Birdie called, finally, last night. After three weeks of no contact. He arrived in Fayettenam and found a land line. When I say “no contact,” I don’t mean to say he hasn’t called others. Just not his Pop. Wrong gender.
I think I’ll smack the snot out of the little twerp next time I see him for not calling his old man any sooner!
Nah. He might slap back.
Joseph Epstein’s article, Writing on the Brain, has me pegged!
I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy?once you have these in place, you are set to go.
The article is a review of a book on brain function, The Midnight Disease, by Alice W. Flaherty. Epstein spends a lot of time discussing the science of brain function, which is what interested me, while discussing writing and its relationship to thought processes. He congratulates Flaherty for the unassuming nature of her conclusions, but disagrees with many of them:
I should like Dr. Flaherty to know that my two motives in writing this essay have been, first, to collect a decent fee, and, second, to try to knock down her book as an assemblage of profoundly muddled notions that I, given my calling, find mildly but genuinely offensive.
We visited Austin this weekend to help Son #4 move into a new apartment. Bogey and I got a round of golf in at Jimmy Clay. Nice course, with far better greens than we’ve got here. Three bad holes cost me a decent score.
Well, the site is changing. Bogey convinced me my color scheme sucked. What you see is the result of changing a couple of simple things in the CSS file. Bogey, the web site expert, loves CSS because you can change the appearance of all pages with a change in a single file. Unfortunately, changing a CSS file changes the appearance of all associated files! So, I got home and attempted some damage control because the Comments and Trackback displays were…let’s just say there were problems! I reverted to the original CSS for Comments, so they are, at least, readable. Maybe today I’ll get at the rest.
Real men need to take back their manhood!
* A Retrosexual opens doors for a lady.
* A Retrosexual DEALS with shit. Be it a flat tire, break-in into your home, or a natural disaster, you DEAL WITH IT.
* A Retrosexual not only eats red meat, he often kills it himself.
* A Retrosexual doesn’t worry about living to be 90. It’s not how long you live, but how well. If you’re 90 years old and still smoking cigars and drinking, I salute you.
I concur.
I went out to the shipping area this morning. Each can with an engine or gearbox inside has stencils identifying it, and some have shipment destinations painted on them. One of them had “Austrialla” on the side.
I wonder if the Muslims have taken over Austria, or that was “Australia” misspelled.
That’s right. I said Dogs are cool! Really COOL! We have two. A Jack Russell (Jack. I’m so creative) and a homeless chihuahua we picked up one stormy winter night (Chester. As in Chester Copperpot).
Jack is boss, but Chester wants to be. He just can’t run as fast, and gets tangled up when he tries. Both feel they need to be on my lap when I sit at the computer. So, I’ll simply blame them for bad grammar and misspellings.
Jack has issues with cats, too. He doesn’t hate them. In fact, he doesn’t hate anything. But he wants to play with them. They look like his Mr Hedgehog toy, and he simply wants to see if they squeak. They do, but they do it as they leave the immediate vicinity.
He also likes to swim. Pool, lake, creek, surf. Any water will do. Oh, yes, you must throw something for him to retrieve. Again, and again, and again.
Chester doesn’t swim. Tiny feet don’t propel very well. But he’s a pretty good ballerina. When he stretches, he looks like squirrels I’ve skinned in the past.
Good dogs. Both cool in their individual ways.
Sarah pointed out a simple, succinct explanation. Personally, I think blogging is a simpler way to put down daily thoughts than keeping a journal. When I find something on the web I feel compelled to write about, I can easily link to that item rather than having to explain it all in my own post.
Is that just being lazy? I don’t view it that way. I see it as giving credit where credit is due. When I write something inspired by others, I can’t simply take credit for the idea. Of course, there’s really not too many things that haven’t been said in some way or another. Right now, I’m trying to locate Ralph Peters to ask his permission to post a chapter from one of his books on my reference page. I could plagarize, or post it with attribution, but it still just isn’t right.
So, I blog as a means to get my writing skills in order. I also do it to vent. I’ve had a commenter tell me I’m a moron. That’s okay, too. I told him, “Thanks for playing!”
Boy did this become blather!
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