Well, I'll be darned.
After months of believing that the election would go otherwise, Donald Trump has won indeed.
I've rarely been so glad to have been so wrong. Harris would have been an unprecedented disaster for America.
Congratulations, Mr. Trump. You and Melania are headed to the White House, again! Just try to pick a better staff this time, 'kay? :-)
Since last time I did a status report on how my book is coming along there have been six chapters added to the manuscript.
It is also nearly 100,000 words in size.
I've been trying to write something since yesterday but I'm having difficulty. Maybe I've been pushing myself too hard? Perhaps I need to take a break. Spend some time in nature, play with my dog, read a good book.
Well, what I composed in the past week is good stuff. Some comedic material also. There is an entire chapter devoted to the delusions I had about my hair: one of the rationales I had for going off the meds. Which ended in disaster. It's funny and also not funny, if you know what I mean.
As things look right now, I may have the draft of the entire book finished by Thanksgiving.
And then I'll go back over it and edit and revise and add and delete stuff. After that, well... we will see what we shall see.
Want to know a secret? I haven't showered in thirteen days! I've been that determined to work on this project. If I haven't been sleeping or job or eating or taking care of and playing with Tammy, I've been writing.
I look terrible. I've dry-shaved every few days. That and brushing my teeth have for the most part been my only hygiene.
But what has come out of that has been amazing.
Twelve chapters written this past week! But it must be emphasized that these were smaller chapters than most of what have been composed so far. Still, I'm very happy with the progress made.
I'm still writing this book out of sequence. But as of yesterday my life from birth up to winter of 2002 has been chronicled as thoroughly as is feasible for a project like this. And I've also got 2016 on through the present day written about.
Also, the book is split into eight parts. Other than a few chapters still needed for the one about my college years, and the very last chapters, there's only one part left to be written. All the others are complete.
I'm striving to keep the manuscript within 150,000 words. As of last night it's at 90,000 written. Sixty thousand remaining to use on one part sounds like a lot, but this part, titled "Years of Heaven, Years of Hell" is absolutely the biggest of them. Sooooo much happened in this period. It's going to be tough to pack it all in. I think the episode involving the newspaper may be two chapters.
I'm not making myself out to be a saint in writing this. I'm already coming across as a very horrible person. But that's just the truth of it all. I'm only writing about what happened, and trying to be as honest and forthcoming as I can be.
No writing today. I'm taking a break. And there is my "real life job" that must be tended to also. But I think I've earned a day's rest, after writing most during most of my free time for the past two weeks.
Okay, me go shower now. And play with the dog. She's earned a new toy for putting up with me as she has.
I'm beginning to believe that the presidential election is going to go to Donald Trump. After stating for several months that I believe Harris will be the one who gets sworn in come January.
Harris right now is doing her damndest to appeal to the hard left. That's ALL she really has that she's been consistently running on. Especially about the abortion issue. One would easily believe that abortion is her biggest concern. But those voters were already a lock for her anyway.
It was forty years ago today, October 26th 1984, that James Cameron's science-fiction thriller (I'd also consider it horror) The Terminator was released.
Cameron was sick with food poisoning in Rome. While convulsing in agony he had a fevered dream of a robot assassin with glowing red eyes hunting him down. And that was the genesis of the Terminator.
This is a movie that has aged very well. Including the design of the Terminator and the then-relatively distant future of the SkyNet-dominated 2029. Ask a conceptual artist on a modern film to create an endoskeleton for a cyborg killing machine and it would be difficult not to envision something along the lines of the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Hunter-Killer.
I first saw The Terminator in 1986. My best friend Chad had seen it on cable TV and was really raving about how good it was. So I was able to rent it not long after. I thought it was amazing. It was definitely nightmare fuel for a twelve-year-old. Especially that shot of the metal skeleton rising out of the wreckage to continue chasing down Sarah Connor. I was like "Can't ANYTHING stop this guy?!?"
I've got this movie on DVD. It's been awhile since I've seen it though. Think I'll pop it in tonight.
A little over two years ago I wrote the first chapter of what was going to be the book I had always intended to write. It's not one that the reader is supposed to find early on in the tome. It's actually a chapter that comes in quite late into the book.
For various reasons I needed to write that one first. It more or less establishes the tone of the work still to come.
As of a few days ago that first chapter written now has its place in the manuscript as a whole. I didn't have to change a thing to it. It just slid right into place without any mess at all.
