It’s about two million degrees outside this morning. Now I know I am prone to exaggeration, because the IRS told me that in a letter this year, and my wife felt the same way when she found out what I really paid for her diamond ring forty years ago.
But one hundred degrees just does not sound as hot as it feels out there. I mean if seventy-five is considered optimum, and fifty is just cool, then why does twenty-five degrees higher than room temperature feel like I’ve been given a short visit to the devil’s home to see how the other half lives?
I’m sticking to my estimate of two million degrees until someone explains this to me.
The heat probably has my already fuzzy brain a little more dimwitted than usual but I came up with a reason for why it is so darn hot: We left the door open to Mexico.
It’s always been hot in Mexico, even in the ice age the residents of that country were wearing string bikinis and taking siestas to get out of the heat of the afternoon.
During the past decade or so, as all the immigrants were crossing the border, they probably left the door open behind them when they came running through. That means the hot air from central and South America has been streaming into Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Hot air rises, and we are north of Mexico. Everybody knows that North is up from reading a map, so the hot air has been rising into the U.S. and this year it has reached Virginia.
If you think about it, the hot air from Victor Chavez alone is probably good for a few degrees rise in our daily temperature. Burning all that oil in the gulf hasn’t helped the situation any either.
So what’s the solution? Open our doors to the Canadians. That way the cold air from the arctic will come streaming down and cool this place off.
July 26, 2010
Hot Air Rises
February 26, 2010
Ants Swarming In My Mind
The human mind is a wondrous thing, but it seems that far too often the voices we hear in our heads are more against us than for us. One author has labeled those thoughts of negativity as “ANTS” or Automatic Negative Thoughts, and I like that imagery because these little stealers of my life just keep coming no matter how much I try to shoo them away. ANTS emanate from a primitive section of our brains, and those that study the brain have humorously referred to their voice as “The Itty Bitty Shitty Committee.”
I think these ANTS, just like real ants, need three things to survive: a place to live, food, and a way to reproduce. Since these little critters make their home in my head, I cannot literally destroy that home without undesirable consequences, and therefore I’m left with the dilemma of finding a way to take away their food, and in a way, take away their chance for having sex.
I should have said reproduce, but writers know that if you use the word sex once or twice in an article more people will read it to the end.
We writers like books for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that sometimes by reading we find an answer to a question that has plagued us for a long time. In this case I found a way to kill these little life suckers.
Every time I begin to think one of these negative thoughts, I now yell in my mind the word “Cancel,” and I imagine stepping on the thing, so that I stop its reproductive cycle.
Yesterday was one of those days when the critters were swarming, and several times I let them take control. But as I worked through the day, I got better and better in getting rid of them. I don’t know yet if I’ve killed their queen, but I do know I’ve got them on the run.
February 21, 2010
Automatic Writing
An example of automatic writing done this evening. No thought given before I started typing.
Dark is the evening, darker still my thoughts. No light can shine here to even give a hint at things that could be better. I’m left only to remember, and remembering brings nothing but pain.
I can’t expect you to understand. Unless your life took the same unfortunate trail as mine you could never understand, because you would never believe I’ve been haunted by the dead since I was five.
I remember little before that day in June in 1950. A few snippets of images come and go at times, but they are images of places, not people. And it is hard for me to know if they are real memories or if I saw them in books or on TV. But in that evening in June almost sixty years ago, my life changed.
My memory had been keen ever since that day. I can remember every face I have ever seen, both living and dead. I remember ever place I have ever been, both in this world and the world inhabited by those no longer alive, and some that never were. And I remember every scream I have uttered when some of my nightly visitors have appeared. I scream no longer, I just endure.
My first visitor was my grandfather, a man who died several years before I was born. When he came that night and sat on my bed I did not know who it was. I thought that my older brother had come to bed, but in the dim light filtering under the door from the hallway, my eyes finally adjusted enough for me to see his face
I did not know that face, so I screamed, or at least I thought I did, but no one came: A five year old, alone with a primal fear. I remember eventually sitting up and straining to see the features of this man, and for a while he made no attempt to communicate with me, he just stared back, and I do not remember even a hint of a smile.
Eternity can be no more than a few minutes long when you are frozen in fear. And I do not know if he stayed there for most of the night, or if he left quickly. But when he left, he looked at me as he entered my closest and said. “I will see you again, and so will the others.”
