Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

As I’m thinking about the direction of this site (in the past tense, not in the future), it looks like I’ve spent a whole lot more time discussing green power and the environment than I have my writing. Since the site is called “mattmitchellfiction.com,” that lines me up for a misnomer award. But I’m not fretting; if there’s one thing I make clear on the about page, it’s that I’m liable to discuss anything at all here, and I feel like I’ve kept my promise on that end. Besides, there hasn’t been much to talk about on the writing front anyway. I’ve collected a half dozen rejections this year for various stories, all which were submitted to SFFWA markets. And I’m not particularly down about it, because I’ve got my hand stirring other pots right now, including the one Super Sekrit Projeckt that I might as well go ahead and tell you about, because though it might not be a revolutionary idea, it is a remodeling of things that are, to better fit in line with where I think things want to go. To explain further….

Social networking is what it is, and a lot of people mess around with it. But MySpace and Facebook and the like have just grown to such gargantuan size, and friending has grown so rampant, that it’s become cumbersome to use them. Not to mention the fact that if you’re a guy of a certain age and you use it a lot you’ll get the perv stamp applied to your forehead. Some people are forecasting that social networks are going to shrink down in size and become modeled more for specific groups of like-minded people. When I first started reading about that, it made me kind of excited, because that’s exactly what I’ve had planned for some time now. And I’m not talking about making a little ning carbon-copy-type network, I’m talking about a full-blown SN site with all the bells and whistles and a few tambourines and jingle jangles that aren’t being done at all right now. Something to send social networking into a different direction.

As you can probably guess, since I spend so much time ruminating about the state of the environment, being eco-friendly, green energy and just the outdoors in general, you might ascertain what the general mindset of folks who might use my SN will be tempered like. But it’s much bigger than that. To what extent, I can’t really say yet. Like I said, it might not be revolutionary (I think it is), but it is at least a remodeling of the way SN is done. It’s something that I’d like to get a lot of attention. It’s something that I feel will potentially be a positive source of forward-thinking for the world, for society and civilization as a whole. Yes, I’m thinking big, but I’m a big thinker…so.

The site will go live on or near September 8th, 2008. Me being a big fan of 8s, you might remember, and this being my year, this is a day that may live in glory. It would have been great to go live on 8-8-08, but my network people assure me that’s a practical impossibility. But still, 8-8-08 will be a day of importance, because that’s the day I hope to begin recruiting a group of beta testers (I’m going to call them “trailblazers”), who will receive a free lifetime membership in what I hope will become a very large and successful social networking site. So: the beans have been spilled (at least to the extent at which my business partner has allowed me to spill them), and the project is now out of the closet (er, so to speak), unveiled right here on Unabashed. I’m frankly tickled about it, and I hope some of you will be, too. If you’d like to be a trailblazer for [Re]Evolver, just let me know in the comments of this post or in email (mattmitchell8 at gmail dot com). There are going to be a limited number of slots available (to the tune of around a hundred), so it’ll be best to get your name in quick.

Want more specifics? Fine. Here’s what I can tell you now:

The site has a home already at reevolver.com. There’s a splash page up that I made myself, so don’t expect the end result to look even remotely similar. I’ve contracted a pro to build the site (a pro, who I might add, likes the idea so much he’s asked for a partnership).

[Re]Evolver is just how I wrote the name when I first thought of it (Imagine my surprise to find that the .com, .org and .net URLs were all available!), but it looks like the official logo will be similar to that in form, at least.

And what is Re-evolver, exactly? Re-evolver is a term for the human tribe. It is based upon the principle that we’ve evolved into a separate entity from the environment, and that it is now time to re-evolve into a more beneficially symbiotic organism that can work with Earth’s ecosystem rather than against it. But it’s not preachy, dogmatic or unrealistic, it’s (what I hope will be) a fun approach to educating people on eco-friendly principles, promoting sustainability and a back-to-basics, back-to-Earth mentality.

