said Author.

Caleb saddled his mule, told his wife he would be back late that evening or the next morning then the two men rode east to Chickasaba. The two men had traveled about three miles when they came across Colonel Hatley's men; they were clearing timber and started setting the corner post for Fort McFerin. Hatley welcomed Caleb and Author then asked why they were this far east. Author told him he was going to Chickasaba to find the parson to perform James' and Caroline’s wedding. "Chickasaba is about a good five to six miles from here. The town is just pass Chief Chickasaba's village, there are about sixty to seventy Chickasaws living there. They are peaceful people; they trade and sell to the towns people, so I do not think they will give you any problems. I was over there last week and he and I met and is an honorable man" said Hatley.

"Does the town have a parson" Author asked. "As a matter of fact they have two; one is a Methodist preacher that has been there for quiet sometime as a missionary to the Chickasaws. His name is Reverend Ezekiel Lewis. The other parson is fairly new to the area, he is helping build the Baptist church in Chickasaba his name is Reverend Benjamin Massey. If either one of those parsons are not available let me know. I have a Chaplin on my staff that would be glad to perform the wedding" said Hatley. Author said he would be sure and let him know on their way back from Chickasaba.

The men arrived at Chickasaba around three o'clock that afternoon. Arriving Author and Caleb saw Chief Chickasaba's village, it sat on a high mound with several other mounds built around it. The Chickasaws were busy smoking fish, and working in the small fields of corn, beans, and squash. The mounds held several log and clay long houses. The children were playing in the green fields of grass that surrounded the village.

Author and Caleb proceeded into town, looking for the Methodist and Baptist church. A few store fronts lined the dirt main street, cabins and tent structures spread out over the cleared area of land. At the end of the street was a small log structure that had a rough wooden cross that stood in the front. "I reckon that might be the church, it's got a cross in the front" said Author. “Only one way to find out Author, let's go ask" said Caleb. Author cleared his throat "Last time I was in a church, was when Star and I got married. Just make sure your standing far away from me Caleb in case God decides to send a bolt of lighting" said Author.

The two men dismounted the mules and started toward the church door, when a balding grey haired man from the cabin next to the church asked if he could help them. "Yes sir, we are looking for the parson Ezekiel Lewis" said Author. “I am Parson Lewis" said the man as he rose from his knees patting the dirt from his hands. “You will have to excuse me I was just tending to my flowers" he said as he extended his hand to Author and Caleb. "Parson I am not sure what the misses is, Methodist or Baptist. Me I am pretty much nothing, I figure God would have a hard time molding a hard old ridge runner like me; but we have a son that is getting married and we need a preacher." stammered Nance.

Reverend Lewis invited the two men to the porch of his cabin and had them to sit while his wife fixed them some tea. "Well now Author I wouldn't be too sure about God not being able to use a man like you. Just by looking at this old frail aging body you would have never thought that fifty years ago I was one of the cussinest and fightinest young bucks around" Reverend Lewis said. “I used to go by the church on Sunday morning just to holler, yell and make fun at the folks on the inside; yep I was a hell raiser and rebel rouser back in my day, till God spoke to me. So don't count yourself out just yet Author Nance"

The reverends wife brought out some tea for the men as they continued to talk; Ezekiel asked when the wedding was going to take place. Author told him June twenty eighth. "Oh my, that is only a few weeks away Author, but I tell what, if you will have the young couple come and visit with me next week, I will perform the wedding. I like to talk to the couple and try and give them some guidance before they make such a sacred commitment" Said Parson Lewis. Author agreed to have the two come to visit him the following week. Sipping his tea Ezekiel said " The conference board is sending a young vicker down to preach for me that weekend of the twenty eight so I will be able to come though I would ask that you would have a place for my wife and I to spend the night. I am not as good traveling at night anymore." Author assured the reverend that he would have a place for them. The men finished their tea and thanked the parson and his wife then mounted their mules and headed back west.