February 3, 2010
Self Publishing: My Experiences So Far
More than two decades ago I decided I wanted to write novels. Working for a living kept me from aggressively pursuing that dream for almost three quarters of that time, and only when I retired did I allow the pleasure of this task to take over my life.
If you write, you are a writer, and I believe strongly that statement is true. But it is also true that most of us who write would like to have others read what we have written, and so that motley crew, of which I am a member, stalk the dream of getting one of their works published.
When I finished writing my first novel a few years ago, I was naïve enough to believe that my end goal was in sight. Eight, one page query letters later, my ego was trounced so I went back in my hole to write my next novel, putting the first one on the shelf for some future purpose.
By writing almost every day, I believed I was getting better: better in character development, better in description of places and events, and better in putting the story in my head on to digital paper. Most important was the fact that I believed my self, and my book worthy of being published.
You should read that last sentence once again because it is the essence of what follows.
After a lot of editing on this second novel, I started sending out query letters, with a synopsis and the first twenty pages to a set of potential agents listed in the Guide to Literary Agents. 40% were not answered. 35% were answered with a form “no thank you” letter, and the other 25% I received personal letters ranging from, “I like it but it’s not the type of book I handle. To, “I like it but I am not taking on new, (read unknown) authors at this point in time.”
The fact that the book is about a cyber attack to destroy the US banking system probably did not help my cause, since at that time we were right in the middle of the financial meltdown, as well as a nosedive in the publishing industry.
In the past I would have either given up writing for good, or just put that book on the shelf and moved on to my next story. But I didn’t. And I didn’t because as I said before, I felt the story was worthy of being published, so I decided I would pursue self-publishing through Amazon’s Book Surge process.
The book went on sale yesterday, and for anyone interested you can follow the link below.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Time-Richard-C-Thuss/dp/1439263612
The process was not cheap, with the main cost coming from a professional edit of an eighty-thousand word manuscript at $0.02/word, another two hundred dollars for making it available on kindle, and four hundred dollars for a professional review company called Kirkus that went out of business the week my book was available to them.
The process took four months from the time I uploaded the draft manuscript until it was available on Amazon, and half that time was caused by my iterations of the cover design.
I can tell you that without even selling a book, it has been worthwhile. The editor was extraordinarily helpful both to my ego and to my writing. The cover designers read the book and offered me a great set of options for the cover. And the book summaries they wrote for me, I felt were better than my own. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this process that have already helped me in the editing of my third novel that I recently finished.
I’ve read some horror stories about self-publishing , but for me I only have good to say about the process.
February 1, 2010
Distractions: Want to trade?
There is an old saying, but I forgot what it is. And therein lies the problem.
This trying to be clever when you have a memory with a half life measured in pico-seconds is getting to me, because if anything distracts me when a brilliant thought comes in my mind, the thought quickly fades into the either, most likely never to be thought again.
Now I am not trying to tell you that I have a lot of brilliant thoughts. But there have been a few of them when they came into my mind that I was sure the Macarthur foundation was going to call me just as soon as I put them down on paper. Most of those opportunities were lost when either the phone rang or my wife called me down to dinner.
I got to thinking about this problem, and it hit me that this is probably what is happening to all our elected officials. That is, they think about brilliant solutions to our problems, and then they get distracted. Their distractions are different than mine. Mine are dinner, the bathroom, and the telephone. Theirs are, money, power and getting re-elected, but I think the principal is still the same.
I read somewhere that what distracts us is different for each person, so I thought that if I traded one of my distractions for one of theirs, then everyone might make out better.
Now I don’t want to give up dinner, because my wife is an excellent cook. And I can’t give up my time in the bathroom, because none of the magazines I get would ever get read. So that leaves the telephone on my side.
On the other side, I don’t really want to run for re-election, and long ago I found that power is not really an elixir, it is a poison. So on their side it looks like money is the distraction they should give up.
I sent my congressman, and senators a letter asking them if they want to trade my telephone for their money.
I just hope I get a positive reply soon.
January 9, 2010
I Have To Stop Complaining
I Have To Stop Complaining
I’m sometimes a complainer. And if my wife was looking over my shoulder right now, she would tell me to scratch out the word “sometimes” and replace it with one that indicated a higher frequency: well actually much higher.
It’s not that I complain about a lot of different things, because usually it is limited to the fact that my wealth and my looks never crept above average before age started to take away even the little of what I had.