There will be activities.

There! I’ve said too much. Let me know what you think.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the future of Unabashed, never fret. This is my personal blog and it’s going to stay right here for the foreseeable future. And besides, ReEvolver might not be a book getting published, but it’s because of my writing that it exists at all; that little habit I have of jotting down ideas finally resulted in a project with momentum. And by the time I’m through with it, I think it will be the size of a book. Anyway…

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Photo by veintecerodos.

I still love this bit from Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

There are many versions of this story, but this is by far the most popularized. My personal favorite goes like this:

An English philosopher was visiting India, and was introduced to a holy man. The philosopher asked the Holy Man the nature of the world, and the old man replied, “Oh the world is a great big ball that sits on the great flat back of the Great World Turtle.” The Englishman of course asked “What does the turtle stand on?” The seer replied “Why on the back of an even larger turtle of course!” Then the Englishman asked “and what does THIS turtle stand on?” The old man shook his head and sweetly smiled and said “it is no use my son, it is turtles all the way down!”

Why is it a turtle that the Earth is sitting upon? Why not a crocodile, or a cockroach, or a mammal even? Because turtles are one of the most ancient species that lives–it is, in fact, the most ancient of all vertebrate animals. It’s not as ugly or filthy as a cockroach, and because the turtle is considered patient, wise, and there’s very little threat of it tipping its head back and eating the planet. The turtle is safe, and with its shell has a solid foundation for the Earth to sit upon.

The turtle is considered in folklore to be a keeper of doorways. Some turtles’ shells have thirteen individual sections, or markings, which led Native Americans to associate the turtle with the lunar cycle and the power of female energies. Being opportunistic omnivores, and being a symbol of Mother Earth, Native American mythos considered the turtle to be powerful medicine, and a reminder that the Earth will provide. Its long life and slow metabolism reminds us to slow down and take our time, and shows us that sometimes it’s okay to live inside a shell.

The turtle appears in modern legends as well. Stephen King uses the turtle in many of his stories. In It, the main character meets a giant turtle professes to have had an upset stomach and sicked up the Universe. The turtle pleads not to be blamed for having inadvertently having created All That Is.

In King’s Dark Tower series, a turtle named Maturin is one of the “Guardians of the Beam.”

See the turtle of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.

The name Maturin is obviously borrowed from Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, just as the name of the great bear guardian was borrowed from Richard Adams’ Shardik, both immensely cool references.

I found a painting of a sea turtle one time over at DeviantArt, a page which has since sadly disappeared, but fortunately I had saved the art piece, along with its inscription:

Due a very stressful period of my life I was constantly having bad dreams and nightmares. During one, I felt myself sink into deep, blue water. I saw the sun filtering down through the water and waves, and slowly a large gnarled, ugly Turtle passed over me. This huge behemoth of a creature, scar covered, and armoured created a feeling of peace within me. The next day, I painted this.

I do sometimes ponder the Earth and mysticism, and I wonder at the practice of using animal totems or having a spirit animal guide. I have no idea what mine would be, nor how I would find out what it is. I’ve always had a fascination with wolves and hawks, turtles and beavers. I hope that doesn’t mean I’m pretentious and slow and large-toothed. I like the idea of spirit animals, sure, but barring some monumental mythic quest, how would you find out what yours are? I have dreamed about whales. I see hawks virtually every day, but I usually accredit that to the fact that there are so many of them living around here. Suppose my spirit animal was a giraffe. Does that mean I’d have to travel to another continent to commune with it? I have no idea, and most of the web resources I find don’t give much good information, just carbon-copy duplicates of other sites that all share the same mentality and fraudulent air of Sybill Trelawney.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

