For a few days, anyway. I’ll be doing my science-y kind of thing for work and visiting a partner laboratory in Sacramento to assess how they do things in an up close and personal manner to make sure they are doing things with an eye towards getting quality analytical results [spoiler alert: they probably are; this visit is mostly just ticking a box].
While I don’t have a ton of time to do much, let me know if you live in the Sacramento area and want to grab a coffee (or two). I might have time one evening or in the morning before I catch my early afternoon flight home.
While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.
I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.
By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…
By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.
There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.
And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.
Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.
I re-opened a blog site from ancient history (2007-2008) and made it public again because one of my new readers requested access to what had been marked a private blog (or maybe not, but it is back “live” regardless).
It is just a catalog of quotes and poetry that caught my fancy, namely of a Taoism or Zen Buddhism bent. There’s nothing terribly exciting there unless you are into those kinds of things, or if you want a peek into where my mind was about a year before I ended up choosing sobriety as a more enlightened path than wonton drunkenness.
Check it out, if you are so inclined: Useless Tree
I originally made the site private primarily to stop a reader from demanding new posts when I had decided I was no longer in the mood to be enlightened. And then I never got back to posting on it or making the site public again when that mood passed away.
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust last night as part of my recent determination to create some air between my brain and various digital and social medias (streaming services including YouTube, mass-social media, news sites, video games, & etc.). I am annoyed with myself now that it has taken so long to read his writing aside from Freedom and Necessity.
I hope that no one is offended when I say Jhereg is just the kind of pulp fiction I was looking for. It is not high literature, nor does it pretend to be. The novel is a fantasy tale of an assassin and mobster, Vlad Taltos, who happens to be a second-class citizen (because he is human) in a fantasy city full of thievery, deception and double-crossings. Plus, he has magic and a reptilian familiar.
And, so far, it works — as a bit of a hard-boiled noir and fantasy crossover. A movie with similar DNA (except set in a futuristic Earth instead of a medieval fantasy world) might be Blade Runner.
Like The Witcher books I’ve been re-reading, it has an easy flow to the storytelling that I think might be missing from a lot of the more recent writing out there. Even some of books I’ve enjoyed that have been written in the past 25 years seem to be trying real hard to be “good literature” when they are, at their base, pulp novels. Or, maybe, I’m just more tuned into penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and weird tales and would prefer to read that birdcage liner stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if we put too much emphasis on structure, formulae and erudition, and not enough on merely telling a “ripping yarn”. I certainly don’t know. But I’m sure there are tons of opinions about the matter.
On whim and a lark, I added feta to my breakfast of steel cut oats, almonds and pepitas. I have added feta with mushrooms, sausages and eggs on my oats in the past, but was hesitant without the other savory ingredients.
FYI: It tastes damn good, it is less work, and it is better for me than adding a tablespoon of chocolate chips when I don’t want to go through the hassle of frying up eggs, sausages and mushrooms.
I’m toying around with joining the less than one-percent.
No, I’m not buying into a get rich quick scheme involving illusionary money (all money is illusionary, but that’s a topic for a different post). Or joining an “Outlaw” bikers club.
As I hit publish on the piece falling yesterday, I was visited with the memory of recording my very first song which, of course, had very little to do with the piece written yesterday.
Honestly? I’d forgotten the event entirely. But fragments of the song came back and I couldn’t figure out until this morning why the song sounded familiar.
The old notes I found have gotten my thoughts pointing back in the direction of those kinds of studies again. This is probably obvious to some of you. While it can be difficult to find reliable, scholarly texts on the matter, I find that I learn something new almost every time I read the few texts out there that are supported by scholarship. And there is always those untapped journal articles out there that are less about meeting sales quotas than they are about serious scholarship.
I can’t decide if I should be surprised that it finally did happen or that it took so long for it to happen.
But I got my first email from a fan who thinks I am an adult film director from the late 90s/00s who also went by “Michael Raven”. For the record, I was using the pen name well before he was directing films in the, ahem, genre.
They wanted to know where they could get a legit digital copy of a specific film. And a song title. Did this fan check to see if I was who he thought I was? Absolutely not. But that did not stop the fan from asking all the same.
What added to the surreal nature is that apparently it was a movie (very) loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.
For the record, there is another author who goes by the name and writes nonfiction and has been published well before I was. I’d almost rather have gotten an email from one of his fans because then I could just say, “Sorry, wrong chap” and be done with it. But with adult entertainment, it could just as easily be a phishing expedition — so ignore and block is my method for handling those.
Of all the things I might unearth as I was repackaging and cataloging some belongings to put into off-site storage, I guess I never expected to find some old handwritten notes from my druidic lessons circa 1992. I had recently joined a local druid group that was one of the original 1970s groups in the US and a handful of pages are from a course they were teaching their new members. And old members looking for a refresher (which was the bulk of the attendees at these gatherings in the head druid’s home).
I found it stuffed alongside the truly awful tale of Ben who, apparently, we liked to lock up just to hear him scream, written about ten years later than these notes. Don’t ask, I can’t imagine my motivation twenty-three years ago for pairing the writings in a single place.