In my defense, complaining has sort of become the national pastime, an indoor sport that we can all excel in. And as the national pastime, it binds us all together with what is sort of like a self-pity glue.
The business section of the newspaper often provides the kindling to start my inner fires raging, and so after reading that section this morning and downing two cups of coffee, I was pretty much prepared for my day.
But then I looked out the back door at the thermometer mounted on the wall just a few feet from our bird feeder. It read minus ten degrees centigrade. That’s probably defined as balmy for my North Dakota, Colorado and Montana friends, but back here in Virginia we call it cold.
There on the ground near the bird feeder was a small sparrow picking up the remains of the seed scattered by the larger birds. I was shivering just looking at the little guy, and I was in a room that at that moment seemed to be a thousand degrees warmer than the one that little bird was in. And I also spent the night under four blankets, while he spent the night under a twig.
It sort of put my complaints in the proper perspective. So now I have a choice in the morning: keep the curtains closed, or look out the window and realize just how lucky I really am
January 6, 2010
The Aging brain
A friend of mine sent me an article from the New York Times dealing with the aging brain. She kept insisting that I read it, and so it didn’t take me long to realize that her suggestion probably had something to do with her hope that I would not travel much further down the “stupid,” path.
Now I am pretty proud of my brain. It serves me well. It’s sort of like a 1986 Ford Taurus, rather than a new Ferrari, and although there are definitely times when all the cylinders aren’t firing, it still gets me where I want to go: especially with the help of a GPS.
After I started to read the article, I realized that they defined an aging brain as one belonging to anyone over forty, and since I am a long way past that birthday, I figured that I better pay attention to what was written, that I might learn something.
I would probably forget it quickly, because that’s the sign of an aging brain, but I figured if I ran downstairs right after reading it, that I could tell my wife about it, and she would gain a little hope that my rate of progress down the “Stupid” path might have slowed.
The article dealt with the fact that we need to mix things up as we age. Hear different viewpoints, do things a different way. My wife read an article like this a few years ago that suggested that to improve our brainpower, that we should use the opposite hand in the morning to brush our teeth and comb our hair. She gave up on that idea after the first day when I came downstairs that morning with both halitosis and hair that looked like it belonged on a rhesus monkey.
I decided to try the concept once again when writing this article, and that is I would use a different finger for my typing. I gave up after realizing that there are not that many words with a “Q” in them in the English language.
Earth like planets
The folks at NASA announced this week that they have discovered five new unusual planets orbiting stars a few thousand light years away. They’re close neighbors according to the article, but they are probably not conducive to life as we know it. And it’s a hard thing to decide if that’s a good thing or bad.
The real prize is the search for an Earth-like planet, one that orbits a distant star within the habitable zone. And that means a place where liquid water can exist to support beings that may or may not look like us.
I’m really glad that NASA is doing this research, and my joy is not just for the obvious reasons, like hoping that my alter ego on that planet is rich.
My real reason for liking this research is selfish and I’ll admit it, because you see that before the discovery of an Earthlike planet is announced to the public, NASA must first tell the president and congress.
The way I see it is that as soon as congress gets word that there’s another civilization out there, that they will all rush to go on a fact finding trip to see if the residents of that planet will buy Georgia peanuts, or a GM car.
Think of it: Every congress person and Senator quickly leaving on a set of spaceships heading to another star system.
I sure hope they find one of those planets fast.
November 2, 2009
Tuesdays Child: Beginning Chapters 1-3
Chapter 1: Tuesday
Mondays child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, but that is not always so.
Tuesday Wells was born on a Tuesday so that should have given her a double chance, but grace was not an attribute she had or had acquired from the moment she was born, and she was one of those children you see with her parents in the supermarket that make you glad she was born to someone else.
When you met her parents, it took you all of a few seconds to decide that Tuesday had been given a bum selection from those available to raise her. Her father was always conniving to get more than he deserved, and her mother, well her mother was the object of every tongue wager in town.
“Do you know what a balloon word is Tuesday?” her father asked her the day after her eighth birthday.
Tuesday usually ignored her father when he spoke, a byproduct of that lack of grace I mentioned earlier, and she continued with her self appointed job of pulling the feathers out of the pillow on the sofa. Her father got her attention by the back of his hand, a technique he learned from his parents, they learned from their parents, and so on, back as far as the stunted Neanderthal that began their lineage.