You know, when I said the planets must be lining up because of all the weird I’ve been seeing, I didn’t know they really were. Interestingly, in this article the author claims that planetary alignments “are nothing more than the visible clockwork mechanism of our natural skies,” and that the myths associated with those movements are all erroneous. Well, number one, a myth is by definition erroneous, or at least a myth is an imagination, invented idea or story or concept. Number two, the author fails to consider all the weird that occurs when the planets line up just so. It’s like saying the full moon has no impact on people, and yet, ask any ER nurse or doctor and they’ll tell you that on full moon nights the ER fills up quicker and fuller than usual, and usually with a healthy dose of weird. I’m not saying it’s not a myth, but in my mind it’s a dangerous thing to dismiss anything too quickly, and I think there are still inexplicable things in this vast Universe we live in. In fact, I think it’s downright simple to presume that everyone who believes there is significance in such celestial drama are wrong, when you have no proof of that yourself.

But it is a nice blog (even though it is way too heavy on the advertising), and the author did point out that the planets were all aligning for our entertainments. So go read Universe Today (just pull the RSS feed like I do and you don’t have to bother with the irritating mass of adspace).

Photograph by Richard McCoy.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

The Constant Siege has a lovely observation about spirituality that I wish I’d written myself:

It’s the ozone smell of the desert after a summer rainstorm, or the damp magnolia fertility in the air of a New Orleans night. It’s old Puerto Rican men playing dominoes on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, spilled out of their apartments, our public space blended with their private, their women dancing to boombox salsa, their children running for ices, far off police sirens singing chorus.

It’s the atoms in my blood and heart and brain. Atoms that have existed since the dawn of time, and will continue until it never ends. Atoms that have been in the heart of stars, and traveled in comets, and lay in the cold grey dust of the moon. Atoms that have fed great sequoias, and the earthworms underneath them. Atoms that have been breathed by kings and paupers, philosophers and madmen. Atoms that I’m carrying right now, on brief loan, my contribution to their life, and theirs to mine. Pure eternal energy, great and small. It’s being old when young, and young when old, knowing I will die soon, but I’ll never really die.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

How many stories are there in a day? Every day, every one of us is a story. Some are boring, but some are fantastic. Every soul on Earth has its own story, set to the cadence of every heartbeat drumming up the words. The most frustrating thing is not knowing the stories of the lives that we intersect with. Points of interest along the route of life compile without definition: we don’t meet, we don’t know, we only move on, just as the story does. Today I met four stories, but I have no idea how they began or end, I only have the snapshot in my mind, a single page or paragraph, and the frustration and wonder at what it is that made that story fantastic.

In order of occurrence:

There was a dark-haired woman and a toddler sitting at a table in McDonald’s eating breakfast. Her arms and legs were crossed and she stared down at her food, but the little boy, with a pacifier in his mouth, watched me as I walked by. When I left, walking back by them to get to the door, I noticed a car right outside the door with New York plates, and I wondered if it belonged to her and the little boy.

A big, tall man with copper-colored long hair was walking along the side of the road with a petite blonde woman wearing short-shorts. The woman was holding the hand of a little girl who might have been five years old, and the little girl had a dolly wrapped in her free arm. All four of them stared straight ahead, without expression or conversation (at least in those ten seconds that I saw them). The man was walking with a deliberate gait, and the other two were just keeping pace as well as they could. Or so it appeared.

A woman wearing a white dress and a black backpack was standing by a patrol car with the police lights spinning, and the officer, a burly macho type with mirrored sunglasses, was standing beside her holding a book or a pamphlet of some type, staring down at it. The woman wasn’t looking at him, but past him, at nothing I could see. There was a church nearby, but the road they were on was a connector route between Centreville and Tuscaloosa. There are a lot of houses along that stretch, but not much else, so it was kind of odd to see a woman walking alone through there.

Another woman, barefoot, wearing a tee shirt that was just long enough to make it look like that was all she was wearing and with a big blonde hairdo of loopy curls, was walking smoothly across the pavement around her car, which was stopped at an intersecting road between Centreville and Montevallo. She wasn’t walking with the “I think I have a flat tire” hop, but as if she was thinking something through, something very distracting. I didn’t stop to help because she got back into her car, and I saw in my rearview that she was pulling onto the main highway, heading back toward Centreville.