It joins five chapters that I've been able to finish the first drafts of since a week ago today.
It can be noted that one of the chapters was written start to finish while I was suffering from conjunctivitis (also known as pink eye).
The drafts of the first five chapters I wrote are from the start of part three, which covers the years I spent studying at Elon. A lot happened in that time and to be honest I hadn't been exactly sure what tact to bring to bear upon it goes.
But so far it's almost wound up writing itself. I'm just pouring my memory out upon the page (or the keyboards at either my desk or my iPad Pro). Those are five chapters that build up to something and when it finally came to that... well. I needed to step away from writing for awhile. It took a lot out of me. I haven't gone back to finishing that part of the tale but I did move forward to another section of the book and began writing that.
(Lots of authors do this with their own books. Tolkien wrote parts of The Lord of the Rings at various times in the period before, during and following World War II. You write what comes to you, whatever interests you most right then. And then you piece it all together. I figure that I'm in good company :-)
So much has been done yet a lot of work still remains. But I'm feeling really confident about this. I've shared a few of the drafts with a select number of trusted friends. I insisted that I need their most brutally honest thoughts. All of them have come back with nothing but good about what they've read. I'm taking that as a good sign. If I can keep that kind of vibe going, I'll be quite pleased and thankful.
I am both proud of myself and a little let down. I only wrote one new chapter for my book this past week.
Maybe I should forgive myself?
For my own account of things, my life is still being impacted by Hurricane Helene, an hour or so south of the true devastation. A few days ago on Friday I saw my psychiatrist and got refill prescriptions for my medication. I assumed the scripts were sent over to the pharmacy as usual. When I went to pick up the refills early that evening however, the pharmacy was closed and there was a note on the door saying that their Internet was down and they couldn't fill prescriptions at all. I had gotten an automated text from the pharmacy several days earlier, saying the hurricane had knocked out their computers. I just assumed they would have been back in business already.
That was a wrong assumption on my part.
There was one med in particular that I was all out of. I was counting on getting the refill. And I needed that med.
It might have been a long shot but I drove to the emergency room of the nearby hospital and explained my situation to them. It was a very good idea, because a little less than an hour later they gave me an Rx for a "bridge" of the med I needed to get me through the next week. A quick visit to the CVS practically next door to the hospital later and I had my medication.
That emergency averted, I went home and plopped down and tried to write something, anything. Before I knew it I was working on a new chapter. It's the final one of part two, which covers a nine-years span of my life. I completed it last night. And there are going to be some edits and revisions but the basic endoskeleton is in place at least. I'm happy with it.
I'm going to try to write some more today, before my week begins in earnest and the opportunity to write before Saturday becomes diminished. I'm supplementing my typical work with a part-time job, it lets me engage with more personal projects on weeknights and long weekends. Maybe I'll get to knock something else out before returning to that job tomorrow.
The past few days will go down in history. The comparison I keep hearing is that "this is our Katrina" and that's not inaccurate at all.
If God saw fit to humble us, He certainly did with Hurricane Helene.
As I write this it's almost 7:30 pm EST on October 1st, 2024. I was away from the house for much of the day so I don't know when exactly the juice came back on but when I returned an hour ago the power was restored. It had been out since a little before 8 on Friday morning, four and a half days ago. So that's about a hundred hours that we were without electricity.
I drove around the area on Friday night. Didn't get too far. There were big trees fallen all over the place, across the roadways. I've never seen so many power lines down.
I had to conserve battery power on the various devices, like my phone and iPad. Yesterday morning I ventured out and got to the library in downtown Spartanburg, found a spot on the floor next to a wall outlet and recharged the phone. I've been limiting its use, employing it only when absolutely necessary. Because there was no telling when power would come back to our homes.
My dog and I are in upstate South Carolina. And it could have been much worse.
Asheville, North Carolina is a little less than an hour to our north. As of this evening I-40 going east out of the city is open but nothing else. The town is pretty much unreachable except by helicopter (Asheville Regional Airport is starting to get supply flights coming in but that's a bit far from the city limits). At last count more than 60 people are dead from the storm in Buncombe County.
Half an hour to our west, we have friends in Greenville. They have been without power since Friday.
The town of Chimney Rock has been wiped off the map.
Sections of highways in the western part of North Carolina have been destroyed.
Local schools are out until Monday next week. Remote learning via Internet is also out.
The power crews are working around the clock to restore electricity. They have come in from all up and down the country and some have arrived from Canada. They can't possibly be appreciated enough.