The men arrived at Fort McFerin around eight that evening and colonial Hatley invited the two men to have supper in his officers’ tent. The cook had prepared fried quail that colonial Hatley had shot earlier that evening. The colonial told the men that he hoped to have the Fort finished by latter July, and that the settlers would be seeing mounted patrols every other day. There came a voice from the front of the tent "permission to enter sir" said the voice from outside. "Permission granted Goodman" replied Hatley.

Goodman walked inside the tent stood at attention and gave the colonial a salute. “At ease Goodman" commanded Hatley. "Yes sir, my detail has returned from patrol sir. We encountered no hostiles or have had any reports of trespassing or vandalism" Goodman reported. "Very well Goodman, put it in your report, file it with the corporal and put the soldiering down for the day and say hello to Caleb and Author" said Hatley.

Goodman shook Authors' and Caleb's hand and greeted them. The four men talked for a couple of hours before retiring for the night. The colonial had the night watchmen to make available their tents for Author and Caleb to sleep. The lights slowly went out in the tents one by one as the crickets and whippoorwills sang into the night.

James was pulling stumps from some of the land he had cleared on Martha's place when Author returned home that Sunday. Author told him what the Reverend Lewis requested and James agreed that he and Caroline would make the trip to see the reverend that coming week. While James and Author were talking Martha came from out of the cabin with a small basket. She walked over to James and Author and said "Good morning gentlemen I just pulled some biscuits from the heat box, I have some fresh dewberry jelly that I made yesterday and I brought you some cold cows milk; that has been cooling in the creek." James and Author didn’t turn it down as they spread the rich sweet dewberry jelly on the warm biscuits. "Good gracious almighty woman, those are the best biscuits I have ever tasted and I am telling you don't tell Star" said Author as he grabbed another on and spread more jelly on top.

The two weeks passed quickly and finely it was the weekend of the wedding. Everything was planned for the big gathering. The town’s people and James' neighbors began to show up at James's house Friday afternoon, setting up tables and benches. Simion and Author were getting BBQ pits ready while the women prepared the rest of the food.

Reverend Lewis and his wife arrived around noon to visit with James and Caroline to discuss the ceremony for Saturday. Martha offered to share her cabin with Reverend Lewis and his wife. Albert Perkins and his family arrived with a wagon full of musicians ready to play. Mrs. Perkins reminded Caroline that after midnight she could not see James because it was bad luck to see the bride on the wedding day. Some of the towns folk pitched tents to stay over while others would bed down in their wagons. Colonial Hatley had given Sergeant Goodman a weekend pass to attend.

"Son tomorrow is the big day and we are going to have a great party tonight" said Author. “I am sure of it pa, and I have to say I am not as scared as I was a couple of weeks ago. When Caroline and I went to see the Reverend in Chickasaba he shared some things that really put my mind to rest. Caroline and I really like him and told him we may visit the church" replied James. "That sounds good son, I don't know to much about the Methodist I kinda shy away from that hell and brimstone stuff. Tell you what son, why don't we grab Robert and Goodman then go cut some more wood. We are going to need a big fire to burn all night" Author said.

Star Nance, Lucinda Cockrum, Bessie Stone, Martha Reed, Lillie Palmer, Zeta Eubanks, Ellen Harris, Nora Ingram, Kate Cooper, Mrs. Perkins and Caroline kept Mrs. Lewis company and discussed some of the wedding plans. Mrs. Lewis asked Caroline who she had as bride’s maids. "I have my childhood friend Helen Shrable, James's sister Genevieve Nance, my cousin Rose Mary Tatum and Jenny Simpson is my maid of honor" Caroline replied.

