wreddyornot

God bless the USA---God curse the USA.

2012-01-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

You keep hearing it over and over, "God bless the USA. Godbless the USA. God bless the USA."

But I've tended to cringe each time I've heard it for thepast eight or more years. Not because I didn't wish for it to be so or want itto happen. In fact, I cringed for quite awhile with only a vague understandingof exactly why I did. Then I read CHEATING JUSTICE, by Elizabeth Holtzman withCynthia L. Cooper. Now I know why I cringe. Because President George W. Bush, VicePresident Cheney, and others actually did deceive Congress and the citizens togo to war in Iraq. Furthermore, they set free the appalling policies of brutaland inhuman torture in violation of law and basic human compassion. And theyhaven't faced the consequences for having done so.

So let me stand now and applaud these courageous women,Elizabeth Holzman and Cynthia L. Cooper, who are capable, very experienced and knowledgeableattorneys and writers, who refuse to let American justice be cheated withoutraising the roof, setting forth an exacting case for action. Their book presentsthe facts and the case for how and why we, as a society, should proceed againstthose responsible for various atrocities, including torture.

Often, the "God bless the USA" refrain is heard ina political context. Frequently, for me at least, it's the President of the UnitedStates of America I hear saying it, seeking to sanctify his speech as he closes:"God bless the USA." But now, as I've said, I cringe when thathappens and find myself wondering: is such a petition blasphemy? Will the USAbe cursed? Must we, as a nation, not repent, acknowledging wrongdoing in notholding the rich and powerful people responsible and accountable? Shouldn't we,with Elizabeth Holzman and Cynthia Cooper, stand tall for justice and not allowthe swindle of righteousness to continue?

Remember back to March 20, 2003 to the attack on Baghdad? Iwatched on television: the bombing, the explosions, the gunfire, the risingsmoke and the bleeding bodies, the innocent killing and destruction that wenton and on and on. The war continued for days and weeks, for months and years, everonward. Remember the news reports night after night? Remember the cost inlives, in injuries, in time and money, not just of Americans, but Iraqis andothers involved in the mess. Remember the loved ones lost or maimed, the financialdisasters it has wrought at home and abroad? Remember, in the midst of it, all thosewretched pictures at Abu Ghraib? Men --- guilty or not --- tortured, laid bareand brutalized, subjected to gross humiliations, absolute terror in their faces,maimed and killed? Remember? US soldiers standing over them, mocking andtorturing them, and getting off in doing so? Torture, plain and simple. Savage,sadistic and callous. Plus the continuing stories, not only of Abu Graib andIraq, but also of arrests and renderings, at home and abroad, of the perhaps guiltyand the innocent in the "war on terror"? The miscarriages of justice.

Remember the pretexts for starting the war in Iraq: thealleged weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi's connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was a pack of lies and untruths.Pretexts, laid bare in this deliberate, take-you-all-through-it, step-by-step, book.

Will God curse the USA? Despite repeated, ad infinitum,incantations of "God bless the USA" by Americans of all walks oflife, can we as citizens truly expect God --- or, for that matter, any secularphilosophy --- so petitioned, to bless the USA?

I worked as an appeals officer for the IRS. (When I used to mentionthat I worked for the IRS, people would cringe. I'd say that at least it was appealingwork). What does an appeals officer for the IRS do? Where warranted, they make compromiseson tax cases appealed by disgruntled taxpayers --- individuals, corporations,partnerships, etc. Appeals officers weigh the state of the existing pertinent lawsand all of the relevant facts and circumstances of a case. Then they assess therisks to the parties in litigating. They try to make compromises, accordingly,if warranted. The reason I mention this is because that is precisely what theseauthors do with CHEATING JUSTICE.

You should read it. I hope you do. Eventually people need tosay and hear "God bless the USA" without cringing and worrying as anation we've shirked our responsibility in justice. Can God bless the USA?

We're Spinning

2011-10-29T13:33:00.003-06:00

Is this book stellar? Cosmic? Heavenly? Is that too cliché of a characterization?

Well, yes and no, I guess. It depends on how literally you take it. At least in my mind, this work probably deserves something like a 3.5 or a 4 rating. I definitely found it a better read than 3.0 or below.

I am certainly no historian, scientist, or astrologer, and those who are, or who pretend to be, seem to have given their ample, comprehensive, and fairly convincing reviews so far relative to this work based upon perspectives and expertise. I defer to them on such matters. I also submit to them relative to their recounting the structure of the book and summaries of its contents. I can do no better than they have.

So now I will just throw in my two cents as a common reader, certainly underqualified as anything more, who picked this book up because I enjoy the interplay of the roles of the church (or theology), the government, and the discovery of knowledge, both in the past and in the present. Most people generally realize that Copernicus played a significant part pertaining to the historical tensions between theology and the church, government, and accepted knowledge as his discoveries rolled forth and spilled the glass of wine. His discoveries changed perceptions and minds. But it did so only after it caused great pain and hardship and grief. Probably much soul-searching. This book, of course catalogs some of those problems that had to be endured or worked around --- celibacy, the deference to interpretations of others regarding history and scripture, legitimate applications gazing at the heavens could have --- that eventually led to changes in apprehension. It does so with historical documentation and narrative, but also with insightful nuance through fiction. No matter how complete a historical record is, we are never able to fully comprehend the past, even our own lived ones. One of Ursula Le Guin's fictional characters described truth as a matter of the imagination. As it pertains to comprehension, truth is a matter of the imagination. You cannot divorce yourself from its effect. I think probably Sobel realizes as much, and I personally delighted in the play that was inserted between the dense, although very interesting, prose sections.

Religion has played a role throughout my life and in my society, especially in the locality where I lived most of my life (Utah). It continues to do so. No less so have my church, my government, and the increasing knowledge in my environment had significant impacts upon me. I suppose that's probably true, to some degree or another, of everyone. The tension between discoveries of knowledge, science, and mind over against the sway of theology, religion, and worship --- the mystical, if you will --- intrigues me. Faith versus knowledge. Obedience versus discovery. I read Sobel's previous works, LONGITUDE, and GALILEO, and, from reading the latter, was fairly certain A MORE PERFECT HEAVEN about Copernicus would be insightful. And I was not disappointed.

If you are intrigued by the interplay of church, government, and knowledge, as I am, you surely will benefit in reading this book.

He Still Doesn't Cooperate

2011-10-28T16:47:00.000-06:00

"But Ididn't drop him," Papa says when everybody stops giggling.

They all laughagain.

I don't think Papawould've dropped me. I trust him.

"So youwere there, too, Mr. Romero?" Sedge asks.

"Oh, yeah,I was there," Juan says. "It's good, too. Who can say what would'vehappened if I hadn't been. After all, Emilio dropped the baby."

People who get immigrantsacross the southern U.S. border are called coyotes. Juan had kind of been anunofficial one for my parents, helping to lead them across. He had experiencecrossing the desert and was a lot cheaper and safer than trusting a real one.

"He wasmostly ordering us around," Papa says.

"Telling themwhere to go," Juan says.

"No kidding,"Papa says.

"So youdidn't get lost. I was trying to hustle my sobrinaalong, hoping she'd make it to civilization before Alejandro came out."

"But theydidn't make it?" Sedgwick asks. "Alejandro was really born in thedesert?

"Uh-huh,"Juan says.

"Oh, that'sso sweet," Sedge says.

Not so sweet though. They always told me it wason the wrong side.

"I carriedhim across that desert," Papa says, "past the saguaro and pricklypear cactuses, keeping him away from king snakes and cottontail rabbits, allthe way in a sling. He was naked against my chest, without a diaper. There wasnothing to catch his pee."

"Orpoop," Juan says. "I had to keep telling Emilio where to turn, urginghim not to stop, and reminding him of creepy crawlers: poisonous scorpions and rattlesnakes,sidewinders and centipedes, Gila monsters and tarantulas."

"I don’tremember," I say.

"It wasn'tfun," Mama says. "No doctor or midwife. Only Emilio and Tio Juan. It's lucky you even survived,Aljehandro."

They usually don'ttell about being nervous about la migra—theBorder Patrol. Not to people like Sedge, anyway.

"At leastAlejandro was pequeño when he cameout," Juan says. "But he sure didn't stay little."

"He came outearly," Mama says, "that's why he was so small."

"He was a niño when you wanted a niña," Juan says. "And right offhe didn't cooperate."

My grandparentsand parents agree, nodding. Mama hadwanted a girl. She still does.

And of coursethey had wanted an American. A girl and a citizen, that's what they had wishedfor.

"He stilldoesn't cooperate," Sedge says. "I wanted him to do my Spanish homework,and he wouldn't."

Everybody laughsstill again.

"I just wouldn'thelp you do something wrong," I say. "Besides, you needpractice."

Alejandro the Great

2011-10-26T22:48:00.000-06:00

I play only pickup games withneighborhood kids here at the small park in East Clayton, near my house. I'vegot a reputation for being rock-hard and fast, two traits most people don't puttogether in soccer players. Nobody can catch me, and nobody I've played withcomes close to being as bulky strong.

Fink comes at me again, fuming. Ityet again ends badly for him, and he whines. "You're a freaking wetback,Alejandro, I know you are. Someday they'll come and arrest you and send youback to beanerland. You stupid illegal."

I don't say or do anything. My bestfriend, Sedgwick Benson, comes over to Fink, and I jog off, continuing tofollow the game's action. "Knock it off, Keith," I hear Sedge say."You know he's a mini version of The Hulk. Pull your panties out of yourbutt and let's play."

"He's a freakin' firehydrant," Fink says, "and one dog too many's peed on him. He smellslike piss."

Later, heading home, I ask Sedgeover for supper. Earlier Mama had said it was okay to invite him; it's not somethingI've ever done before. My family trusts Sedge and his mother too, like they doMaggie's family, even if they're citizens andMormons. Mrs. Benson --- her name's Ivy --- and Sedge's sister, Tonia, aregoing to some church dinner just for mothers and daughters. Sedge's father isdead; he died in Iraq a couple of years ago. He was a soldier.

If I don't invite Sedge, he'll behome alone eating something microwaved instead of Mama's home cooking.

Sedge knows we lay low. I'll ask himwhat he thinks it means to be an American.

"Alejandro was born in thedesert," Mama tells Sedge, "in November 1995."

In the Mexican desert, I've always been told. Nobody's told Sedge about itbefore. I know I haven't, but I think he assumes it. Mama doesn't say now thatI came out a few yards south of the U.S. border, but that's what I've alwaysbeen told. My family wishes I'd been born in the U.S.

"So he was born in a desert andnot in a hospital?" Sedge asks. "You're kidding, right?"

"No, it was a desert," Isay. "Papa saved me. I would've dropped straight out of Mama's belly ontohot sand and cooked weeds, but Papa caught me. Papa's got good hands."

"That's right," Papa says."I caught him."

“You dropped him on a cactus,” Juansays. Juan's mama's uncle, Grandma Augustina's brother.

We all laugh. Juan always says thiswhenever the story comes up, usually around the family or other undocumentedswe trust. It's Sunday, so my family is all here: my parents, Emelio andMariana; my grandparents, Carlos and Augustina; my uncle Juan, grandma'sbrother; and me. And of course Sedge.

“It’s how your hijo got that scar on his caboose,” Juan says.

It's a legend ---that scar --- afamily one. Part of it, at least, is a myth. I do have a big mark that lookslike a scar en mi trasero. Whetherit's a scar or birthmark is anybody's guess. It’s where it’s hard to showanybody: on my right cheek, near the crack. The only place anyone could eversee it these days is in the shower, after gym class; I doubt anyone would belooking. It's not as cool as a lightening scar on your forehead.

"Harry Potter's got nothing onme but location," I say. I always do say this when the story comes up. Itgets a few laughs.

"Butt location, B U T T," Sedge says.

Everybody laughs again.

The Sonoran Desert --- Still No Daffodils, 2009

2011-10-20T10:59:00.000-06:00

I don't see KeithFink coming because I'm looking the other way and thinking about a writingassignment for Mrs. Moll: what-it-means-to-be-an-American. So Fink and I collide,to the max. First, I hear the air go out of him, and then I hear an oomph as hehits the ground. I try not tosmile, thinking that Keith's teeth must still be jiggling. All right! I pump myfist, but I don't say anything. That's got to hurt him, although it barelyfazes me. I'm solid, unlike so many other skinny and out-of-shapeninth-graders. Some kids call me the fire hydrant.
Anytime I can playpickup soccer and take out a Fink, it's a good day. Only thing better would beif I'd taken out his dad, George Fink, co-founder of Grassroots Boots. But I'd settleright now for a good idea for that writing assignment. And it'd help to be anAmerican.
I pass the ball offand turn to see if Fink's still lying there. He's all pissed off like theweenie he is, squinting as if he's hurting and it's all my fault he ran intome. The red rises in his white face. Big baby. A little blood trickles out hisnose. He swipes it with the back of his wrist.
"You freakin'beaner," he says as he pushes himself up. "Idiotic spic." Hefaces me and spit flies from his mouth. "You're a stupid greased pig;that's what you are."
He comes at me,but I stand my ground. I keep my mouth shut and stay cool. I have to.
His body runs intome again, but it just bounces off. Another impressive oomph escapes from Fink.He doesn't fall this time; I'll give him that.
I look toward thebackyard of Maggie's house that borders the grassy field. Maggie's my girl,although if you asked me, I'd deny it. I'm not sure if she realizes it yet either.My family knows hers from the Cathedral, and Maggie goes to school with me. Often,she sits on her deck to watch who's playing on the field behind her house, maybechecking out the guys. I see her smiling at me now. She waves. I smile back andsignal. Her family is one of a couple outside the ring of undocumentedimmigrants like us that my parents trust. Yeah, my family, we're what a lot of peoplecall illegals.
As I play, I makeuse of my solid body as well as I can, especially with sissy-prissies like Fink.He's used to "team play" in fancy-shmancy uniforms with referees anda coach to protect and baby him. Even in organized games, he's a wuss, shootingoff his mouth when he doesn't get his way. I've watched from the sidelines lotsof times. For years I've been watching him and the others. I think I know whatit means to be an American; I wish I was one. If I was, maybe I'd tell him tostick it where it stinks and there's no sunlight.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2011-10-12T17:38:00.001-06:00

I've not directly known cancer's grip on/in my body...yet. Maybe it will come to me --- chances are probably good; but maybe it won't. Nonetheless, like almost everybody living, it's affected me, it's affecting me. That's how I came to pick up EMBRACE, RELEASE, HEAL. There are some great reviews of it already out there, so I'm not so much intent on recounting what it contains. Reading it is probably worth your while if you have cancer or are dealing directly with someone who does.

My wife, a brave dear soul if ever there was one, presently has fourth-stage peritoneal cancer. She had a severe case of Hodgkin's disease some twenty-six years ago and overcame it, living cancer-free with relatively good health until about a year ago. She loved and appreciated the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers who helped her through those times. Now, there's this new challenge for her...for us.

Recently, my wife wrote that she had finally finished reading ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND for the very first time. Of course, she was familiar with the story from childhood books, the movies, cartoons, etc. But she had put off reading the fantasy for several decades, indicating it had always seemed too "...curiouser and curiouser!" to take on.

After being diagnosed with cancer again, and after undergoing various procedures and treatments, she decided things couldn't be much curiouser and curiouser than they were at that point in life. She indicated, however, that when she finally began reading the book, she had to constantly keep in mind that Lewis Carroll was writing dream-like scenarios. She quoted from the work:

"Alice, childish story take
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where her childhood's dreams are twind
In memory's mystic band
Like Pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers
Pluck'd in far-off land."

Cancer, which shows up any time in the middle of life, whether you're young or old, can be, I suppose, a lot like young Alice falling unexpectedly into Wonderland. It certainly is curiouser and curiouser, but usually not, I can only surmise, in as fun or entertaining a way as in Lewis's fantasy. It seems more like Horrorland. It certainly can be for someone like me, who is only tangentially affected by it, and seems like it can be for people I have observed closely like my wife.

So, I enjoyed reading the case studies, analyses, and personal life stories in EMBRACE, RELEASE, HEAL. Certainly, firsthand accounts tend to confirm the disorienting nature of falling down the cancer rabbit hole. I liked that Leigh Fortson recounted her own story and retold some of the stories of others, who had mostly positive experiences down the hole. I also liked the alternative approaches to the problem people recounted to cope with the problem of being down the rabbit hole, trying to get along enjoy the experience as much as possible, and trying to get out alive.

The thing I didn't like so much about Fortson's approach was its lack of balance, perhaps, I'd say it's dreamlike quality. There seemed to be throughout her book a sustained attack, although subtle, on the conventional medical establishment. It is fine to tell a tale, to go down the hole into Wonderland --- and I delight in that as much as the next person does. However, at some point you have to face life outside of Wonderland. Sure, there're greed and avarice built into the healthcare system. I acknowledge it. Greed and avarice, I'm afraid, have a foothold in just about everything. But it doesn't, in my experience, predominate within the medical field. There're good, kind, gentle practitioners, caregivers, researchers, and even people who work at and run drug companies. There are also villains, just like there are in Wonderland or in Horrorland. The author seems somewhat to suggest that medical professionals' hands are tied in pursuing viable alternatives. Maybe, to some degree, they are. But that is not always the case. There are viable studies underway.

Not every hole that people go down is wonderful. As I've mentioned, often there is horror and you don't always come out once you go in. The biggest hope is that we can dream.

Overall, I give the book kudos and appreciate the positive, life-affirming approaches.

View'>http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1005462-walt">View all my reviews

Terrific! I'm Not Lying.

2011-08-03T17:36:00.000-06:00

Terrific!

I'm not lying.

And I'm no chump in saying so.

Perhaps I should just leave it at that and hope you have the good sense to buy and read the book, if you haven't already.

Everyone should.

OKAY FOR NOW deserves the Newbery Award --- not a Newbery Honor, but the award, in my humble opinion.

And my opinion is humble, but it better be accurate in this case. I have to warn you, I have Christopher Swieteck waiting in the wings to do some arm-twisting.

This is a book about family --- mostly, the Swieteck family --- and community --- mostly Marysville ---, and the institutions --- like the library and Audubon's collection in it, the local deli, the dream of Broadway, the military, the nearest professional sports team, the schools, the police department --- that flesh the people who occupy them out and make them better or, in some cases, worse.

It is about the dynamics of art and sensitivity over against rationality's often heavy hand and stifling effect in ordinary life.

It is about the way things of the heart affect things of the mind and vice versa; it is about people, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sensitive and not.

It is a love story about Doug and Lil and lost art and so so much more.

It is well fleshed out, nicely sketched, colored almost to perfection. But not overdone.

It has wings as light as feathers and it takes flight. And soars into the heavens.

Hasn't almost everyone as a child or youth been cast into a new environment, whether in a move to a new town, going off to a new school, or finding oneself with different people in a new family configuration? Then there is the resulting disorientation, the inherent fear and anxiety. This is what happens to Doug Swieteck, Gary D. Schmidt's protagonist in his latest novel. How will Doug fare? How will be affected by the new people and institutions in his life? How will they? The narrative of the story provides the answers to these questions.

Although, perhaps I shouldn't have read this book just when I did --- while my wife is suffering chronic cancer --- or the way I did --- reading it out loud, I'm so glad I did. But, I must say, it's very hard to read aloud in an emotional storm, seeing words blur on the page through a stream of fluid flowing from your eyes.

I was born a few years before the protagonist of this adventure. I loved reminiscing, visiting the past's sights and sounds and events portrayed in the story, wallowing in it, reminiscing in my own private way. After all, I have my own Lil with whom I share a love for great art and literature. And life.

Critiquing Writing

2011-07-15T15:29:00.000-06:00

Sometimes somebody can't come to critiquing.

That can be good…and bad. It means we can utilize more time on fewer pages or that we get done earlier. It's not like we don't have other lives. On the other hand, it means that someone who may be a very able critiquer is perhaps gone. Furthermore, we get invested in the stories of others and want to see what's coming next.

This past week --- in fact, the past couple weeks --- M has not been able to come.

Not coming, however, is not entirely optional; you need a pretty good excuse for not being there. The consequences of not being there consistently eventually comprise of being replaced by somebody new. There's basically only time and space around a decent sized table for six of us. Family emergencies, personal emergencies, sickness, work conflicts, and, and since we're writers, book signings, speaking on writing, etc. are all acceptable excuses for not being there, within limits.

M is our only professionally published book writer at this time. The second book he worked on in the critiquing group got published by Scholastic. He made a three-book deal with them, as I understand it. The first of the contracted books --- the second he worked on in the group --- came out last October. The third one he worked on in the group will come out I believe in October. The first one he worked on in the group will be the basis for the third one that comes out sometime in the future, unless things changed. The last time he met with us, he indicated he had had an epiphany about a new book --- or a new book series --- and was having a hard time not diverging from what he had been working on to write it.

B is a schoolteacher by profession. She had written in excess of 200 pages in her novel that she has been presenting to us by the end of the school year, but when she got the break because of school being out for the summer, she hurried and completed her book. She is in the process of editing it and pitching it to agents. She said she has had some encouraging feedback.

C went first the other night. So she passed out her four pages to each of us, keeping four pages for herself to read from. Then she read. She's now several pages into a new novel set somewhat in the future geographically in what is now Montana. Her protagonist is a girl, about fourteen years old as I recall, who is enslaved to a master. In this particular episode, her protagonist is pretending not to be enslaved and is visiting a local official, trying to make some inroads with regard to her situation. So since C read first, M was gone, I critiqued her first. And on it went around the table: D, J, and B.

"… we're seeing this at the tail end of where you've changed a lot, so it might work after we read the hundred pages," says B to C. B goes on and, of course, has said more before this clip, explaining her take on the pages read, noting major pluses and minuses in what has been presented. And there's a conversation back and forth.

After one of us have finished a hundred pages we're entitled to request a meeting to discuss the entire hundred pages in context. So arrangements are made for the hundred pages to be distributed, for a time everyone has to fit it into their schedule to read and critique it, and a meeting date scheduled for that to take place. The discussion of the person's hundred pages then takes the place of the typical meeting .

Critiquing Writing with B, C, D, J, & M

2011-07-14T17:20:00.001-06:00

I do one thing on Tuesday nights.

That's right, one thing. Don't even start thinking about me eating or satisfying my visceral needs or attending to family emergencies. I said I do one thing on Tuesday nights, and I mean it. One thing. Got that?

Beginning at 6 PM, I sit together with five other people --- four women and one man --- and we critique each other's writing. We continue on in that endeavor for three solid hours, without interruptions, with no kids present, no spouses interrupting, and all cell phones off.

Well, let's be practical here; there are emergencies, but they darn well better be occasional.

The typical mode of our endeavor has us going over twenty-four pages --- four pages each.

I've wanted to blog about this endeavor for a while. So now I am, and I want to do it consistently. However, don't cross your fingers about that.

This is our methodology.

We take turns.

Whoever's turn it is begins by handing out copies of their four pages to everyone else and then reading them out loud. Their four pages consist of of whatever they choose. They determine that. For the most part, what is worked on are novels. But there are exceptions. For example, D has been working on a dialogue between the narrator (herself) of her new novel (First? She's new to the group.) and her protagonist, whose name is Rachel. She's trying to work some problems out.

Anyway, the beginner reads while the rest of us listen, taking notes, and make editing marks on the four pages which have been provided to us. After finishing the out loud reading, the reader waits while the critiquers continue making their notes and suggestions on the four manuscript pages. After everyone finishes, a discussion ensues, hopefully, in an orderly fashion. The person to the left of the reader starts, revealing their thoughts about the manuscript, positive and negative. For the most part, the others listen during this process until it's their turn. The process continues all the way around back to the reader. The reader has a chance during the process or at its end to comment, ask questions, try and get clarification. Then the next person in line reads and the process continues on, like I said for three hours. Three hours of hard work, if we do the work well.

I have written a tax book for writers, Making Expression Less Taxing, and two novels: Time for All Eternity and Alejandro the Great. I have worked on all of these books utilizing feedback I got from this process.

M, J, B, and C have all worked on various novels in this group. D is new to the group and, to my knowledge, has not completed a book-length work.

Please Look After Mom

2011-06-11T23:55:00.000-06:00

Piercing.

This novel about a Korean family cut and passed through me, stabbing me, penetrating my soul.

Yeah, that's the adjective I want to use, piercing. That word describes my thoughts about PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM by Kyung-sook Shin.

The novel's story, which recounts interactions and their resulting implications between a husband and his wife and the same with respect to a daughter and son from the same family with their beloved mother, made its way through me. It forced its way into my conscience as a son, as a husband, and as a father. I could identify with its characters and their flaws and failings in many ways, even though it was set in a foreign land with people of a different race and milieu than mine. It moved me deeply relative to its characters and story, but at the same time, it made me introspective as to my roles in similar situations in America. Also, it's foreign setting provided entertaining novelties --- for example, ancestral rites, various food dishes and historical sites, and the Full Moon Harvest --- I was unfamiliar with and interested in learning and hearing about.

However, in using "piercing" here, I realize the nature of the word has changed during the later years in my life up until now.

I'm in my sixties, and the way the word "piercing" is used today is different than it was when I was younger. The word "piercing" now has a meaning that predominates in contemporary culture that it didn't have when I was younger, one that doesn't seem nearly as poignant as that older meaning. "Piercing" now often refers to the accommodation for a decoration and/or a modification to a body, usually a person's body. It can include, for instance, tattooing and the making holes to accommodate ear and nose rings and the like. It relates, as I understand it, to body art. So when I use piercing here, I use it in the earlier sense.

I liked how Kyung-sook Shin utilized varying points of view in her depiction of characters' reactions to Mom gone missing. I also liked how the author utilized the less familiar second person in telling the Father's and daughter's stories. I also liked the subtle underlay of faith and its final manifestation in the story arc.

After reading the book, I feel it has touched me and informed me, made my life more interesting and me more introspective because it has cut and passed through me, stabbed me, and penetrated my soul perhaps in a way that younger persons may feel informed by various manifestations of body art they undergo, including piercings and tattoos.

Piercing.

Flip Out

2011-05-04T16:42:00.001-06:00

FLIP is an interesting word. It means many things, of course. It can be a transitive verb — to throw or toss, to spin, or to flick; an intransitive verb — to turn over, to somersault, or to move quickly and lightly; or a noun — the act of flipping, as in a flip of the wrist, a reversal, or a mixed drink made of alcoholic beverages often with beaten eggs. It has transformed into other words, too: flip-flop, flipbook, flippant.

When I was fourteen or so, the age of the protagonist, Alex Grey, in this YA novel, the kids in my neighborhood used the word "flip" when they were frustrated. If, for example, you tried to make a layup when you were playing basketball and missed, you'd say, "Flip! I should've made that!"

Martyn Bedford chose to call his main character by the moniker, Flip. It was also chosen as the title of his book. It was a careful and calculated selection, bringing lots of inherent connotation with it. It's selection is indicative of the care with which Bedford has constructed an adventure in the lives of Alex Grey and Philip "Flip " Garamond for any willing reader to consider. Flip denotes action: being turned over or around, the dizziness of spinning, the frustration of — not a missed basket — but a missed life.