All of these people were beautiful, from the burly cop right down to the little dolly. They were all people in my own story’s margin, people whose lives I’ve glimpsed but whose stories I’ll never know, no matter how boring or adventurous or scandalous or petty or eager or psychopathic or horrific or desirable or melodic or distressful or macabre or mischievous. All I know is each one of those stories was interesting, for those few words I was able to read of them. All the planets this morning were spinning out of line–or into a line–and gave me a glimpse into the eyes of ordinary grandeur, everyday wonder. And I liked it.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Here is a great tribute to America, courtesy of Matt Parker and Trey Stone of South Park fame. Er…disclaimer: there’s a lot of foul language in this video, but it’s funny, so…Happy 4th of July.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

I have a question that may be dumb: would it be unethical to write a blog that was completely fictional, using fictional characters, based in a real place, but not tell anyone it was a work of fiction? I know there’s been some flack lately over phony memoirs (which is clearly unethical, unlike what I’m proposing), but I’m not wanting to write a memoir. This isn’t a story of my own past, but an ongoing story written in blog format. And I’d rather not reveal right away that it’s a work of fiction because in my mind that would minimize interest. I can see someone reading a few blog posts and thinking, “Hey, this is pretty cool,” but then clicking the site disclaimer link to see the big “This is a work of fiction” banner, click out never to return. I’m genuinely in the dark on this, and would appreciate any opinion I can get…

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

I love the Big Idea series John Scalzi is doing. I like reading about the genesis of an idea, how it came to be written. If I had an opportunity to show John Scalzi my Big Idea–which I don’t, since the book is not published–I might tell him that my idea has a lot to do with bringing science to fantasy. It might look something like this:

I love stories where there are invisible worlds set within the world we live in. The idea that someone is right there, standing next to you, but you can’t see them because they’re in this other place. The first time I remember thinking about that was in high school, when we were talking about the Mayan culture that just disappeared off the face of the Earth, without a trace. While everyone else was thinking drought or war or famine, I was thinking that they must have evolved into a higher state, and then transitioned into a separate reality from the physical one we can see.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint…there are a lot of writers who utilize the “world within a world” plot to great effect, but they always seemed to miss one important detail that I always wanted to see expounded upon: how did the invisible world come to be in the first place? Once I began wondering in that direction, the book Modern-Day Mythica wrote itself.

The story evolved from the concept of an energy mass that encircles the globe, that flows across the surface of the Earth like a river, from north to south. That energy is called the Wash. And everywhere that the Wash touches ground it forms pockets of reality within reality, some large and some small, attainable by certain doorways which are difficult to find and even more difficult to access, unless you really know what you’re doing. But to simply go that far with the idea still wouldn’t have satisfied my curiosity of how the Wash itself came to be, in order to form these pockets of reality. And that was the point where the idea became my Big Idea. The complexity of the concept is vast, but it fits perfectly within the scientific laws of the universe, if you can accept that there is one ingredient in the universal stew that remains undetected and unaccounted for: the energy of the Wash itself, which originates from a celestial body once in orbit around the Earth, when the Earth had two moons in the sky.

The implications of this are much more far-reaching than might initially be thought of: the presence of a moon that is unaccounted for, that disappeared some ten thousand years ago and is unrecorded except perhaps in some arcane hieroglyphs drawn on cave walls, could have a devastating impact on how science looks at history. With two moons, Earth’s time line could shorten considerably. Things that might take millions of years today, such as the formation of mountain ranges, might have only taken thousands of years in an environment where there was so much more gravitational pull on the planet’s surface. The tides would have been greater, earthquakes and volcanoes much more frequent…essentially, everything that science has applied to a timeline would have to be compressed into a much tighter margin, because things would have been happening so much faster than we can account for today. This is important because it enables the scenario where the ages of mammals and dinosaurs could have overlapped, and it is entirely feasible in the real world. Indeed, this is a scenario which is entirely possible, one which I do not believe can be proven incorrect. That was the essential Big Idea of the book.