Mrs. Lewis asked if they had the traditional trinkets for the bride. "What are those" asked Caroline? Mrs. Lewis replied "Sweet child every bride should have with her on her wedding day, something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue." Zeta stood up and said to Caroline “Ellen and I have brought you something new." Ellen walked over and placed in Caroline’s hair two bone hair comes trimmed in mother of pearl and lace bows. "We made these for you Caroline" said Ellen. Mrs. Lewis said "I have something that you can borrow" and took from he small carrying purse a lace kerchief. Caroline told everyone that she has something blue, the cameo that James bought for her. "Well Ladies we have something new, something borrowed and something blue all we need now is something old said Mrs. Lewis.

Mrs. Perkins walked over to her daughter and sit beside her. “I have something old" she said as she opened a small wooden box and pulled out two copper coins about the size of a modern day quarter. "These are two half cent pieces that your father had in his pocket the day we were married in 1819. That was all the money that he had but our love and dreams of raising a family out weighed the hard times and the bad. With hard work over the years we saw our dreams come true, that is one of the reasons he's been so protective of you. The day you were born your fathers heart filled with joy and never once was he ever disappointed that you weren't a boy. You will always be our little girl. We started out with very little and we want more for you so I give you these two coins and the wooden box where I tucked them safely away, as a reminder of mine and your father's wedding day." Caroline and her mother both broke down in tears as they hugged each other knowing tomorrow she would become Mrs. James Nance.

The women decided to pick the wild flowers the morning of the wedding so that would be fresh. They would consist of daisies, butter cups, daffodils, wild bachelor buttons and wild prima roses.

The evening sun began to set that warm June evening as the fire pits were stoked and the smell of BBQ beef and pork filled the air. Lanterns gave off their glow as the people gathered around the tables. James and Caroline were placed at the head of the table as everyone started to set; Ken Goodman took a seat next to Martha. Once everyone was seated the Reverend Lewis stood up to say Grace. “Before we give thanks this evening I would like to say something special to the couple seated before you. Friends and neighbors seated before you are two individuals that have found love, comfort and completeness. They have put their trust in each others hearts; tomorrow they will give their vows before you and God almighty and become one. I encourage each of you to support this young couple be a good friend, a good neighbor to them. James and Caroline may God bless you in a mighty way. With that said, God we thank thee for this bounty, through your son's name Jesus Amen."

Family, friends and neighbors made marry that evening as laughter and talk filled the air. Two young people with a sparkle in their eyes and a flame in their heart would set forth the next day on a journey that would span over sixty years together. Once the meal was over the musicians gathered on James's and Caroline’s front porch and began to play as James took Caroline by the hand and danced the first dance.

Martha stood at the edge of one of the fire pits staring off into the night. "Martha are you alright" asked Lucinda. Martha shook her head and said "oh yes Lucinda I am alright. I was just thinking how Thomas would have loved being here playing music with Robert, Mr. Harris and all the others. I can't believe he has been gone almost five months. I miss him." Lucinda put her arm around Martha's shoulder and said "Martha look up there in the northeast part of the sky, see that bright twinkling star. I never notice that star until the night Thomas passed, Bessie took my place so that I could get a cup of coffee and a bit of fresh air. I walked outside and just offered a prayer to the heavens and noticed that star twinkling its bluish, white and red shades, when Bessie came to the door and told me Thomas had passed. I knew from that moment that was Thomas's star saying that he would always be with us, watching and shining down on his family and friends. Martha it will get better I know it will, keep him close in your heart and he will never leave."

Martha smiled at Lucinda and said “I know it will get better, and I am glad that I have such good friends that look out after me. Now let's join the others, this is a time for celebration not sadness." The two women joined the others who were kicking up that delta dust as the traditions of chivalry were set in place in Mississippi County.

The musicians played for an hour then took a break, The Knowlton boys showed up bearing a gift for the bride and groom to be. W.C. walked up to James and said "Sorry we are running a little late, but you know Absalom Petty his boat always ports an hour behind." J. D. added " We brought a wedding present for you and Caroline, Just got it off the boat this evening, straight from Parie' France via Captain Petty". W.C. handed James and Caroline a bottle of Chardonnay wine.