As a redheaded kid — or, as the British say, ginger-headed — with a freckled face, I identified with this story. Often, as a lad, I daydreamed about being popular, being athletic, having dark hair and skin that tanned, and being good-looking. Wished for it. "If only," I thought. Well, that's the basic premise in this book. Alex Grey plays the clarinet and likes chess. Boring. He sunburns and does relatively well in school; he doesn't get in trouble. He is not popular, there's nothing much about him to attract much attention. But all of that is, of course, backstory that unfolds after his life has flipped over and he has become Philip Garamond, a.k.a. FLIP the beautiful. If you were a coin and got flipped high into the air, turning over and over and over again before you alighted, you would be dizzy and disoriented.

So, with a new identity, also come new challenges and responsibilities for Alex, who now is Flip. For as Flip, you have to live the life of someone athletic, of someone attractive, of someone prone to trouble; you have to put up with all of the intrusions of popularity and a whole new set of people to deal with. And it makes you think. It makes you wonder. It makes you analyze.

As I finished the book, I said to myself, Flip! It's over! It wasn't a missed layup, although I'm still trying to figure out all of its meaning. Very nice job.

I wrote TIME FOR ALL ETERNITY.

The Professor

2011-04-25T23:39:00.001-06:00

By 7:10 that evening Julie was sitting at a table in Starbucks, drumming her fingers, waiting. Melissa had agreed to standby just in case. Julie had hoped Clayton would be waiting when she got there. He wasn't. So she ordered a latte and blueberry muffin and sat down. She wished she'd brought her laptop. She could've gotten something done.

Finally, the professor made an entrance. He came right up to her, like he knew her. "Hi, Julie," he said, no question in his mind it was her. "I'm Clark Clayton. Do you remember me?"

She nodded, stood and shook his hand. It felt large. He was tall, six-four or five, slender, in great shape. She liked being around someone taller than her five-eleven. He looked handsome, if old. He had an engaging smile and a gentle, yet masculine voice.

"You had a class from me. It's hard to forget your beautiful smile."

"I remember you." she said. "You're grading wasn't that complementary though. I enjoyed your class. Especially the lectures, even if sociology wasn't my tea."

"Well, speaking of tea, it looks as if you've ordered. Maybe I should get something. Will you excuse me? Can I get you anything else?"

"No, thank you," she said. "I'll wait."

Professor Clayton was a surprise. He had on a suit, a conservative one, not made of leather either. In fact, he was wearing no leather, except for a belt and some shoes. The shoes looked store-bought, the belt inconspicuous. The outfit was blue, pinstriped, expensive; he had augmented it with a nice buttoned-down white shirt and an artsy tie. He looked distinguished.

Sketching It Out

2011-04-24T23:33:00.001-06:00

Melissa had insisted that Julie meet with Professor Clayton.

Julie found her request strange and tried to probe Melissa more about its necessity. It seemed like rain out of blue sky, without any detectable cause or logical explanation. However, Melissa wouldn't give any clues or additional information. She just said Julie had to.

So, to appease Melissa, Julie agreed. What could it hurt? Julie met with strangers of all kinds in audits all the time; she didn't think meeting with the old, gone-off-the-deep-end professor would be any more challenging than meeting with some arrogant taxpayer with over-bloated claims on his business's tax return. And, besides, now she was curious about why Melissa thought it was so important.

But she saw no urgency in doing so and wanted to put it off for at least a couple of days. After all, detritus cluttered her life at every point of the compass at the present, what with work and trying to facilitate an excuse to get out of going to Atlanta, the separation from Ron and the divorce and its fallout, especially, as it related to Tommy. Furthermore, Angela was still sitting in jail without Julie having even been able to visit or help her in any way.

When it came right down to it, Julie saw no purpose in meeting with the weird, old professor. "And if I do," she said, "I want you there with me."

"That's not going to happen." Melissa was adamant. "You need a couple of minutes at least to talk one-on-one."

"Then a meeting isn't going to take place." Julie tried to be as firm.

Nonetheless, Melissa insisted and demanded that the visit be as soon as possible: that night, at the very latest.

God, Julie thought, she's a bitch. "So, am I supposed to - what? - just show up at his office?" Julie asked. "At the University? Like I'm a student or something?"

"No, that's probably not a good place to meet or strategy," Melissa said. "It'd be better someplace else."

Why? " Here, in one of these audit rooms, like this one? Him over here and me over there. Like it's an examination of his financial records? I'd be totally comfortable doing that."

"Very funny. No." Melissa pulled out her telephone and made a call. "Yeah, it's me," she said after a moment. "Is tonight okay?" A couple of seconds passed. "All right. Let's say Starbucks at 7 PM, the one at the Courtyard Marriott where I'm staying."

So it had been arranged and Julie agreed to go.

A little after 2 PM, Julie took a break from work to go get Tommy from school. It was her turn to pick him up, so she didn't anticipate any problem relative to Ron interfering. She didn't know yet what she would do tomorrow, however, when it'd be Ron's turn to pick the boy up. Julie hadn't thought that far in advance yet. By now, the divorce and injunction papers had probably been served on Ron, who therefore wouldn't be able to legally contact her. So she would have to work through Bob Cartwright to make arrangements with Ron as to how they would handle matters relative to Tommy in the interim until everything got all sorted out.

Before leaving to go get Tommy, Julie called Katie Truman, a college-age girl Julie usually counted on for babysitting. Katie was always desperate for spare change, and Julie regularly utilized her services. Katie agreed to meet Julie at Angela's, where she'd watch Tommy until Julie got off of work around five o'clock.

So after work, Julie hurried home, relieved Katie of her babysitting duties, fed Tommy and the dogs, and called the Sheriff's office to see when visiting hours at the jail were. Not until Wednesday's. Then Julie hurried off, dropping Tommy at Claudia's to play with Claudia's son, Doug, his cousin. Then she went to the appointment.

Now Julie sat at a table in Starbucks, drumming her fingers and waiting alone. Melissa had agreed to be on standby in case Julie called her and said she needed to be there. Julie had hoped that Clayton would already be there, waiting for her, but he hadn't been. So she ordered a latte and a muffin and sat down. She almost wished she had brought her laptop - after all Starbucks had Wi-Fi - so she could get something done as she waited.

Finally, the professor made an entrance. He came right up to her as if he knew her. "Hi, Julie?" he said, a question. "Clark Clayton. Do you remember me?"

She stood and shook his hand. He looked great, handsome, had an engaging smile.

"I think you had a class from me years ago, at the University. It's hard to forget that beautiful smile."

"I remember you." she said. "I enjoyed your class, the lectures, even if the subject wasn't quite my cup of tea."

"Well, speaking of cups of tea, it looks like you have ordered. Maybe I should get something, also. Will you excuse me a moment. Can I get you anything else?"

"No thank you," she said. "I'll wait right here for you."

Professor Clayton surprised Julie. He had on a suit, a conservative one, not made of leather. In fact, he wore no leather except for his belt and shoes, and the shoes looked store-bought. The suit was blue and pinstriped; it looked medium-priced, if she was guessing right, and he had augmented it with a white shirt and a dark tie. He looked distinguished.

When he returned and sat down, he said, "Well, sociology as a course of intense study isn't for everybody."

"Yeah, I know." Damn if he didn't look like a lawyer scheduled to appear before the Supreme Court.

He sniffed and then slurped at his drink and complimented it. "It's not often I get my coffee done up so dignified."

Julie laughed. She'd never seen Clayton dressed like he was. Especially, lately when she'd caught glances of him around town. Once, not long ago, she'd seen him on the news. He'd even looked his mountain-man self there, and she wondered why he hadn't worn something to lend more authority to what he was saying to the journalist. He had, according to the newscast, invited a group of neo-Nazis to speak to one of his sociology sections. It turned out a media event. All of the local stations carried the story, including an interview with the professor.

"So, what did you study at the University?"

"I got my degree in accounting," Julie said. "I'm a CPA. I work as a revenue agent with the Internal Revenue Service."

"That's quite different from sociology. However, I bet it requires considerable contact with the public."

"Sometimes more than I like."

MILES FROM ORDINARY

2011-04-22T15:07:00.001-06:00

Light-years from middling, not just MILES FROM ORDINARY.

That is Carol Lynch Williams's latest novel for youngsters, and it is light-years from middling.

I enjoyed reading the novel, but, in the interests of full disclosure, I am an oldster, and probably not among those of its primary audience. After reading Williams's THE CHOSEN ONE, however, I just had to read her latest offering, which is set in a very real, if atypical, world.

Recently, as my wife and I walked through Barnes & Noble, she noted how difficult it seemed to be to find new books for kids and young adults that didn't deal with vampires or other fantastical elements, with dystopian adventures, or alternative realities.

What is it? Have we become so fraught with challenges of everyday living that we have to resort to escapism to entertain and inform our youth?

Well, this novel, MILES FROM ORDINARY, fits the bill for the here and now; it is very real and most compelling, yet just as horrifying and challenging of mind as anything in fantasyland or sci-fi. It doesn't have the ubiquitous vampires or a panoply of Hogwarts-like characters or characteristics; it isn't dystopian, and its realities aren't alternative. At some point in time, all of us, even the youth among us have to face reality.

After all, who needs the paranormal when you can read first-hand paranoia and insanity in a tight, fast moving story arc like this one? Or when you can see the effects of mental illness in Lacey's mother and its consequent demands and eventual effects upon the thirteen-year-old's life. She simply longs for some degree of family normalcy and friendship outside of home.

Lacey indeed: the delicate interweaving of a thread of life of a sensitive, caring, and concerned daughter of a very sick and, as it turns out, most dangerous mother. Lacey. Dicey.

But this novel produces the same emotions and intellectual challenges as fantasy and sci-fi do in a far more immediate and practical way. There really are young people like Lacey: classmates, neighbors, riders on buses, customers at the grocery store. Not only do the children and teens in such circumstances need to read this book and understand its implications, but everyone does. We all need to realize that our society is diverse and contains all the horror and intrigue of fantasy or sci-fi. It behooves us to recognize it and to show the proper sensitivity for it, and face it more realistically.

Carol Lynn Williams's MILES FROM ORDINARY, in my estimation, achieves that end.

It isn't perfect. There were a few grammatical and punctuation errors. (After all, I was reading from an advanced, uncorrected proof.) Some of the other criticisms in the critiques present here certainly have validity, but overall the novel has a nice story arc, compelling characters, tremendous conflicts. I believe it is original in the contemporary literature out there for children and young adults. It was a plausible scenario and seemed realistic in its presentation. I didn't find that it made unjustified leaps in logic. I found the writing at times powerful and, at times, a little less than powerful. I liked it's building pace, and what some others took for a slow start, I took as calculated, a deliberate attempt to make the quickening pace more compelling. I thought flashbacks were overused. In fact, I was quite surprised by the number of them given the intended audience.

I wrote Time For All Eternity.

Manuee

2011-04-21T23:26:00.001-06:00

Our youngest daughter was born to her biological parents — possibly just to her mother, but we really don't know the whole story, or truthfully, any of the story relative to her parents or birth other than through supposition — on February 15, 1980. So she was about as close to a valentine baby as you can get without having a valentine baby. She didn't come to live with us, her adoptive parents, however, until about six months later, probably in August sometime. I'd have to look to see the exact date of her arrival.

She was born in Korea, in Seoul Korea, as I recall, or thereabouts. She was apparently abandoned at an orphanage there, I believe, but I'd have to talk to my wife for clarification and to get greater information about anything we know or found out about her or her family in advance, but I don't think there was or is anything. My wife did most of the paperwork involved in the process. She wasn't working at the time outside of the home. We utilized the services of the Holt Adoption Agency to arrange for our youngest daughter to come here to the United States to live with us and to be adopted and naturalized as a citizen.

We had some experience adopting already, since we had adopted her older brother. He was born in the vicinity of Boise, Idaho and we were able to gain custody of him a few days after his birth — he was born May 30, 1979, and we took custody of him on June 8. We went through an agency affiliated with our church to adopt him.

We also had a biological daughter who was born in 1973.

Our adopted daughter had a birth defect. She was born with cerebral palsy and a tendency to have seizures, both petite and grand mal, which early on were controlled pretty much by phenobarbital. In her infancy and toddler state she underwent considerable therapy, which included physical, occupational, and speech therapy. In her early years most of the therapy that she received was provided by the Shriners Hospital in Boise.

As she grew into puberty, the seizures became more frequent and more difficult, even impossible, to completely control. She has over time taken more and more medicine and had more and more severe and frequent seizures. In her elementary school years, the phenobarbital more or less held her seizures in check but she still had to deal with the effects of cerebral palsy, which included partial paralysis on her right side and diminished mental ability. From the onset she needed accommodation in school.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

2011-04-19T23:50:00.001-06:00

I finished reading THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO a few days ago. Carol picked it for us to read this month for our book club.

I liked it. Everybody in the book group liked it, I think. There were criticisms. Cheri, for instance — I hope that's the correct spelling — didn't like it switching between viewpoints so often over against a more even and flowing story arc.

If life were longer, it was good enough it would definitely be among books I would revisit. I may, in any event. I liked it.

Did I already say that? I did.

I flatter myself thinking that I am a pacifist. I consider myself one. Of course, I'm not that good of a pacifist. But I'm opposed to killing. I'm against the death penalty, for instance. I take literally the "thou shall not kill" admonition in Christian Scripture. I take it literally even over against stories in various scriptures that illustrate something quite the opposite – I'm thinking of the Mormon Nephi-Laban killing. (No wonder so many people say the Mormons aren't Christians, ha ha).

The book is nicely put together. I found it well organized, with its characters carefully selected to illustrate the effects of war upon common citizens. Of course, all of the characters were good guys, from the cellist to Arrow, the sniper, who is on the side of those being shot at from snipers on the hills above and around the city. At least, I considered them all good guys. They felt real to me, given their circumstances. They seemed well-rounded within the parameters of their existence in war-torn Sarajevo during the war there in the nineties. Was of the nineties? Yes, in the mid--1990s. They also, ask characters, seemed flawed and at the same time displayed heroism to some degree or another. From the father, going to get water for his family and for his cantankerous, hard-to-get-along-with neighbor to a baker frozen with anxiety and worry about crossing a street for fear of being shot to death yet hungering and worried he'll starve if he doesn't cross and get something to eat. Over against them there was the clearly evil of the snipers on high, who represented the devil in war and killing.

I liked the book's originality. It stole, it seemed to me, enough of history to color in with sufficient original palette to make a nice, new detailed painting to accompany the sound of the one-man adagio commemorating the killed.

I found the book plausible.

The writing felt strong and vibrant to me.

The following represents some of the very powerful positions taken by characters in the novel:

"But power is rarely given up voluntarily. It's a question of who will prevail. She knows the survival of the city depends as much on the attitude of the defenders as it does on repelling the attackers. A city of the zealots and criminals isn't worth saving."

I highly recommend this book.

Servitude

2011-04-19T00:02:00.001-06:00

The life of servitude. Who really knows anything about it? That is, that I know about? In this day and age? In this land? In my neighborhood?

Hopefully no one. But who knows what goes on behind the walls and doors and the windows of the neighbors? You think you know, but truthfully you don't. They think they know about you, but truthfully they don't. We have more private lives then perhaps we think we have in this modern era of social media and everybody spying on everybody else, taking photographs and watching each other and filming and listening without telling or disclosing or otherwise indicating you are doing such.

I'm pretty certain there are individuals out there who are like slaves, who are in the command of somebody else. In fact, you hear about such instances in the news — I want to say all the time, but it is not that frequent. It occurs in the drug culture and in prostitution rings. Undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable to such treatment. And the unscrupulous with power and money are not above imposing such restraints on individuals to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of the individuals who don't have documentation.

What must it be like to be a servant, a slave?

There is a difference between being of service and being in service. One is voluntary; the other is not. I suppose they can and often do overlap. No employer considers himself/herself as going without a servant. Employers have expectations of those they employ, probably not unlike the expectations upon those who have slaves. Yet there are also differences. There must be.

Up or down?

2011-04-17T23:23:00.001-06:00

I've hurried away from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. I've done it already this year. I've faced the music, to use an old metaphor, a cliché, in doing so, too. I'll do it again if I survive until next year, too. It's almost as if it is inevitable, or as if I'm too stupid to ever learn better. I'll use old worn-out clichés again, too. That's just the way it is. I don't think it's predetermined…you know, the way life plays out isn't; I don't believe in predestination. Do you?

Likewise, I've used this program in Word before with similar faulty results, and here I am doing it again when I know it isn't as efficient as it is using it in the other program first and then copying and pasting. I am a slow, inefficient learner. Perhaps we all are. I plod along, making commitments that are difficult to keep up with and doing little to improve myself the way I dreamed and hoped for and planned to do.

Anyway, somebody said hard work can be the ultimate refuge. Balderdash. It is not refuge. There is no refuge. There is just life in all of its complexity and perplexity, or not. We see it through rose-colored glasses on one day and through Coke bottles the next. Guess which day is today.

What Is Engaging?

2011-04-15T20:04:00.001-06:00

Often times when I sit here to write, nothing seems that engaging that I want to write about. Either not that engaging or too engaging to want to bother with. I need to write about privacy laws in the United States and WikiLeaks and espionage and all of that, for example. I could begin writing my pages for critiquing on Tuesday, but somehow I don't want to, not yet. I could go back and edit Alejandro. It needs to be done. But I don't want to do that either.

It would be nice to be able to just sit down and let the words flow like the enthusiasm of a nice spring creek. That doesn't happen often, if at all. I don't have that gift of gab that some people seem to have, or at least, I haven't nurtured it. Also, on that note, I think I've talked myself into thinking that it is too late to nurture it or anything like it. That's probably a false assumption, pure laziness, but I guess it's one I mostly accept.

It's getting late. The sun is either set or off in the western sky where I can't see it or its effects. It isn't dark out, but it's getting there.

Off in the still-barren oak trees, a magpie sits above the entire oak tree forest and watches for a few minutes, that he sails down, down, fast and controlled. Not stuck in his flight or correction on words or thoughts like me.

Pretty soon some of the closer magpies are squawking at each other before it's too late to squawk much and they retire for the night. It always makes me wonder where they sit during the darkness. They are still busy, fighting over something, arguing like they do. I also hear the distant traffic along the highway down below, people coming and going on a Friday night, people younger than I, with more energy, with more going on.

Someday, maybe, my thoughts would be so rambling and insecure. Maybe. There are plenty of people out there to admire who are much more organized than me.

What's Coming Up

2011-04-15T19:42:00.001-06:00

The plan for Shelley in the immediate future is to have her undergo surgery a week from next Thursday, July 27, 2011. It will be done in Salt Lake City, at the Intermountain Healthcare Center just off of 52nd South sometime in the afternoon.

They call it a debulking surgery. Typically, they open patients up from just below the bottom of the lungs to the pelvic bone to do debulking — removing and scraping out whatever is cancerous that can be done reasonably.

With her, the plan is to go in and do a laparoscopy first to look around and see what they think is prudent to work on and remove. It might entail the long convertible incision of our regular debulking procedure, but it might not, too. It depends on what they see through their scope and what seems the most sensible thing to do. Sometimes they can remove the most affected tissue through small incisions. For example, in Shelley's case, the omentum is involved. Sometimes the omentum can be removed through a smaller incision. Same with ovaries.

In the interim, Shelley needs to work on getting stronger. The big prescription for that is eating and drinking lots of proteins and getting some small degree of exercise.

Lately, Shelley's oxygen levels have been back to normal or near normal. She has ceased wearing oxygen all the time and now just wears her when she's asleep, and then because of sleep apnea.

After the surgery, she will have to be in the hospital a few days — from two or 3 to 5 to 7, just depending on what they do. Afterward, they planning on her having some physical therapy to build your strength up. Also, as soon as she can she'll go back on chemotherapy.

We can't separate ourselves from the past

2011-04-13T23:01:00.001-06:00

We can't separate ourselves from the past. Nor should we want to, I suppose.

I grew up in Utah. My parents also grew up in Utah.

My mother was the oldest in her family, the big sister to her siblings. She had both brothers and sisters. She was born in Central Utah; I think in Richfield, Utah. I know that she graduated from Gunnison High School, which isn't far from Richfield as I recall. She never talked much about growing up in Central Utah. I don't remember her ever taking me there to those small towns or showing me where she went to school or anything like that. I don't remember any stories from her youth. She didn't talk much about what it was like being a kid or going to high school in such a rural area. I wonder why. Actually, my mother didn't talk much about anything about her life to me. She liked to focus on me, not on her.

My father had ten siblings, and he was one of the last of the ten. Maybe he was third from the last; I don't remember for sure. He was born in Ogden, but not in the hospital but in the home his parents lived in, located someplace — I'm thinking about twenty third street — below Wall Avenue. He talked more about his youth than my mother did. His father died early — I'm thinking when he was about fourteen, maybe younger. He told me how difficult it was trying to make ends meet, emphasizing that he had quit school because of the hardship, whether that was true or not. By that age he had taken up smoking and he smoked as long as I lived with him. I think he quit after I married my wife, sometime after 1971. He was born in 1920. I'm thinking he quit smoking sometime around sixty, perhaps later.

Even though my parents grew up in the midst of Mormonism, neither of them adhered to its tenets or seemed to care about it much at all. While my mother had been baptized a Mormon and even graduated from Mormon seminary when she went to high school and graduated — I saw her yearbook and that's how I know, I never knew her to be engaged in the religion or to practice it. My father was never baptized. His mother was disaffected from Mormonism early on — possibly before she even married. Her husband wasn't Mormon. She came from Holland when she was a youth — I think when she was fourteen. Perhaps she came under false pretenses, lured here by promises never kept, but I'm not sure. I'm just left with that impression.

After I married, in 1971, my wife and I finished our bachelors' degrees and then left Utah. We went to Illinois, then to California, then to Idaho.

imagine blooming flowers falling from the heavens

2011-04-12T15:47:00.001-06:00

I picked up BEYOND RAIN OF GOLD mostly because of the illustration on the front of the book jacket (by Steven Yazzie).

That painting shows what I take to be a young man — his back is to you, but his hair is dark and not grey or silver and he doesn't look overweight or disfigured or bent over with age. He appears to be conducting the orchestra of a desert. The shirt he wears appears to be split at the bottom like the back of a tuxedo is. His arms are raised, and his right hand holds a baton; his left hand is opened and a bird sits in its palm. The sky is blue with a few clouds on the horizon, the mountains in the distance. The desert is out ahead and all around the conductor, cacti and other desert flora covers the landscape out to a ridge. The sun is peeking into the picture in the upper left-hand corner. For the most part, the artwork looks like it is set in the physical here-and-now. It seems to suggest that the book is about a confident young man who is egotistical enough to think he can lead the music of a natural setting familiar to him, and perhaps tame it.

Of course, I had kind of an agenda in picking up the book because of the cover. I had myself, an old, once redheaded but now white headed Caucasian, been writing the fictional story of a boy born in the desert as his parents crossed the border from Mexico into the United States some fourteen years ago. (Oh, the arrogance of me to take on such an endeavor.) So I was interested in reading about the life of a Mexican-American first-hand, and the book seemed to have that flavor from what I read on the jacket and saw in that painting.

But then, in the artwork on the jacket of BEYOND RAIN OF GOLD, blooming flower buds are falling unnaturally from the sky all around the conductor. And I reminded myself that that little bird was sitting there unnatural-like in the young man's palm. And I asked myself, what's with all of that?

Please excuse me for a little tangent. I have lived most of my life in Mormon country. Recently, Gary Lawrence wrote How Americans View Mormonism. One thousand randomly-selected Americans were asked fifty-five questions about Mormons. The results indicated that those individuals saw Mormons as friendly, honest, kind, having strong family values, willing to help the needy, and patriotic. Conversely, they also saw Mormons as self-righteous, out of touch, insular, brainwashed, fanatical, and narrow. Mormons in the Mormon area I am from for the most part see themselves in the positive forms indicated but not in the negative ones.

I think a similar dynamic is at play with respect to Victor Villasenor. Often, the problem is that we seldom associate very closely with groups of individuals who aren't like us. We often don't know how to talk to other people about what we believe in ways that they can understand or find useful. Furthermore, often we don't have a clue about our own naïveté and talk past other people.

Now it is quite obvious that Victor Villasenor sees himself as the youth in the picture, the conductor of an orchestra of his desert. The falling flower buds in bloom seem to speak to "magic" or the "spiritual" — some say fantastical — elements in the "musical" score of Villasenor's life as a writer, conducted by him but influenced by all of the characters in his life, including his parents, Lupe Gomez Camargo, his mother, and Juan Salvador Villasenor, his father, and his wife, Barbara. You a lot of individuals who says have passed away and gone before and have come back to him.

For instance, he writes: "It was like heaven had really come down to Mother Earth. For instance, every morning my writing room would fill up with these Grande Masters from the Other Side – like Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Frank, Confucius, though Stravinsky, and many others — and they all wanted to help me.

"Also, I didn't know my dad's cigar anymore. No, now I smelled wildflowers, just like I smelled outside of Phoenix, Arizona, when I heard OUR SYMPHONY OF CREATION!"

The book is classified, among other classifications, as a biography of a twentieth century Mexican-American author on the copyright page. It is published by Hay House, a "new thought" and "self-help" publisher.

I won't reiterate all of the faults and irritants that I, too, found in the narrative characterized as Villasenor's autobiography . Other critiquers have more than adequately covered them, even ridiculed them, and I, for the most part, agree, except with the ridicule. Despite them, however, I did find enjoyment as I read along and contemplated the spin Villasenor tried to put on his life, the spiritual and fantastic elements of living.

For me, it is easy to contemplate that when the "downs" in life exceed the "ups" that it can have an effect upon your perception, and can make it sometimes difficult to separate reality from what is hoped for and believed in. And when you get to that point, it might be difficult to communicate with somebody who hasn't had that experience or contemplated it.

I'd say if you read this book, read it with curiosity, trying to understand the elements of Villasenor's life that took him where he is. Try and imagine blooming flowers falling from the heavens in all of the music.

A Long Day

2011-04-11T23:31:00.001-06:00

I've worked on and off all day on Kiele's computer which has been infected by a FakeAlert malware attack. It occurred after Mike helped her set up online Scrabble. Of course, it might not have anything to do with that. Also, washed sheets for Shelley's and Kiele's beds, etc. and took Shelley to see doctor for her edema. That took at least two hours and then we went to eat at Crown Burger. I never did get to the store to do some shopping I need to do. Tomorrow. I did manage to finish my four pages for tomorrow night.

Shelley is restless and unsettled tonight. Asia is right now too, begging for treats at 11:26 p.m. It's time to shut this down and go to bed. Below my stomach and my lower back hurts; it has a couple of days now. Poor me.

A Foundation

2011-04-10T23:35:00.001-06:00

Foundation

It is late again tonight, and I've felt tired all day and especially so tonight. I had already shut down my computer, put on my nightshirt, and went in to the other room to read a bit more of Victor Villasenor's book Beyond Rain of Gold — it's slow going reading it. I almost dread having to do a critique of it because of the mixed feelings I have about it.

