And the Winner of the Book Giveaway Is:
Time to give away a brand-new copy of The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby!
Using random.org
Which on my spreadsheet of comments:
That makes the winner Cyndi! Cyndi, I sent you mail. Please reply and I will ship your book tomorrow! Congratulations!
The Memory of Scent
(repost from 2008)
The house smells so wonderful.
My penchant for Scrooge-like feelings during the holiday season has slowly been replaced by warm memories of my children’s joy for the season. For young boys, yes, Christmas is a lot about presents. If you are a good parent, if you could overcome the bombastic rampant commercialism, there is an underlying simplicity about the season that can pull at the heart like no other time.
This morning Thing Two came in while I was getting dressed, wanting to know if we could go get Thing One’s Christmas present tonight. How cute is that? I’ll tell you how cute it is, it is a bit of the ultra-cuteness.
Yes there are the presents. But then there is the smell of the tree. The gingerbread house. The decorating. The Christmas cookies. The story of Christmas. Grandpa and Nanna. Daddy’s Christmas Day roast. Santa. The music. The warm fireplace and the happy dog.
Long after those presents are gone, the memories of our close family during this time will linger on. One day my sons will be walking in one of the great national forests around here, and after the morning rain, smell the fresh scent of grand firs. And it will smell like Christmas.
And that will be magical, always magical, even in the dead of summer, it will be Christmas magic.
One Day Left to Win The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby!
Click on over and leave a comment. It’s that easy!
Wife Unit Christmas Poll
Dear 9.3 Readers,
The Wife Unit was very specific this year. She wanted a spinning wheel. Not just any spinning wheel, but a certain make and model. Since a spinning wheel is a handy thing that can pay for itself, and the fact that she wanted it, I of course, great hubby that I am, got her the spinning wheel that she wanted.
So far, so good.
Except, the wheel was shipped from Spokane and arrived the very next day that I ordered it.
My plan is to wrap that sucker and stick it under the tree.
The Wife Unit, of course, thinks this is spousal snarkitude and wants to use the wheel now.
Thus, I leave the entire question of the Spinning Wheel Christmas Question entirely in your hands! Vote below. Voting closes December 2nd.
War with Self
The human condition is to socially relate to others, yet we recognize that in order to master socialization, one must find the center to self and live there without fear.
This duality of the human nature is a war. It is a war for independence against the war for socialization. This is true balance, the yin and the yang. Honor and integrity are internal concepts, while justice and righteousness are external. All must exist on equal footing.
In any true conflict, there are winners and there are losers, but sometimes victory comes from the unexpected and defeat is all too predictable. Just as one must find the center and dwell within, the path to that place is not a singular journey.
The path to true independence, then, comes from choice. Not the choices we make on our own, but whom we welcome on our journey, and those we recognize as subversive influences.
It is always choice, and without it we may achieve socialization, but only to avoid self-progress. The wrong choices are merely strays off the path.
The absence of choice is a loss and a war with self.
You Are the First Responder
On this day in the Year 2001, a group of Americans, when faced with the horror of the morning unfold, sought to do what Americans were born to do. They fought back, by themselves, against evil and tyranny of the worse sort, and they sacrificed their lives to do the right thing, even when it was the hard thing.
In this age of double-talk and other tomfoolery, in which the very language we hold dear is used to debase the individual and the righteous, there comes a time when Goodly Men and Women must take a stand against those who would use labels to define us.
Those who fought back shook off more than the enemy. At their moment of truth, these brave Americans were first responders.
You are a first responder.
If you think otherwise—your very thoughts besmirch the honor of those brave people and for you, they died in vain.
For the rest of us, we remember them as we should remember them—they made the attempt and succeeded, they set a standard for which we judge all like men and women.
There comes a time where, in the midst of blood and death, we can take action and prevail.
You are a first responder. If another labels you as something different, this is where you take your first stand.
I Have Skills, I Have Game
The other day I was in the coffee shop, again, hanging with the baristas. One of them pipes up:
“You’re in here enough, you should totally be a barista.”