But what happened to the moon, one might ask. Well, this is the point where the story leaves the plane of the real world and delves into fantasy or science fiction. The moon, a crusty, charred satellite with a surface composed primarily of slate, is the source of the energy of the Wash. Some combination of minerals and exotic materials, in an environment of intense heat (such as the core of the moon, which happens to be molten), releases the energy, which is copious enough to encompass both moons as well as Earth. This shared energy is a fuel for magic, making the impossible possible in many ways. For instance, the cocktail of energies allow for the existence of creatures on the moon in question, which could not exist in any world where magic is not possible. And furthermore, the influence of the energies allows for those creatures to migrate to Earth, lending credence to the ancient myth of dragons.

In Modern-Day Mythica, dragons are pivotal characters, striving to reach the cool blue comfort of Earth once again. But they were banished long ago, by means of a spell woven by a man, using the inherent energies of their home moon itself. For thousands of years the dragons have been seeking to undo what was done, and once were able to expose a rift between Earth and the realm to which their moon had been banished. This rift allowed the energies of the moon to once again enter Earth’s atmosphere, forming the Wash, and enabling magic within its borders.

This work is unpublished and unagented, although it is under consideration at this time. Read the first five chapters here.
Crappy cover art was contrived by myself, with a ganked photograph from here (the cover art is crappy, but the photo is pretty cool).

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Matt Staggs warms my soul:

Thanks to the internet connecting all of the great social tribes together we’re re-entering a “storytelling age,” where authenticity, experience and the ability to communicate ideas in a compelling manner matter more than the authoritarian mono-culture sponsored by corporate America. Those of us who can adapt to this new world - the creatives, the visionaries, we who would have been Skalds, Bards and Troubadours a few centuries ago - will thrive, assuming our place by the fire and our rightful position of importance in the new global tribe.

And blogs will be the campfires around which we huddle for stories, warmth and grog. Or ale. Depending.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

General Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter, never missing an opportunity to smear the opponent of his preferred candidate, had this to say about McCain’s service record:

Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president

And if you read that within the context, understanding that Clark was asked about how Senator McCain’s national security policies might be influenced by his military service, you realize two things:

1. General Wesley Clark is a stooge for the Democratic party.
2. General Wesley Clark is an asshole.

For starters, Clark has an opportunity in this interview to take the high road, but makes it abundantly clear that he is in this game only to smear the McCain camp as much as he can. Especially when you consider that his argument against McCain began with “in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions.” To which an open-minded observer might ask: And Obama has? And that is the point: taking every chance to smear the opponent. Thankfully, the interviewer noted the remark and added, “I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…” To which Clark has to crawfish, saying, “But Barack is not–he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements, he’s running on his other strengths. He’s running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment, and those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership.”

To Senator Obama’s immense credit, he’s distanced himself from the statement. His campaign spokesman said: “Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

In the end, I can only observe that Clark has done no harm to the McCain camp, and no good for the Obama camp. He’s only proven two things, and I listed those above.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

It’s no great mystery that I live in a primarily conservative state. Alabama is a red state, and it’s hard to imagine that changing very much. I generally don’t talk politics with friends or family, unless I’ve already got an idea of how they’re inclined to think, because there aren’t many more futile things to do. They believe one way, the right way, and there’s no changing that, no altering it, absolutely no pliancy. I do have my conservative leanings, but I’m far, far to the left as far as most folks around here are concerned. So, in order to keep from being considered “wacky” or “goofy,” I keep my politics to myself. But this weekend when I was visiting with my mother, my step father began talking and I felt my blood boil. He began by telling me what lousy shape we were going to be in if Obama becomes president.

“We’re already in lousy shape,” I replied. “And you can blame that on Bush.”