Then I remembered my baseboards' blog entry last night and knew I needed to come in here, start the computer, and write this. So here I am to make a small entry. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this but I do want to do it. There is something about a foundation that his firm. Usually, the ones underneath houses here are made of concrete. Solid. People hope they are immovable. I guess a commitment to make an entry on a consistent basis is like that: a foundation of sorts.

It would be sad — at least two would be to me — to have made a mental commitment to myself to make entries more consistently only to give up and not do one the very next day. It wouldn't be a very firm foundation. So here I am, doing one. Hopefully, I put in the right ingredients to make this foundation solid and hard and immovable.

BASEBOARD

2011-04-10T00:08:00.001-06:00

BASEBOARD

I want to talk for a moment about baseboard. After all, it is late, — almost midnight — I promised myself I'd make a blog entry, and it's the first thing that came to mind that I found acceptable for a short analysis.

The baseboard I have in mind, without looking the word up in the dictionary or in an encyclopedia, is the board at the base of the wall on the interior of a house. For instance, in this room I'm in there is a baseboard. It is at the intersection of the finished sheetrock and the floor, in this case a carpeted one. The baseboard in here is an inch-and-a-half to two-inches in height and perhaps a little more than a half-inch wide at its widest. It is painted the same color as the wall is. It is grooved, I suppose to make it more appealing to the eye. It is not only grooved, but it his also notched, I assume to further please the eye and overall to cover the more unpleasant transition at the bottom of the sheetrock when it meets the floor. I've seen much more simple and considerably more complex and intricate baseboards. The one in this room is pretty standard for the construction at the time the house was built.

I doubt that baseboard, like the one in this room, or even generally, adds anything to the structural integrity of the wall or house. I don't think it makes anything particularly stronger or more functional in a strictly practical sense. If it did, it would be so minute as to additional function that the additional cost would not justify having it. No, the baseboard is aesthetic. It is to make things look better. To cover up what would be considered ugly. Less artful, less pleasing to the eye.

More generally, what issues in life, if any, are important to structure and integrity over against mere aesthetics. Is an analysis of that issue important to me? What do I think about it?

NECESSARY SECRETS

2011-03-26T23:20:00.001-06:00

I read NECESSARY SECRETS as a fluke. It isn't my normal fare.

At the height of the WikiLeaks and Julian Assange news blitz, I had a conversation with my brother-in-law. I told him I didn't think there was much room for keeping secrets. A secret, of course, is defined as "something kept hidden or unexplained." Thus, it seemed to me antithetical to everything I was taught: that knowledge is power and its application is wisdom. Keeping things hidden and unexplained kept me from knowledge and, hence, from having wisdom. "Necessary" of course means absolutely essential.

My brother-in-law reminded me, however, that there was a need for secrecy — times when it is absolutely essential. Some secrets are necessary. For example, he suggested I probably didn't want anyone knowing my daughter's bank account information. (It gave me pause that he didn't use my bank account information for his example.) Otherwise, he said someone could go in and withdraw willy-nilly. It is necessary, he argued, to keep the critical information secret or unscrupulous individuals or entities will make you regret it.

My conversation with him got me thinking more and more about secrecy, more than I ever had before. It even spurred me on to start writing a novel with secrecy, privacy, or confidentiality, or all three, as a theme. It also caused me to start considering those matters — secrecy, privacy, and confidentiality — more fully. I ended up, through happenstance, picking up NECESSARY SECRETS to read and learn more about the subject.

Obviously, since my immediate take on secrecy with my brother-in-law was to want to do away with it, I wasn't very close to the position of Gabriel Schonfeld, the author of NECESSARY SECRETS. Schonfeld argues that some classified information is so sensitive it needs to be kept secret and not disclosed, because, if it is, it will be harshly detrimental to Americans. And Schonfeld argues that those individuals and organizations who do make such disclosures of a harmful nature should be punished harshly under U. S. laws.

The Schonfeld book was written before WikiLeaks and Julian Assange hit the newsstands big time. It basically covers the history of secrecy in the United States from its inception to the time the book was completed. Since it focuses mostly on the history of secrecy in the United States, including case law and issues covered in the news, it moves quite slowly, especially in comparison to much of my normal fare. However, it is well written and not difficult at all to move through or understand. Schonfeld basically tries to make the case that the press should not be releasing sensitive classified information that could bring harm to individuals or to the U. S., and if it does, it — including all individuals who participated in its release — should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

It seems to me that secrets are only necessary when there are individuals or entities that are dishonest and unscrupulous. Of course, there are such individuals and entities. It also seems to me that, over time, the ability to keep things secret becomes more and more difficult with modern technology and social media being what it is today. Hence, it was informative to read NECESSARY SECRETS and to contemplate its history and arguments. I am not certain I am where its author is on the subject, but I'm certainly much more informed on the subject matter as it pertains to the United States.

A Blue Sky in the Winter

2011-02-08T15:43:00.001-07:00

My dear Shelley is resting this afternoon, and I find myself with a rare opportunity to sit here and write something. It's been a difficult few months and more months of challenge loom ahead. Nonetheless, we find delight every day.

Just this morning, I was looking out the window into the beautiful blue sky of winter and saw a black bird fly across the sky. It was just that fast, in the blink of an eye, the bird displaying its proficiency in flight, moving from treetop to treetop. I think I could tell that the bird was having fun flying. It didn't just streak through the sky, but fluttered up and down, like a young kid with the new bike going down the road. Such delight in an instance.

And so our life goes. We have such moments alone and together that bring happiness and delight. Every instance is not relished or cherished. But if we take a moment, and contemplate what happens thoroughly, I believe we can and often do find something to appreciate and find joy in. Of course, my perspective differs from Shelley's; I am not called upon to suffer so. But we do laugh together often. And cry.

Shelley has now undergone three chemotherapies. They have been hard on her, very hard. She has lost considerable weight and most of her hair, had persistent nausea, struggled with bouts of diarrhea and constipation, bled from her nose and down below and other places too, suffered shooting pains and cramps, terrible fatigue, etc. She still cannot breathe well; is supposed to be on oxygen 24/7. It is hard. There is, after all, still a plural effusion and clots in her lung, besides everything else. There are persistent appointments at the doctors' offices, prickings and pokes, probings and sticks. It is not possible for me to articulate all of her various troubles and trials. Yet, she still is able to find laughter and a smile and delight and happiness, more than you would expect.

Some days are better than others. Some moments are worse.

At times, I think I should catalog all of this better. I think sometimes I should tell the whole story, if that were somehow possible. It's not. First of all, it would all be just from my perspective, not hers. I miss a lot.

The type and the advancement of the cancer Shelley now has — peritoneal (related to ovarian cancer) — is chronic. It differs from the kind of cancer she had twenty-five — going on twenty-six — years ago. Then, her Hodgkin's lymphoma was curable, not chronic. The cancer she has now was first detected when doctors drew out fluid from her pleural cavity and tested it. It did not originate in the pleural cavity so it had traveled there from another location, which means it is metastatic. It is also diffuse.

The foreseeable plan includes her visiting with a specialist in her type of cancer in Salt Lake City this week. She will need to have an other CT scan, but she has difficulty drinking the prep fluids, in this case, barium, for such scans — she can hardly get the fluid down, and if she does, it usually comes right back up anyway.

Friends and relatives have been very sensitive and loving. They want to help and serve and, when we let them, they do. They're very supportive. It would be difficult to articulate here all of the get well wishes and cards, gifts and flowers and plants, letters and notes, visits and phone calls, meals and treats we have received. The cousin who came and gave Shelley shots when she needed them. People have come and taken Kiele out to eat or to a movie to help out, have made certain that she feels welcome at meetings, have called her to help her deal with all of this. The same is true of various healthcare providers, generally. They have been wonderful — caring, sensitive, comprehensive in their attentions.

We are, by nature and by choice, an independent couple. Since we married all those years ago and left our respective homes and immediate families to forge a new life together as husband and wife, we have never needed or sought much help from anybody; anything anyone ever did for us, we always tried to pay back, generously. I hope we have succeeded in that regard, although there are many people much more generous than we are who make it very difficult to do, and now, I'm afraid, we've fallen behind them will never catch up. In any event, over a lifetime we have grown quite self-sufficient — made it into a way of life. We like it that way and believe it's the way people should generally live, if they can. Plus, I think we like our privacy.

Anyway, we are grateful. People have prayed for us and blessed us. They continue to do so, perhaps in measures that we will never be able to fully appreciate or repay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

On Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T23:59:00.001-07:00

Life has gotten the better of me lately. Hence, I haven't posted here. It's not that I've been lazy or anything — well, not more than usual — but circumstances have changed, and it has left me dry and tired.

Several months ago, maybe as much as a half a year a year ago, Shelley was walking the dog every day and most days if not every day exercising on the elliptical, also. Her routine, however, slowed over time, as some inner process apparently started to take malicious effect. She began losing her breath. After a time, it was too difficult to exercise and walk the dog both on the same day, so getting on the elliptical took a backseat to walking Asia, the greyhound. Then, even walking the dog became taxing. The hills would take Shelley's breath away and she would come home exhausted. About that time, I became ill, some sort of influenza manifested by shortness of breath, nausea without vomiting, diarrhea, a bad cough, a headache, and general achiness. Soon thereafter, Shelley manifested some of the very same symptoms. After a week or ten days, I began feeling better. After two weeks, Shelley didn't feel any better. She did with respect, perhaps, to the achiness, diarrhea and such, but not with respect to the shortness of breath. It was worse than ever; so was her cough.

We took her to the doctor. He checked her over, didn't find anything specific that he found of major concern, and made some general recommendations, particularly, because neither one of us — Shelley or I — have been much on doctors or getting regular checkups and shots and the like. So the general checks were overdue. You would think we would be better, especially Shelley, given her track record, but there you go, we are fallible human beings. One thing the doctor wanted to do, among other medical tests, was a chest x-ray. He planned on just having as yet the next word getting these particular tests done and then giving us a call about the results. However, after the x-ray was completed, Shelley knew something was wrong because of the technician's reaction: he called the doctor right away. The technician let Shelley know that the doctor wanted to see us before we left. So we rode the elevator back up to the doctor's office and learned from him that the x-ray showed Shelley had a pleural effusion. That is, she had a collection of fluid in the pleura, a sack like structure that envelops each lung. Her particular effusion was on the right side. It seemed to have collapsed up to three force of her lung on that side.

Shelley was sent to see a pulmonologist. We went to McKay-Dee to do that, and after visiting with the pulmonologist, we were told told to go to the radiology department to have the fluid drained from the pleura. After they completed the drain — they drained about a liter and a half of fluid —, they discovered pulmonary embolisms (blood clots) in Shelley's left lung and had her admitted to the hospital. She spent some five or six days there while they were trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the pulmonologist had the drained fluid analyzed. The analysis was inconclusive; however, it did show some abnormal cells and help rule out various things that could've caused both the effusion and the embolisms. The pulmonologist's best guess was that cancer was causing the problem. There were a host of other things that could have done it, however. The most hopeful was that there were some bacteria causing problem. That would've been easily treatable and eradicated.

In the hospital, they started Shelley on a regimen of medicine — Coumadin — to thin her blood to try to eradicate the blood clots in her lungs. Just before they discharged Shelley from the hospital, the pulmonologist conducted another fluid drain, again taking out just over one point five liters of fluid. He ordered more tests, this time more complete testing. Also, upon discharge, she was told to stay on oxygen 24/7 at two liters.

Shelley was sent to see a gastroenterologist. He told her he needed to conduct a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. Shelley was to prep and they gave her the kit to do so, but she had an impossible time with it: it made her throw up more than voiding out the other end. Hence, by the time the doctor wanted to conduct a colonoscopy, she was not ready. Since they do the two procedures in tandem, neither was completed, and she was told to go home and prep again. They gave her a different kind of prep kit, and we went home to try it. By this time, she was exhausted. She, however, successfully completed the prep. The doctor was able to proceed. However, the large: was twisted and kinked and because of her Coumadin level it was too dangerous to proceed. Therefore, the doctor was only able to check out about a third of the large colon. Everything he saw looked okay, but he wasn't satisfied that he had seen. Furthermore, relative to the endoscopy, the opening was too constricted, and for similar reasons — the level of her Coumadin — it was too dangerous to force his way through.

The doctor recommended that she have another procedure — since she had already prepped — and sent her to another facility to have a virtual colonoscopy. She was too weak and unable to complete that procedure, however.

Well, it's getting late, the story is a long one, convoluted and, perhaps, I will get it all down and perhaps not. But for tonight, that's enough said.

All I can say is that I am prayerful. Our family and friends have been very helpful and kind, very loving.

This is not the kind of Christmas Eve anybody wants to spend, worried about the person they love most in all the world.

Heart, In Abundance

2010-09-30T21:50:00.000-06:00

The Clockwork Three by Matthew J. Kirby

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every boy or girl, no matter how old, should read this book. I'll try to tell you why.

I believe at some time every child, no matter who or where they are, feels at least once and maybe several times like a slave of sorts, even in the best of times and in the most favorable of conditions. I know I did, and most of the people I've talked to enough about it to know, did also. Even though I was raised in pleasant circumstances with everything I needed, I did. Nonetheless, I had red hair and freckles, and my skin burned like the dickens. Ginger hair and abundant freckles that multiplied like crazy when I stayed out too long in the sun didn't appeal to me, not at all. Neither did the painful blisters from my sunburns. And that is putting it mildly. I felt like my light complexion made me a slave to it. I knew that my red hair made me an object of ridicule and bullying, and there were times when I utterly hated it and thought almost no one else, except perhaps another redhead, could ever understand.

THE CLOCKWORK THREE is the title of Matthew J. Kirby's novel about three young people that every person can identify with who is in or has experienced similar circumstances of crises, big or small: Giuseppe, Hannah, and Frederick. It is set on the eastern seaboard in a bustling city of the United States around 1900. Those three young characters provide ample opportunity for every young reader to find a friend to identify with relative to feelings of enslavement to something, whether it's freckles and red hair or something else much more or less serious.

Take as a mentor either the orphaned Giuseppe, who must play his violin in the streets for money and turn over all the earnings from doing so to an evil master, or the lovely and tender Hannah, who must work her fingers to the bone with little opportunity or future as a maid in a high-class hotel in order to provide for her impoverished family, or the handsome and strong Frederick, the young apprentice to a clockmaker who can't remember what happened to him earlier in his life so that he lost his mother and ended up in an orphanage. Because, if you do, you'll find more than the magic in Giuseppe's green violin found as flotsam in the bay, or in the automaton Frederick has long dreamed of bringing to life, or in the treasure in the park Hannah hopes to find to deliver her family from poverty and worse. You will find the magic of friendship, of sacrificing yourself for someone else, and of loyalty to both people you love and to principles.

This is Matthew's debut novel and what a grand one it is. You will love his tight storylines that will carry you away into the world of the three children; you'll marvel in the way he weaves his prose together so flawlessly, and you'll find satisfaction in the ease with which he employs metaphors and other literary devices. And characters! Oh my, the characters. Awesomeness.

Steampunk, fantasy, history, it has it all, subtly. But most of all, it has heart, in abundance.

View all my reviews

SOME THOUGHTS ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

2010-09-29T16:32:00.001-06:00

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

I suppose I should set forth a few of my basic beliefs relative to politics and social commerce. I don't know that I've ever done that in any substantive way, at least I have not since college, when the demands of a class might have required it. Of course, since that time my political views have changed dramatically.

Let's start today with crime and punishment.

I do believe people should be held responsible for the wrongs they do. I also believe that society needs to protect itself from those who break its laws. I also believe it is probably in the interests of our society for habitual criminals, particularly criminals who are involved in violent crime, to be put away for increasingly long periods of time.

Hate crimes seem especially egregious to me and merit enhanced penalties above and beyond that of the normal, run-of-the-mill crime. I believe children should be taught early and often — including in school — to have respect and honor for other people, even if they are different in looks or their personal religious beliefs or lack of belief.

I am opposed to the death penalty. I believe killing is evil. I personally believe killing is against what God wants any human being to do in any situation. I believe God has the power to deliver man from death and does so. I believe man rationalizes when he thinks that he is entitled to kill, even in situations where that has occurred in scripture, as in the case of Nephi and Laban, with an understanding that the Lord sanctioned it. We possess enough resources to protect ourselves from sociopaths, serial killers, and other truly evil individuals without resorting to killing them.

I lean toward legalizing recreational drugs, not because I have any intention of ever using them and not because I think they are anything less than evil in that context — recreational use, but because it would be a better avenue to getting a handle on the problem they have, in our era and place.

Where there is a tension between the "haves" and the "have-nots" as there most certainly is in the United States as is witnessed in the news today with reports of the growing gap between the rich and the poor, I am not for capping jury awards. There is no question but that rich and powerful people and corporations exploit the masses. In doing so, it isn't above those individuals who wield power and exercise it to cut corners inside or outside of corporations, to jeopardize, to exploit people. I believe they should be held accountable when they do so, and I believe that legitimate lawsuits should not have an upper limit.

While I recognize that the Supreme Court has indicated that there is an absolute right of individuals to own and use weapons, I'm opposed to it. I aspire to be a pacifist in all I do and say. I see no need for those who love their neighbors as themselves to own or use a weapon. I see a place for them in society in law enforcement, but above and beyond that I don't.

Some Final Plotting

2010-09-17T10:22:00.000-06:00

So now I've got Alejandro on the run with Migra after him. He went up over the ridge and anticipates that Migra will utilize all of their resources to come after him. He's seen the turkey vulture flying through the sky, and given adequate warning to his father and to José. They have heeded his warning and turned back. Alejandro has lots of experience laying low but little experience fleeing through a harsh desert. Now he must do his best to get away.

I anticipate him getting caught. There's no way he can get away. So after he gets caught — and that has to only be after I have fully exploited the chase — there has to be a mechanism that allows him to go home to the Playhouse. What I've anticipated all along is him being able to exploit the "born on the border" question. Although, all along he has been told by his parents and family that he was born on the Mexican side of the border, what's to say he really was? How did they know? Did they cross the fence like the one I have posited in my exposition so far? It could be that he was really born on the American side.

Anyway, I anticipate the next section will be the chase and the capture. So that's what I need to work on and formulate.

THE CLOCKWORK THREE

2010-09-15T15:26:00.004-06:00

So my friend Matt Kirby's first novel comes out on October 1 of this year, in a few days. Everyone ought to read it. The title of the book is The Clockwork Three. Of course, I along with my other fellow critiquers are particularly invested in its success, because to some degree or another we all had input in Matt's book, even if it was only to suggest the rearrangement of a sentence or the incompatibility of some particular construction. Not only us in the critiquing group, but also other confidants helped Matt along the way, but mostly the credit goes to Matt and his fine ability to tell a compelling story and to string words together in a most magical way.

The book is targeted at youth. There are essentially three protagonists: Giuseppe, an enslaved street musician, Hannah, a maid at a hotel, and Frederick, the apprentice of a clockmaker. I won't bother here to tell about them any further or about the book, because the reviews that are out there already are more than adequate to compel you to read it. Check out Goodreads and Amazon, and you'll see. Then go buy the book.

The House in Star Valley Ranch

2010-09-10T11:20:00.001-06:00

Earlier this summer we purchased a house in Star Valley Ranch, Wyoming, a little town not far from Thayne, Wyoming, another little town on Highway 89, about twenty miles north of Afton, Wyoming. Star Valley Ranch is about fifty miles south of Jackson, Wyoming. More people will be acquainted with Jackson. It is the big jumping off place for the Tetons, Teton National Park, etc. It has substantial celebrity.

The house is on an acre of ground, most of which is simply grassland. It is substantively flat with little or no elevation. The soil is quite rocky. Perhaps, there is a gentle slope toward the west, since the lot is on the east side of the valley and everything slopes downward toward the center of the valley. There are no houses or developments to the west of us.

It isn't that large of a house, although it is more than adequate for the three of us. It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor and two more bedrooms and a bathroom in the basement. There is a nice kitchen, a dining nook, and the living area. The living area has a fireplace, and to the south, another nook with bookshelves and a place for a desk. It is fully finished. The floors are hardwood, tile, and carpet. The hardwood runs throughout the living space: the hallway, the open living area, the dining nook, the kitchen and down the hall to the bedrooms and the bathroom.

The aspect of the house I like best is its opened, airy, and light living area. This is the area you come into from the east side of the house through the front door. It has a vaulted ceiling, and there are big windows to the east, looking out to the West. To the right, is the kitchen, and the dining area. To the east of the dining area there is a door that goes out onto a wraparound Trex deck and porch.

The house is above elevation enough so that the windows in the basement are at least partially exposed, except for one that is underneath the wraparound deck and porch. A yard has been put in around the house, approximately the size of a quarter acre lot. It is in grass and lightly landscaped. We had a contractor come in and put in a log fence with green wire mesh.

There is an attached two-car garage that is a nice size. It is bigger than the one I have in Layton.

In Nogales

2010-09-04T16:32:00.001-06:00

"Alejandro," I think I halfway hear. "Alejandro," I hear again, more clearly through my dream, the night vision that I've had so often lately, the one of me finding Papa in the Sonoran desert and helping him get home to the Great Basin.

"Alejandro. Alejandro, wake up."

It takes me a minute to realize that the voice isn't part of my dream. It's José. Now he's shaking my shoulder, and I'm kind of remembering where I am, in Nogales. "You've got to get up; it's time to go. Before it's too hot."

"What time is it?" I ask; my voice feels all hoarse. "It gets hotter than this?" I say, only half joking. It's already too hot.

"It's 5 AM," he says, "come on; stand up." He tugs on my shirt.

I get up from the dirt of the cellar and dust myself off. At least it was more comfortable sleeping there in the cellar, in its dirt underneath the house than it would have been trying to sleep upstairs, even if the swamp cooler is going, which I'm sure not sure is.

"Go to the bathroom," José tells me. He talks to me like he's my mother. "Hurry up."

Well, this is his turf, and I'll respect it. After all, I've never been here before; in fact, I've never left Clayton and its surrounding area before. So this is all foreign to me.

I trudge up the staircase, trying to go quietly even though it squeaks with every step, and go into the house and down the hallway to the bathroom. I go in, close the door, and take a leak. Next, I splash my face with water in the basin and look at myself in the mirror. I rake my fingers through my hair and think how much I look like Papa: the slant of my eyes, the jut of my chin, the heavy eyebrows. I miss him so much.

"Come on," I hear José. "It's time to go."

I gulp some water, wipe my mouth with my hand, and go out. José is there.

"Roberto is out at his truck," José says. "Let's go."

I follow him out. The city is already busy in the dark morning. People are moving about; the cars are coming and going. Roberto is in his truck, and we climb in beside him, me first and then José. The truck's engine could compete with Grandpa's Corolla for the roughness of its operation.

"You sure you can find him," I say.

"Yeah, pretty sure," José says, "Diego can find out just about anything because of his connections."

"But there's never any guarantees," Roberto says.

Isn't that the truth.

It's September And the Crickets Are Chirping

2010-09-03T23:29:00.001-06:00

The crickets are loud night. They get that way in the fall. It probably takes them all summer to grow big enough to be able to make the noise chirping they do. It's amazing how loud they are, even with the window closed. The sound comes right through it. Their chirps are so consistently uniform. It's hard to fathom the mechanics of it all, and to rightly understand what they are all about in making that sound; to understand it I would have to Wikipedia it.

So it's September third already. We're into the short month of September, and it'll pass by so very quickly. Too quickly. The days are cooler and shorter and the leaves on the trees are all tired out after being in the sun all summer long. Tomorrow I need to reseal our asphalt driveway. Today I got it ready to do tomorrow morning. It's supposed to be warmer tomorrow, then midday start turning cooler until on Sunday it is quite cool.

We arrive in Nogales between 10:30 and 11 PM.

"We're here," José says.

"Where?" I ask. I've been asleep; I finished the book long ago and there wasn't much else to do.

"At the bus station in Nogales," José says.

It is dark, and the streets are quiet. Quiet, that is, until we step off the bus and hear the chirp of the crickets. I guess they have waited all summer to sing their one-note song.

"What now?" I asked.

"I'll call," he says. José looks around as we get into the station, and then he goes and uses the pay telephone to call his friend, Roberto, who lives there. Roberto then comes in his beat-up pickup truck and gets us and takes us to his house and lets us sleep in the basement. It's not really a basement; it's more like a cave. It is a crawlspace that has been dug out to make room to stand up in, or, in our case, to lie down in.

Tomorrow José and Roberto will take me to the desert along with a five gallon plastic jug of water, a straw hat, and a compass. They will then show me where to go, and I will go into the desert and wait for José there to come with Papa. I will have the water for me while I wait and for them when they come.

After they take me and show me where to go, Roberto will take José to the border in Nogales, and José will simply walk across. It doesn't take any magic to walk across the border going from the United States into Mexico, at least that's what José and Roberto tell me. Nobody cares in the United States if you go back to Mexico — well, lots of people might celebrate — and for sure nobody cares in Mexico. At least that's what they say.

Alta, Wyoming

2010-09-01T16:41:00.001-06:00

I'm supposed to list out some places that have significance to me. And then I'm supposed to write about one of them for a while.

Alta, Wyoming

Star Valley Ranch, Wyoming

Carlsbad Caverns Cave

Rockford, Illinois

The San Diego Zoo

Yellowstone

Disneyland

Twin Falls, Idaho

Boise, Idaho

Munich, Germany

Coburg, Germany

I'll write about the first one.

Alta, Wyoming isn't a place I ever would've gone to without the influence of friend. The friend's name is James Lee Christiansen. I first met Jim in Boise not long after we moved there from Twin Falls, Idaho.

At church, they asked me to teach a lesson in priesthood meeting, so I did. I don't remember the subject matter of the lesson exactly, however, I do remember relating the story relative to the three German youth who belonged to the Mormon church during the Third Reich and the reign of Adolf Hitler who took up a private campaign against the Nazis and Hitler in particular. The leader of the three youth ended up beheaded. The other two were imprisoned and tortured until delivered by the Americans.

After I completed the lesson, Jim Christiansen came up to me to discuss the story further. I learned that he had enjoyed my use of it as an example for the lesson and that he was a professor of sociology at Boise State University. Thereafter, we became friends. Jim was a unique character. He was devoted to self-reliance and primitive ways. For example, he made his own clothes, often from homemade leather. It wasn't unusual for him to ask a farmer for the hide of a steer that he would then treat and utilize to make clothing and shoes. He was also a jogger, and in those early years he often ran marathons. I remember one trip we took to the Idaho Falls Temple on a bus with the rest of the people who wanted to go from our stake in Boise. As the bus approached Boise after the trip, Jim stripped off his clothing and stuffed it into his suitcase, left the suitcase with a friend, and talk the bus driver into letting him so he could run home.

Anyway, Jim was born in Alta, Wyoming. Where is Alta, Wyoming? Most people are acquainted with Teton National Park and know where it's located. Many who have visited the park have also visited Jenny Lake, one of the most frequented locations in the park. At Jenny Lake, visitors can hike down to lakeside, catch a boat to the other side, and visit a waterfall or hike further up the trail of the canyon beside the stream that provides much of the water that flows into the lake. If you hike up the canyon and climb over the mountains on the trails there into the canyon that comes out the other side of the Teton Mountains, you'll come to Grand Targee, the famous ski resort, and further on down the road you come to Alta, Wyoming. If you go much further than Alta, Wyoming you'll be in Idaho. If you keep going down the road you'll come to Driggs, Idaho.