Without blinking an eye, I replied, “My Marxist charm would totally bring the girls to the yard.”
I made not one, but two customers sputter on their drink.
Yeah, I still got the moves, baby.
Random
Sometimes, things happen for a reason, and in the world filed with randomness, there are greater truths that are not random at all.
Two Years!
My little blog is two years old.
My blog cracks me up. About once a week, a new reader will come by, read everything worth reading, not comment, and disappear.
If there was ever an indication I should become a fiction writer, that is it.
What is strange is I’m enjoying some success as a fiction writer, just not the way I had always envisioned. All this success does is give me a thirst for more.
I love writing.
I love you, my blog readers.
I love writing just a bit more, though. Forgive me?
Feel free to comment below, say hi, ask questions, or make fun of how short Kiersten White is, or make even more fun of my stalker-like fascination with baristas, or guess how one pronounces “Pacheco”.
We Are All Liars and Sinners
A man of God once told me that we’re all liars and sinners. At first, I thought he meant we constantly lie to other people. How could that be so? My parents taught me lying was bad (usually with a generous application of a wooden spoon to my backside), so I avoided it even when it would have been convenient to do so.
But over the years I’ve come to a different interpretation. I believe he was speaking to all the little lies we tell ourselves.
That’s when I knew those were the worst lies of them all.
Thus, the secret to fulfillment through the art of seeking the truth, is to embrace all the little lies within, and simply let them go.
Introspective
Self-sacrifice is a positive, not negative, endeavor. There is a fine line between self-examination and self-loathing. One leads to simplicity and change. The other leads to blockage and withdraw.
The Things I Come Across in Book Research
A few days ago my oldest son asked The Wife Unit: “Just how long did you know Dad before you married him?”
Snicker.
Women and Power
The nebulous and hardly ever footnoted they say the firearm is the great equalizer amongst the sexes. Which is true, but only insofar as a moment of time. A wink in existence. Seconds, actually, and what a wonderful equalizer, albeit brief, it is. Nothing says, “No, I don’t want to be raped tonight,” like multiple 124 grain 9mm jacketed hollow-points traveling 1030 feet per second.
A woman, measured from simpler times and simpler places, always had the power of life, but rarely ever death. No, death, in these simpler times, was the purview of men. Men are stronger, yes, but men held the other key, the most important key, the key unlike any other.
Knowledge.
Knowledge is power, and the Twenty-First Century Woman is a creature of knowledge. At her fingertips is a vast and endless stream of information, most of it biased, but all of it readily accessible. The cynical woman would say that to make sense of it all, one should close off the avenues of distraction.
The optimistic woman, surprisingly, comes to a vastly different conclusion. More, she says. I want more. Always more.
That is true power. The powerful woman is not simply the woman who stops her rapist by filling his thoracic triangle with expanding bullets.
No, the powerful woman fights against the cynical forces that tell her that’s not possible, trying to push her back in time and victimizing her by proxy. It’s not the tool. It was never the tools. It’s about the power.
Earthquake
At 5:20 AM I was awoken by an earthquake.
Since moving to the Pacific Northwest, I’ve been in many earthquakes. I have the dubious honor of falling down on the garage stairs during the Nisqually earthquake and bruising my wrist.
This small earthquake, however, was totally different than anything I have felt before. I could feel and hear the shock-wave approach. It was something like this:
(rattle) rattle - Rattle - RATTLE – BANG – RATTLE – Rattle – rattle (rattle)
The shock-wave moved very fast. Super fast. Faster than anything I have ever experienced.
I’ve come to the conclusion, I don’t like earthquakes.
image from City of Long Beach, CA
The Hack Writer Presents: Banana Bread Fueled Political Dreams
Literally.
So there I was dreaming last night after eating too much banana bread, see? I was at some office in a strip mall, and this woman handed me an invitation to the White House 2010 Christmas Party. I was like sweet, but then she was like “it’s a conditional invitation” and I was like
“Wait… what?”
“For the invitation to be valid, you have to take sensitivity training.”