Surprisingly, he nodded at that. I couldn’t really believe he was agreeing with me, I thought I was traipsing way out on a limb, but evidently it’s more commonly accepted that W has placed a noose around all our necks than I’d thought. Even among my fellow Alabamians.

“But it’ll get worse if Obama is elected,” he said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“You just watch, if he gets elected, he’s going to give that preacher of his a job in his cabinet. Maybe even Secretary of State.”

Whoa, was he talking about Jeremiah Wright, the controversial reverend who Obama’s publicly disassociated himself with? “But he denounced that preacher,” I said. “Publicly.”

He nodded, knowingly, with his smug expression, as if he had all the answers in the world, and said, “You just wait and see if he doesn’t. He’s going to side with the Muslims.”

At this point everything kind of happened in a blur. I accused him of slander. I reminded him that his beloved Ronald Wilson Reagan was predicted to be the anti-Christ at one point early in his presidency because he had six letters in each of his three names, which made it obvious to some people that he was from the devil. I told him I wasn’t convinced who I was voting for, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be based on the information I’d gathered from the Bubba crowd of ill-wishers who think the country has to be run by a Republican or it’s going to go up in flames, especially when it is, right now, in as bad a shape as it’s been in since the Great Depression, and it was a Republican who drove it into the fire. I also told him that I was convinced that the good ol’ boy network wasn’t going to vote for him because he’s black, and that they’ll do anything to sabotage his campaign, even resorting to petty slander and baseless character defamation when they’ve got nothing solid to use.

At that point my mother told me I needed to calm down a little bit. And I realized I was raving, and I regretted it immensely. This is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics, I thought, but it was too late, I’d already accused my step dad, essentially, of belonging to a racist Bubba faction of conservative politics. Things got really quiet for several long minutes. And then my step dad said, quietly, “You know, I would have voted for Colin Powell if he’d run.” And of course he would have, because Powell would have run on the right ticket. He couldn’t be evil because he isn’t a liberal. I pointed out, politely, that Powell’s politics were a lot less conservative than most Republicans and left it at that.

Down here, people pick their political parties like they pick their trucks, or their favorite sports team: Ford or Chevy, Republican or Democrat, Alabama or Auburn, and they support them no matter what. It’s a marriage of sorts, and it’s intended by God (obviously) to last one’s entire life, no questions asked, right or wrong. Even the Democrats vote blindly for their party, as I’m sure most of the country does, too. And that’s the biggest problem I have with the two-party system. People want their team to win, and even if the other party has a vastly, obviously superior candidate, they’ll still vote in their dumdum, just because they want their party to win. And if they lose, they’ll never be convinced that the president will ever do anything worth doing. They just criticize, non-stop, in hopes of getting their team’s candidate elected the next time. It is for that reason alone that I will not claim a party. I will try my best to look through the party lines, to see where they stand on actual issues that I care about and then vote for them. And I am sick to death of hearing the one side slander Obama and the other side slander McCain. It’s almost impossible to know what any candidate actually believes and stands for, because there’s always going to be one faction who’s convinced that the opposing candidate is the enemy and must be slandered at all cost. I hardly ever hear anyone touting their own favorite candidate, giving me their policies and positions, I just hear people trying to rub dirt onto the candidate they’re not supporting. My policy is simple: If you begin talking politics and say anything negative, I will shut down and not listen to anything you say. Give me the good of any and all sides and I’ll be raptly paying attention, with genuine interest, and I’ll let you know what I think when you’re done. This goes for all you candidates, too: smear campaigns do nothing for me. I won’t listen to them.

Politics suck; God bless America; Roll Tide!

