Roll away the dew

Whenever I write something venturing into or bordering on the political, I am bound to piss off some portion of my readership. There have been intimations made by business colleagues that they have heard rumblings that my partisan blather has cost me money. If that is true, and even more so if I have alienated a future friend, I would hope that the offended can look past petty politics and we can find some other place where we can possibly meet and agree.

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Many of you run from politics like it's a root canal and I can understand that perfectly.

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I have to also say that it has been very hard to write this blog for several months. Oh, I can glance through the headlines and riff all day long but I have not felt like broaching anything approaching literary or personal intimacy. Simply because I am not feeling it right now. Haven't written a fictional piece in ages, since I don't know when? Except for this piece in K.B. Gressitt's opening paragraph contest, which ends today.

Write one opening (as in first) sentence to an imagined work of fiction or creative nonfiction. Your sentence can be any genre, any subject; serious, humorous, romantic, satirical; whatever you like.

And so:

As a seasoned veteran at the whole relationship thing, Blair knew that even a slightly negative mention of Wanda's physical attributes, no matter how well considered and conceived, would assuredly result in a quick and sudden alteration of some of his own most personal and distinctive features.

Robert Sommers

Guess I need for a wind to change. I want to go back to writing speculative fiction. It is very freeing. But I need to feel loose enough to relax. Need to make good friends with my guitar again too. Either solve or disregard any financial neurosis.

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For a guy who doesn't drink anymore, I am surprised by the amount of time I am spending at the new microbrewery across the street. Their IPA's and Stouts are fantastic. My favorite is the Coffee Porter. Thick coffee nose that is worth the price of admission. Some how my allergies have been okay so the problems I was having may have been strictly seasonal.

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Randy Walters dad died. But not until after seeing the new video Randy made for him that I posted a short while back. He sent me a picture of his sweet old dad, smile a mile wide. Love the guy.

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I have had some wild dreams lately. I will share one. There was a time early on in this blog when Grumpy would pull out his dream book and do a spot analysis for me. Haven't done that in a while. Don't need one for this.

I dreamt about my old friend Al, the fellow that took his life a few years ago. Al came to me in the dream or his ghost did the other night. Looking tall and happy and as self determined as ever. "How you doing, Al?" Fine, everything was copacetic. "Where you been?" He confided in me that he now hung out in places where people couldn't see him.

It was a very vivid dream. Could have sworn I made some psychic contact with my old friend. I miss my friends that have passed, Tony D., Al, Liz D., many farther back. Murray. May the four winds blow you safely home.

I have been thinking a lot about the millennials lately. I like the kids by and large, ink, giant ear holes and all. It is merely a matter of branding, they are asserting their independence from the previous norms. Who hasn't done that? 

We saw a lot of bi racial millennial couples in Hawaii, many white men with black women, gay couples, all kinds of variations and blends in their age demographic. They are cooler with shit than their predecessors. Maybe a little more aware.

Don't think that they will indulge in many furrows that my generation hadn't already plowed, deeper, straighter or whatever, but I think that their seeming social acceptance of the slightly eccentric is commendable and they are headed into a bit of fun.

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We had breakfast with some old friends yesterday and he turned me on to the book of aphorisms by John Fowles, The Aristos, written in 1964. Fowles wrote the French Lieutenant's woman. Fairly amazing book. Must find my own copy.

The ordinary man and woman live in an asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society. They lose all independence of judgement and all freedom of action. They see themselves increasingly as limited special functions, as parts of a machine, with neither need nor right to perform any other than their role in the economic structure of society. The civic sense becomes atrophied. It is the job of the police to prevent crimes, not yours and mine; it is the job of the town councilor to run the town, not yours and mine; it is the job of the underprivileged to fight for their rights, not yours and mine. Thus more and more live in cities, and yet more and more become decitizenised. What began in the suburbs reaches right to the city's heart.

(John Fowles, The Aristos, 1964)