Alta is a small town. I think it is incorporated as a town, but there is not much of an infrastructure there. Jim grew up there. He has a "house" there that is as rustic and unique as the clothing he made and wore back then. His mother's house is still there on the side of the road that runs from Driggs on up to Grand Targee. Jim and his wife invited us to that rustic house and we went there many times.

2010-08-31T16:14:00.002-06:00

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Insightful first person narrative of a brain scientist who gained spiritual and personal insights when she had a severe stroke. About the time I read the book, a good friend, who is a college professor and a great writer, also had a stroke. This book and my friend's experience make me anew recognize the variety, delicacy, and intricacy of life and experience.

View all my reviews

1965 My First Paying Job

2010-08-31T12:54:00.002-06:00

Our camp rested at the base of a forested ridge that rose up behind it to the north. Our beige canvas tents, which we paid rent for and were probably Army surplus, were situated on mostly level ground in the sagebrush flat, out in the open, exposed to the summer sun. There must've been ten tents or so, and the tents were big enough for six or seven people, but usually only housed four or five, max. We slept on cots in sleeping bags. Each tent had a stove in it, and we put ours to good use in the early, brisk mornings. We'd have fetched a nice log or two, sometimes split, sometimes not, that would fit comfortably into its belly the night before. Then we soaked the mess in diesel fuel, so starting a fire in the brisk morning air would be no challenge whatsoever. It was also the reason it didn't matter if the logs were split or not. It took no time at all to have the pipe coming out of the stove and going up through the roof of the tent glowing red hot in the first morning light. After the tent was heated up we rolled out of our sleeping bags and comfortably dressed in the warmth.

We were buggers, but not buggers in the sense that the English use the term to denote a sodomite, a contemptible fellow, or a fellow chap, although we would come to know that we were often held in similar derision. We killed bugs, at least that was the reason we had been hired, but that was never the reason for anyone holding us in derision.

The camp was located within Teton National Park in the Pilgrim Creek drainage. The year was 1965. I had just barely turned seventeen. I had finished my junior year of high school and would be a senior in the fall. This was my first paying job.

I have Norman Hansen, a goodly neighbor and friend, who lived behind our lot, to blame for it. Or to bless for it. He had talked me into it, or rather, told me about the opportunity, which I readily chomped at, eager to work and to earn money. Of course, Norman hadn't experienced the work and didn't know its expectations upon us; otherwise, I doubt he would've ever told me about it or thought to go work there himself. In retrospect, I suppose you'd have to be semi-crazy to have worked that job.

Norman's dad, Phil Hansen, had a garage full of tools; Phil was a salesman who traveled around selling tools for mechanics around the west. He had also worked as a mechanic, I think, so he had a garage full of every conceivable tool that a mechanic would envy having. In any event, Norman and his older brother, James, were always in the shop at their house using those mechanics' tools. Shortly after Norman got his driver's license, he began assembling a dune buggy. He got the frame off of some old jalopy, used a welder to cut it in half, and cut out a piece of the frame on both sides to shorten it. Then he welded it back together. He continued assembling the dune buggy, giving it a seat, an engine, and, what I remember most, an aluminum beer keg for a gas tank.

Not only was that aluminum beer keg unique, it shocked me to see that Phil, a highly spiritual and religious man, allowed Norman to put it on that dune buggy.

In any event, it was in that dune buggy that we traveled up Highway 89, through Jackson Wyoming, and on up to Teton National Park.

Day Three

2010-08-27T21:41:00.000-06:00

I don't remember the blood. I don't remember my father's shock. I don't remember what happened to Brent and Tom. I don't remember the reaction of my mother when she came home.

I do remember the doctor above me with his tool in my nose, pushing on it, and the pressure I felt, along with some pain. I remember the fear, but not major fear, only minor. I remember the lights above me, shining into my eyes.

I don't remember the specifics of much of anything else. I don't remember my sister's reaction. I don't remember my brother's. I do remember that Brent brought me a gift, something to reconcile himself to me, something to give me comfort. It was a mitt, a baseball glove, a first baseman's. He got it, I think, using his parents' S&H Green stamps.

One other thing I do remember. I remember at home looking in the mirror before we went to the doctor's office. I remember seeing my nose underneath my right eye. I also remember that there was a gash in my nose. The doctor gave me a couple of stitches to take care of it.

That's about it. Beyond saying that I would have to invent. Even at that, I am aware of the frailty of my memory and the propensity of mind to create and fill in the empty spots we think we need. I will say this. The breaking of my nose was a major event in my young life, one that has stayed with me and in some measure molded me, in conjunction with the choices I freely made, to become the person I am.

Day Two

2010-08-26T23:08:00.000-06:00

Today I am to think of childhood experiences, for good or for bad, that left a lasting impression upon me. I've talked about them other places. I'm supposed to list five or ten and pick from them one that wants to be written about. I don't know about that. It doesn't appeal to me. I guess it doesn't matter. You can't always do what appeals to you.

I remember distinctly so few childhood experiences that almost all of them I do remember must have left a lasting impression on me.

1. Sitting underneath a tree for shade in the hot summer time with friends, then dozing off, and then waking up knowing that I had missed some important conversation and possibly some activity.

2. Taking a bath.

3. Breaking the glass in the coffee table.

4. Going with my dad to salvage lumber at Hill Air Force Base.

5. Having my nose busted by Brent.

6. The announcement of the winners in the decathlon contest at my elementary school.

7. Digging out the dirt underneath the house in Clearfield.

8. Cleaning out the attic in sunset.

9. My grandma cussing out Helen Dunn.

10. Going to the movies with my sister.

Now, the idea is to select one of the above and then to freewrite about it for ten minutes.

Okay. I've written about it before, but I will write about it again here. Number five.

My best guess is that it happened in the springtime. For some reason it seems like the leaves on the fruit trees behind Tom's house were fresh and perhaps in blossom. In any event, we had gathered there behind his house early and had enough time to spare to play before leaving for school. I'm thinking we were all sixth-graders, eleven or twelve years old. I think it was that sixth year because that is the only year I think I had classes with both of them, Tom and Brent. It may have occurred in fourth grade, however, and I'm just not remembering clearly.

It surprises me to think that we had gathered there early enough to mess around with a bat and ball before heading out to school. My recollection of behavior from back then is that I generally left home and went straight to school without any deviation. However, on this particular occasion, my father was home asleep and my mother was at work. I wouldn't have remembered that except for what happened.

Tom was pitching the ball, and Brent and I were taking turns batting. For some reason, I'm pretty certain that it was Brent's bat, however, I could be totally wrong about that. The edge of the bat around the bottom that permits a batter to keep his grip when swinging all out had been partially knocked or chipped away --- maybe the bat was old and had been mistreated or whatever. Anyway, Brent was up. While Tom was retrieving the ball, Brent was swinging the bat with all of his might. I was waiting for my turn at bat. The next thing I knew, however, the bat was headed straight for me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't even have time to raise my hands up to protect myself. It came around from its twirl and caught me directly in the nose, moving my nose beneath my eye.

Blood gushed out my nose. I guess I started howling and moving toward home, and home was about a half a block away, so I was leaving a gruesome trail of red blood along the sidewalk all of the way. I wasn't paying attention to who was following me or anything. I was just headed for home. I don't remember much, other than my father told me to stick my head in the sink --- although my father always said zink instead of sink --- so I wasn't dripping blood all over.

Eventually, he packed me up and took me down to the clinic to Dr. Peterson, a tall man who was slender and older than my father. Dr. Peterson put crowbar-like instrument in my nose and moved my snoze back where it should be.

Kill the Watcher

2010-08-25T21:10:00.000-06:00

The question always arises as to whether you want to be a writer or you simply love to write. Of course, questions like that are dichotomies and I much prefer continuums. I suppose I fall someplace between the two extremes. I don't think I can say that I love to write, not yet anyway, although I could say I want to write. It brings to mind my youth, after I had moved in with my family to a location different than the one I had grown up in. The new location took me where I didn't have any friends and there were no nearby neighbors, so I had a lot of time on my hands and my father had jobs for me to do if I wanted to do them. I did. At first, I wasn't very good at what he wanted me to do, and I didn't like it that much. As time went on, and I exerted myself, I got better at the tasks and I began to like it. I suppose writing to be like that. Now, it just so happens, I've been at it a while now, however, to some degree or another, because of work or other things I was attending to, including many distractions, I never focused enough on the process and the actual exercise of writing. I've written a lot, a book on taxes for writers and artisans and a novel of over 400 pages, so I'm no beginner. But in a sense, as a writer, I feel like I am.

The fellow whose book I'm reading --- well, one of them; it was written by two men --- was more like I am. He didn't have a compulsion to write. It took some doing for him, kind of like it has for me. He indicates that at first he hated individuals who have that innate compulsion and desire and, perhaps, talent. Actually, he says he and beat them. He says as a child he composed stories in his head but he didn't like to get them down on paper. I can identify with that. Well, I can to some degree. I'm not sure I ever liked to compose stories in my head that much. I've thought a lot about that and I don't think I did. There might have been a time when I was quite young that I like to do that, playing with the cars and toys in the sand, but after that I didn't do it that much at all.

There were times off and on when I tried to journalize my thoughts --- to keep a diary --- but I was never successful. I'd start out gangbusters and then peter out. I always seem to do pretty good in the subject of English, however. I seem to remember that I did alright writing essays and short stories and the like. I always got Bs or better, even when I didn't always finish my homework and, especiallystudy my spelling words. I even did alright on vocabulary tests because I always made the effort to look words up and create my own list of words to learn and then studied the words on it.

The author tells about a conversation he had with a friend that he describes as loose and unstructured when he realized that hour after hour of conversation had yielded them significant insights about the topic they were discussing. And he realized that they had been trying to do that; it had just happened. They had done it by merely saying things off the cuff, things that they haven't analyzed and nudged here and there to get just right. They had simply talk with a degree of sincerity and openness to each other. He learned from that to concentrate on the process and not the resulting piece.

The assignment today is to address the internal critic, the Watcher, and tell him what I think.

Dear Watcher,

I don't want to be too harsh to you. You have caused me some grief but I recognize some value also in what you do. In fact, I suppose I have valued what you do more than perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should give this other a try, and let you sit on the sidelines for a while and watch. Then call you up after I have had my way without your interference to help me out. What do you think about that? Can he do that? That's, I think, what I want to do. To put you out of the way and let myself go. Deal? Why am I asking you? I guess, because I have great respect for you. But for now, let's do it my way, this new way.

Refuge

2010-08-24T16:45:00.000-06:00

I read the memoir, Refuge, by Terry Tempest Williams, long ago, when my wife bought it and read it. That was not long after my wife had been treated for cancer. My wife read it and promptly added it to a small bookstand on her nightstand next to her bed. It's where I think she adds favorites she wants nearby to inspire her dreams. It's still there to this day.

Refuge excels in interweaving several different narratives: that of a dying mother, the influences of natural phenomenon on life and death, the beauty and ugliness of the world, the wantonness and the care and concern of mankind and its institutions, the nuances of religion for good and for bad. It's a book I should revisit, because its subtle shouting voice and its terrible tender stories are ones that seem kindred to me. It somehow captures not only the serene beauty of the bleak desert and the dead sea of the Great Basin where I often live, but also similar places found inside culture and people whereever you are. There is an ebb and flow, not unlike the lap of waves on silent shores.

Love, Harmony and Cooperation

2010-08-23T22:30:00.001-06:00

The whole universal system is held together through love, harmony and cooperation. If you use your thoughts according to these principles you can transcend anything that gets in your way. --- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.

A couple of thoughts come to mind. One of them is the expanding universe. I'm not convinced that it necessarily manifests love, harmony and cooperation. The other is evolution. As Darwin put it, there is a competition between species for survival. While I personally believe that everything is held together through love, harmony and cooperation, it isn't that hard also to see hatred, disharmony, and polar opposites fighting with one another. In my entire lifetime, I don't believe I've ever experienced the degree of outrageous behavior, self-righteousness, and intolerance by the conservative realm. So you can see why it seems to me difficult to believe that the whole universal system is held together through love, harmony, and cooperation.

On the other hand, we are talking about a "holding together". Cooperation, of course, brings us together, holds us from separation and divisiveness. Competition, on the other hand, tears us apart. It results in war and destruction.

Therefore, I subscribe to love, harmony and cooperation. Now I need to implement them better in my life.

Let Go and Let It Flow

2010-08-22T19:40:00.003-06:00

Everything in the universe flows. You can't get ahold of water by clutching it. Let your hand relax, and you can experience it. --- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

These notions of Dyer's are somewhat difficult to wrap my mind around in isolation the way they are. It seems like I need some context or something.

Okay, I agree that everything in the universe flows. When I was younger I had courses in high school and college in physics and so to some extent I know the dynamics of the world in which we live. Truly, a piece of iron is composed of basic elements and there is plenty of activity there. There is in everything of a substantive nature. Of course, in Mormon thought, it seems as if there is nothing but substance in one form or another, refined or unrefined. So yes, I can agree that everything in the universe flows. Certainly my thinking does.

So let me grapple with the next part. You can't get ahold of water by clutching it. That is simply a statement of fact. How does it relate to the preceding sentence? Water, as it is calmly conceptualized in the first instance, is something in the universe, and it's easy to see and understand that it flows. Likewise, generally speaking you can't get ahold of it by grasping it; however, that's not always the case. In water's frozen form you can clutch it. Or does Dyer expect me to call that simply ice as distinguished from water? water is water, it seems to me, no matter what state it's in. But I guess you could say that in its gaseous state it is steam, in its liquid state it is water, and in its frozen state it is ice. But that doesn't do anything to help with respect to the first sentence which is all inclusive. All of those states of water are included in items in the universe, which he says flows.

Then the last sentence. Let your hand relax, and you can experience it. I take that to mean that you are to let your hand relax within the water referred to, in liquid form, that you cannot clutch or get ahold of and you will somehow have a greater experience of it.

It's as if the example of the liquid water and you trying to grasp it is a kind of metaphor for the notion that in order to comprehend the universe you need to relax and let it pass you in order to fully appreciate it. You can't get all uptight and try to grab it.

Is that it?

Don't Judge, Be Negative or Immoderate

2010-08-21T22:51:00.001-06:00

Dyer says three things clog your soul: negativity, judgment, and imbalance.

I'll have to think about that.

It seems I have to admit to some degree of negativity, although I'm not entirely negative. In fact, from my perspective I'm quite positive. I doubt that many others see me in that way that much, however. But I think it's true. For example, I'm pretty positive about trying to write and trying to become more and more proficient at it. Others, who began writing about the same time I did, don't seem to be still writing like I am.

Judgment. Dyer says judgment clogs the soul. I'm not quite sure what he means. I guess he means don't be judging others. I doubt he's suggesting that you should use poor judgment in making choices, however. Maybe so, however. The problem with his claim is that it doesn't have enough surrounding context to understand exactly what he means. If he means it categorically, I'd have to disagree. I'm mostly opposed to the categorical. On the other hand, if he means it in the Christian sense, that a person shouldn't judge others lest they be judged themselves, I'm right there with that notion. Judgments should be made with love and concern and compassion.

I don't know exactly what he means by imbalance. The definition of imbalance is simply having a lack of balance. And balance is defined several different ways. It's a weighing device. I don't think he means to use that definition, however. It's a state of equilibrium or parity which is characterized by cancellation of all forces by equal opposing forces. I think that's the definition he is interested in. A person should try to have balance. I think this is the same as saying that there should be moderation in all things. Except for the categorical, I think I agree pretty much with a necessity to be balanced.

I think I'll try to do better and be more positive, to make fewer judgments of others, and to have better balance in my life.

Tune in, Get?

2010-08-20T20:57:00.001-06:00

So Dr. Wayne W. Dyer says that all the abundance you want is already here. You just have tune in.

Thinking about the statement, the first one, it seems to me that the abundance here exceeds anything I could ever want. Furthermore, relative to the second statement, it seems like I tune into whatever degree of abundance I really want already. However, it seems like Dyer is saying that the more you tune into wanting more the more you get. It seems to me that there is a balance necessary. If you tune in too much to what you want more than you already have, it seems like you give up something.

Spiritual and physical life

2010-08-19T11:41:00.001-06:00

Okay. Here's what I'd like to do. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer authored a small book published as Everyday Wisdom. I got it for Christmas or something from somebody in the family. I didn't note who gave it to me or when. Vaguely, I think I remember getting in my sock, so that would suggest it was from Shelley. In any event, it gives a snippet of "wisdom" to contemplate for each day. Perhaps I'll attempt utilizing it as a guide to some free writing and thinking, trying to do maybe one per day and perhaps posting it. So here goes, the first one:

"You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience."

I have so often heard that quotation at church, that I assumed it came from some scripture or from a General Authority or something. I am surprised to learn that it came from Wayne Dyer. I wonder if he stole it from someone else or paraphrased what someone else had said. I suppose that's true of everything that's ever said, isn't it?

It could be said that the notion expressed goes to a fundamental truth LDS people cling to: that we had an existence as a spirit being before we became human beings. I don't know if that's what Wayne Dyer had in mind or not. It would be interesting to know if he believes in an existence via spirit before the existence of body. My inclination is to believe he does.

I have believed and continue to believe that I am a spiritual being clothed in a physical body in concert with what is taught in Mormon theology. Of course, I don't have any memory from a life before this one, and I don't have any experience with anyone coming back from the dead to give me any objective evidence of the continuation of life hereafter. It is something I accept on faith after having listened to and studied out what others have said and believe on the subject. Additionally, there are self-serving reasons for believing it. The notion of complete obliteration after you die isn't something that appeals to me or, I suppose, most people. Perhaps that accounts for most people's belief in a hereafter.

Naturally, there are times when I kind of hope there isn't a hereafter; for instance, when I contemplate my failings and that there will be some sort of accountability there. On the other hand, there seem to be times when something from a past seems to be there, an insight or intuition, that I can't account for in the earthly life that I have experienced and that I remember.

So, bottom line for me is that I do believe in a duality of personality. Part of that belief includes the notion that in some stage or another I have always existed and always will. Perhaps that belief, however, stems from a longing for life incompatible with death.

Write What You Know, or Not

2010-08-06T22:48:00.001-06:00

Donald Maas says you should write what you know. Natalie Goldberg doesn't think it's a good idea to write what you know. Donald admits that the writing what you know has a tendency to produce unexciting protagonists, settings that can put you to sleep, and plot lines nobody wants to read. Natalie suggests that we think about how little we know before concluding we should know what we write. Her point is that writing what you know severely limits the field of what you can write. Furthermore, she maintains the reason we have imaginations is in order to write what we don't know.

Donald maintains writing what you know doesn't mean you have to record everything that is plain and usual. A person should draw upon their experience in order to make the story personal, passionate, and true.

This debate of writing what you know versus not writing what you know comes up relative to me in writing about Alejandro. I really don't know about Alejandro, per se. I was never an undocumented immigrant, I don't know Spanish, I was never a thespian. On the other hand, I have an imagination, and I read of a girl going through the dust bowl during the depression in Oklahoma who I thought was in a situation that presented enough of an analog to what an undocumented immigrant boy like Alejandro might experience. Maybe that's cheating. I don't know. Anyway, that was the way I was going about it.

Donald says writing what you know means writing what you see differently, what you feel profoundly and know that it's important for the rest of us to understand. He maintains none of us need to have lived a life of merit or through a newsworthy phase, of sorts. We only need our own unique outlook and the will to write with a new purpose. Natalie says to lose control when you write. To write such things as what you're not thinking of it and what you don't remember. She contends if you get out of your box and do some exploration of a new place you will be able to find the hidden, the extravagant, and the mysterious life of a wild mind.

After Taking up the Pen and Ink

2010-08-05T14:18:00.002-06:00

It seems a person must proceed with a degree of optimism and confidence even in the face of great, perhaps impossible, challenges. Well, if such a person doesn't so proceed, it can mean not proceeding at all, becoming so discouraged that they can't go on.

How does a sixty-two-year-old English-speaking white man (me) capture the voice, the setting, and circumstances of a fourteen-year-old Latino boy (Alejandro) in America? It takes a considerable amount of conceit to even make the attempt , although, perhaps, I wasn't smart enough to apprehend just how much moxie it would take. Yet that is precisely what I've been doing for several months now, writing a manuscript that I am around 220 pages into about Alejandro, a boy who is here in the United States with his parents, and none of them, not him or his parents, have legal documents to be here. They are illegal immigrants.

Now, it seems being in the place I'm at, as I try to tie things up into a climax and a tight conclusion for the novel, this project becomes more dicey than ever. My fellow critiquers, especially one in particular, raises new and bigger red flags of its difficulty to speak for this culture, this situation. Caution! Proceed at your own risk. Danger ahead.

This friend has been to a recent writer's convention and attended a panel that discussed this very issue, writing about Latinos. So, through him, I become more and more aware of the sensitivities in taking this on. The irony is that the very people who live in such circumstances --- undocumented immigrants --- usually don't have an opportunity to write for or speak for themselves because of their situation: trying to lie low and survive in a culture and society that views them as filthy lawbreakers, worthy of deportation and not much more. Some even characterize them as terrorists and invaders of this country. It is partly from such a perspective, recognizing these people's lack of sympathetic voices, that I decided it was important to write about Alejandro to begin with.

The challenge facing me raises various issues.

Do I want to even continue the attempt? To the degree I have a natural competitiveness, and I do although mine isn't as great as some people's I've experienced, do I want to proceed with the project and finish it in order to show everybody I can do it?

Do I want to cut my losses and turn to something else? I already worked for an entire career, enjoyed the work I pursued for well over thirty years, but retired , intending in retirement to do less. However, doing less certainly didn't mean doing nothing. I fully intended to do something in my retirement, and at the time I retired, I fully intended to continue writing and honing that particular craft.

Do I want to step up my efforts? If I want to receive recognition and some of the success others have received, like, for example, the friend I received the cautionary warning from mentioned above, I'll have to do more. That friend, who has publishing deals for three books with Scholastic, has a better background to be a writer: he has been dreaming of it, has been consistently reading and studying writign, and even began writing, it seems, at the outset of his life. Not me. Additionally, my friend seems more intelligent, better trained for writing, and more well connected in contemporary life and society than I am.

Is it fun enough?

Even as set forth these ideas, I know I want to do it. I know I want to complete it and to make it as good as I can. Nonetheless, there is some ambivalence and some wavering.

Plus, it just occurred to me that perhaps I should write this story from a first person perspective as an observer of the boy's life. Then, perhaps, I couldn't be accused of being anything but the dumbass I am.

No, thinking about it somemore, I previously considered that possibility. While I don't rule it out --- it always hangs there in the back of my mind as a possibility lurking in the shadows --- I'll try to finish in the way I've begun.

Ramblings on The Lonely Polygamist

2010-08-03T16:11:00.003-06:00

So, here I am two days in a row thinking about writing something about The Lonely Polygamist. Not so much writing about it as writing a review of it, but perhaps that's a difference without substance. It would be easier just to stare out the window and watch the clouds float by in the deep blue sky. Of course, that would be easier than just about anything else anyway.

Brady Udall wrote The Lonely Polygamist. Udall is a big name in Mormon country. There are some famous names in government with that surname. It's a big name in Arizona, where I guess most of the Udalls of Mormon heritage hangout. Well, that's my generalization. None of that, however, has much to do with the novel, except to some degree relative to, perhaps, its setting in the desert somewhere not far from Las Vegas. Maybe Brady Udall had some history, some ancestry, of sorts, or perhaps even some contemporary members of the extended family who engaged in the practice of polygamy. (Why do people have to practice polygamy? We don't go around saying we practiced monogamy, do we? We just simply say we're monogamists, if the subject comes up at all. Yet, there is something mighty strange about polygamy, you have to admit it.) So, perhaps Brady had a hankering to explore the subject and flesh out a character he could imagine being a polygamist in these modern times, even though probably his ancestors gave up the practice when the main body of Mormons did back at the turn of the twentieth century.

Who knows why a person stumbles onto a topic. I stumbled onto polygamy from a totally different perspective. I'm not aware of ancestors in my lineage who ever practiced polygamy, although it's entirely possible some of my early ancestors on my mother's side did --- it appears those ancestors were immigrants from Denmark, who came here and settled in Central Utah.

If I could talk with Brady on a casual level and sense somehow that I could ask him a question without giving any offense and having some self-assurance that I might get an honest answer, I'd ask to know how he came to the subject of polygamy.

I know how I came to it. A friend told me and my wife one Christmastime his wife was leaving him for a polygamist. All of the modern polygamists I knew anything about at the time were totally weirdos, meriting only disdain and mocking. I had read about them in the newspaper, because whatever antics they had been up to had merited a story, usually one on the front page of the newspaper or as a headline in the television news for some stupidity, including murder and intrigue. This couple, had a few kids, and there was no doubt that if momma left the daddy for a polygamist, the kiddies would suffer and be exposed to such idiocy.

How could I resist writing about such blather?

Plans for Future Postings

2010-08-02T23:17:00.001-06:00

When I get to this stage, the stage where I have time and energy to do this, usually late at night when I should be thinking about getting to bed instead, and actually sit down and write, it is always difficult to decide just what it is I want to say. Life is a demanding thing. It is no less so for me than it is for anybody else, I suppose. No less demanding, nor more demanding. There is always so much to be done that you have to be more selective in what you choose to do or you will never get to what you want to do. Or rather, you should be, perhaps, more selective than you are in what you put down. Obviously, I'm not selective enough nor consistent enough, or I wouldn't be going through this pathetic exercise of saying all of this. I would just dive into what it is I want to say.

Someday soon I want to do and post a comprehensive book review of The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. I read it some time ago now, and I have wanted to do a book review of it ever since I started reading it, maybe even before then. It, however, is a comprehensive book, a novel of great length and nuanced narrative and composition. Now, I don't want to review it frivolously or short shrift it.

I picked up The Lonely Polygamist originally for self-serving reasons --- perhaps, truthfully, a person never picks up a book otherwise. However, I wrote a novel about polygamy long before Brady Udall did. Well, at least I think I did. I don't know all the particulars of when he began writing his book or the chronology of his finishing it and getting it, with the help of his publisher and whatnot, out there. Obviously, he had the success I didn't have in getting an agent and a publisher to work with him on it. He had had previous publishing successes. But I picked the book up because I wanted to compare my writing to his. Isn't that pathetic? That I would want to compare my writing to his?

Well, from my perspective, it isn't pathetic. I figure that, since he got published by a big publishing house and received wide critical acclaim and attention, he must be a pretty darn good writer who can stand as a decent measurement for me. So sometime I intend to start writing drafts of critical reviews of his novel. Maybe just for the fun of it I will post them here. It'll give me something to do, something to work on until I get it done, something I don't have to think about every time I start thinking about making a post.