As for my own account...
Restricting the use of devices meant that it would be unwise to write, no matter how creative I was feeling. And the only flashlight I have is on my iPhone. So I spent the daylight hours doing lots of reading. I try to read George Orwell's 1984 every few years and I was behind on that so Sunday afternoon I was engorged in that novel. And yesterday, for whatever reason, I started re-reading Helter Skelter. I did write a bit for my book, the old-fashioned way: with a pen and notebook. So I guess it can be said that my attempt to contribute to the world's literature is sort of a multimedia effort.
It's been a wild past few days. And I was expecting the power to be restored sometime late Friday. So I'm very thankful that it's back.
I've been through hurricanes a number of times in my life. Helene topped them all. For it to come this far inland and still packing a punch is almost a freak occurrence. It's being called a one-in-a-thousand-year catastrophe.
And that's pretty much my report. Going to spend the rest of the evening getting my bearings back, take a LONG hot shower, give my dog Tammy some love and treats, maybe watch a movie.
Helene has certainly made me thankful for things that we too often take for granted. And like I said, it could have been worse here.
Thoughts and prayers going up and out for everyone who's been affected by this storm.
Well, this turned into something interesting. My home is in the upstate of South Carolina. Three days ago the entire western Carolinas region got slammed hard by Hurricane Helene. I lost power on Friday morning about 7:30 and 77 hours later it still hasn't been restored. Based on what I saw on the way to the library in downtown Spartanburg this morning, it may be days if not weeks before power is turned back on 100%.
This was a catastrophe on the same level as Hurricane Katrina. Our kids will be telling their grandchildren about this one.
So I wasn't able to work most of the weekend, because power is out. Until yesterday when I started writing in a notebook with a pen, jotting some thoughts down that will go into further chapters. It will honestly be able to be said that I worked on this book through a hurricane.
Anyhoo, since last week I have been able to fully write one chapter, along with editing the previous one and the aforementioned bits and pieces that have been jotted down.
And that's pretty much it, for now.
Almost a month ago I posted about the status of my book, something that had been on the back burner of my life for ten years now. Work on it has taken various forms, there had been progress made only for that to be tossed aside... well, it's been a mess, not to put TOO fine a point on it.
Things are very, very different now and have been for much of this past year. A few months ago I had a breakthrough moment and was able to crank out the first few chapters of the story of my life. That has led to more, and more.
Maybe it will help to keep me on track to post a status of this memoir's progress, say each week on Sunday. Perhaps that will encourage me to stay committed.
Here it is as of September 22nd, 22024: so far, not counting the preface, there are fifteen chapters that have been written. I spent most of this past week working on one, that had really been making me struggle. It's still considered a VERY rough draft but early word that a dear friend I shared it with is that it's good.
There are going to be at least six parts. Part one is complete. There are five chapters done so far for part five, which is currently titled "Three Months and Three Ladies". I'm not writing this book in sequential order. Just working on it as the Muse leads me.
There is still a lot of work to be done. Ideally I would be producing two to three chapters a week, but I'll be happy if it's even just one. This book is finally getting the attention I needed to lavish upon it. It's not going to be rushed. But when it's finished, I will have written my life story, as well as such things are possible.
And that's how things stand now.
4 8 15 16 23 42
It was twenty years ago tonight - September 22, 2004 - that arguably the greatest television series of the new millennium premiered.
Lost was an instant sensation and for six seasons its tale of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 gripped the world's consciousness. ABC's hit broke all the rules, subverted expectations, and cooked long-held tropes like so many White Castle hamburgers. Lost was television of the highest order of storytelling. Yes, its story ended without every mystery getting a solid answer... and many maddeningly unresolved. But some things should be left to the imagination and Lost certainly provided viewers with fresh new enigmas seemingly every week to ruminate upon.
I think that Lost wasn't so much about the riddles as it was about the characters. That was the greatest ensemble cast assembled in the modern history of the medium and they brought to life some incredibly deep and multi-layered personas. My most favorite character was John Locke: the crippled "man of faith" who inexplicably regained the ability to walk after Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. There was so much about him that resonated with me. And I also came to have some sympathy for Benjamin Linus, perhaps the most flawed of the show's characters. I like to think that Ben found redemption in the end, and truly repented of his ways. It was as good an end to his arc as there could probably be had.