“Oh, come on! I know I’m not a Democrat, but that’s…”
The woman interrupted me through her grin. “Nobody cares about that. No, this is because of your potty mouth. There are kids present at the first half of the party
and I was like WAT and she laughed then I was like doooooooh but took the invitation anyway and then
the dream morphs into a shopping trip to Home Depot with one of my female coworkers, trying to find some type of wipe that would remove permanent marker from a washer and dryer but she was wearing a poodle skirt but I think she forgot to put on a bra and then I was going to ask her if she forgot to wear panties too but then I remembered I needed to be sensitive for the children at the 2010 White House Christmas party so I didn’t say anything and then the cat woke me up.
The Hack Writer Presents: Gamer Talk
“Dude! Dude!”
“Dude?”
“Duuuuuudddee!”
“Dude!”
“Like, have you downloaded the new Mass Effect 2 DLC?”
“Dude, not yet. I’m still on the Dragon Age expansion.”
“Dude! Dude! You got a Fem Shep, right? Well get this, the new mission you wear a dress. And you get to keep it!“
“Word! Whoa. Still…”
“Dude! Wait, wait for it… the little black dress comes with shoes. High heels!”
“Dude! No way! Gee-Tee-Eff-Oh!”
“It’s awesome, Dude. You’re like ‘click-click-click’ walking around the Normandy!”
“Dude!”
“Dude!”
(high-five)
Actual conversation. Discuss.
Advice for the Dating Young Man
Universal Waffle Rule of Dating: feed a woman waffles and you are pretty much half-way into her pants.
Discuss.
Goals: Self-Defense
The singular goal for self-defense is to articulate to the felon that he has made a catastrophic error in the victim selection process, and then simply show him what you mean.
Plan accordingly. Sometimes you’ll need to show before you tell, but that’s his problem.
Bookish
Feeling very bookish. Think I will bolt a bookshelf to a wall and load that sucker up. My nightstand is drowning in books.
books books books books, books books books books, WONDERFUL BOOKS, books books, books books, books books, books books!
(sung to Monty Python’s spam chant)
Zombie Dreams Gone Bad
So there I was, dreaming about nothing in particular last night, when I happened to drive to my dream vacation home in Colorado (which, by they way, is beautiful in the late spring), and thereupon notice that my dream self has quite the assortment of firearms lying about his modest home.
Yeah, see, right there I should have known this dream wasn’t going to be pleasant.
This dream self was on vacation. Turns out I am a therapist. It’s a nice day, so I’m walking into town. I’m trying to buy cigars at the local smoke shop (don’t ask), when the proprietor asks for some counseling. The conversation goes something like this:
“Mack, Bud, I’m on vacation.”
“Ah, ok,” he said, looking troubled.
I sigh. “Tell me about it.”
“I was dreaming I was really sick, and then this voice inside my head told me to find people looking scared and bite them. That it would make me feel better.”
Ooooookkay. “So, Mack, did this voice say anything else?”
“Yeah, it said if I found people who didn’t look scared, that I should sneak up on them instead. Safer that way. What does that mean?”
“Zombie dreams are simply watching too many horror movies, Mack. If you’re taking vitamins or eating cheese before bed, you might want to avoid that. Those things can make dreams more vivid.”
“Ah, ok.”
“Did you say anything back to this voice?”
“Naw. Too busy puking out my dinner and blood. It was gross. Take the box of cigars, on the house.”
So now my friend Kevin walks up as I leave the store with my newly acquired box of goodies. Kevin looks at the box and says “score!” Apparently he was on a coffee run, because he hands me a big coffee. We start walking back to the house.
“Man, that barista was hot, but everyone knowing we’re therapists now kind of blows. She totally unloaded on me about her nightmare,” Kevin said as he rolled his eyes.
“What, did she dream about some voice whispering in her mind to bite people to make her feel better?”
Kevin stops.
“Yeah, how did you know?”
That’s when the person across the street stops walking her dog, leans over, and pukes blood.
I won’t go into the details of what happened next. Let’s just say that we didn’t have nearly enough ammunition or gas. What happened to Kevin was just about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever dreamed about. And what happened to me, well, that was worse.