On the List

2010-07-14T17:22:00.002-06:00

Here in Utah the news when I returned from Wyoming this week was about a list somebody or some group had compiled and spread anonymously throughout the news media and government. The list, it is said, contains the names of some 1300 people, their addresses and telephone numbers, their Social Security numbers, whether or not they were pregnant, if they were women, and the like. Apparently, the list was also sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, too. It argues that all of the named individuals should be deported from the United States because they are, the document argues, illegally here.

So "the list" has been in all the news stories broadcast on television and radio, in the newspaper, both locally and nationally. It coincides with the extremists who want to apply Arizona-like tactics to everyone they think shouldn't be here.

My observation is this. People with this type of vitriol should go after the perpetrators of the problem: the holders of office in the federal government. It is our congressmen and our president, present and past, who have caused this crisis.

And this is a crisis that affects real human beings, ones without much of a voice at all, ones living a bare existence here, always having to "lay low" and watch their backs. The extremists, it seems to me, seem to have little heart or soul in analyzing the nuances of the problem as it pertains to real individuals affected by their sad and callous tactics. Instead of raising their ire against politicians who hold offices and could have done something about the problem over the years, they want to cause heartache and catastrophe for families. I find it particularly ironic, in a state where people laud the supremacy of family, that these individuals are so allied and agitated in this ugly manner against individuals in families.

But I don't blame just the politicians. I blame the citizens, including myself, who haven't held and didn't hold the politicians accountable; I blame the citizens who didn't care enough to do anything substantive relative to the situation to hold politicians accountable for their lack of doing anything, because it didn't matter to we, the citizens, in years past, when life was good and rosy , when jobs were plentiful and paid well. Now, when because of past policies that favor big business and the rich and powerful our economy has crashed and is still trying to recover slowly, such individuals blame the people who came here hoping for something better than their sad lives someplace else, who we, collectively, tolerated and even, to some degree, esteemed and appreciated, or, at the very least, cared nothing about. They weren't on our radar. They were seen as a threat to us. Now, these extremists seek to put a target on their chests and shoot them, in a figurative sense.

The Republican Party and the so-called Tea Party Movement, the Libertarians, and others unaffiliated but who perpetuate this vitriol are hypocrites. They have contributed to the enduring situation as much as anybody else, and now they are contributing to something even worse: the disruption of family life and security for all these people.

For believing this way, I would probably be and have been labeled by these types of individuals who spew hatred a bleeding heart liberal, a socialist, and/or a Communist.

Go ahead, label me. Say what you will about what I am. Maybe I am a bleeding heart, a liberal, inclined to socialism. At the same time, I am inclined to argue that such detritus as people who would disrupt family lives like these groups belatedly seek to do to people who have been here for years and years trying to seek a better way of life for them and their families are not unlike those who showed disdain and hatred for Jews in Hitler Germany or whowanted to perpetuate slavery in early America and segregation more recently.

An Ugly Wart

2010-06-27T19:41:00.003-06:00

I want to write about a wart --- well, I think it's a wart, but my wife thinks it's cancer --- that I have. I also want to write about a senator of mine, Orrin Hatch. I've had them both too long. I want to get rid of each of them. They have gone about irritating me for far too long, and it's time to do something about them. I didn't do anything to deserve either one of them, not that I know of at least. I want them gone.
First, let me describe, even though you might not want to know about it, my wart. It is on my right forearm out of my sight, about to the end of the arm of a short-sleeved shirt. I can see it in the mirror or if I twist my arm with my hand. It is an unusual growth.

It is quite ugly. Other people usually can't see it because of my shirt sleeve, at least I don't think they can, and they don't mention it. It would stick straight up, probably four fifths of an inch or so, if it weren't kind of bent over. It is flesh-colored at the base, but crusty looking and pointed at the top. The tip is the part which is bent over, probably from my lying on my arm at night and, hence, it, when I'm trying to sleep. It has become very awkward and uncomfortable to cope with it. It hurts when it catches on my clothing or when I accidentally bump it.

I am not by nature, a warty person, or haven't been for most of my life, at least not in a literal sense. Those who know me may describe my thinking, personality, or humor as warty, though, I suppose. Many years ago, before this wart appeared, I had another strange wart on my left hand. It was at the base of my thumb. While it never grew as big or as ugly as the one which now resides on my arm, it was still itchy and uncomfortable. Eventually, I showed it to my physician, a family doctor, and he removed it, had it checked for cancer, and found it was benign. It has never come back, unless you think perhaps the wart on my right arm is its reincarnation. I don't think so, and I have my reasons, but they don't pertain to this particular essay.

I have an appointment with a doctor, a dermatologist, who just happens to be the son-in-law of the doctor who removed my other wart, in a few days. Hopefully, he will be able to remove the growth and restore me to normality, and at the same time, benefit his son-in-law through having referred me to him.

I am looking for a similar solution to get Orrin Hatch out of my life as a senator. To me, he is just as irritating as that wart, although I have to admit, he isn't nearly as scary looking as it. Besides that, Orrin does have other redeeming characteristics my wart doesn't seem to have. I have enjoyed that he has been willing in some very limited instances to cross party lines and join with his colleagues in the Democratic Party to get helpful legislation enacted and enforced. Nonetheless, I think I have put up with him and his deceptive antics long enough. Here though, what I want to mention is my latest aggravation with him. It involves immigration reform or, rather, his obstruction of immigration reform.
Let me tell you what I mean.

This past week eight senators sent the President of the United States a letter which demanded that he stop going around the will of Congress on immigration. There is no evidence whatsoever that the President ever did or intended to go around the will of Congress on immigration. Orrin was one of the eight who signed that letter. It alleges a secret illegal agreement exists to grant "deferred action" --- the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in refraining from removing someone from the United States --- to undocumented immigrants. It suggests that the President subscribes to the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no way the President or his administration is interested in granting more than 10 million undocumented people in the United States some kind of immunity from prosecution. What the President is and has been interested in is comprehensive immigration reform. And he is probably also interested in utilizing whatever presidential power he has to afford relief where it is warranted in the most sensitive specific cases. For example, he would use the relief where immigrant children have grown up in the United States, have done extraordinary in their studies, and want to continue their education in our colleges and universities without being deported for a lack of documentation.

The letter of the senators is an ugly wart on the public, like the ugly wart on my forearm. It --- the letter --- is intended to perpetuate ugly rumors grounded in nothing more than bigoted people's imaginations. Those people in this particular case are interested in a political agenda that opposes comprehensive immigration reform. It is quite obvious, although their specific intent is left unclear. Of course, these individuals know something about "deferred action" because the Bush administration used it during Hurricane Katrina, granting rights to individuals victimized by the storm. And that is when it is usually appropriate, when there is some serious crisis that pulls at the heartstrings, when things are fundamentally unfair and inequitable and against our basic ideals for our fellow beings.

Sen. Orrin Hatch and the other senators who wrote the President are being disingenuous. In their letter they suggest that they agree that immigration laws need to be fixed, but then they go on to gripe about the potential of the administration using "deferred action" or some type of parole for large populations of undocumented immigrants, although that is impossible. Sen. Hatch and the others seven senators have never done anything whatsoever to reform immigration laws. Hatch has served in the Senate for years and years. He defeated Frank Moss in 1976 and has been Utah's ranking senator almost ever since. Pray tell, what has he ever done to correct immigration laws? Nothing. Even during the period when his party held the presidency and controlled both houses of Congress, he did nothing. Nothing! He intends to do nothing about immigration reform. That's why he voted against the Senate bill that would have been a first step in giving us comprehensive immigration reform. That bill passed the Senate in 2007. In fact, the senators who wrote the subject letter, moved to close the debate on the bill and to prepare the bill for a vote in order to kill it.

Orrin Hatch is bound to big business, which benefits with the situation relative to immigration as it stands in this country. Senator Hatch is interested only in doing whatever furthers the funding he needs to retain his position and power.

Sen. Orrin Hatch is a useless wart on the forearm of the public, worthy of removal. Hopefully, he is not a cancerous growth, who will lead to more serious problems or our demise. One thing for sure, Senator Hatch's intent is to scare people and frighten them, rather than simply doing what is helpful and compassionate.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY

2010-06-26T10:18:00.001-06:00

When I got home from Wyoming, there was a package from Amazon on the porch. I hadn't ordered anything from Amazon that I remembered, and I didn't know that Shelley had, but that is always a possibility. The box was addressed to me, not her. I opened up the box to see what was in it and it was the complete National Geographic, I mean every National Geographic issue since 1888. I knew I didn't order it, although I would've liked to have had it, and I didn't think Shelley had, either.

Inside the box as always there was a document giving the details of the transaction. The first thing I looked for was the label they include to make returning items sent easy. That label was gone. I looked at the shipping address, and it was mine, and I looked at the billing address and it wasn't mine. I don't know how I looked at just the address without seeing the name with the address but I did. It was an address that seemed foreign, and I jumped to a conclusion that somebody had used my credit card to make the purchase and I immediately thought I'd better call Shelley to tell her I needed to cancel the credit card. Then I got to looking closer. The name with the address was the name of my son-in-law, and it immediately became clear that this was a gift, probably a Father's Day gift from my daughter and him.

Shelley called a little while after that and I told her what had happened and she laughed and said that my daughter had mentioned that there would be something in the mail for me for Father's Day --- my daughter had been ill and had been unable to visit on Father's Day.

It is such a nice gift and I'm grateful. Thank you very much. And it's nice to not have to cancel that credit card.

The Rivalry of Saul for David

2010-06-14T15:05:00.001-06:00

Rivalry. What does it mean? The dictionary says it is the act of competing or emulating. A second definition indicates it is the state or condition of being a rival. A rival is one who attempts to equal or surpass another, or who pursues the same object as another. We would say, a competitor. Can rivalry get us into trouble?

Do you remember David, from the Bible, the guy who killed Goliath with his sling shot? Would it be difficult for you or for any of us today to have envied David, to have jealousy for what he did?

Well, let me talk about somebody who did for a moment. After David has this great victory and receives all these great accolades for taking care of the fearsome, loathsome Goliath, Saul, who is the king, brings David to court, figuring he could honor David, probably thinking he could utilize David some way to make life better there for himself and the inhabitants who lived there with him. In fact, the invitation from Saul to David is somewhat of an honor for David, but at the same time David was just a boy and his place of honor was inferior, or should have been, to the place of a king's.

However, the news of David's victory over Goliath apparently spreads, possibly gets amplified and exaggerated, maybe, and David receives the attention, fully deserved or not, of the masses --- well, possibly not the masses, but whatever. He soon becomes, it appears, more popular than even the king, Saul. This can all be read in 1 Samuel 18:5-16. So Saul has to contend with this circumstance, with David receiving greater attention and a greater following of the people than he himself. That had to be galling and incite jealousy and envy within Saul. And the Old Testament narrative indicates the same. Saul wavers between a type of submission to David because of David's popularity and a desire to kill the boy. Saul blames his son, Jonathan, saying the boy is unfaithful to his father, and that he is supporting his arrival, David. Saul massacres the priests at Nob just for honoring David. They become victims for merely honoring David for helping the people defeat an enemy.

So instead of killing David, who was still so popular, Saul has had these priests all killed, substituting them for David. I guess he thought nobody would care about the priests but they would about him killing David. Nonetheless, the killing doesn't solve this problem of Saul's of David getting more attention than him, and David continues to receive accolades and praise of the people, all to Saul's chagrin.

Next Saul sends his soldiers into battle with the Philistines, hoping to regain the attention of his people and receive their praise. But before the battle, he consults with a medium in Endor and lapses into a kind of insanity, receiving a chastisement from the dead prophet, Samuel. Saul loses the battle and kills himself.

What is interesting in this situation for me is that Saul, who held a more powerful position and place, becomes the rival the rival of David, a mere youth. Powerful people can become rivals of people generally seen as weaker than them.

Sunday Musings

2010-06-13T13:41:00.001-06:00

The title of the Sunday school lesson today was "God will honor those who honor him." Now, that is a conditional premise. If I honor God, he will honor me. The implication is that, if I don't honor God, he won't honor me. God, therefore, does not love unconditionally, but conditionally. That seems to fly in the face of everything I believe and know about God. I believe he does love unconditionally. The ramifications of our bad behavior toward him or toward anyone else or even toward ourselves operate independent of His love and devotion to us. That's what I believe.

Now, thinking about that notion --- you respect me and I'll respect you --- I try to reconcile it with the Golden rule, which says, as I recall, that I should do to others what I would want them to do to me.

The two notions seem to be in conflict with each other. If God will only honor me if I honor him then he is not following the admonition to do to others what you want them to do to you. I believe God will honor me because he wants me to honor him. And I should want to honor him because I want to be honored by him. The lesson seems to have it backward.

I wish though when we talk about these Old Testament cases we could utilize a different Bible than the King James version that the church insists on us using. It's very irritating to have to wade through prose that is difficult to understand when prose that is more modern and easy to grasp is available.

In any event, Eli's sons are a little out of control --- and that's putting it mildly, because the scripture says they were sons of Belial --- and they were doing things they shouldn't be doing according to Eli and according to the traditions and commandments of their religion. And so Eli, like most parents, takes them to task. He tells them they are setting a bad example and make the faithful people also transgress (which seems like a non sequitur). Eli goes on to say that if a person sins against another person, a judge will sit in judgment and impose, in essence, some sanction or punishment. If they sin against the Lord, Eli asks rhetorically, who will judge them then? He goes on to say that if they didn't follow the counsel of him, their father, the Lord would slay them.

Hmmm. Curious. What exactly is meant there? The Lord kills people for doing evil against him? Well, does he? It seems to me there are plenty of influences around in real life where that hasn't and doesn't happen, where people are warned by good, wholesome people not to do evil or not to do this or that which seems simple, yet people still do it and doing it would be, at least in the view of the faithful person, a sin against God. Yet, we don't see God taking revenge and killing the individual for their behavior. Of course, the argument can always be made that in the end God gets them, just as he gets all of us because we die.

In 1 Samuel 2:30 it suggests that God will honor those who honor him and those who despise him he will esteem lightly. The verses after that go on to talk about cutting off arms and killing people and destroying progeny, if I understand it correctly.

I just don't understand how you reconcile the two notions. God wants us to love one another. Yet killing is not thought of as showing love but hate.

I think the Old Testament manifests the inclination of man to put words into God's mouth and make him something He isn't at all. It is man's inclination to mimic others and to scapegoat whenever mankind gets into trouble.

Time for All Eternity

2010-06-12T21:32:00.001-06:00

I finally gave up hope and surrendered patience and published Time for All Eternity. I had explored the possibility of obtaining a literary agent based upon the work, but after months and months of trying and submitting time after time queries to various agents in a number of different agencies and being rejected, I decided to just go ahead and do it myself.

So far, relative to money spent on the project --- other than of course the value of my time and the other pursuits relative to more literary proficiency and contacts, generally, like the costs of driving to and from critiquing and to participate in Wasatch Writers and the League of Utah Writers and attending a few Roundup writers conferences --- I spent nothing to make the work available as a Kindle book and $49.22 to make it available as a 450 page print-on-demand book available on Amazon and through other distribution channels.

My friend, and fellow critiquer, Matt Kirby, have discussed frequently the merits of self-publishing over against the merits of finding a publisher. Matt, who is very talented and able as a writer, was able to enter into contracts for a few books and a short period of time with Scholastic through his agent. So, he was prone to argue the merits of getting an agent and being published through a conventional publisher. He was less enamored with self-publishing. Today, he e-mailed me with a link to an article in the Huffington Post written by a literary agent on the merits of self-publishing for those who can't find a literary agent or a publisher.

It will take few sales for me to recoup my total investment in setting up the book. I don't know if it's the right thing to do or not, I just know I wanted to do it. I had spent a lot of time and effort doing it, and doing it itself was its own reward, but nonetheless it was nice to see in print and available to those who want to read it. I think it's a good book. I think it's not that bad for a first novel for somebody who has my type of background.

I hope somebody will read it and like it.

Clichés Don’t Tell the Whole Story

2010-05-19T17:37:00.001-06:00

My wife told me about an email she got at lunch today, and I asked her to forward it to me. I wanted to respond. The email had pictures posted here on Snopes with the following verbiage:

Hey everyone out there!

We, in Arizona , know you're boycotting us -- but you really should come out here and see our Beautiful Sonoran Desert .

It's just gorgeous right now! We know you'd love it and maybe you can share what you saw with the rest of the country so they can love it too!

This is on an 'illegal super - highway' from Mexico to the USA ( Tucson ) used by human smugglers.

This area is located in a wash, approximately 1.5 miles long, just south of Tucson , Arizona . If a flood came, all this would be washed to the river and then onto the sea!

It is estimated over 5,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers. And as you can see in this picture, fresh footprints leading right into it.

As we kept walking down the wash, we thought for sure it was going to end, but around every corner was more and more trash!

And of course the trail leading out of the wash in our city, heads directly NORTH to Tucson , then leads to your town tomorrow.

They've already come through here. Isn't Arizona just beautiful, America ?

Why would you boycott us???

Our desert has basically been turned into a landfill.

The trash left behind by people illegally crossing our border is another Environmental Disaster to hit the USA .

If these actions had been done in one of our Northwest Forests or Seashore National Parks areas, there would be an uprising of the American people.....but this is the Arizona-Mexican border.

You won't see these pictures on CNN, ABC, NBC or the Arizona Republic newspaper. Nor will they mention the disease that comes from the uncovered human waste left in our desert.

However, with respect to CNN, ABC & NBC, they do offer us "Special Reports" on cheating celebrity spouses....

This information needs to be seen by the rest of the country.

This is what I said:

It is heart-wrenching. Not so much as a result of a little littering --- a church congregation or a similar organization or two could clean up the detritus and make what's reusable available to Goodwill or Deseret Industries in an afternoon or two --- but because of all
of the lives behind it.

The undocumented immigrants, whose lives were so desperate that they risked them (read The Devil's Highway, for example)
to escape circumstances intolerable wherever they were coming from to cross a barren, harsh desert to come here to live like new-age slaves because living here as new-age slaves was better than what they had before.
The elected officials of the U.S. government, who through willful and ongoing neglect of responsibility essentially facilitated the building of this highway through the desert and all the other immigration woes and concerns (read We Are Americans) by failing to enact, fund, and enforce meaningful and comprehensive immigration reform years and years ago, when it could have done some good in avoiding this minor part --- some littering of a desert --- of the whole big problem.
We citizens, who through toleration of a worsening situation and inaction by duly elected officials, augmented by our greed, allowed the situation to continue on and on through all the years, especially through the years of plenty when it was more advantageous to communally own these new-age slaves to do our drudgery before our economy went sour and it wasn't so easy to tolerate these folks any more, worsening the situation to its present proportions and making it more and more difficult to solve, heightening hatred and fear.
The multitude of U.S. businesses, small and large, and the individuals who have hired and exploited such new-age slaves --- new-age slaves who, without documentation, are in little condition to stand up for basic human rights themselves, (read, for example by analogy, Slavery by Another Name) --- which businesses and individuals thereby benefited from their hard work and sacrifices as new-age slaves, using their massive financial and societal resources to influence lawmakers and avoid responsibility.

The problem for me with the email is its facile nature. Like everything political these days, it's a cliché (see, for example, "How to Skin a Moose"), lacking deep analysis and heartrending empathy for tender lives. (Think of the story of the good Samaritan.) There seems to be little frustration out there with easy clichés like this one. Some garbage, strewn through a desert, and people in dire need of relieving themselves on their way leaving it to soil the earth. Oy vey. I wonder what the pioneers did.

We're lacking in emotional and spiritual wisdom when we make this kind of argument. It suggests we're not up to date in humanity, contemporarily or historically. It's a treacherously naive concept of existence. Sound bites and clichés thrive in societies of simpletons. Clichés can serve as tools in expressing our world, but not to move beyond them, to say that they are the end-all or that newer tools aren't required, suggests a stagnant world without insistence on growth of understanding. No doubt ease is an asset in communicating. But it's a liability when you sacrifice precision or respect for real complexity. That's what bothers me with this email.

Are we taking part in deep discussions or just enamored with pace and simplicity so that exploration means only synthesizing sound bites? Do we send such drivel as these pictures and cursory narrative as a dull tool to make a point because it's the limit of our articulation? Is fresh, creative, complex writing rhetorically ineffective because readers, like us getting this, can't or won't spend time for that which is deep or difficult? I hope not.

I have deleted the pictures below. They don't tell the whole story. Furthermore, they are, it appears, taken from the Snopes site which says the materials (e.g. pictures) can't be used without permission. I also note the originator's CYA at the end of his message. I don't wonder why he/she needs to put it there.

Be Kind

2010-05-16T16:31:00.001-06:00

A woman once cleaned out her attic. Once? A woman? What way is that to start writing and thinking, anyway?

While it's true that a woman once did clean out her attic, it's more likely that many women have cleaned out attics, although I don't myself recall ever having cleaned out an attic while I have been married. Oh, and incidentally, I'm not a woman, but a man. And I suppose just as many men have cleaned out attics as women, although I'm not sure anyone has gather statistics on the notion.

We --- my family and I --- cleaned out an attic once when I was a kid. When I was twelve, my parents bought this older house that was next door to my grandparents' house. The house had been owned by a couple, the Dunns, who had a couple of boys. Don't ask me the boys' names. The Dunns were both alcoholics and as a consequence of their debauchery had been threatened I guess by the bank with losing their house. Therefore they had had to sell it at a bargain. My parents had found out about it and purchased it.

Consequently, there was a lot of work to be done to make this house suitable for our family of five to live in.

At the time we moved to the house next to my grandparents' I was twelve years old.

I can remember that it had an attic in it that we never really ended up using. However, the former owners had stored a bunch of stuff in the attic --- for all I know my parents had also stored stuff up there, but if they did I was unaware of it --- and we had hauled it out and burned it.

So, I guess I have been involved in cleaning an attic.

Anyway, the person who wrote the introduction to Natalie Goldberg's book, Writing Down the Bones, talks about cleaning out her grandmother's attic and finding a motto encased in a picture frame that said to do your work as well as you could and to be kind, or something to that effect. She laughed over the motto, thinking the two messages incongruous, but then later the motto made perfect sense to her.

So much of writing is self-discovery and the exploration of what a person wants to know more intricately. However, the exercise can be daunting and can cause you not to want to write anything at all. Let's face it, it's easier to be fed thoughts by others, to be spoonfed and entertained. We grow fatter because we are lazy and we have grown accustomed to not have to think or exercise our brain as well as our body.

According to the introduction of said book, to be valuable writing needs to be sane, clear-hearted, solid, practical, vital, and honest so that it makes you want to cry. According to it, that is what writing has when it is good.

I'm not sure I agree. Sane? I'm not sure good writing has to be sane. Maybe over all it has to be sane, but can't it have snippets of insanity? It seems to me it can. And then some of the other descriptors just seem a little vague. Clear-hearted. What does that even mean. It's too cardiac for me to really understand. Isn't a clear heart something we want to avoid? You know, it's just better to have your heart pumping blood than to be clear, and blood is anything but clear. Solid. Well, sometimes solid writing is good. But I've also seen loose writing that's good. A nice haiku. I don't know, I guess I'm just too picky.

Well, be kind. I agree with that sentiment. I aspire to that sentiment. Some might say it is even a flaw for me. I'm too kind, they say, but they have only instances in mind. You see, many think I'm an enabler. Truth be known, somebody probably thinks you are an enabler also.

More Rambling Than Needed

2010-05-06T16:24:00.002-06:00

Seems like I'm an old man stuck in a rut, who doesn't have a cell phone or any of the typical diversions of retirement. I don't play golf, have season tickets for a sports team, or volunteer my services because I have too much time on my hands. In fact, I'm probably more intellectually engaged at this point in my life than ever before. At the same time, I'm not physically fit; I don't go to the gym, take walks, lift weights, and I don't go to the pond or walk up and down the river to fish. I don't have a boat, a four-wheeler, or a snowmobile. Not only that, I don't want them either.

What I do have that I enjoy is a nice computer and a larger-sized Amazon Kindle. I have a guillotine paper cutter that allows me to cut the backs off of books and I have a nice high-speed scanner that allows me to feed the sheets of the books through it and convert the text in them to electronic form. There's something empowering about being able to carry a library with you or to know that the books that you have acquired over your lifetime can be held on a computer or on a couple of DVDs.

I don't have other vices common to people: I don't drink alcohol, smoke, do drugs, engage in illicit sex, or feel the need to tan myself in tanning salons or to tattoo or pierce myself to improve my look, but I'm not saying I am good looking, not at all. Maybe I should get some tattoos and a few piercings and it would improve things. Just kidding.

As I've said, I'm probably more engaged --- at least within my mind --- in philosophy, in reading, and writing, and other venues such as politics and religion than ever before. I am more questioning and less settled that I was in my youth. While I feel self-assured, I do not feel certain about most things. For me, faith is more meaningful than certainty. Part of all that results from having experienced marriage all this time with my one faithful and true wife, and raising four wonderful, challenging, beautiful, exasperating children.

My Rant For Today

2010-05-06T15:59:00.000-06:00

You've got to remember such things as Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials and what he said there. The people don't want war but can be easily lead there. He said that leaders determine the policy and drag the people along no matter what type of government it is. In essence, he said people are stupid and blindly follow the leaders they follow without checking things out or thinking things through. And, according to him, that's true in a democracy where people have a vote or in a dictatorship where they don't. He said all you have to do is threaten them with being attacked and then you can denounce pacifists for not being patriots and thereby exposing the country to danger.

If you do that, remember the words of Hermann Goering, evil man though he was, it shouldn't be too difficult to recognize the danger in all of the hysteria of the Tea Party Movement. Not all of it, but a lot of it, a lot of those people are, as has been often described, wingnuts. It's as if they are taking the advice of Goering and trying to lead the people down the proverbial rat hole. Their hysteria would have our nation on the brink of calamity and unutterable disaster if they don't get to conceal their forty-five and carry a weapon --- I'm sure some would say they should be able to carry a nuclear bomb as a weapon to defend themselves and the imperiled nation --- to shoot somebody with when they have to pay tax on their cigarettes or whatever else they don't agree with.

Arizona's Law Isn't Racist; the Bulk of Its Citizens Are

2010-04-29T12:11:00.003-06:00

This is my response to an editorial by Doug Gibson, in the Ogden Standard Examiner.

The majority of Arizona citizens are racists.

I agree with Doug that Arizona's law is the wrong solution to a neglected problem. And he is right, the law is not racist. However, a savvy opponent to his point of view doesn't claim that the law is racist or Nazi-like. Laws, per se, aren't racists or Nazi-like; laws have no volition. They can't act. They aren't moral agents. People can be and are racists and Nazi-like and do have volition. People, like Doug, are racist in suggesting that such a law won't lead to racism. It will.

My dictionary gives two definitions of racism: First is the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. Second is that racism amounts to discrimination or prejudice based upon race.

We, as citizens of the U.S., through our less-than-wonderful elected representatives who have allowed themselves far too often to be prompted and influenced by big (and, to a lesser extent, small) businesses' lobbying efforts for many years, have caused the problem. We citizens had for decades before our recent financial meltdown tempted the residual humanity of Third World countries to flee harsh and often dangerous conditions and corruption where they lived to come the U.S. because their coming here so was beneficial to us. Truth, be known, it still is beneficial from an economic perspective.