J.D patted his brother on the shoulder turned to the others, smiled and said " friends and neighbor my younger brother got caught up in another one of Absalom bartering battles, now mind you Absalom gave us the run down on this here Chardonnay, the green grape, neutral terror, oaky, flinty tasting wine from Blanc de Blanc's high flutin France. Well, hell we got a whole case now. Pretty bottle, but to me it taste like sour persimmons, but hey we're bringing culture to Mississippi County; its 1837and life is good on the Little River Riviera." Everyone burst out in laughter as J.D. turned to Caroline and said "I am just kidding, it is a very nice wine and my brother and I wish you a very long and happy life together."

The musicians started back playing and everyone took to the dance area, at eleven o'clock Mrs. Perkins stepped up to the porch and yelled for everyone’s attention. "Friends and neighbors, it is an hour till midnight and we all know it is bad luck for the groom to see the bride on their wedding day. So I would like the musicians to play a song, Robert would you fiddle the "Appalachian waltz" for James and Caroline’s last dance for the evening. Robert began the soft melody as the other musicians joined in. The young couple danced looking lovingly into each others eyes and speaking soft words of love. Caroline’s heart pounded within her chest as she thought about the coming day, she would be married to the ever loving man that she so desired. James fought back the desires that burned deep within him along with the thoughts that raced through his mind; knowing that tomorrow he would be able to give himself completely to the woman that he loved.

After the waltz James told Caroline goodnight as she and her mother along with Mrs. Nance and some of the other women went to Author Nance's home stead to spend the evening. The men would keep the fires burning the rest of the night and celebrate till dawn. Author made sure he had plenty of stump water on hand and the Knowlton boys had plenty of ale and rye in the back of their wagon. Goodman came up to James after Caroline had left. "Nance you sure are one lucky man, your own land, a crop, probably one of the finest houses around and tomorrow a beautiful new wife" he said as he extended his hand to James. "Thanks Goodman, but you ain't got it all that bad either, you got adventure, fightin Indians, seeing parts I ain't never been and already a sergeant " replied James. "Someday Nance I'll become a farmer. Hopefully while I still got my scalp" Goodman laughed.

Goodman and James walked over to where the Knowlton boys had their wagon. "Is there any chance a sergeant can buy ale for himself around here" Goodman shouted. "Well I reckon you could but it's on the house" said W.C. Goodman had W.C. to pour one for James as well and they drank a toast together. Martha came over to where James and Goodman were standing and told James that she was taking the Reverend and Mrs. Lewis to her place and she would be back in the Morning. "Uh Excuse me Mamma, I don't mean to be forward but it is very late and very dark out there. I would consider it an honor and my duty as a sergeant in the army to see to it you make it to your place safely" said Goodman. “Thank you Sergeant Goodman but I am sure we will be quiet alright" replied Martha. “I am sorry mamma but I would feel like I was shunning my duty as an officer. It will be no trouble at all I will tie my horse to the back of your wagon and return once you all are safely home" he said as he removed his had and bowed. James laughed and said "Martha telling Goodman no is like telling my pa his stump water ain't smooth." Martha laughed and said "Well it's not as smooth as my hot biscuits and homemade jam, but I guess your right Sergeant Goodman I would feel a little safer, yes sir you may escort us home."

James bid Reverend Lewis and his wife goodnight as Goodman tied his horse to the back of Martha's wagon. "Now make sure you watch how many stynes of ale you have son, I wouldn't want you entering into this marriage tomorrow half witted" Said the Reverend Lewis as he patted him on the shoulder then helped his wife into the wagon. "Be back shortly James, keep a full one for me" replied Goodman as he snapped the reins and the wagon lunged forward off into the night.