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

I took my 3-year old son Lucas to the river Saturday (the Coosa River, specifically around Lay Lake in south Shelby County, AL) and we took to the water on my mom’s Yamaha waverunner. At one point out on the lake an island came into view, and I had to slow down and make a slow pass by the island, because it looked very odd. It was only about a hundred feet across and was covered with tall pine trees, some of which didn’t look very alive. But all the trees on the island were topped with something very white, and as I came closer I realized that the island was a nesting spot for egrets. Of course I didn’t have my camera with me, either, so I can’t show you how amazing it was. There were probably ten to twenty nesting pairs crowding the tops of the trees, in a mass of nests (which is why some of the trees looked dead). They were huge birds, with wingspans that must have reached six feet.

It occurred to me later that, before Lay Dam was built, this spot would have been a hill, not an island, possibly overlooking the river, which would have been narrow and fast in those days, and of course it would have been densely wooded. I wonder what it would be like to step foot on that island. Sure, there’d be a mass of guano probably, but what else? Might there be any mammals living on so small a piece of land? I dread to think it might also be a nesting spot for cottonmouths, which is entirely possible. But what else? Might it have once been a burial ground for the indigenous Creek Indians who lived around this area? I’ve found several spots around that area (which is where I grew up) where arrowheads could be found by the handful. Has anyone else ever decided to try to walk out on that island? I have no idea, I just know it was wonderful, and beautiful, and I want to go back again (and take my camera this time!).

Photo by mikebaird.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

What can I say, it looked like fun when I saw it on Dave Klecha’s blog…As memes go, this one is fun. I can’t believe “The Old Man and the Sea” isn’t on the list. There is one book on this list that I did read, but did not fess up to (out of an intense sense of shame). One free pat on the back to the first person who tells me which one it is :-)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - better viewed than read, but yanno
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Automobiles have never been efficient, but they’ve always been economical. And that’s even more evident today than ever before. I remember when I was younger how common it was to see an older car or truck running on the road. But you don’t see that much any more. It’s too easy to buy a new car, or even a new-used car, just a few years old. When I was a kid it wasn’t unusual to see a car driving down the road that was 20 years old or more. Today, it’s unusual to see a car much more than ten or twelve years old. Most anything so old as twenty years is considered vintage and is considered a collectible.

There was a time when buying a car didn’t mean you were identifying yourself, too. Today, you have to consider what the car says about you, you have to consider what it means to drive a Sebring, or a Hummer, or a BMW. Status has always been a consideration when buying a car, but it’s never been anything like it is now. Now there are tons of cars in the $50-75k price range. You don’t just choose from one or two. You decide which of the ten or twenty you can choose from correctly represents your personality. Everyone knows a similarly-priced Mercedes or a Hummer makes a statement about your level of income, but a Hummer delivers a completely different message than a Mercedes.

Buy my, how times do change, and how quickly they do it. Now, looking at someone driving a Hummer my first thought isn’t the desired “battle-ready” that I’m sure most Hummer owners want to project. I do think of dollar signs, yes, but the specific dollar signs I see are the ones they ring up at the pump. And it’s never been more evident how much pollution cars are spewing from the tailpipe. Now that it’s no longer exactly economical to drive everywhere, I’m hearing a whole new class of folks bemoaning their gasoline bills. The guy who sprays my house for insects mentioned this morning how great it would be if someone would invent a new power source for cars. I told him, “They’re working on it.” And then we had a nice little conversation about MIT’s pledge to deliver a more efficient photovoltaic system, even edging into the territory of all-too believable conspiracy theory, said he: “You know there’d probably already be something if it wasn’t for the oil lobbyists in Washington.” Yes, Big Oil definitely wants to keep us hooked on the pipeline they provide.

So what are the benefits of absurdly high gas prices? Well, for one, it’s entirely possible you might see a revitalization of small-town America. The super stores have all but killed commerce in the little towns, but it’s not too far beyond reason to presume that people will start shopping closer to home, that they might opt to drive ten minutes to a small grocery store than thirty minutes to a Wal-Mart. But the biggest benefit is one I’ve already stated: That more and more people, from previously unlikely places, are wanting to see a change. That the guy who drives the Hummer might just say, “Man, I sure wish I was driving a hybrid.” That people will actually begin to care what kind of efficiency the cars they buy might have. And, even better, that interest alone might be the provocation enough to develop a mass transit system for the country, and an improved drivetrain for cars. Personally, I find it rather appalling that we don’t have better mass transit systems than we do. Previously, if improved transit was needed from Baltimore to New York, they would just widen the interstate, rather than build a better system.