Further, we U.S. citizens, through our elected representatives who are so easily influenced by powerful money-brokers and influential lobbyists, didn't adequately oversee, through regulation and adequate funding, the enforcement of adequate laws and regulations over our financial and business markets so that we collectively got robbed and bilked. If you don't lock the car doors and have the police patrolling, you invite trouble and break-ins. Their incidence increases.

Now, while we're still licking our wounds from the resulting downturn in the markets and the loss of jobs, we citizens, who, having gotten, through our own neglect, all of these alien folks here, the bulk of whom demographically look different from the bulk of us, now want them gone. So we start enacting such inane laws as Arizona's.

In Utah, county records show undocumented immigrants are not big criminals over against citizens and documented immigrants. So, are all undocumented immigrants criminals? Many claim they are. They say “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” inferring that they're criminals. We hear that all the time. For people who actually do some thinking, though, who see murder and rape and those types of crimes in a different league than illegal crossings and document fraud, such easy answers don't prove a thing. Citizens race up and down the roads and highways way faster than the posted speed limits all of the time. They run red lights and litter. But we don't consider ourselves criminals for doing so. Our acts don't hurt people the way criminals' actions do. The illegal-border crossers --- many who have been here most or a good share of their lives, including some 2.5 million children nationwide --- who live in a given area don't cripple a community. Rapists, murderers, and violent gang members do that.

That's not to say people who cross without documents never rape, murder, or get involved with violent gangs. Some do. But in Utah from 2004 to 2008, the number of undocumented immigrants increased 57 percent. During that time, undocumented state prisoners increased 10 percent. So the facts show that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants coming here obey our laws once they're here; they're not a main source of crime, not any more than citizens or documented immigrants are.

So, we citizens of the United States have gotten these desperate folks from other places here to do our dishes, etc., and for the most part these folks work hard, obey our laws, pay taxes, and contribute to our society. But then, when we, who have power and control, have a financial and employment crisis of our own making, a state like Arizona starts taking national immigration matters into its own hands, against the advice of experts galore. In a sense, we as a citizenry have made these folks our new-age, new-style slaves. They have no voice, no power, and, increasingly, no life.

Doug asks can a state take action when the federal government won't. Truthfully, states and federal governments don't ever take action. People do. We deflect our responsibility by talking like this. It's not Arizona who will be enforcing the subject law. It is real people. Flawed people. As such, they will be making judgments that inevitably will, in some instances, lead to discrimination or prejudice based upon race. Racism.

Doug makes a specious argument when he refers to Arizona spending billions in educating children of undocumented immigrants (he, or course, doesn't know if such children might be U.S. citizens or not), because he also fails to mention the taxes and the economic contributions such undocumented families make. Undocumented immigrants pay taxes, directly and indirectly, just like anybody else, only they don't benefit from the graces awarded to citizens in our tax system. Furthermore, they buy goods and services, just like citizens do. Doug also makes another false argument when he talks about a violent gang using Arizona as a conduit for human and drug smuggling, failing to mention our failure as citizens to elect national representatives and a president who will adequately work with other nations to resolve international issues such as the toleration of corruption in their governments. Of course, it's hard, because we citizens have tolerated such corruption in our own elected officials, and now we reap what we have sewn.

The fact that most Americans support anything, as in Doug saying that most Americans support the Arizona law, doesn't mean that what they support is right, moral, or the smart thing to do. In the years before the civil rights movement, there were many times when most Americans supported segregation, too. Same with Nazism. So was it right? Nah. The majority of people in the South supported slavery? Did that make it any less barbarous?

So Doug essentially admits the Arizona law in question is flawed; it wasn't Arizona's place to act; it only did so in frustration, and its law doesn't really do what's needed. Yet, he goes on defending it: it's only there because the U.S. didn't do what it should have [the citizens didn't]; it's more mild than what others on the national level are, in part, proposing; it doesn't require officials to harass [harassing was misspelled in the article] law-abiders (from your viewpoint, a Latino standing on the street, ostensibly doing nothing wrong, could very well be "illegal" (undocumented) and, therefore, not law-abiding).

Why not tell it like it is, Doug? We failed. Now we're desperate. Citizens in Arizona are desperate.

You and me and ever single citizen failed.

We failed in the past to elect representatives who would enact necessary laws relative to immigration to protect us and to protect immigrants, too, and we failed to fund the laws on the books and to enforce them because we were, in an ugly way, benefiting from our omissions. So now, Arizona --- actually, the citizens of Arizona --- gets to take out our failings, our collective immorality in treating these people as our new-age slaves --- who are slaves here willingly because, in contrast to the dire lives they lived, it is still better for them --- on these very people who have no voice and no standing except through us, and often, in comparison to us, live such simple lives, and can only speak out at the risk of an arrest, deportation, and losing everything they've been working on for years, and perhaps even losing their very lives?

I think we can all agree we don't want criminals here, maybe even especially undocumented ones. I agree that compromise is necessary. But I deplore the idea of a spreading plague of Arizona-like immigrant law virus because it causes us to be racists, to prefer our collective demographic over something else, largely on the basis of race and color.

A Day with Little Accomplished, but Oh What a Day!

2010-04-24T20:21:00.000-06:00

It has been a long day with little accomplished. In our lives it seems like there are far too many days like that. Well, perhaps I shouldn't use the word 'our,' but 'my.' But seriously, doesn't it seem like some days are just wasted.

However, once you start contemplating it, no day is truly wasted. No day you can experience the phenomenal aspects of living and sensing the data that is out there for you or me to enjoy is wasted. Can anyone adequately capture the wonder of the human eye and what it is capable of capturing in vision? Or the sounds, whether it's the chirp of the bird at the end of the day saying goodnight, the hum of the fan in the computer keeping things from getting too heated, or the sound of the television in the other room.

Not only do we experience the sensory data our faculties collect, but we are able to analyze it and integrated into our lives. So I am so thankful even though it wasn't the best of days, and it seems I didn't accomplish much of anything at all.

A Second Home?

2010-04-22T19:41:00.001-06:00

I didn't notice any screen doors on the houses up there, and there certainly was no wind. I guess screen doors aren't that popular anymore are they? I didn't see any. They say it doesn't blow much in the valley up there, but it is located in Wyoming, and Wyoming is known for its wind, isn't it? However, situated in a valley sitting at over 6000 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains of even greater heights, I guess it's true, it doesn't blow much up there. That's good because it gets cold --- I read it gets down to forty-six degrees below zero --- and, as the real estate agent from the valley told us, the snow in the valley gets high enough to reach the butt of a tall Indian. (Indian, as a Native American, I take she meant. It's too cold and the snow is too deep up there for political correctness.)

This late in the year there is still snow on the ground, deeper, of course, on the north side of buildings. The daffodils and crocuses are still asleep. Some places, there is lots of snow there. The day we were there looking, it was nice, though, and I didn't need a coat or anything, and I didn't wear a hat, although, somehow that makes you feel somewhat naked and unmanly up there.

It was a nice leisurely day. In the small town we visited it looked like there was only a couple of places to eat, none of them the familiar fast-food outlets of cities. We ate at a small place that served Mexican food --- well, American style Mexican food, I guess, although its proprietor looked like he was a Latino. It seemed like he had no accent and spoke perfect English. And he was a perfect gentleman.

People were folksy, and the real estate experts were about as friendly and helpful as you can imagine. They gave us some attractive properties to look at and to consider. So in the last few days we've spent more than an inordinate amount of time gawking at things on the Internet, considering our finances, contemplating the logistics of it all, and vacillating back and forth in making a decision relative to our next step.

An artist had taken up residence in one of the houses we witnessed, and it was nicely decorated and well kept. One house was situated between a house where the tenants were abusers of animals --- a couple of poor hound dogs had been confined to a space in the backyard that was barren and filthy, with a pile of crap two feet deep in the corner. The house on the other side bore a number of stars on its exterior walls. Its owners, who we were told were quite wealthy, must've thought to replicate the Milky Way.

Stinking Rumination

2010-04-10T22:16:00.002-06:00

It's funny --- well, kind of funny, how life passes by. I'm tempted to say, how life passes me by, but then I realize it hasn't passed me by; it just is. I don't grab parts of it I want to and make the most of them, I guess. I suppose nobody does. Or rather, I don't bother to grab what I think I want, and then I grouse mentally about it. That's probably pretty universal. I suppose, to be completely honest (is there anything that is truly completely honest), I grab pretty much what I want. The trouble is, reflecting upon it all is sometimes very discouraging and depressing. It doesn't seem like very much gets accomplished that I want to get accomplished. It is so difficult to quit comparing myself to other people and their massive accomplishments. And the problem with that is that I focus on those who have excelled, not on ones that have merely struggled along or have even failed.

Spring is such a phenomenal time of the year. It's fun to watch the ongoing development of massive reproduction in the world --- the robins dancing around in pairs, gathering twigs and whatever else it takes to make a nest. Same with the magpies and other birds.

It seems like the birds are most noticeable, but all life begins to stir. The trees. We even have some green trees now. The willow-like ones. I really ought to find out what they are. But not right now. Maybe later. Anyway, they're the first with leaves on their branches. The sugar maples will be budding, and the Gambel oak. Around here, they call it scrub oak. It's the predominant tree in the yard. The one tree I see the most of out in the backyard.

I ought to figure out how many varieties of different trees I can see out in the yard and in the surrounding yards, the ones that border our yard. I ought to at least know the names of all those types of trees. It seems like it ought to be in bare minimum.

At 2:30 AM on Easter morning I got up to go to the bathroom. No sooner had I gone out the bedroom door and headed toward the bathroom down the hallway than Asia stood up, hurried past me, and started running down the hall growling, and went through the kitchen and out the dog door. I went into the bathroom to do my business.

As I sat there, I was amazed that what I was passing was smelling so --- rigorous? --- and it made me start wondering what was the matter with my. My stomach wasn't hurting, and I hadn't eaten anything to account for the peculiar smell. As soon as I opened up the bathroom door, though, I knew exactly what had happened. Asia had gone outside, encountered a skunk, been sprayed, and had come back in the house.

I went back down the hall and into the bedroom where Shelley said something was wrong with the dog. Asia had ran into the bed and into the wall, as if she couldn't see. I turned on the light to see her --- the dog, that is --- and Asia was on her doggie pillow, foaming at the mouth. She had definitely been sprayed by a skunk. The funny --- poor choice of words, I know --- thing about the whole thing was that the smell in the house was very very strong, but it didn't smell so much like what a skunk smells like that you usually smell when one comes into the neighborhood. It was somehow very different. VERY different.

I hurried to give Asia a bath, and Shelley consulted her greyhound book, trying to find out what to do when a greyhound gets sprayed by a skunk. The first thing it said was not let the greyhound come back into the house. We laughed at that, even though it was so late, and we were tired and the intrusiveness of the situation was so very frustrating and aggravating. We knew we had family coming for Easter lunch and we had a lot to do to get ready. Yet now we had the smell in the house, and we had to do something about Asia.

Anyway, I took Asia to the bathroom, put her in the bathtub, and gave her a shower/bath. I didn't use anything on her --- no shampoo, no soap, no other chemicals. I just sprayed her off with warm water as well as I could, dried her, and let her go back in on the bedroom pillow.

The next day Shelley read about how Asia should be bathed in hydrogen peroxide, I believe it was. Early the morning Shelley began calling --- well, as early as Shelley dared --- our sleeping children on a weekend. She told them what had happened and told them they didn't need to come to be our guests for Easter lunch and if they didn't want to. Amy said she would come with her family and I think Mike was a little noncommittal.

I don't know how much we slept after the late-night encounter. Perhaps the smell had enhanced our sleep, for all I know. Maybe it's just luck we ever woke up again. I know that I did drift back off to sleep and slept okay for a few hours.

By morning, we were fairly accustomed to the smell. Kiele woke up and she didn't even know anything had ever happened until we told her about it.

Norman was the first person to show up on Easter, sometime afternoon but not quite one o'clock, when we were scheduled to begin having guests arrive. He was just checking in to see how we were doing and seeing what was going on. We were glad to see him and to hear about his trip to see his friend, Cory, in Arizona. He could smell the stench of a skunk, but it wasn't offputting enough to drive him away, and he stayed and enjoyed the meal with us.

Oh, did I mention that Easter Sunday was also general conference? Well, it was. And it isn't a joke to say that it was the stinkiest general conference we ever experienced in our home. To tell the truth, we were so busy, we didn't really get to listen to much of Sunday conference. We'll check it out later. I understand it was actually pretty good, especially morning session.

Today is my brother's birthday. Happy birthday, brother, wherever you are. I wish you well, and wish I could be more for you.

The Chosen One

2010-04-10T17:17:00.000-06:00

Talk about a thrilling scenario. The one Carol Lynch Williams has carved out for this novel's protagonist is a very compelling one.

Kyra, the novel's first-person narrator, is a girl growing up in a polygamist community in contemporary America. Presumably, she lives someplace near or on the Arizona/Utah border. Hence, the landscape is stark and barren and unusually hot, as it seems are the hearts and minds of those who control the religious lives of the polygamous people who live there. This is a story that explores the implications of faith at the extremes of blind obedience and the use of ostracization of community as a tool in implementing such extremes in obedience.

Lynch throws this delicate, young girl, Kyra, who is just thirteen-years-old and who takes risks to be able to read books, directly into a boiling pot of incredible religious expectation and conflict for her and her family.

After all this time since reading it, I can still see Kyra --- because of Carol Lynch Williams's incredible ability as a writer --- sitting in the branches of a tall tree in that barren landscape reading, reading and gathering information about the wider world, reading and finding in the stories she read inspiration to resist evil designs of power-hungry, delusional men that were ruining people's lives in the community where she lived and who wanted to ruin Kyra's and their families' lives, too.

I can't believe I hadn't added this novel to my list of books read on Goodreads. I read it some time ago, although I don't remember exactly when now. I read it before I went to listen to Carol Lynch Williams speak at the League of Utah Writers Roundup writing conference last fall. I had intended to do a review of it back then. However, completing it escaped me, even though the story and Lynch's incredible writing has not.

I grew up in Utah and have been exposed to the culture there throughout my lifetime, even during periods of absence from there. The history of polygamy permeates the entire history and culture of Mormon people whether they live there or not, even though polygamy is not widely practiced anymore among Mormons, and even though it is now viewed widely by the hierarchy of the mainstream Mormon church as almost a forbidden topic.

Many years ago, after returning to Utah after living in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in Idaho, my wife and I encountered a friend of ours. He told us that his wife --- who is related to my wife --- was leaving him for an older polygamist. That meant that this friend's children would be ripped from a monogamous marriage and exposed to the polygamous culture and its extreme religious views.

It was heart-wrenching for me to realize my friend would lose his family, and not just lose them in the regular, everyday divorce-and-move-on scenario that is so commonplace. But he would lose them also to a culture of closemindedness and blind obedience. I began writing my own story relative to the expectations of polygamy and the whole dynamic of its intrusion into regular lives and the expectations of its blind obedience. Polygamy always posed in my mind unseemly expectations, perpetrated by men who, it seemed to me, were operating with ulterior and evil motivations rather than the motivations they suggested came from God. Things haven't changed in that regard for me.

Some of my highlights from reading the book:

"I am warmed to the teeth at my father's smile. My good father. I REMEMBER sitting on my father's lap."

"That's all I'm not allowed to read anything but the Bible."

"... that everyone in the world is wrong, and just The Chosen Ones are right... there are so few of us and billions of them."

"We don't speak of that," Mother says. Her face turns pink. "That is sacred. Never meant for anyone but a husband and his wife."

"Satan is in what we read, if we read anything the scriptures."

"Prophet Childs moves into the trailer, taking up all the good air. I actually wince, then moved behind Father."

"At last I can breathe the air that isn't coming between clenched teeth."

"We walk toward the light in the house and the girl."

All I can say is that Kyra found release from her dire situation in her disobedience to those generally accepted as authority figures in her culture and environment. Sometimes it is more righteous to be disobedient than obedient. Sometimes it is more important to act than to be acted upon.

The Intimidating Library

2010-04-02T16:00:00.001-06:00

You know how libraries are: intimidating.

So many books, at least in big libraries; you could never read them all. So much information. So much opinion. So many pictures and diagrams. Things to listen to and watch.

I could never read them all, not with the time I have left and with my inclinations to do something else. But there's a lot there in a library. A lot to learn. A lot to contemplate. A lot of varying opinion.

The trouble is, after you go to the library you come home and think about all the things you missed in your life by not being able to read all those books. You think of all the time you wasted when you were younger, and all the time you wasted when you were not so young. It can be depressing.

And then, on top of that, people are coming along every day wanting to add to the library stores, publishing books they think should add to the collection, or replace something else there.

Maybe all of this is why I don't go to the library too often to check books or other materials out. I know I should, but the truth of the matter is that I have a pretty good library right here at home, one that is fully capable of intimidating me and making me realize how little I know. So I don't need to get in the car, navigate my way down to the library, and become depressed thinking how little I know and how much is out there to know.

No, I'm perfectly content to sit here and to utilize the content of the library I have here at home, the one I have been slowly working on converting to e-data. Well, most of the time, that is. Sometimes I'm up to a little intimidation and depression.

Envy

2010-03-31T19:36:00.003-06:00

I do a little writing. Sometimes, too little. I should do more. We all should.

There are few people interested in what I write. Mostly, it's those who have to listen to what I write, because I take it to critiquing group, and there are usually five other people there who write who in exchange for my criticism of their writing give their criticism of my writing. Otherwise, they wouldn't read it either. A few people have purchased my book, Making Expression Less Taxing, a Freelancer's Tax Resource. Whether they read it or not is another matter altogether. My editor read it all; I paid her to help me out.

Writers, even quite prolific ones, probably never reached the type of audience they dreamed of. There are exceptions, of course, like some of the best sellers. I'm pretty sure JK Rowling and Stephanie Myer are examples.

Over the years, I have been in a critiquing group. Many aspiring writers have come and gone in that group. I am the only one who remains of the original five or six individuals who started the group. I don't know how much those other individuals write now. My friend, Doug, was one of the more talented individuals who started with the group to begin with. He was published in some historical journals and, perhaps, some other places. He stopped coming to critiquing when he signed up for a screenwriting course at the University of Utah. He utilized a manuscript he had been working on in our critiquing group to create a screenplay. He entered the screenplay after it was completed in the Slamdance screenwriting contest. The contest is sponsored, as I understand it, by Sundance Film Festival. He won and subsequently tried to market his screenplay, although he didn't have the luck he hoped to have because he became affiliated with someone who was devastated because of the downturn in the economy.

I'm not aware of others until recently who have published anything who have participated in the critiquing group, although there may be some. Oh, as I say that, I remember one person --- Julie --- besides the one I was thinking of telling you about next. Julie published a story she brought to our critiquing group in the LDS church publication, The Friend. There are probably other individuals who had success, too, and I just don't remember or know about it.

Now I want to mention Matt. Several months ago, perhaps even as much as a year or so ago, Matt obtained an agent who ended up selling his second novel --- Matt writes for children and young adults --- to Scholastic. The book, known during the days that it was being fed to us at critiquing sessions, was The Fiddler's Grimoire. Now it is known as The Clockwork Three. It will be released on October 1, 2010. Matt will be headed out to New York next week to be with all the important people relative to its publication and release.

This whole background now brings me to the reason for this posting. Envy. They say that envy will knock at your door and beg you to let it in. It will use every conceivable enticement to have you let it in and turn you green, including begging.

I don't see it that way. It doesn't seem to affect me that way. Maybe it would have in my younger years. For one thing, Matt is a young man and I am an old one --- well, relatively. (Old, that is, not manly.) My dreams these days don't go to being a big, published, and recognized author. That all sounds just wonderful, but it also sounds like a lot of work and effort, too. And I am retired. And in case you haven't tried it, someday you ought to. It's awesome. However, it isn't that compatible with being a new, published author anticipating big things.

So, I don't think envy has much play in the success I see Matt having and anticipating over against my lack of success. They say also a writer should displace their envy of another writer with hard work and produce something of publishable quality. I hope I'll do that, but I'm not looking forward to all the implications of being successfully published, including all of the work.

But I guess I could make an exception, if somebody offers me big bucks and a platform.

Not that they will. :-)

The History of Words

2010-03-29T16:39:00.001-06:00

You can drive yourself nuts thinking about things too much. I got to thinking about the history of a word. I wasn't thinking of a specific word, but of the notion of any particular word having a history. It was all stirred up by Emily Dickinson. I happen to read one of her poems, "There Is No Frigate Like a Book", and it stirred up all this bother about the etymology of words. It's rather intimidating to think about. Take the word "intimidating." How did it originate, how many times has it been said, in what circumstances? It boggles the mind to even think about it. It makes my short history and life seems so insignificant, somehow. Even though I know that my life isn't insignificant, thinking about that history of a single word like "intimidating" almost makes it so.

What a Life I Have

2010-03-14T22:58:00.003-06:00

What a life I have. Retired. Enough money to live on. Enough money to have what I want, which it doesn't seem like is a lot, but compared to so many others it must be considered a vast fortune. And yet some may think, and I admit I often do, too, that I don't do very much with what I have, and my life isn't that meaningful or productive, and that I don't have that much stuff. At least people in my neighborhood, in my state, in my country might say that. But they don't know what they're talking about if they say something like that; they don't know what the world is really like and how much poverty there is out there and how very rich and blessed I am.
How do you measure something like that anyway --- how well off I am? I don't know, but it seems to me like I have it extremely good. I do pretty much what I want to do, hermit that I am, and I kind of like it that way. I'm always trying to learn something new and push my understanding out there further than it is. Yet I would say that I remain relatively ignorant. I think I am rather slow-witted when it comes to intelligence and lacking when it comes to creative powers. It is difficult for me to find "flow." Some of that probably is innate and some of that is probably because I haven't necessarily applied myself like maybe I could, like maybe I should.
Today we visited another congregation, the congregation of a friend who was returning from doing work for the church across the ocean but not too far away. It was fun to see something different for a change, another congregation, other folks, and to listen to our friends report about what they had been doing the last year, to listen to them delight in their activity, but also to listen to them convey how happy they were to be back home again. As I listened to them, I sensed how very hard they had worked and applied themselves to what they were doing, and I sensed also the great satisfaction they had in so serving. I'm glad for them; I'm happy they enjoyed themselves. They are better people for it.
I am happy too. Although I don't probably do as much as I could do or should do, I'm not going to beat myself up because of what little I do do. I'm not totally content, but I never have been my whole life, and I will plod along and do what I can and see if I can improve even if it's a little bit, realizing that over a lifetime of sixty-one years --- well, almost 62 years --- I am the person I am; I do the things I do. But I have improved. I have learned. I know so much now compared to what I did when I was born it is almost hard to imagine how much I have learned and grown and experienced. Have others done better? Certainly. Have others done worse? Certainly. But I have to measure myself in terms of myself and consider that I am who I am and try to find some solace in all of that.

My Stroke of Insight

2010-03-14T18:58:00.005-06:00

Jill Bolte Taylor is a scientist, a brain scientist. She has a PhD and has written a book published by Viking, My Stroke of Insight, a Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. It was published in 2006.

One of the fellows --- actually, the only other fellow --- in our --- I say our because both Shelley and I attend --- reading group chose the book. He had had, like Jill Bolte Taylor, a stroke, and wanted to read the book to compare notes, I guess. Anyway, we read the book and I have it finished now and plan to discuss it with the reading group tomorrow night.

Reading the book and gaining insight from a brain scientist who had had a severe stroke on the left side of her brain was quite interesting, particularly because my focus in the last few weeks has been on time. Not on time as in timely, but as in the nature of time itself. What is it? All about that.

Anyway, Taylor told about her experience having the stroke, what it was like, and what she could do in the midst of it, but also about her recovery and how she thinks her experience might help both those who have similar experiences and those who are caregivers and family of individuals who have strokes.

One of the reasons I was looking at time in the first place was because of its relationship to free will, the ability or discretion to choose. That subject came up as I attend church a few Sundays ago when I suggested that the infallible foreknowledge of the future, which some people propound characterizes, in part, God, is incompatible with, it seems to me and to other individuals with similar beliefs, free will. At least one other individual in the classroom that day was also interested in the apparent incompatibility and tried to keep the conversation going without any success, as usual. At the point where people differ as to the opinion about the subject matter or at the point where someone says they don't know the answer to the question, the notion of going on with that is invariably seen as contentious. And, in the congregation I attend, and probably in the church I attend in general, dismissing something as contentious is about as dismissive a tactic as is possible. Anyway, hence came my interest in time over against the notion of free will.

As I was reading Taylor's book, I was keenly interested in both of these concepts: time and free will. I will say this much. She made apparent, at least to me, that her conception of time and free will during her stroke were intact, if I read her correctly.

Here are some of the interesting citations I notated. The first one doesn't have to much to do with either of the subjects of time or free will.

Most of the different types of cells in our body die and are replaced every few weeks or months. However, neurons, the primary cell of the nervous system, do not multiply (for the most part) after we are born. That means that the majority of the neurons in your brain today are as old as you are.

The next one has a subtle reference to time:

My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.

"Peace is only a thought away." Another thought I appreciated was:

I desperately needed people to treat me as though I would recover completely.

Not anything on time or free will there but nonetheless a sensitive and caring God.

I noticed significant improvement in my brain's ability to learn and function for eight full years post-stroke, at which point I decided my mind and body totally recovered.

This next one goes it seems to me to free will and the notion of time.

I needed the people around me to believe in the plasticity of my brain and its ability to grow, learn, and recover.

One of the points Taylor made over and over again was the necessity of getting plenty of asleep during her recovery. She indicated that she needed far more sleep than she ever had after working hard on her recovery. She also stated the following:

... my brain needed to be protected, and isolated from obnoxious sensory stimulation, which it perceived as noise.

I was interested in the following:

I firmly believe that if I had been placed in a conventional rehabilitation center where I was forced to stay awake with the TV in my face, alert on Ritalin, and subjected to rehab on someone else's schedule, I would have chosen to zone out more and try less.

She said:

At the essence of my soul, I was the same spirit they loved.

There was this about encouragement and inspiration:

I needed people to celebrate the triumph so I made every day because my successes, no matter how small, inspired me.

She made it clear that it wasn't and effort that could be done on her own:

Part of getting out of my own way meant that I needed to welcome support, love, and help from others.

Along with that was this:

I needed people to come close and not be afraid of me.

And:

Extremely nervous, anxious or angry people were counterproductive to my healing.

This one seems directly involved with the notion of agency or free will:

I may not be in total control of what happens to my life, but I certainly am in charge of how I choose to perceive my experience.

So, for her it was a matter of choice and agency, her freely choosing to perceive a particular way and to act. In contrast she makes this observation:

Before the stroke, I believed I was a product of this brain and that I had minimal say about how I felt or what I thought. Since the hemorrhage, my eyes have been opened to how much choice I actually have about what goes on between my ears.

