Whiners are gonna wine.
Winos are gonna whine.
Winners rarely whine are known to wine on occasion.
Whine, wine or win — best two out of three, wino not included with purchase.
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Yesterday’s Today is Tomorrow
For a brief moment, I was a kid again.
Yesterday, in preparation for watching a film at the cinema about a cartoon character known as Iron Man, I scrolled through websites detailing a few storylines that encompass worlds and universes in one comic book series or another.
Although I was never geeky enough to keep track of comic drawing styles, character bios or inside jokes, I knew enough about the fantasy lives of fellow classmates who did that I could briefly carry on a conversation with those who read not only comic books and watched Saturday morning cartoons but who also consumed novelisations and books containing specifications of spaceships, weaponry and superhero powers.
A few of them transitioned to board games like Dungeons & Dragons — I detailed those people in a previous novel or blog entry and won’t repeat myself here — because fantasy and science fiction computer games didn’t exist, unless you can stretch your imagination and say that Pong was a game between gods sending universes back and forth across matter/antimatter timelines.
For the most part, our schoolyard games were either cowboy-and-Indian or space cowboy-vs-evil alien shoot ’em ups and chases.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released when we were too young to care and Star Wars arrived in our high school years when most of us already had well-established hobbies to occupy our thoughts. Star Trek was an after-school show that, along with Batman and Wild Wild West, captured the attention of the average nerd in our early teens.
Now that I’m a middle-aged white guy who’s more likely to die of suicide than a car wreck, I can either further regress into a childhood I never really had or I can progress into an elderly adult I haven’t yet been, avoiding the mental illness pitfalls that lead to premature death.
To end today’s blog entry, I’ll provide an untraceable source of a quote by a semi-famous author:
“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Falsely yours,
Henry Charles Bukowski”
Show: Me, the Money
Life seen from the point of view of the masses, which are obsessed with CEO pay.
Life seen from the point of view of the masses, which are obsessed with how real life works.
If you don’t know that money makes the world go around, get out of the math and sciences (and, rich gods forbid, the liberal arts) and get a real job.
In sporting news…
Earlier today the SEC and ESPN announced an agreement that exploitation of college athletes is their bread and butter for at least the next 20 years, pushing the importance of academics in the SE United States further back into the 20th century.
When…
When the U.S. political party known as the GOP recently moved to the far-right on the political spectrum, it moved the Democratic Party to the moderate right right where the GOP wanted the U.S. government to be, did it not?
After all, I see little in the way of protests about the latest appointments to the Obama presidential Cabinet, which means that the so-called left has no grounds for complaining and neither does the so-called right.
Stalemate.
Now, back to my reading the original issues of the exciting comic book series, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents!
Trying to understand why goldfish muck around a fountain…
My friends in the American sport known affectionately as the NFL have argued with me that just because they like wearing tight pants, gloves and fancy, shiny, bejeweled hats does not, in fact, imply that they are anything more than normal heterosexual men, neither gay nor bisexual, and certainly not cross-dressers or transsexuals.
Well, who am I to counter-argue?
After all, my fat-to-muscle ratio is entirely out of proportion to theirs and my 40-yard dash is more like a 40-yard wheezing shuffle.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good argument.
Let’s look at some examples of what a good football game could look like if we decided not to take the players at their word.
Like this one, a nice, muddy reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbour.
Now, compare it to its “opposite”, a muddy NFL game — is there really any difference?
I mean, if women are willing to play football in their skivvies, what are guys all wrapped up in pads trying prove?
Let’s take another look: helmet-to-helmet hit vs. the Battle of Hastings vs. NFL players at their toughest vs. other guys in outfits dancing.
I don’t know…is there that much difference? Seems like the first video was the toughest of the bunch.
Of course, what takes place in the locker room afterward may seal the deal but it’s not my business who likes taking group showers.
I won’t bother you with comparing ballet performances to NBA games — you’ve surely already seen those comparisons….or NHL games to Disney on Ice…or…Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a tutu???
21 Questions Adhere To The Wall
Only 13,519 days to go. Is that still the 6th of May 2050?
The backward science on this planet in the the second decade of what some call their 21st century frequently tries my patience.
Just like this momentary search for a map (found it!) and what it means (yet to be found) but tying it to the date given to me, the 6th of May 2050, makes some if not more sense. Does the camel saddle in the bottom of the sea chest have a meaning?
Living in the zeitgeist is all we have, isn’t it, because somehow, some way, we are attached to the local environment in which our sets of states of energy prove the concept of the conservation of mass.