Around one a.m. most of the women had retired to the wagons or tents and the music died down to most men talking around the fire pits, drinking their liquor and ale. Robert was talking to Simion and Author Nance about his cotton crop. Harris and Eubanks were over near the dessert table foraging for a late night treat. James was sitting on the front porch talking with his soon to be father in law Albert Perkins. James noticed to the Northwest of his cabin in the timberline some movement. He quickly stood up and reaches inside the cabin door for his rifle and yelled to his pa and the other men.

James, Robert, Mr. Perkins, Simion and Author proceeded to walk to the Timberline. Robert noticed it was Chief John Big Knife being carried by some of his braves. As the men came up to the Indians Robert ask “what has happened to Chief John Big Knife?" One of his braves who spoke English replied “We were out hunting and had made camp this evening. After we had eaten our evening meal one of the braves on watch came across the tracks of Tluh-dah-chee very close to our camp. We began to track the big cat as it moved through the swamp. We split up to corner the Tluh-dah-chee in a thick cypress grove. Tluh-dah-chee must have double backed on us and come up on the chief unexpectedly, we heard the Tluh-dah-chee give out their death scream and Chief let go of a war whoop. Buy the time we got to him Tluh-dah-chee was gone and Chief John Big Knife was lying on the ground."

Robert raised the lantern and took a closer look “He has got some deep cuts lets get him over to the house by the fires." The braves carried the chief over and placed him near on of the fires as James grabbed a blanket from the house. Simion asked Jonathon to find Dr. Fox's wagon and see if he was still awake. James brought some linen sheets from the house as Author put some water in one of the water pots to heat, so that they could clean the wounds. The chief tried to talk but was very weak so the chief smiled and raised his fist clutched as to say victory. When his hand was raised into the air he opened his clinched fist and a huge claw attached to a single toe fell from his hand. The chief had managed to swing his tomahawk at the big cat as it was attacking severing one of the front digits from the animal. Robert smiled back at the chief and said "Well, that should make him pretty easy to track."

Jonathon showed up with Dr. Fox a few minutes later, Dr. Fox bent down to examine Chief John Big Knife "Hmm... He's got some pretty deep cuts but none to close to any major arteries. My main concern is he is bruising pretty badly along his right side; he may have some busted ribs. We need to get him inside so I can have more light to sew him up and stabilize those ribs so it doesn't puncture his lung." The men and braves gently took John Big Knife inside the house and placed him on the table in the kitchen. James began to tear the linen into strips as Author took the dish pan to get the hot water. "Robert light as many lanterns as you can find" said Dr. Fox. "This is going to take awhile, you might want to have his braves wait outside, you and your pa stay here and help me" he replied to James.

The doctor put his black bag on the table and opened it. Dr. Fox pull out some suture needles and thread then said. "James while I am getting ready I need for you to take and clean the best you can; the blood, dirt and grit from the wounds, use the hot water and Author bring a Jug of that stump water in here, it will probably sterilize better than what I have in my bag." James and Author did as the doctor had asked. After all the wounds were clean and Dr. Fox stitched the chief up they put a tight bandage around his ribs to stabilize them. “Well all done now we just need to keep him hydrated and warm. I am surprised those cuts were very clean just as if a surgeon’s scalpel had made them" said Dr. Fox as he closed his black bag. "I take it Doc you ain't never seen a panther. Claws so sharp they could take your head off with one swipe. Not to mention their powerful jaws and speed. Yep chief here is one lucky Redman." remarked Author Nance. "

The doctor James and Author let the chief rest on the table as they walked outside. Robert and the Brave that spoke English walked up to the porch, "How is the chief, Dr. Fox" asked Robert? "Sixty two stitches and two busted ribs but I think he will be alright. He is sleeping right now, He will need a few days rest before he is able to travel any long distant" replied Dr. Fox. James turns to the brave and told him that Chief John Big Knife was welcome to stay at his place. Dr. Fox said that the chief should be able to travel that short distance without a problem. "Well it is four thirty in the morning, I am going to turn in for a few hours men" said the doctor as he pulled a silver watch from his vest pocket.

