I
am writing about the night that I stormed out the door of our apartment
without telling my wife where I was going, because not even I knew
where I was going. And how I wound up in Raleigh at my best friend's
door at 10 at night. God only knows how I made it to the highway
without crashing the car at the high speed I was going at.
This
is the part of bipolar disorder that I hate the most. Asking God why He
let me have something like...
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Son of ex-slave and Union soldier passes away (you read that right)
It's stuff like this that never ceases to fascinate me. These things impress upon us that so much of our history... isn't that long ago after all.
Luke Martin, Jr. passed away a few days ago in Raleigh (that's the capital of North Carolina for those who might not know that). Mr. Martin was 97.
He died 179 years after his father was born. His father, by the way, was a former slave who escaped to freedom and then fought in the Civil...
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn
I won't apologize for the all-caps there. I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here...
Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b. Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view. Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff...
Monday, January 19, 2015
I finally beat Zaxxon!
You might have heard about the Internet Arcade that Internet Archive fired up a few months ago. All of those arcade games that we (or at least some of us) used to feed quarters into? Well, almost 700 of them - as in the originals, not home console ports - are available to play for free in your web browser! Which is a great thing because these games are a...
Book update for mid-January
I think I'm getting back into the full swing of writing my book, at last.
I've completely re-written Chapter 1. And I seriously hope that I'm not just seeing things but the more I read over it and how it flows into the rest of the manuscript, the better and better it's looking. It sets up a much better tone for the book that follows. It's more gripping. It's more "me" than the original version was. And that is what...
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Reidsville's $30,000 monument to madness
So my hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina has decided to ultimately remove a nationally-recognized statue with more than a hundred years of history, and let it instead be replaced with a horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft...
"We'll tear your soul apart!"
Brief recap: almost four years ago the Confederate monument in downtown Reidsville was toppled and smashed...
Monday, January 05, 2015
Watch it now: the legendary CNN "end of the world" video
One of the things I've always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff. Or at least those things that are intriguing to me. Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months. Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad's passing a month and a half ago, this hasn't been the best of times to...
Friday, December 26, 2014
A joyful Christmas despite myself
Here I am, the day after Christmas 2014. And I'm only writing this because a lot of people were praying for me yesterday, that I might get through this holiday.
Grief is hard enough already. It's especially heartbreaking when it comes so close to the holiday season and you see that empty chair at the table. It's not something that I haven't experienced already. Mom passed away three days after Christmas three years ago, and...
Saturday, December 20, 2014
It's a very Dalek Christmas!
Okay, that's it. I give up. I didn't know how having a Christmas this year was going to be at all possible. In light of everything that's happened in the past nearly two months, yuletide joy was something that seemed way past feasibility. Although, I haven't begrudged anyone from having that. Just feels like I'm on the outside looking in this...
Friday, December 19, 2014
Currently going through a bout of depression...
Actually, it's a rapid-cycling episode that's been going on for the past two days. I woke up yesterday morning, remembered that Dad was gone, went into sadness that suddenly plummeted into clinical depression (something that lacks any emotion whatsoever) and then got catapulted into a bout of mania where the sadness returned, got escalated beyond my ready grasp of things,...
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Classic SESAME STREET: Bert and Ernie's "The Gift of the Magi"
Good googeley moogely... it's been ages since I posted any Sesame Street clips!! I think maybe at least two years, maybe longer than that. How in the world did I overlook such timeless material? Shame on me!
Time to make up for it. And boy howdy, do I get to make up for it...
I was waaaay young when this aired but I vividly remember it. It was part of a Sesame Street Christmas special from... I think it was 1980? ...
Friday, December 12, 2014
The book: Moving ahead...
It was three weeks ago today that Dad passed away. I'm still in a great state of grief, more than that even, about it. There's a real shock that comes with seeing someone so close to you suddenly leaving you like that. But I still believe that there was something of God's hand in how things played out. If the circumstances had been slightly different in any of a thousand different ways, my family would not have had those sixteen...
You voted Republican last month? Why?
I'm going to say something right now, and I don't care if it offends
ANY body. If it happens to offend you, good: maybe you NEED offending
to open your eyes...
There is NO difference at all between the
Democrat and Republican parties and anyone who puts the SLIGHTEST amount
of trust in one party or the other... and I'm going to single out those
who support the Republican party especially... are worse than fools and
idiots.
For the past...
Monday, December 01, 2014
Memorial video for Dad
On the night after Dad's passing, Anita (my sister), my aunt and uncle and I went through a ton of old photographs to use in the video that the funeral home would put together for the tribute that would play during visitation on the following night. Wilkerson Funeral did a very solid job in doing so and I wanted to share it on my blog.
I don't want to say which one, but there is one photo in here that seriously broke my heart to include. It...
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
The FORCERY Four, together again!
I don't know how else to put it, but there are some things that happened at Dad's funeral that despite the occasion were an amazing delight. And I truly believe that Dad would have had no small measure of pride if he could somehow know that this celebration of his life brought so many wonderful people together to celebrate not only his own life, but also of the most...
Monday, November 24, 2014
Taking Dad to the edge of the Jordan
.JPG)
Yesterday was supposed to have be one of the saddest days of my entire
life. Yet here I am after Dad's funeral and I cannot help but
feel like the most blessed, most overwhelmed with joy, most hopeful
man in the world.
Mom and Dad's grave site,
the morning after Dad's funeral
This entire time, I believe Dad would have felt
honored by every aspect of it. Anita and...
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Dad's page on the funeral home site
The thought this morning was that I would post Dad's obituary on my blog after it had been published on the Wilkerson Funeral Home website. But the staff at Wilkerson has rendered such an astounding service during this time of our need... well, that and the page they did for Dad is so spot-on perfect (and totally in keeping with his character)... that their tribute...