“Listen to me Tuesday, I need to teach you something. Now I’ve always made it clear to you that people that have more than us don’t really deserve it as much as we do, and that taking some of what they have is really just getting our fair share. Well we haven’t been getting our fair share lately, so I have a plan to rectify that, and you’re going to help.”
Tuesday was facing her father, but she was listening to the voice in her head that kept repeating, “I hate him, I wish he wasn’t my father, and I wish he was in jail.”
“Now balloon words are words that make us forget what the other person was saying,” her father said, “and when we hear a balloon word, we go off and think about something else, ignoring the rest of what the other person is trying to tell us. So you and I are going to use balloon words to get a little money out of some people’s pockets. Here’s how it works.”
Her father explained that she would be the diverter of attention using a series of balloon words he would teach her, and when the sucker’s attention was somewhere else, he would lighten their wallets of all the paper money.
Her father wasn’t particular, so he taught her how to use the words, “sex, dog poop, your fly is down mister, and lady that outfit is ugly,” to divert someone’s attention long enough for him to redistribute some of the wealth in the world.
The first few times out worked perfectly. Five hundred dollars in two days had made her father generous, and instead of a slap in the face when she messed up her part, he simply yelled at her. He learned that if he timed his hand to grab the wallet at the exact moment his daughter said the balloon word, that he was always successful.
Tuesday understood the game a little too well, and she knew something about her father that few others knew, so when they went out the next day, she had a plan.
Tuesday waited for just the right victim, a young man whose time at the gym was obvious. Young men’s thoughts were usually diverted by the “your fly is down” series, and she began with, “Hey mister,” as her father got in position, his hand just inches from the young man’s back pocket.
“There’s a spider on the back of your pants!”
Her father’s balloon word was “spider,” he was afraid of them, and for a minute he forgot what he was doing, which was just long enough for the young man, to turn, feel the man’s hand on his wallet, and knock him unconscious with one blow.
“It worked,” Tuesday thought as they took her father off to jail, “now how can I use this on my mom.”
Chapter 2: Tuesday’s Mom
Tuesday’s mother considered her daughter an inconvenience. It was inconvenient to have to feed her, and it was inconvenient to have to spend good money on her clothes that could have been used for a new pair of shoes for herself. It was especially inconvenient to have a daughter that knew she’d been sleeping around with a half a dozen local men, all who knew when Tuesday’s father wasn’t going to be around and also, when it was their turn.
Tuesday hadn’t quite known what was going on when her mother closed the bedroom door when her father was away on thieving business, but she sure didn’t like the sounds or the words being shouted, so she would just go outside and play, no matter what time of day or night or what the weather.
When it was raining, she would huddle in the back shed of a neighbor, a friendly old man that discovered her there once, soaking wet and shaking from the cold. The next time it rained, Tuesday found a chair, a warm blanket, and a light to read by that was powered by an extension cord strung from the man’s house. One time there was even a half eaten box of Oreos.
The judge residing at the pick pocketing trial for Tuesday’s father was not a sympathetic man. He resided over the man’s previous four trials for petty theft and had completely lost his patience.
“Three years,” the judge said in sentencing, “and no time off for good behavior. I’m retiring in three years and I don’t want to ever see this crook again.”
The only one surprised that Tuesday and her mother didn’t cry at the sentencing was her father, and he mouthed the words, “I’ll get even with both of you,” as he was taken away.
Tuesday had no expectations that her life would be better with just her mother around, so from the day her father was sentenced, she started plotting how to get rid of her mother. She liked this balloon word idea and kept looking for an opportunity to use it that would help with her problem. The problem was that she wanted to live with her grandmother on the farm and not have to live with her mom.
Her mother would have been glad to have been rid of her except for the fact that she needed the money the state provided for child support, not for Tuesday of course, but for things she found more pressing, like new dresses for herself.
When Tuesday’s father was put in jail, the male traffic through the house increased, and Tuesday spent more of her time outside, wandering around the streets. She tried running off to her grandmothers once, but was forced to come back, when her mother threatened her Nana with child abduction charges.
Now Tuesday was a brilliant child, she seemed to be one of those rare cases where her IQ was the additive sum of her parents, and even with the low starting numbers, that meant she was a genius.
Third grade was therefore not a challenge for her. She read and did every exercise in her books by the third week of school, and was bored stiff as her teacher Mrs. Plum droned on day after day trying to make those with only normal IQ’s understand.