So her experiences belief. Before she had the stroke, she thought she had very little control, although, it's clear she wasn't thinking she had no control whatsoever. Afterward, however, she says her eyes and opened to how much choice she really had about what goes on in her head, in her brain, in her mind. They she made this observation that I liked.

My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world.

The word character in the preceding quotation is interesting. Character is defined as the mental or moral qualities distinctive to an individual. I'm not sure exactly what she means in this paragraph and how it relates to the notion of agency or free will. The next quotation is the following:

... these scientists identified the neuroanatomy underlying our ability to have religious or spiritual (mystical) experience.

This of course goes through the recent scientific studies that seem to have located a part of the brain associated with spiritual experience. It goes to the question of where in the brain we undergo a shift in consciousness away from individuality to a feeling that we are at one with God or the universe or whatever. Also relative to that:

First, there was a decrease in the activity of the left hemisphere language centers resulting in a silent scene of their (the subjects of the study) brain chatter. Second, there was a decrease in the activity in the orientation association area, located in the posterior parietal gyrus of the left hemisphere. This region of our left brain helps us identify our personal physical boundaries. When this area is inhibited or displays decreased input from our sensory systems, we lose sight of where we began and where we end relative to the space around us.

Here was another one of interest to me.

No matter what information is being processed (or not being processed) in my two hemispheres, I still experienced the collective of myself as a single entity with a single mind. I do believe that the consciousness we exhibit is the collective consciousness of whatever sells are functioning, and the bolt of our hemispheres complement one another as they create a single seamless perception of the world.

This is a really long quotation:

Some of us have nurtured both of our characters and are really good at utilizing the skills and personalities of both sides of our brain, allowing them to support, influence, and temporal one another as we live our lives. Others of us, however, are quite unilateral in our thinking -- either exhibiting extremely rigid thinking patterns that are analytically critical (extreme left brain), or we seldom connect to a common reality and spend most of our time "with their head in the clouds" (extreme right brain). Creating a healthy balance between our two characters enabled us to flexibility to remain cognitively flexible enough to welcome change (right hemisphere), and yet remain concrete enough to stay the path (left hemisphere).

This was a curious one relative to free will and time.

We are ultimately a product of our biology and environment. Consequently, I choose to be compassionate with others when I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around.

So there is an intermixture of free will and, it appears, determinism. Curious. Next:

Huh? Now that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. First of all, there is determinism, because she says that we're a product of biology and environment. Then she says she chooses compassion. How can you choose compassion if you're a product of biology and environment? That doesn't make any sense to me and it is confusing. Then there was this:

To monitor how things are going in my life, I pay very close attention to how things are flowing, or not flowing in the world around me. Depending on what I am attracting, I take responsibility for how things are going and consciously make adjustments along the way. This does not mean that I am in complete control of everything that happens to me. However, I am in control of how I choose to think and feel about those things. Even negative events can be perceived as valuable life lessons, if I'm willing to step to the right and experience the situation with compassion.

Well there seems to be some confusion. In the previous quotation, she indicates that we're products of our biology and environment. Yet above, she indicates that she had a choice. So there continues to be this tension, this confusion, this lack of clarity, just like the rest of us seem to have. It all goes back to the notion of time and whether everything is laid out and determined or if there is such a thing as free will.

On an energetic level, if I think about you, send good vibrations your way, hold you in the light, or pray for you, then I am consciously sending my energy to you with a healing intention. If I meditate over you or lay my hands upon your wound, then I am purposely directing the energy of my being to help you heal. How the arts of Reiki, Feng Shui, acupuncture, and prayer (to mention only a few) work remain pretty much medical mysteries. This is mostly because our what Raines and science have not yet successfully caught up with what we understand to be true about our right hemisphere functions. However, I believe our right minds are perfectly clear about how they intuitively perceive and interpret energy dynamics.

Here's another one:

Before my stroke, I thought I was a product of my brain and had no idea that I had some say about how I responded to the emotions surging through me. On an intellectual level, I realized that I could monitor a shift my cognitive thoughts, but it never dawned on me that I had some say in how I perceived my emotions. No one told me that Apple took ninety seconds for my biochemistry to capture, and then released me. What an enormous difference this awareness has made and how I live my life.

So the deterministic elements only works for something like ninety seconds and then were free again. But then she makes a statement like the following:

Ultimately, everything we experience is a product of our cells and their circuitry.

There's that word "product" again. We are a product of our cells. Isn't that akin to fatalism or determinism? It seems to me that it is. How about this?

To experience pain may not be a choice, but to suffer is a cognitive decision.

Or how about this one?

As an independent agent, I and I alone, in conjunction with the molecular genius of my DNA and the environmental factors I am exposed to, will decorate this space within my cranium. In the early years, I may have minimal input into what circuits grow inside my brain because I am a product of the dirt and seeds I have inherited. But to add good fortune, the genius of our DNA is not a dictator, and thanks to our neurons' plasticity, the power of thought, and the wonders of modern medicine, very few outcomes are absolute.

Wow! That's one you have to read and think about for a while. So there is this interplay between the determined and between the and determined self somehow, and it all suggests free agency. Free agency amidst determinism. Hmmm. Then there is this:

Your body is the life force power of some 50 trillion molecular geniuses. You and you alone choose moment by moment who and how you want to be in the world.... Own your power and show up for your life.

Hallelujah! I'm all for that. Just one more:

Own your power and show up for your life.

That one needs to be said twice.

The Hunger Games

2010-03-10T16:30:00.001-07:00

It's been a couple weeks now since I finished this book. I liked it. It explored some interesting themes that I like to contemplate: liberty, self-sufficiency, cooperation, loyalty, manipulation, exploitation, power, love, and envy come readily to mind, among others.

I believe it represents the best of commercial fiction. Of course, that's a rather evident observation given the rate at which it is selling and has been selling for quite some time now. It is fast-paced and its protagonist, Katniss, is in peril almost all the while. (Well, let me amend that to say all the while.) There's a nice set up even at the resolution for a sequel. It has a nice, conventional story arc.

Targeted at young adults, it taps the dystopian feature of many successful science-fiction/fantasy narratives. Two of my favorites are The Giver and The Road. I like them both better than this book, though. Of course, the former is targeted at the same audience as is this book, whereas, the latter is not.

I liked the main character, Katniss. She had many dimensions and was capable of introspection and compromise. She was nicely textured. I didn't like the set-up so much. It was contrived and manipulative. Furthermore, for me, the outcome seemed quite obvious and predictable. It's not that there weren't surprises along the way; there were, but the overall outcome seemed quite clear. On the other hand, there were some nice surprises along the way.

High School Graduation Rates

2010-03-07T16:18:00.001-07:00

The other day in the newspaper they had an article about high school graduation rates, listing the graduation rates of some of the worst cities in the nation. As I recall, some cities were below a forty percent graduation rate and many bigger cities were around that figure. I just couldn't believe it. It seemed so astonishing to me. It doesn't comport with my experience when I graduated and so for days now I've been intending to look up the graduation rates here where I live in Utah and where I was a youth I graduated.

I was pleased to see that overall Utah graduation rates are high. In the school district where I graduated more than forty years ago, ninety-two percent of the enrolled students graduated. The lowest graduation rates were in Ogden, where the rate was only sixty-three percent, which is quite low, it seems to me. Also, in Salt Lake, the graduation rate was sixty-nine percent. So, I guess my astonishment at the low graduation rates reflects some of my naïveté when it comes to understanding what is happening in other places.

In Utah there is a disparity between the number of whites who graduate and the number of people of color who graduate. Like he does have a tougher time. The most recent rates indicate that they graduate about seventy percent of the enrolled individuals within their ranks. Individuals with limited English proficiency graduated at about the rate of sixty percent. Blacks graduated at seventy-seven percent. People with disabilities graduated at eighty percent. Whites graduated at ninety-one percent.

Utah does a lot with the resources it devotes to education. On the other hand, Utahans do a lot despite the fact that they are limited in the resources devoted to education. I am firmly for upgrading the pay of teachers and the amounts of money and resources devoted to education, both in the public schools and in the public institutions of higher learning.

Spring Is Coming

2010-03-07T16:01:00.001-07:00

It's one of those days when the sky is a solid sheet of light gray. There is no color in it at all. It's not a dark gray; it's light, very light, but not white. There is no blue, no other color. The clouds up there are blocking out the blue. And there isn't much contrast, either. Maybe a little bit, but not very much at all. It's more like a solid shield of gray that the tops of the trees contrast with.

Off in the distance, I see the roof lines of a couple of houses. Mostly, however, I see the bare branches of the Gambels oak trees. I suppose if you studied the patterns of those branches long enough and hard enough you could find some symmetry or design in them. However, the cursory looks and attention that I give them, leads to no such symmetries or design. Yet, somehow, their patterns against the sky brings some comfort and artistic beauty within my soul. I can't explain it or rationalize it; perhaps I could but doing so would somehow make it less meaningful and moving.

In the days ahead, the branches will begin to reveal their hidden secret, the new growth that hides within them. Life will begin to burst forth from them, the yellows mixed with blues that will slowly evolve to solid green that will not be so solid if you look closely at it. I can see the first imaginings of the buds within those branches now.

Such life, such hidden color, rests within each of us, waiting to get out.

The Ramblings of a Mad Hatter

2010-03-06T15:05:00.003-07:00

Confucius advised that one should study the past and divine the future.

Divining the future. Hmmm. Why should divining be limited to that?

I guess as well as divining the future, I could also divine "a" past. Isn't that what the author Elizabeth Kostava --- Is that how you spell her last name? --- did in her novel The Historian? You know, the one about Vlad? Isn't that the same notion as divining the future? Isn't it the same for any fiction? Isn't fiction simply a divining of something set back in history or of something set in contemporary times or something that could happen in an unset future? So we can study the past, but there's no reason we cannot put a spin on it that didn't actually exist except in our subsequent imaginations. After all, any subsequent imagination or remembering is a fiction. Similarly, we can do the very same thing with the future.

I guess, though, truthfully we can't do that with the present. The present is that knife blade that is cutting through the past and the future. It is here instantly and then gone; it is a point of decision making and acting.

Lately, I've been a little obsessed with the notion of time, which doesn't seem much like a notion at all but a reality. Only the Mad Hatter questions the reality of time. Each of these words on this page or screen come in succession. I can change their order and rearrange them, I guess, but doing so also has an order and succession. None of it is a mumbo-jumbo and totally at random. However, it seems like there is also mumble-Jumbo and totally randomness, like the dust floating through a ray of light.

The reason I hold time to be so critical is because I believe in free will. If time is simply a construct that doesn't exist, then it seems to me there is no free will. If time is simply another block, like we perceive height or breadth or depth, and has always existed in full form, then my will is not free. And if my will is not free, life doesn't seem to have any meaning or necessity to me. And intuitively I know it's not that way.

So I'll be studying time and the notion of free will even more in the next while. Those notions --- of time and free will --- seem so critical to me, although, if they are not real, I have to ask myself whether my life would be as meaningful as it has been in recognizing the possibility that I have misperceived it all along.

It just seems so unsettling to contemplate that as a possibility.

I have purchased a new book entitled From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. Its subtitle is The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.

The Fruit on the Tree

2010-03-01T22:53:00.001-07:00

One of the things I liked most I think growing up as a boy was my neighborhood.

I liked going to the various yards I could get into without getting into trouble and there in the spring and summertime finding some fresh fruit still on the trees to eat. Cherries, apricots, apples, peaches, and plums. The people whose fruit I took I don't think cared one iota. They had no plans to harvest the fruit as far as I ever saw or knew. Of course, there were other yards I didn't go into to take fruit because those people did harvest and preserve their fruit.

I don't know why I was always so hungry to go find some fruit to eat; it wasn't like my mother and father starved me at home. We had plenty to eat as far as I can remember, so it's a curiosity now to remember those long-ago escapades into other realms to feast.

I don't know what made me think of those days tonight except that I've been reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. There's plenty of reason to think of food in that particular book.

Anyway, the past few days have hinted at spring and soon there will be blossoms on the trees. However, we don't have a single fruit tree in our yard and I don't have much of an appetite for fresh fruit these days. The thing I liked most I think growing up as a boy was my neighborhood.

I liked going to the various yards I could get into without getting into trouble and there in the spring and summertime finding some fresh fruit still on the tree to eat. Cherries, apricots, apples, peaches, and plums. The people whose fruit I took I don't think cared one iota. They had no plans to harvest the fruit as far as I ever saw. Of course, there were other yards I didn't go into to take fruit because those people did harvest and preserve the fruit.

I don't know why I was always so hungry to go find some fruit; it wasn't like my mother and father starved me at home. We had plenty to eat as far as I can remember, so it's a curiosity now to remember those long ago escapades into other realms to feast.

I don't know what made me think of those days except that I've been reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. There's plenty of reason to think of food in reading that particular book.

Anyway, the past few days have hinted at spring and soon there will be blossoms on the trees again. However, we don't have a single fruit tree in our yard and I don't have much of an appetite for fresh fruit these days.

Working Hard Versus Listening to Your Internal Critic

2010-02-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've been busy the past few days setting up a new computer and it has taken me away from any entries or much writing. Now, when I just tried to post a blog from Word I had difficulty setting up my blogger account to work with it, so I'll have to figure that out. So for now, I'll just post it the regular old way. Maybe I'll decide that's better anyway. I don't know; I'll have to figure it out.

The comedian, Robin Williams, said something like doing more work isn't the solution. Instead, he said the answer is that your internal critic should be telling you that you could do better.

I guess that is so, but I'm pretty sure Robin Williams probably works harder and longer than many others do in his line of work. So, at the same time that you're the one critic tell you to do better, you also have to work harder.

I don't know if I like that solution. Maybe he didn't like it either. Personally, I think you can work really hard but that you also need a break from working hard, too. And definitely you have to listen to the internal critic, and, from my perspective, you also have to listen to the external critics you think you can believe and trust.

Free Will Versus Infallible Foreknowledge

2010-02-22T16:32:00.002-07:00

There is a long-standing debate about free will and God's foreknowledge.

Intuitively, the two notions seem mutually exclusive, at least they did to me some twenty-five or more years ago when I first considered the matter and started contemplating it.

The whole issue was so bothersome to me --- becoming an issue of study, prayer, and serious contemplation --- that I did something unusual for me then or even for me now. I went to the University Library looking for something that would clarify the matter. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, however, I knew that I wanted to find something that addressed the issue. But I also wanted something that had arisen within a context of my faith . In other words, I wanted someone with a similar background to mine to address the issue with a delicate, spiritual balance of faith and intellect. I wasn't that interested at that time in what philosophy professors might say about the subject. I wanted, if I could find it, an LDS point of view. I could deal later, I thought, with what philosophy professors and intellectuals said relative to the issue.

What I stumbled onto that day was an article by an individual I had never heard of before, Blake Ostler, an attorney who also dabbled in philosophy, but who was also a practicing, and as far as I could determine a faithful Mormon.

It was an article in a scholarly journal on Mormonism, one I had heard of before but had not ever seen or read: Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought. The article was entitled "The Mormon Concept of God".

I read the article, took the journal to the copy machine and copied it, took it home and kept it, and subscribed to the journal, which subscription I have kept since that time. I even made a special purchase of the volume that the article contained, since my subscription was prospective and the volumes I would receive in the future after I took out my subscription would not include the volume with the subject article .

Most Mormons I know and those at the top of the heap of Mormons who control the church and lead it, believe God has infallible foreknowledge. Yet they also believe in free will, that is, that individuals have the right to choose without compunction. They believe the two notions --- God having infallible foreknowledge and individuals having free will --- are compatible.

They are want, however, as far as I have determined, to explain how that works. They just don't know; they just believe it's so without questioning it or having to explain it further. In fact, most of them think the exercise in doing so is a waste of time or believe that contemplating it and exploring it or expressing chagrin over their take of it is a manifestation of lack of faith, a contentious exercise.

Most of them believe that life isn't so much a test administered and graded by God for Him to see if we will do what is right or not, but rather is a test for ourselves to show how wonderfully magnificent or how totally awful we will do --- including, of course, every possible intermediary position. God doesn't need us to do it for Him; he already knows. God does it for us so that we gain insight into ourselves that he has and, apparently, always has had. (I can't imagine living without discovery and surprise; it seems like it would be so boring and unfulfilling.)

I suppose some of these members' concerns could have to do with the notion that if God is or can be surprised, he isn't really in total control and isn't, perhaps, the kind of God they want to worship or put their faith and trust in. Ironically, they will almost uniformly agree that God is bound by the very necessity of preserving free will, admitting that if God didn't permit free will to exist he would cease to be God. On the other hand, given their perception that God knows the future without flaw, there is no such thing as free will.

My dictionary defines free will as follows: The power, attributed especially to human beings, of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.

Review Once Was Lost

2010-02-20T13:31:00.002-07:00

All I could think about every time I considered Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost was the completion of the line with 'but now am found.' That title set up an expectation that her book never quite fulfilled but hinted at. Maybe there will be a sequel with that title. Nonetheless, the book didn't leave me at all dissatisfied for not having fulfilled the "being found" part, because the book left me with the distinct impression that Sam could find her her way, whatever it might be, wherever it might take her.

The book is about young teenage Samara Taylor --- Sam --- during a time that she justifiably felt lost. Her mother is an alcoholic who is committed to a rehab facility. Sam misses her mother. Sam's father is a pastor who in some ways acts very pastorally and in other ways seems and is just as incapacitated and irresponsible as his committed wife, maybe even more so. On top of all of that, there is a crisis of major proportions in the community --- a young teenage girl goes missing --- that impacts Sam and her father, the pastor, and everybody else. This mystery also propels the story forward.

Zarr's writing is subtle and sensitive. I was very impressed with her ability to create believable and realistic characters that weren't extreme or caricatures.

I am a sixty-one-year-old man who doesn't typically read in this genre or books written for this audience. Yet I didn't feel lost or like an alien reading the story and learning to better understand the mindset of its young female protagonist teenager.

Great job, Sara Zarr.

Matt Kirby recommended this book. His first published book, The Clockwork Three, will be released October 1, 2010.

Making Expression Less Taxing: A Freelancer's Tax Resource

Black-And-White

2010-02-18T00:18:00.001-07:00

Where is your focus? Is it on the extraordinary? Or is it on the mundane?

And what do we define as extraordinary anyway? Also, how do we define mundane? Those seem to be extremes, outer limits, or close to it.

Again, there is always a range, it seems to me, a continuum. Isn't there? Things are not black and white, generally. Even total black can be represented in varying lighter shades. The purity of white can also be slightly tainted with fill over a range, too.

It seems to me, to recognize this --- that there is a range or a continuum --- is a higher degree of wisdom and insight than seeing things only as extremes.

Memory

2010-02-12T23:30:00.001-07:00

Just how important is memory in the total scheme of things? Some might say it's very important; others say it's a blessing not to have a good memory. I believe my memory is quite poor, but perhaps I exaggerate. It seems like I just knew so many other people who had better memories in comparison to me in life's experience that it made me feel inept sometimes. In fact, quite early on in my college education I decided not to pursue a degree in chemistry because others seemed to have a better memory than me and therefore had to devote less time and effort to studying and still aced the tests.

I'm not sure abandoning chemistry as an occupation was such a bad deal. I ended up, through happenstance, doing a job I really enjoyed. I couldn't have stumbled into something more conducive to my nature than I did. And the job didn't particularly require much of a long-term memory. What I didn't know, I quickly learned I could look up and research. Part of the job involved analysis and creativity.

Memory is always helpful. When I'm writing creatively, like working on a novel for instance, it is helpful to remember what has happened many pages ago, to remember your characters, the nature of a scene, or the characteristics of your antagonist.

How Heavy Are Your Thoughts

2010-02-08T23:24:00.001-07:00

It's not as if we could ever be static. That's not even a possibility. Even when we die, the atoms and molecules of our body are teeming with activity. Even when we're totally dissembled by maggots and the dissolution that we undergo over time after we die, there is still movement and activity. When we suggest that something is static, having no motion, we error. It's as simple as that. If you think about it, nothing is at total rest.

The monitor there before you as you work on your computer, or read this blog entry, maybe seems like it is static, but it's not in any true sense. If it's turned on, and if you're reading this it must be, there's a mass of organized electronic activity within it. Even if it were turned off, nothing of a material nature is without motion down at the subatomic level. All of being is in motion, relatively speaking.

On the other hand, what about the intangible? First of all, is there such a thing as something intangible, like thoughts and ideas? Or are they simply an assemblage of the tangible in some inconceivable way that we don't comprehend or understand?

Heavy thoughts. --- note how we even make tangible our thoughts, calling them 'heavy.' No less heavy, though, than the idea that "in today walks tomorrow," as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said.

Fiction Is Absolutely True

2010-02-04T23:26:00.001-07:00

I recently completed reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Kudos to him.

I hope someday I can to some degree and in some small measure convey the nature of my culture and geography as well as I think he does in his book about a boy living on an Indian reservation but going off the reservation to go to school.

Sure, the story he tells of Junior is a fiction. In some measure all of life is fictitious, all caught up in our imagination and fantasy. Fiction or not, however, the truth seems to shine through the best works of literature.

Hacking Away the Underbrush

2010-01-20T15:41:00.001-07:00

I'm glad the feeling comes in difficult endeavors that you think you can make your way through.

Paul Simon said he gets a satisfied feeling by writing songs that never comes in any other parts of his life. Susan Shaughnessy said of writing books --- or in writing long narratives, I guess, distinguishing from songwriting --- that you get the sense of a breakthrough coming.

I've only finished one novel, start to finish. I have to admit there was, or, perhaps, there were times when I felt a breakthrough was coming and had other senses of insight and ways of getting through a forest when I felt lost in the dense trees and brush. It was nice to have the feeling or the sense that you could break through. But that all didn't finish the work or make it any easier to stick to it and fight through it. Sometimes the underbrush had to be hacked away.

Library

2010-01-15T22:12:00.001-07:00

Weird isn't it? I don't go to libraries much. It seems like about the only time I go there is to show up for my critiquing sessions with my fellow critiquers. I don't usually check out books --- at least, not at the library. Occasionally, I'll help Shelley download an audio book to listen to, but I don't even usually listen to it myself.

Shelley goes. She goes all of the time. Takes a bag; fills it up; brings it home. Chooses a few of the books to look at, reads some. Pretty soon she says it's time to go to the library again to check the old ones in and some new ones out.

As I think about that notion --- me not going to the library or checking books out there --- I feel a little ashamed. It's as if I don't wanna put such information out here for all the world to see. Here I am, professing to be a writer, and I don't go to library and I don't check out books. Weird, huh?

I remember going to the Clearfield library when I was a boy. I don't know who I was there with. It doesn't seem like my parents would have taken me there. I don't recall them ever going there, having library cards, or whatever you needed back then to check things out. It's possible I was there with a friend or with my sister. However, I doubt my sister ever checkd anything out from the library either.

I had a friend named Tom --- well, I still consider him a friend --- whose mother worked at the library for a while --- at least, I think she did. I doubt, however, him having a mother who worked there had any connection to my memory of being there, but perhaps.

But I read. I would say, relative to the general population, I read a lot. What I read, however, is usually something we've purchased over the years. Sometimes, I'll pick up a library book Shelley has brought home, and I'll read that. For example, I'm reading Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr. Come to think of it, though, I actually went to the library with Shelley that day, and I picked that book out. She read it, liked it, and I decided I better read it.

In fact, I ought to decide to make going to the library and picking out books to read more of a habit. It's not a bad idea.

Writing to Pick Subjects Apart

2010-01-13T23:50:00.001-07:00

Does writing have to hurt somebody?

Can what is written please everybody and get received across the board without criticism or concern?

Hardly. Everybody brings to reading their agenda, their biases.

It's no different for the writer. The writer brings biases to the table in dissertation. I don't know of any way around that.

My writing has a focus, at least it seems that way to me. What got me writing more seriously to begin with was a friend telling me his wife was leaving him for an older man who had a reputation as a polygamist. My friend and his wife had children, like me, and I couldn't fathom losing both my wife and my children to an older man who ascribed to something as crass and ugly as polygamy. So, in dealing myself with the trauma the situation of my friend faced, I started writing about a scenario enough like it that I thought I could get some resolution or understanding from it. Of course, it was a fiction, a creation of my mind, only partially related to the actual situation as I understood it.

I finished the novel --- as revised, it has almost 120,000 words --- of the scenario I crafted based upon the premise of a wife leaving her husband and taking her kids to be with a polygamist.

The next writing project I undertook had me contemplating Al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq, war, and the consequences to family when a family member is lost fighting abroad. Not only that, but the notion of religious fanaticism that causes men and women, and even children, to sacrifice themselves to create death care in others for political ends. I wrote about 100-120 pages on that project and put it on the back burner. There were some problems with the beginning of the story and its setting and the environment that I wanted to percolate with the full intention of returning to it later.

As I analyze it now, it also involved scenarios for which I felt emotionally drained: self-sacrifice to kill others and push a political/religious agenda; the death and loss of a father of a family due to military service in a war abroad that had devolved into a morass of involvement that should probably never have happened to begin with; and the prejudice in America of those who are outside of the norm.

My next project --- the one item most actively working on presently --- involves the family of immigrants from Mexico to the United States who don't have documentation. The protagonist is a boy who was born on the Mexican side of the border just before his parents crossed the border into the United States the first time. The story is set when the boy is fourteen and the family has lived in the United States all that time, and for the most part during that history they faced no dire consequences for being in the United States without legal documentation. However, as the United States economy started to tank, the heat on them as immigrants without documentation start to rise, and their lives became much more difficult and complex.

So most of what I choose to write about seems to involve questions I have about the nature of things in the world around me, usually, things I have no control over but have an emotional impact on me because they seem like they would have a grave emotional and physical impact upon people in those situations.

I suppose this is somewhat the process of all people who try to write.

Check out Expelled Exposed

2010-01-10T22:32:00.001-07:00

We have church now at nine o'clock in the morning. In priesthood meeting, we had the first lesson out of the new Gospel Principles manual. The first chapter in that manual is "Our Father in Heaven." Our group leader taught the lesson today. The major points were: there is a God, the nature of God, and coming to know God.

At a point in the lesson discussion, a couple of the men in the class started deriding people who don't believe, even suggesting that such people are colluding with each other to prevent religious people from believing what they want to believe, trying, I guess they were suggesting, to override the Constitution. One fellow trotted out the same old allusions to Korihor from the book of Mormon, casting everybody in the same mold as him.

I took them to task, suggesting that many people who are nonbelievers are good people, undeserving of their aspersions. One fellow became defensive, suggesting he wasn't casting any aspersions. After the class was over, the one individual came over to me and offered to let me watch a movie by Ben Stein, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I said I would like to. So he went right out to his car, I guess, and before Sunday school started, produced a copy of the movie, all wrapped up in a plastic bag from the grocery store, for me to take home and watch.

I went home and watched the movie. Well, it was Ben Stein to begin with, and on the cover was an endorsement by none other than Glenn Beck. Of course, I wasn't expecting much else, I guess. In any event, I watched the movie, found it interesting and entertaining and about as biased as anything gets. No wonder I have never liked Ben Stein that much. At least he isn't as caustic as Glenn Beck.