"Well Robert what are we going to do" asked Author? “Well first thing were going to do is get your boy married off tomorrow then we will worry about that panther." replied Robert. Robert and Author talked to the braves and gathered as much information as they could on where the big cat had been spotted. The one brave spoke his peace, "in the Indian tradition this cat and Chief John Big Knife are now destined to battle for the Tluh-dah-chee has taken flesh, and John Big Knife has taken flesh. The chief pride will want to defend his reputation as a warrior and hunter."

The women began to stir early Saturday Morning, every woman had their job for the day Mrs. Nance and Perkins along with Lucinda would help Caroline with the wedding dress. Mrs. Cooper, Stone, Harris would tend to the day's cooking with the other women of the town. Mrs. Eubanks, Stacy, Ingram and Palmer would pick the wild flowers for the wedding. Martha Reed would tend to the Reverend and his wife.

James and his brother Hulen who was the best man started their day early as well by heading into the woods near the spring feed creek that ran behind James's new house. As they set on a fallen log near the creek taking their boots off getting ready to bathe in the creek Hulen looks and James. "I guess after today pa will depend on me more since I will be the oldest at home" said Hulen. "More than likely, Hulen It will be up to you to help him with his crops and run the traps with him. I will have my own crops to see to" replied James.

"Hey James remember when we was younger in Tennessee, you always did get me in trouble" said Hulen. James laughed and said "I guess I was pretty much the cause of you getting a taste of pa's leather strap or ma's green switches." Then Hulen busted out laughing "How about the time that ma was over and Aunt Clara's and pa was in the woods at the still. Remember you and me got into some of his smoking tobacco, and were going to learn to smoke." James smiled and said "I remember that we took it up into the loft of the barn and rolled a cigarette thought we would never get it lit. You coughed and hacked yourself almost to death."

Hulen rolled his eyes and picked up where James had left off. "Well that wasn't the worst part; the worst part was when I saw pa coming out of the woods. I knew if he caught us smoking we would get a whoopin for sure. So I threw it out of the barn loft, and it landed in one of the chickens hind feathers." Laughing James said “The look on pa's face when he came around the corner of the barn and that chicken was running in circles and smoke coming from its backside. Dang that was so funny." Hulen turned to James " wasn't so funny when pa' found out we were the ones that set the chicken on fire. James it sounds corny but I miss those days."

"You knuckle head, just cause I am getting married today don't mean I won't be your older brother anymore. I am sure there will be many more times I will get you in trouble. Now we need to get cleaned up and back to the house so I can get married. Tell you what I'll race you to the creek" James said as the two brothers took off running butt naked and making a giant splash as they jumped into the water.

James's family and friends were all gathered around it was ten minutes till noon when he and Hulen walked out of his house onto the front porch. He felt a little crowded in his button collard white shirt, and kept tugging and his black trousers. "Well Hulen I guess it's about time" James said. He and Hulen stepped off the porch and walked to the green lush pasture where the women had decorated with flowers and two small weeping willows that formed and arch way. On the backside of the archway stood Reverend Lewis with his bible and a smile on his face, as he watched James and Hulen take their places.

James and Hulen waited patiently along with Reverend Lewis on Caroline and the bridle party. At about twelve o six James could see Mr. Perkins wagon coming up the road from Author's place. James got a big lump in his throat and his heart started to beat faster as he saw Caroline sitting in the front seat next to her father. She looked like an angel in white. Mr. Perkins stopped the wagon and helped Caroline down. The maid of honor and brides maids made their way to the archway where the Reverend, James and Hulen were standing. Robert took out his fiddle as everyone stood and played an entrance song for Caroline as she and her father made their way to the archway. James swallowed very hard to get the lump from his throat. He watched as she got closer, her long white dress hung close to her petite body, as her blue cameo accented her fair skin. Her deep blue eyes seem to grow larger as she smiled at James. Just before the archway she and her father stopped.