As I mentioned earlier, Tuesday lacked that quality we call grace. And she showed that lack every day in Mrs. Plum’s class, fidgeting, drawing her initials on the desk, and several times falling asleep because she’d been walking the streets the previous night when one of her mother’s callers stayed late.
One Tuesday (of course) Mrs. Plum had reached her limit then gone over the edge, and she started yelling all sorts of things in Tuesday’s direction, some of them words the other children in the class had never heard.
When the teacher took a breath, Tuesday said simply, “Your husband is sleeping with my mom, and so are…. Then she listed another six names.
The balloon words, “husband sleeping with my mom,” worked perfectly, and her mother was run out of town that evening.
Chapter 3: A New Start?
Tuesday’s mother was surprised by the accumulation of women knocking at her door. One of them, being the wife of the man who was still upstairs, pretty much unclothed, and cowering in the back of the closet.
Needing to vacate the house in a hurry, she forgot a few things, like her thirty pairs of shoes, hair curlers, and Tuesday. The first two were oversights caused by her frantic reaction to the screaming mob, but the last one was deliberate, and so later in that day Tuesday was driven off by the kind old widower across the street to live with her grandmother, which was exactly what she wanted to do all along.
Tuesday’s grandmother wasn’t really her grandmother. Her father had been raised in an orphanage and never knew his parents. Her mother’s mother died in childbirth, and her mother’s father remarried three more times before he died.
The last wife was the only good one, and fortunately she only had to deal with the horrid man for a year before the creator decided to take him back, wipe the slate clean and try again; this time using a little less damaged DNA.
Her step grandmother’s name was Clara, and Clara had made a smart move after making the mistake of marrying Tuesday’s grandfather. She took out a lot of life insurance on him, and so when he left this world, he left her rich to the tune of five hundred dollars an hour for every hour she had to endure the man. With the first installment, she bought a small farm outside the city and lived alone until Tuesday showed up at her door
Clara always loved Tuesday. And she loved her for what she was. And that was no small task, because what she was, was hard to love sometimes even for a grandmother, so when she saw Tuesday walking down her lane she was happy.
Tuesday’s father’s touch was always done with the back of his hand, her mother’s touch usually came in the form of hair pulling, and no one had hugged her for almost a year, but her grandmother did her best to erase that deficit all in the first day.
Hugging then kissing, then hugging then kissing, and generally repeating this scenario a few times each hour, waking the young girl twice in the middle of the night, and starting again early the next morning.
Tuesday didn’t quite know what to make of all this affection. Not that she disliked it, she just didn’t know what to make of it, and over the course of a few weeks it finally started to sink in. Her grandmother loved her, really loved her, and for the first time in her life she was happy.
She remained happy for almost a month, but that changed when the class bully in her new school returned from suspension and decided his life was much happier when he was humiliating Tuesday and her new friend. Stealing their lunch, tripping them, calling them names were all part of the creodont’s repertoire, as was throwing mud pies at them on their way home from school.
Tuesday’s happy mood began to sour quickly, and the use of balloon words again flooded her mind.
(an additional chapter each week)
October 18, 2009
Aging Solved
I’ve been trying to understand this thing called aging. Not in a scientific way you understand, because I’m an engineer, and after your mind gets fuzzed with telomeres and mitochondrial DNA you sort of lose your focus on the big picture, like “Why did God do this to us.”
I couldn’t really understand why we don’t grow up, reach our prime, stay there for seven decades or so and then “wink out” like a light bulb after the switch has been turned off. Instead most of us go through our later years like a tire that loses air slowly, so we never really know when it’s really going to go flat.
After a lot of deep contemplation, and soul searching, over my coffee this morning I think I have it figured out. It’s a plan that our bodies have to get even with our souls for our eating too many cheeseburgers, drinking too much alcohol; and if you were one of the lucky ones, for doing all those things scrunched up in the back seat of a car when you were a teenager.
It came to me, because the first thing to go is your back. That usually makes you hunch over, and you’re forced to look down at a belly that is too big for your body, and feet that look like they belong on some other hominid.
The next part to go is your eyes. All those things we found beautiful when we were young now appear fuzzy at a distance and they blur into oblivion when they are too close up, leaving just a narrow window of clarity so that the mistakes you make are just humiliating and not deadly.
So when I finished my coffee this morning, I had this all worked out. You see, this aging thing is simply your body telling your mind, “I could have lived a good life if it wasn’t for you.”