I borrowed six books from the library and have need to spend time reading them. I will list their titles later today or in the week.
I am floating in the artificial cloud of happiness, content that, no matter the habits of fellow writers, I am me, having written well, poorly, or not at all.
Will it truly be 20-year old proven technology that ends up on the Moon and Mars for risktaking, adventurous pioneers and settlers to survive with/upon? If not, what is the ultimate “firmware” that can be reprogrammed in realtime like Transformer bots that have no final, definite shape, form and function(s)?
Mystery to solve, solvents to mist
My grandfather was a man of more happiness than monetary wealth.
He reasoned, my father told me, that knowledge is the heated, padded seat in the outhouse of life — you can’t find the swallowed diamond until you sift through a lot of BS.
Granddaddy kept a lot of secrets along the way of gathering facts.
One day, while standing the backyard, looking at the canal but, in his thoughts, staring out at the sea, a fellow old seaman walked up to Granddaddy and told him a wild tale about a plot of land up in New Hampshire owned by a family named Winthrop something or other.
The land itself was not remarkable except for one small fact — every 100 years, a bright light appeared on the horizon, rose into the sky and shone down on a certain spot of the family plot.
My grandfather, ever the realist, asked why the seaman was sharing this information with a sailor and not someone more authoritative.
Well, this seaman, he was known in those parts for his notorious behaviour, having crossed paths with the law a few too many times, but he didn’t mind sharing this information with my grandfather, a nice man who had only beaten this fellow a few times in acey-deucey.
My grandfather asked what the man knew about the farm.
“It’s not exactly a farm. Not anymore. A few years ago, they converted it to a golf course.”
My grandfather had a soft place in his fact-filled thoughts for the irrational sport of golf. “Okay, so tell me what you know about this light. Anything you know for a fact?”
The man shared a document with my grandfather.
Yellowed and torn, the document described a treasure that was like no treasure that had been seen before — not only a map of the stars but instructions for how to travel through space from one planet to another.
My grandfather was a loving, trusting man but he had his skeptical side, too.
What proof did the man have that the document was authentic?
The man said that his grandfather had worked on the farm and found the document buried in the wall of an old, abandoned well, long since dug up and removed from history. No one living knew about its existence.
The man said that the next 100-year visit was fast approaching. All the man asked was that my grandfather visit the golf course, take pictures and share whatever information he gleaned.
Granddaddy was also a curious man, having learned that behind every legend or myth is a nugget of truth.
He had already accumulated enough material wealth to last the rest of his lifetime, but what about the lifetimes of his son and his grandchildren?
He accepted the document, bid the man goodbye and, when my grandmother returned from her garden club meeting, suggested they consider taking a vacation to New England in the next year.
My father had heard this story only a few times from my grandfather, assuming it was more parable or metaphorical tale than anything real.
Dad told me that in every life we’ll encounter people who belief wholeheartedly in family lore. We are not to disapprove or discourage these people from holding their stories on the highest pole, flying them as flags of faith and family honour.
Dad said that Granddaddy promised the story would have a happy ending but he wouldn’t tell my father what was discovered one night in New Hampshire, only that a few photographs he took barely document the event which cemented my grandfather’s belief in one fellow sailor’s tall tale.
Dad didn’t have an ending to share with me.
However, he did said that Granddaddy hinted the answer would be found on his property in south Florida.
Lo and behold, I think I have the first evidence of that fateful, faith-filled evening.
I present to you, dear reader, the images to which my grandfather eluded:
I have more to go through to determine if the map and other information are in the chest and I’m just not seeing it.
While my wife went shopping…
While my wife unexpectedly had the afternoon off to go shopping with a 41-year old friend who looks like she’s still 31, hours after eating with friends, one who’s 24 and looks 24, with her father, 57 going on 58, I dug through the material my grandfather left behind, including a box of slides.
Thanks to a simple return policy by Wolverine Data, I received a working F2D14 scanner in the mail this afternoon.
Pulling a few sample slides, I scanned them and provide them here as samples that have sat for decades in a US Navy sea chest tucked in the back of an outdoor utility closet in south Florida:
My grandfather, the pirate
My mother, me and my father
Four generations of the Eldridge clan – Dad, his mother, me and Great-Granddad
My grandmother at a hotel swimming pool, elegantly dressed as usual
An artistic photo by my grandfather
Monticello, when women and girls wore skirts, sweaters and pretty smiles.
Time and expectation management routines
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