Memo to self: no multivitamin before bed time. Avoid vacation homes in Colorado in the spring. And stop playing Left 4 Dead 2.
I will admit this does all sound like the start of an outline. I’ll file it away under Z for zombie.
When I Think of Shorts, I Don’t Think of Shorts
I think of short skirts.
Oh come on, you had to have seen that coming!
I remember the first time, as a hormone-drenched teenage boy, my girlfriend wore a short skirt.
Now, as a fine American hot-blooded young man, I had an appreciation for girls in short skirts. However, short skirts should come with a warning label:
*WARNING*
IF YOU WEAR THIS
YOUR BOYFRIEND WILL
TURN INTO AN IDIOT
So there she was, prancing out of her house (this girl liked to prance), in a short skirt.
Jenny (named changed to protect the guilty): “What are you staring at?”
“Buuuh.”
“Hello? McFly?”
“Uh, sorry. That’s a great skirt.”
“Thank you!”
“Ok, you’re still staring,” she said.
At this point, I give myself a little shake. “Sorry, it’s just that, I can be sitting right by you and place my hand on your thigh and, you know, connect with actual flesh.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s like candy without the wrapper!”
“You know, I can be sitting right by you and my fist can connect with your face.”
Heh. Jenny was always the spunky one.
Anyway, where I was going with this? Oh ya: The short story contest I’m entering actually has a June deadline, not May as I mistakenly thought.
So I am still working on that sucker, which is good, because I blew past my deadline suffering through the MAN COLD.
It’s turning out to be darker than I was thinking. The short, not the cold. That’s mostly over. The cold that is.
Sadly, there are no short skirts in my short, but there is prancing.
Ha ha ha! Oh, and I’m sick.
Kiersten White succumbs to literary machinations in the form of 140 words a shot and admits her addiction to Twitter. As my original 4 readers of my blog can tell you (that’s half my readers, folks), I knew deep down Twitter and Kiersten were made for each other. Made.
In other news, I’m sicker than a dog. At least it’s not the flu. I’ve tried writing but I just can’t form coherent paragraphs. This short post made me want to take a nap.
Something that sounds fun, but mostly isn’t.
Bleh. Say it with me, folks: bleh!
Not only was I sick on Sunday with a cold (the infamous MAN COLD), which still lingers in my body, I had a fever induced lucid dream in the wee hours of dawn.
I’ve talked about lucid dreaming before, where you are not a participant in some dream-world, but a in full control of your actions. On paper, this sounds good, doesn’t it?
Well, it rarely is. It is confusing and sometimes frighting. Imagine waking up, only you’re in your bed with someone who isn’t your spouse, sleeping away next to you. You are confused. Did you cheat on your spouse and don’t remember? If so, why is she still here? Is this really your spouse, and the other person some dream? Or is this some crazy nut-job who kindnaped your wife and is about to get all whacko on you?
See, I told you it wasn’t fun.
Subscribing to the nut-job theory, I got up and checked in on the kids. They were sleeping. So I went back to bed, contemplating the best way to approach this person. At this point I was sure I was dreaming.
But I wasn’t 100% sure. Eventually, I closed my eyes and “went back to sleep.”
Now, in a normal dream, a person follows along in her brain’s view of reality, like a first-person perspective movie, with little thought on what they are doing. The vivid, lucid dream is mired in rational thought.
So, when I woke up again, this is where the fun starts. Yup, that’s my wife. But am I still dreaming? If I get up and go pee, will I wet the bed? How can I tell? Basically, I had to lay there for twenty minutes, wide awake, before I could “believe” that what was around me was real.
Anyway, not much of a writing topic. Just so you know, Anthony is a little strange.
I do sometimes have a lucid dream that doesn’t contain a false awakening. I would be lying if I told you that wasn’t a little slice of dream awesome. Most of the time, unfortunately, I’m confused, and the irony of not even having my anchor available, from my last post on this subject, is not lost on me.
And this MAN COLD sucks.