After I finished watching the movie, I went out on the Internet and googled the title of the movie and Ben Stein together, read the Wikipedia entry on the movie, and then went to the expelledexposed.com entry, and read some of that. I then returned the movie, thanked the brother for letting me watch it, and he said perhaps Ben Stein had some biases. I said that I agreed with Ben Stein when he suggested that the walls have to come down to communication. I suggested my friend and brother in the Gospel consider looking up expelledexposed.com.

Writer 's Advantage

2010-01-08T21:56:00.001-07:00

Do you think that writers have an advantage over non-writers when it comes to conversations? That is, are writers more articulate verbally?

I think that may be true, however, I don't think it's true in every case.

For example, I'm not particularly chatty. I like to analyze my words and syntax more than the rapid pace of any normal conversation permits. On the other hand, my analysis and effort in composing words on the page pay off by growing vocabulary and an ultimate ability to better organize sentences and paragraphs.

Maybe that's my imagination, though, that it makes for better writing but not necessarily better conversations with other people on the fly.

It makes me wonder where the ability to be chatty stems from. Is it innate, or at just what stage does it seem to develop?

One observation I made involved my father. When he was married to my mother, who I believe was more like me --- less chatty, he, too, seemed less chatty. However, after my mother died, and my father remarried, he became more chatty consistent with the woman he married, Rita.

Down Sand Mountain

2010-01-04T16:44:00.003-07:00

I don't think Dewey Turner and his friend, Darla, ever make it together down Sand Mountain.

You'll have to read the book --- or, perhaps, you already have --- and tell me if they do. My recollection is leaning toward one conclusion about that issue --- it's been a while since I finished it, but you can let me know in your own review when you post it what you think.

It's like a lot of things about the book, though. There is not the easy this or that or black-and-white of easy thinkers there. It's not necessarily a read for the sanctimonious or for persons who would wrench all the color out of it. Hence, it can be said that the book moves a little slowly and perhaps a little delicately, but given the circumstances, maybe that's a good thing. After all, it was 1966, and even if it didn't seem to move so slowly back then, compared with today, it did.

I don't pretend to know whether the youth of today can tolerate a slow read or more complex issues than puritanical crap. Of course, I don't mean to lump them all together, for in my mind, to some degree that is the message of the book: to take your time, to make a careful and considered analysis, to decide what is important, and not to make quick and hasty judgments of people, but to value everybody for their uniqueness.

I think there's a lot to say about an artificial mountain made of sand from the tailings of mining in the flat lands of Florida as it relates to Dewey and Darla and their respective trips down it. What do you think?

Slavery By Another Name

2010-01-02T17:13:00.003-07:00

Don't read this book.

I say that in the vein of Br'er Rabbit's, "Don't throw me in that briar patch."

Exploitation of the downtrodden by some rich and powerful people and corporations is nothing new here in America or elsewhere in the world, and it seems to never vanish. It is an old relic of evolution --- you know, survival of the fittest and all that crap. And it continues well after evolution has passed beyond the notion of just picking on the poor and the meek and exploiting them to something more sophisticated that assimilates the poor and meek into the process of all of mankind getting along in the world for the greater good. You know, like loving your neighbor as yourself.

Blackmon does his job in this comprehensive work of chronicling the history of how exploitation --- or, as he makes amply plain, slavery --- played out in America in the most horrific way after the Civil War and on up until almost the Civil Rights Movement.

Rich and powerful men and corporations, devoid of scruples, colluded and bought and sold African-Americans at county courthouses throughout the South in a system tantamount to slavery. They, in collusion with some of the local authorities in government , utilized trumpped-up criminal charges against the newly-emancipated men and women to gain control over them once again. You know, you've got to kick a dog when he's down. Then they utilized outrageous fees, insurmountable for the impoverished newly-emancipated men and women to pay, to keep them in their thrall year in and year out until the new "slaves" died horrible deaths.

It's kind of like what you often see with respect to some of the rich and powerful individuals and corporations over against some undocumented immigrants today.

This is a book of awesome research and deliberate storytelling that, if you have any humanity in your veins at all, will bring tears to your eyes, and, hopefully, an intention to do something about it.

Are We Amercians?

2010-01-02T13:39:00.003-07:00

We ARE Americans is a must-read for anyone who wants to be more fully informed about those individuals who come across the southern border to the United States from Mexico to live among us in order to better themselves. This book will flesh out some of the human drama involved in such lives. Many children have grown up here in our school systems only to find themselves stuck in inexpressible ways from advancing and contributing further to our society. Any person with a conscience and any degree of compassion ought to know the stories.

I personally conceptualized and started writing a story about a fourteen-year-old boy who had been born a few hundred yards on the Mexican side of the US-Mexican border as his parents escaped the hellhole they had lived in by crossing the border into the United States. In my mind, I imagined that his parents' families --- essentially his grandparents --- had been mixed up in the lower echelon of the drug cartels in Mexico. What I wanted to convey was that the family wanted to escape from the dire circumstances of their lives in Mexico.

Therefore, I decided to read We ARE Americans, Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream by William Perez.

Perez interviewed twenty undocumented students who live in the United States and have done so for a good chunk of their lives. Almost all of them are still undocumented aliens living in the United States without legal justification for being here under US law. Twenty is such a small sampling of the 2.4 million children and young adults under the age of twenty-four who the forward indicates now live in the United States undocumented.

Four of the kids interviewed were still in high school. For example, Penelope, who was on the cusp of graduating from high school with an excellent academic record and had participated in numerous extracurricular activities, fears that she won't be able to afford college and go to the university. She came to the United States when she was nine years old. She was raised by her mother after her parents separated. Jeronimo was born in Mexico but came to the United States when he was a year old, and essentially living all of his life in the United States.

Four more of the kids were in community college --- mostly because they couldn't afford to be at the university. Eight of the kids were at the university. For example, Eduardo said he was restricted in joining clubs, participating in school events, taking on leadership roles at the university because of his status. He considers himself a typical American boy, who grew up with brothers and sisters --- three brothers and one sister --- in a regular family. Well... maybe not so regular. He grew up in a two-bedroom house with his mother, father, his three brothers, and his sister sharing the small space. The family relied heavily upon him because he was the oldest of the kids.

Four of the interviewees were actually college graduates. Julia was in graduate school working to get her PhD in engineering. She came to the United States from a poor neighborhood in Mexico when she was thirteen years old. She had attended some school in Mexico, but it was in a poor school without the educational resources of the schools in the United States. It was a dangerous place for her to live. Nonetheless, both in Mexico and in the United States, she distinguished herself as a student.

The stories are informative and compelling. These are the stories of twenty highly motivated and hard-working students. There are others, many others, I assume, here in the United States without documentation who do not process the motivation or inherent ability of these twenty hard-working and motivated kids. I doubt that their plights are any less compelling than are the ones told in the book, other than the fact that they are perhaps lacking in inherent ability and perhaps, therefore, the drive to succeed in school.

Not only does the book contain the heartrending stories of these kids, but it also contains important facts about the composition and, to some extent, the comportment of those individuals who are here without proper documentation.

Every American is affected one way or another by those who want to pursue and to live the great American dream, but who cross our borders without documentation or come here legally but then lose their legal status but don't leave. Whenever anybody makes a judgment relative to this issue, they should be fully informed. These are people.

This book, in my opinion, presents a convincing case for why we need to get a better handle on immigration and in making reformations so that these youngsters, who have lived much of their lives in the United States school system, can be fully assimilated into our society as citizens.

The question is, are we Americans? Those of us with citizenship --- will we step up to the plate and support those so deserving of our consideration? I hope so.

Miracles and Other Christmas Stories

2010-01-02T12:01:00.002-07:00

I've put the Connie Willis Christmas book away for now, stowed it carefully in my Kindle, and if it gets too crowded there, it'll always be available on my computer or in the Amazon archives. Come next November, however, I'll want it back there, right at the top of my reading list again, to savor some quirky story of Willis's in the quiet moments while waiting somewhere in a line, while riding in the car or bus to some destination, when a speaker's delivery isn't up to snuff, or when I'm waiting for the doctor to see me.

Hopefully, I'll use them again to better evaluate my place in the world in terms of the stories and their allusions to history and to myth.

To me, that's the value of reading great stories: self-evaluation and, of course, inspiration. I won't discard other Christmas favorites: Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. Or even the one's Willis recommends there in her own collection.

There's something unique in reading Christmas stories with that fantastical and, at times, science-fictiony element that Willis is so renowned for. The whimsy and the easy nature of her storytelling is so conducive to the Christmas spirit.

So next year, sometime after Thanksgiving, I wouldn't be surprised if my wife catches me cozied down in the leather recliner with a subtle smile on my face reading about Joseph and Mary caught up in current times through some time warp or something, finding themselves in a Christian church where people are encouraged not to get too caught up in compassion, and the two of them not knowing quite how to get back on the path to Bethlehem. I'll be contemplating "Joseph lying about the baby being his, and the wise men sneaking out the back way, the holy family hightailing it to Egypt and the innkeeper lying to Herod's soldiers about where they'd gone."

My wife will speak to me, asking what I'm reading, and I'll say, "We are all capable of murder. It's in our genes." She'll say, "Boy, you're getting in the Christmas spirit, aren't you?" and I'll say, "You know, 'the story of the Second Coming was a single narrative, but it was actually a hodgepodge of isolated scriptures.'"

About that time, the electronic file on my Kindle will magically disappear. It had its origins in Connie Willis, after all, and she has just that kind of magic in her writing. If you've read these stories, you know just what I mean.

Too Much

2010-01-01T22:23:00.001-07:00

People talk of waiting for something to write about, but that's not my problem.

No, my problem is trying to decide among all the available things to write about what to zero in on.

So, mostly, I just don't zero in at all --- well, except for the book I'm currently working on and a few other distractions, but I don't write as much as I should. It's like all my senses overwhelm me. And not only my senses, but my feelings and thoughts do, too.

That pain in my foot. That recollection of my friend from youth who last year got so ill and almost died.

There's just so much.

There's the homemade bandage I made this morning when I couldn't find a store-bought one but had cut myself with my box cutter and was bleeding like a pig.

There's the line of books on the shelves on the wall above my computer screen --- not to mention all the ones I have taken the spine off of and fed through a scanner, hundreds of them.

There's all these colors and sounds, even though the TV is off and the radio isn't on, either. But the computer has a engine, a fan, or something making a faint sound. And even in making that observation, you see how I have to explore it, analyze it, figure it out. And there are other people in this house. They come and go and there is no silence.

Somebody flushes the toilet. Somebody speaks.

I'm thirsty, and I take a sip of water. Water is so bland. I wonder what's in the fridge?

And on it goes, little or no focus. Often little or no willingness to find a focus.

Some Thoughts

2009-12-24T23:32:00.001-07:00

By now, the heat is turned down --- it is done automatically --- and it is, by all accounts, time to retire. But I'm not tired yet. In a little over an hour, it will be Christmas Day, not Christmas Eve anymore. I told Shelley I would get up early enough to help her put the turkey in the oven so it's ready to eat around noon. That means I'll be up about six thirty or seven o'clock. Mike said he and Ashley would come around a while before noon. Sometime tomorrow Norman and his kids will be coming by, I think. Possible in the late afternoon or in the evening. We'll see.

It's been quiet tonight here at home in Layton. Kiele and Shelley watched a movie together --- A Night in the Museum, or something like that --- and I listened to a couple of Christmas musical programs on public television --- the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas program, and the Saint Olaf College Christmas program. We could have watched the traditional It's a Wonderful Life, but it's not our favorite. Not by a long shot.

Brent came up to have a bite to eat and fixed something and ate it, and Kacee came up a few minutes later and they sat together and watched some of the movie with Kiele and Shelley. Then they went back downstairs.

Tomorrow is Christmas. I guess it's my sixty-second Christmas --- or is it just my sixty-first? I'm not sure --- it's one or the other, and it's too late to figure it out. The first few I don't remember, in any event, and the ones after that all seem to blur together anyway. It's funny; the memories of my youth aren't that vivid. The easiest memories to recall involve simply looking into the reflections of the Christmas tree decorations and contemplating the magic of the season, the music, and the notion of the Nativity and the life of the Savior.

We'll be going off to West Jordan to visit Amy and her family in the afternoon sometime tomorrow. Amy has to work tomorrow evening.

Christmas is about family.

While I was growing up, Christmas meant opening presents around the tree in the morning and then visiting Grandma and Grandpa Thompson on Christmas Day and seeing my uncles and aunts there at my grandparents' house, along with all of their kids, my cousins. It was always a busy household at Christmas time, or at least it seemed like it was always a busy household to me. That all changed for me when my mother died.

Of course, I was gone when my mother died, but when I got back home things were never the same again relative to visiting my grandparents'. Not with respect to visiting my side of the family, that is. I returned in 1969. That first Christmas back was pretty lonely, as I recall it. Perhaps it was mostly self-imposed, but I remember being alone and not particularly liking it. Then I married in August of 1971, and after that, my family was mostly my wife's family. We spent Christmas with them, and their house was like my grandparents' house: busy and full of brothers and sisters, etc. We would play games and eat and talk. We would usually get over to visit my father, who remarried in January of 1971, but I had changed and, of course, the situation was totally different. For one thing, I was committed to a more religious life than ever took place in my family growing up or in the extended family of my parents that included my grandparents and uncles and aunts and their kids.

In 1974, Shelley and I moved to Illinois. It's difficult to remember exactly when we went out there, but we came home for Christmas, I'm sure of that. We lived out there for a couple of years and then moved to California for about a year --- a little less than that --- and then we moved to Idaho where we lived for six years. Each year at Christmas time, however, no matter where we were, we came home to Utah, and we were welcomed into my wife's parents' home as guests for the holidays.

The Picture in the Paper

2009-12-23T23:25:00.001-07:00

A few days ago a picture of my brother appeared in the newspaper on the front page of the local section. He was featured as the most wanted criminal in, I guess, the Ogden area. Something to do with a drug conviction, and not carrying out the terms of his parole relative to it, I think. It wasn't anything that seemed too serious. Serious enough, of course. Yet, it wasn't an armed robbery or a murder, thank goodness. Nonetheless, it is unsettling and heartbreaking to know he is in that situation, down and out, so discouraged and desperate at the end of his life. Well, maybe not at the end of his life, but getting there. Especially, if he's strung out on methamphetamine, broke, unemployed, and probably not qualified for any retirement benefits, at least for a few years.

I wonder what his son thinks. They always seemed so close, even though they didn't live together --- hadn't, as far as I know, for most of his son's life. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure he tried to keep up the relationship with his son.

I know my older son was impacted by it being there. As soon as he saw it, he asked me about it, and I could tell his concern, his curiosity. He took the section of the newspaper with the article in it, and later in the day, returned with that section, not wanting to take it without having our permission to do so. When I indicated I didn't want to keep the article --- I could look it up at any time online as long as I was a subscriber to the newspaper, he said he was going to. I don't know why or what he intended to do with it. For some reason, it had an attraction for him.

Anyway, I wish things were different for my brother.

Risk

2009-12-20T20:45:00.001-07:00

I don't believe I have ever been one to take major risks --- maybe I should say, simply, to take risk. I don't think it's a place I came to slowly over a lifetime, but rather a place it seems to me I have always been. As a little boy, one of my earliest memories goes back to my father teaching me how to pull out the grass along the sidewalk. You know, to make it look neat. This was in Clearfield: 97 South 450 East.

We didn't have a trimmer back then. In fact, in those early days we didn't have any power tools. It often seemed as if we were very lucky to have a car. Our lawnmower was mechanical, and it didn't include an engine, other than the body behind that pushed it along. To be fair, I don't rightly recall if we had mechanical clippers or not; we may have had. If we did, at the age I think I am remembering, I doubt I could have worked them anyway. So my dad, he taught me how to trim along the sidewalk there and along the other side where the curb was to the street. He put me to work after I had learned sufficiently and told me how far I need to go.

I kept at it. Pretty soon, though, a friend of mine from kitty-corner across the street, Ray Lechenberg, came out and started playing. What he was doing looked a lot more fun than what I was doing. I longed to abandon my assignment and go play with him. However, I didn't take the risk to do so. I don't want to say that I was an obedient child, although perhaps that is the case. However, it seems to me that a lot of it has to do with an unwillingness to take risk.

One more example. My parents liked for me to play in the yard. They didn't like me going out of our yard. "You stay in the yard, Wally," my mother would say. "That way we can keep track of you, and I know you're okay." Well, a commandment like that wasn't an easy thing to want to follow, especially, when the other kids were over across the way playing tag with each other. It was very difficult under such circumstances to stay in the yard. Nonetheless, for some reason that seems like it was inherent then and is inherent in a way now, I didn't want to take the risk to leave the yard and face the consequences that I felt sure my parents would impose.

Now, one could assume that it wasn't a matter of me not wanting to take the risk, but rather me wanting not to disappoint my parents or me wanting to be obedient when I had been righteously commanded to do so. I don't think of was that at all.

In my younger adult years, I liked to backpack and fish. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for me to do that, especially after school was over, I had graduated from college, and I had my first "genuine" job. We lived in the Midwest, in Illinois, and I seemed to be too busy most of the time, and the countryside there in Illinois wasn't the type of countryside that drew me to go backpacking in. I don't think there were any fish to be had there --- well, not any trout to be had, so I just wasn't interested in going backpacking there. However, when I had vacation time, we always went home to Utah, and, if I could, I would arrange a backpacking trip with my younger brother-in-laws, one brother-in-law in particular who also had that interest, Norman.

One year Norman and his friend Cory and I hiked in the back woods in Idaho. It was in a wilderness area, and we were in this kind of box canyon. There was a beautiful lake at its end, but it was walled around with steep walls of scree and rock. We decided --- rather, my younger companions decided --- to try to ascend to the top of the wall. Well, at first I was game. There was one side that didn't seem too severe, and so I assented.

We started up, but it became more and more hazardous because of the loose rock and scree, and so we gave up on that. We made other attempts, with similar results, more or less giving up because I thought it was too dangerous, and Norman's friend Cory sometimes agreed with me. Norman, however, always seemed willing to take a greater risk. So, while Cory and I gave up and went back to camp, Norman tried one more time. He ended up scaring me so badly going up that face that I've never forgotten it. He took a risk, succeeded, and climbed up that wall. Not me. I watched him, but I did not go where he went.

Now, for me it was and is a matter of inherent fear, perhaps, over against a less inherent fear. Otherwise, for me to admit it would seem boastful, from one perspective, or, of having a tendency to be blindly obedient, from another perspective. I don't pretend to have an answer to the question, though. It just seems to me (tonight) that it goes back to some sort of inherent tendency to avoid risk.

Goals

2009-12-17T21:01:00.001-07:00

When we --- Shelley and I --- were younger, we aspired to greater things. For example, tonight, while working to digitize my library, I came upon a book we purchased not that long ago, probably in 2003. The title of the book is To the Top, Reaching for America's Fifty State Summits. That was one of our dreams. We, however scaled it down, probably even well before we ever made the purchase of that book. We decided we were going to reach the summit of the highest points in each county of the State of Utah. We proceeded, and I can't remember exactly how many peaks we actually climbed --- it wasn't too many, but a few --- but even that was beyond us.

For one thing, we took our daughter with us on the hikes. She has cerebral palsy, which includes a partial paralysis on her right side and epilepsy. That was one complicating factor that made our reaching all of the peaks impractical, among others. Of course, we could have just left our daughter home for those peaks that were too dangerous for her to come along. But the other complication was that ascending some of the peaks was "too scary" for my wife. For example, we walked to within a few hundred feet of the top of Mount Tipanogos, a few rocks loosened by some hikers above us came crashing down, and we didn't get to finish the hike. Willard Peak required some scrambling near the very top. That, too, was beyond my wife's courage.

Nonetheless, Shelley is the one who loves to hike. Give her a trail that winds, and you can't stop her, because she needs to see what's around the next corner. Now, as we grow older, she goes and goes much more than I do, but even then she is curtailed by the deterioration of her spine due to osteoporosis and the heavy strain it puts on her lungs.

However, probably the determining factor in us having given up was my fault. We were hiking the highest peak in the county up by Bear Lake. The trail takes off of the side road off from the road that goes through Logan Canyon over to Bear Lake. We found the trail all right and climbed up to the top with our daughter and found the peak. Then, in my manly wisdom, I decided we could take a shortcut, and we became disoriented and wandered around for unnecessary hours, tiring us out and precipitating plantar fasciitis in my foot. With the bone spur, I wasn't ready to go for a long time after that, at least until the next year. By then, some of the fire had gone out of our enthusiasm for the project.

More Rambling Nonsense

2009-12-17T14:32:00.002-07:00

I just couldn't believe it would happen right there in the middle of the mall food court in the middle of the day with hundreds of people all around her, and most of them not even noticing that she was having a seizure and that most of the ones who did notice, didn't even care. Yet that is exactly where it happened. And that is what happened.

Now, I have to ask myself, what about me? What about my caring about her? Was I more concerned for her or for my Chick-fil-A sandwich? At first, I mean. What had more importance for me? The fact that I didn't do anything says a lot, I think. However, the fact that I haven't let it go --- I can't get it out of my mind, even after having slept on it --- perhaps says even more. I'll go back there. I'll check around to see if she's there. If she is, I will watch her and see if it happens again. If it does, I'll do something.

I found this tax court case today in the released opinions section of the United States Tax Court website. I'll give the link to it later on my other blog post. Of course, as I can, I try to review the newly released opinions, so it wasn't unusual for me to take a peek. Right off, though, this particular case caught my eye. I know two of the attorneys for the IRS. Stephen M. Barnes and David W. Sorenson. I worked in the same offices they did. Their officers were down the hall to the east of me. I often visited with them and had cases together with them. So, of course, that drew my attention. The case is a tax shelter case. Of course, the government wouldn't be calling it a tax shelter case, because Congress enacted laws that make that expression a tenuous one to talk about. Wonderful Congress. Anyway, I'll be commenting on the case some more. At least I intend to.

"Do you think you should be able to engage in frivolous activities when day after day you spend your time in your room doing nothing? When you don't do anything else productive? You don't work, you don't go to school, you don't help around the place much. So do you think you should be able to then spend money and engage in frivolity when other people are expected to do something productive?"

Murder mysteries make for stories that seem to attract a wide audience, evidenced by the numerous shows on television that feature them. The basic premise is usually set up at the beginning of the story when somebody gets killed or when some body is discovered. In Utah, we have our own missing person mystery again. We seem to have a lot of those. The latest one involves a young mother of two boys whose husband has done nothing but make himself appear totally suspicious from the outset of the discovery of the problem. I won't bother to relate that again --- it's been done ad nauseum, but it is interesting, and I have to admit that the story sucks me in even if I think I know the outcome: that the husband will be convicted of murder. I guess I won't be a jury member, huh?

Critiquing

2009-12-16T15:59:00.001-07:00

I critique with a group of writers every week.

The group presently consists of six individuals: LeeAnn, Jane, Brittany, Carolyn, Matt, and me. We meet once a week at the library. Our meetings last from 6 PM until the library kicks us out, just before 9 PM.

I have been critiquing in a group of critiquers for a long time now --- for several years, but I don't remember exactly how many years. It's been so long ago that I started that I don't remember all of the particulars. I do remember that our first group included Steve, who now lives in Logan and has written a most excellent personal memoir that recounts his life with a Japanese war bride, Doug, Bruce, and, I think, Norma, and perhaps Rick. Rick moved to Colorado.

None of the original group I started critiquing with now critiques as far as I know. Of course, I haven't kept up with Rick, so perhaps he does. Steve has been too ill to critique or do much else of late. Bruce got involved in something else that took him away from it. I think Norman's life was just too busy to stick with it.

Of that original group, Doug has probably had the greatest success insofar as I know. He had several pieces published in historical journals and whatnot. I don't think he ever made any money off of it to speak of. Nor did he find a publisher for his lengthy histories. However, the novel he never quite finished while he was critiquing with us, he turned it into a screenplay when he started taking a class from the University of Utah. I think it was a U of U. class on screenwriting. He ended up winning a screenwriting contest sponsored by Sundance. The last I talked to him he was trying to shop the screenplay in California. But I haven't spoken with him for a while now, either.

I have published my tax book for writers and artisans, Making Expression Less Taxing. I haven't been able to find an agent to represent my novel, Time for All Eternity, however. I haven't ever shopped that novel to publishers and editors.

Of the people I presently critique with, LeeAnn has been around the longest. Matt has been the most successful. His novel, The Clockwork Three, will come out next year. He got a nice contract with Scholastic earlier this year on the second book he worked on since joining the critiquing group. His first novel didn't sell . . . yet. The people I now critique with are all great writers with varying aptitudes.

Jane has an agent who is shopping her more recently completed novel she brought to our critiquing sessions involving Pastor Pete. She is a great writer and has professional experience as an editor. If they don't publish her, there is no justice in the publishing world.

Pure Rambling Crap

2009-12-04T23:07:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure I even want to do this. It is late, and I have been having difficulty with my cough, which seems to be caused from intestinal problems and perhaps some related acid reflux. Or, perhaps, it has something to do with my lungs. Something is happening to make me cough. Nonetheless, I'll give writing an attempt and see if anything comes out of it. It would be so much easier just to read something or to switch on the television and watch Letterman or something like that.

I do too much of that, though. I have done that most of a lifetime that is behind me now: procrastinating as it pertains to writing. I can't say that I was lazy relative to everything in my life, but relative to my writing, after I decided a few years ago to try to do more seriously, I have put off doing it seriously far too much and too long.

It is so much easier to allow somebody else to do the heavy lifting of thinking and getting thoughts down on paper in some coherent, persuasive, and entertaining way. Nonetheless, I aspire to do so, at least to some degree I do. I also aspire to be able to left my thoughts freely flow, to be able to get my words to freely come out of my mouth, and let my thoughts be generated by my brain and interpreted through my voice and, hence, reach the computer. In times past my words would have been written down or typed out on paper or parchment. But now, with computers, they get taken down on a monitor and stored in a file, encapsulated in some software that can be used to manipulate them: their size, their position, their look, etc.

How amazing the world is. When I contemplate it, its complexity and genuine mystery overwhelm me. I marvel at the ability to see, the beauty of color, the complexity in the entire notion of being able to see. Seeing, for example, words and being able to put them in my mind by seeing them and manipulate them there in order to understand them, to correlate them with my previous experience.

Part of the problem in ignoring opportunities to write when I've had them is this difficulty getting something meaningful down. I tend to ramble and go all over the place when I'm doing this type of thinking and writing. I'm not sure how productive it is. I'm not sure how useful it is. Nonetheless, I have the sense that it is better than not doing anything at all.

I guess no matter when I started this process, I would have had to pass through this kind of crappy stuff to progress on to something better. In order to become a good writer, you have to first be a writer, and that means you have to be a bad writer. It's like anything else. You start at the bottom and only progress upward through practice and effort.

I suppose it's not surprising how tired I am becoming doing this. It makes me want to quit. It makes me want to go to bed. I wonder if I did, though, would I be able to sleep? I wonder if I would be able to sleep or if I would toss and turn and have to read for a while and maybe even come and take some Tylenol.