I'm not going to post about Lost without mentioning my personal favorite theory, something that I've never seen anyone else posit. I think that David, Jack's son from the flash-sideways world, was the child who came about when Jack and Kate made love before taking off on the Ajira flight. Eloise had told the people who came to the Lamp Post that they had to recreate as closely as possible the conditions of the original flight. What she told Kate was that she had to conceive a child so that Kate could be a proxy for Claire, who had been pregnant on the Oceanic 815 flight. Well, David had to come from somewhere. And he even looks like he could be a child of Kate and Jack, too. He was very well cast.
I also think that the Man in Black wasn't Jacob's brother at all. As evidenced by the hieroglypics that Ben found, the Smoke Monster had existed on the island long before Jacob's mother came. The Monster simply assumed the appearance of Jacob's brother. Jacob found his brother's body, it hadn't been transformed at all. Again, just a theory.
Well, I could go on. This show left us with so much that we're still discussing and debating fourteen years after its final episode. That says something about any series's timeless quality. And I doubt that in another twenty years we'll be too exhausted to still be talking about it.
So, let's raise our glasses of Dharma Initiative cola and toast Lost on its twentieth anniversary! Just as amazing today as it was in 2004.
I got to meet him, briefly, in 2003. Amazing man, with an intellect as formidable as his voice if not more so.
Ninety-three is a good run. And he definitely made his mark.
Who else could make saying the alphabet so dramatic?
Godspeed Mr. Jones. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us for so long.
More than a decade ago Dad persuaded me that my life story would make for something that many people would probably enjoy reading. I started writing that in 2014. And then a lot of things happened. Dad's passing. The year spent journeying across America. Four years as a mental health professional. Those things and more atop the wackiness that life had already sent barreling my way since I was a cub. And let's not forget manic depression and all that led to!
Well, here's a bit of an update on that. Following a few fits with a fresh start on writing, during these past several months I have made significant progress on my memoir. I had been stuck at one point since mid-March however. And then a few days ago I finally cracked it and was able to knock two chapters out of the ballpark in less than 24 hours. Right now I am working on a new chapter, which is set-up for something of a "triptych" in the tale.
The first six consecutive chapters are done. Several other chapters of varying sizes, to be spread around the book, have also been written.
If someone were to ask for a rough estimate on the size this is going to be, I would guess that right now it's going to be a little longer than J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which is 272 pages in hardcover. Actually, that's not a bad book for comparison, for a few reasons.
I'm discovering that it's not just writing my life story out as a straightforward narrative. I am having to examine and consider things - and people - that are coming into a whole new light. The process of writing this is changing me, and I believe for the better. A few days ago I wrote about the little Amish girl who I met when I was ten years old. And that made me realize for the first time what an impact that had on my life (forty years later and I still think of her).
There is a title and has been for a year or so now. It took awhile to find one but I really love it. Only five other people know it and they're all sworn to secrecy. But every person I've told it to has responded with the same question: "What does THAT mean?" Hopefully they and many others will delight to find out.
So, there is the status on that particular project. It's found its groove again and the past several days have been a rollickin' wild ride across the life of young Robert Christopher Knight. This next part is going to be a hard one to tackle though. A lot of tragedy in a very short period of time. Maybe if this book gets published it will help make some things right that happened long ago.
And maybe enough people will be able to not only understand me, but be able to forgive me.
Edit: 09/08/2024 6:10 PM EST: I have been able to knock out three chapters within the past 48 hours. Including the one that illuminates the reader about the meaning of the book's title. That was tough to write but also a lot of fun.
This really is coming together. It might even be finished by Christmas, but that's not a goal per se. Just a possibility.
So help me, I'm going to show this cartoon from almost eighty years ago until I'm blue in the face, if that's what it takes to stop people from drinking Ism!
Not for the first time, not for the last, there are people in this country trying to sell "Ism" to us. But it is a bitter elixir that will do naught but poison us and rob us and our children of precious liberty.
America is not perfect. It never has been. It never will be. We have made mistakes along the way, just as any other nation has. But we as a people have done pretty good in owning up to that. America does NOT need MORE government "fixing things" that we can do on our own. In America there is equality of opportunity. There is no guarantee of equality of outcome though, however. But that is what today's supporters of "Ism" are trying to sell us, and all it results in is that much less freedom and prosperity.
Here is "Make Mine Freedom". Remember: Don't drink the Ism!
"Best campaign ad ever!"
- George Lucas's Edutopia magazine
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