THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

 Having a weird thought / idea right now ... And I bet it's something that a lot of people have figured out sooner than I have. When you create dependencies on people in the world, you give away your power. You look to others to feed you something that you feel unable to manifest yourself. And here's where I'm feeling this sharp stab come from. I have so few friends as it is (luckily, one of these friends REALLY understands me)... and I've tried to be a good friend, and to be of use to others in ways that I would hope to be reciprocated..  Okay, so here's where I'm seeing the holes in this objective of having friends. You either need to surround yourself with people that are so closely of like mind and common interest, people that are weird and thrive on the kinds of activities and ideas that motivate you, or else your going to feel incomplete. If you are a weirdo and all of your friends are normal, you're just going to appear as a circus clown to them. They...

I'm not ready to break out my volumes of files and folders that contain all of my typewritten pages that make up my possibly great American novel, just yet. I'm going to need some warming up and ego building to give me confidence that I'm really ready to go back into that tempestuous struggle. So here's where my head is today. Last week I had an experience with my best friend that led me to think that what we had just gone through was good material for a short story. I've never been a good short story writer, have never really had much impetus to write short stories. and also have not read a lot of short stories... wow, the odds are so against me being good at following this lead of an idea. But it's not like I'm really writing them for anyone other than myself. I'm not writing them for a class or any contests. I just want to try writing them to get my storytelling juices flowing again. And maybe by starting to write some so-called short stories, I mig...

Hmm, I sure am a fan of some unknowns, eh? Shirley Jackson was a writer. An old school sort of writer of simple fiction that carried a lot of hidden intent. She wrote two novels that are favorites of mine, that are considered to be horrific in nature, yet there are no real ghosts or monsters in the stories; other than those that the main characters create out of themselves... in the world that surrounds them. I'm more a fan of her writing than I am of many other writers I may say that I like yet I have only read 3 of her works; The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Lottery. I saw the 1963 movie that was made from The Haunting of Hill House first, when I was a child. Then later in junior high school I read The Lottery for the first time. Then in high school I came across a copy of the book stat struck me thje strongest; We Have Alsways Lived in the Castle. But they are are all masterpieces that stick the closest to my ribs. I've reread the nove...

It feels as if my life is just beginning to hit it's stride. Remember I talked about cycles of 7 years being significant restorative periods of time? And that this year I am living my 7th 7 (turned 49 years old in September)? Tomorrow night I have the biggest photo gig of my life so far. I have photo/press passes to cover the Coheed and Cambria concert at The Warfield in San Francisco. I have earned the privilege of receiving regular photo and writing assignments for the online music zine, groundcountrolmag . After the first concert review I wrote for them last month they asked me to send them a "wish list" of shows that I would like to cover. I will be at a minimum, the writer for upcoming shows by The Cult, The Waterboys, and Queens of the Stone Age. How this worked out for me to be the writer and photographer for C&C happened (I think) because I only requested the show last week and they didn't have a photographer available for the show! Am I jazzed? Yeah, yo...

It's the birthday of James Joyce , ( books by this author ) born in Rathgar, Ireland, just outside Dublin (1882). He's best known today for Ulysses (1922), his attempt to recreate a single day in the city of Dublin, with all its sights, sounds, smells, as well as the many different kinds of people, the way they talked, and what private thoughts floated through their heads as they went about their daily lives. He wrote the novel while living in voluntary exile in Zurich, and he did all kinds of research to get the details right. He asked his Aunt Josephine to send him copies of anything to do with Ireland: newspapers, magazines, history books, guidebooks, maps, and photographs. Because he chose June 16, 1904 as the day on which the novel would take place, he made sure to include real details about things that had happened on that day, including sporting events, news items, and even newspaper advertisements that appeared in newspapers on that day. The first printing of...