Reverend Lewis had everyone to bow their head for opening prayer. "Our gracious father, we come to you this hour and thank you for the very two special lives that are standing here before you. We ask that you would bless them this day and the days to come. We ask that your light would be their guidance. We give you praise and Glory in the name of Jesus amen. Everyone one may be seated" He said. Reverend Lewis opened his Bible "Marriage is a sacrament of high calling ordained and favored by our Lord, his first miracle was turning water into wine at the wedding in Canaan. The Bible says that a man that finds a good wife is blessed. This man, James has come forth today because he has found in his heart a good wife." The Reverend looked up and said "Who gives this woman Caroline to be married today." Mr. Perkins looked at Caroline with a smile on his face but a tear in his eye and an aching in his heart and replied "I and her mother give our daughter Caroline to be married today." The Reverend asked Caroline and James to stand side by side as Mr. Perkins walked her next to James, then returned and sat next to Mrs. Perkins.

Reverend Lewis adjusted his glasses as he asked James and Caroline to join hands and began the ceremony “Dearly beloved we are gathered here today, to join this man James Nance and this woman Caroline Perkins in Holy matrimony. Marriage is not to be entered into lightly for it is a Sacrament of God. So if there is anyone here today that knows any reason why these two should not be joined in the Sacrament of marriage, speak now or forever hold their peace." He stopped there for a minute and looked around and then he said “No one has spoken so everyone here is in one accord that these two people should be married. By not speaking up you have made a comment to lift them up and encourage this couple in their union. I charge each and every one of you here today to show Christian love and do not say an idle word that would cause sorrow in this marriage." He then turned to James and Caroline and said “Look around you, these people are your support, your encouragement they have made a comment today just as you will. Turn to them, talk to them and seek council from them."

"In the scripture the Apostle Paul talks about love, he said that love is the greatest gift a man can find. Love is patient, it is kind, and it is not boastful in the wrong doing of others. Paul says that love is not puffed up or easily angered. He also says that he could be as a sounding trumpet but if he didn't have love he would be nothing. James and Caroline love completes’ you, carries you, heals you. Standing here today before God, family and friends, have you found love?" James looked into Caroline’s eyes and they both nodded their heads to confirm yes.

"Then James Nance do you take this woman Caroline Perkins to be your lawfully wedded wife to have and to hold, to cherish her in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, for richer or poorer forsaking all others give yourself to her until death do you part" the Reverend Lewis asked James. James looked into Caroline’s eyes, "I do" he replied. The reverend turned to Caroline and asked, "Caroline Perkin do you take this man James Nance to be your lawfully wedded husband to have and to hold, to cherish him in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, for richer or poorer forsaking all others give yourself to him until death do you part". Caroline turned smiling and said “I do."

"James I believe you have rings to exchange" Reverend Lewis replied. James turned to Hulen and took one of the silver wedding bands that Robert had made for James and Caroline. Then the reverend continued “This ring will be a symbol of your love and just as the ring is round it has no end and so should your love be. Now James if you would place the ring on Caroline finger and repeat after me; I James Nance give you Caroline Perkins this ring as a symbol of my never ending love for you." James placed the ring on her finger and repeated after the Reverend. Caroline took the other ring and placed it on James finger and repeated after the Reverend.

"In so as much as you two have both given rings to each other and vowed before God your love and commitment toward one another, by the power invested in me by our Lord Jesus Christ and the state of Arkansas, I pronounce you man and wife, You may kiss your bride son" The Reverend stated.

The crowd cheered as they stood to their feet as the Reverend introduced the new couple as Mr. and Mrs. James and Caroline Nance.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will come out with a new book that is a "celebration of American virtues and strengths," publisher HarperCollins announced on Thursday.

The as-yet untitled book by Palin, widely considered to be weighing a run for U.S. president, will feature selections of readings that have inspired her and portraits of people she admires, the publisher said.