It’s hard to believe there’s no bullet train in America.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

This frog needs to be renamed:

It’s surprising enough to find a frog with claws,” says Blackburn, a doctoral student in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “The fact that those claws work by cutting through the skin of the frogs’ feet is even more astonishing. These are the only vertebrate claws known to pierce their way to functionality

Here’s a picture of the claws coming out, but it’s kinda gross so I didn’t gank it.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

I’m a very good sleeper. My wife has observed that I can lie down in bed, squirm a bit while I wriggle into the Optimum Comfort Position, and then I can say, “Watch this,” and fall directly to sleep. And she’s right, for the most part. When I get tired I can go to sleep. It’s a blessing I count, because I’ve known people who can’t sleep or who sleep fitfully, and I value the experience every day. But as a mechanism, a lot of things have to line up for it to work just right. I’ve spent a lot of time developing the process’s fundamentals. All the basics apply: I have to have the right temperature, the right pillow (or combination thereof, because I use two pillows. One my wife jokingly calls “Nurse Nancy,” because I hug up close and tight to it. But it’s really just a way to keep my shoulders from slouching, because I sleep on my side), and I need of course a good blanket over me. After that, things get really serious, but if I succeed at two key functions, then sleep is just a moment or two away.

The first requirement is some level of white noise. A small fan works well enough in this department. The reason I need the noise is pretty simple: I have an active imagination, and when I hear a noise I try to identify it. I try to figure out why that pipe might have rattled, I imagine the water flowing through it, down and down, the clogs along the way: is there a faucet running somewhere? Is it the dishwasher? And the level of noise at nighttime never ceases to amaze me. Minutiae of every sort, encroaching upon my imagination’s wildest forthcomings. What kind of bird was that? What is that growling noise in the closet? Did I just hear that noise the night-vision goggles made in Silence of the Lambs? And it gets worse, of course. But a certain level of white noise efficiently eradicates those mental wanderings, to the point where I am able to concentrate on only those things that increase my chances of drifting off to sleep.

The concentration is paramount in the process. I can’t think about things that are happening, and things that have happened in the past are a death knell for the sandman’s visit. Oddly enough, what I find most settling for my mind is something that I find very exciting, too, and it’s a result of that same imagination that would otherwise keep me from sleep if I didn’t have the white-noise generator. I think about my projects. The stories I’m writing, the ideas I’m nurturing, any and everything that keeps my mind active during the day somehow allows me to unplug when I turn out the light. Maybe it’s just a result of positive thinking, because with my projects I am always positive. Anything negative–bad memories or past failures–spells doom for sleep. I’ve turned over many an idea in my head in those final moments of consciousness and come up with a gripping new twist or a sensational, settling ending. Some of my best thinking happens in those few moments right before I fall asleep, and when I awaken, I find that I can expound and even improve the idea.

Saturday night I decided to sleep outside. I made a pallet on the back porch and let my dog know she was on guard duty, and then I settled in for a night of reconnecting with Mother Earth. She did not disappoint. There’s something satisfying in sleeping under the stars, waking up with a trace of dew across your forehead and pillow, and it’s always a bit startling to experience the world waking up, something I can’t do in my cocoon of comfort and white noise in the bedroom. Sunday morning I awakened with the rest of the world around me, those parts of it that are mostly only seen flitting in the periphery when you live in an industrialized society. The cool gray dawn met me with songbirds by the seeming multitudes, including one particularly throaty mocking bird who I think was about two feet from my head. I lay there soaking it all in for about thirty minutes, and then I staggered into the cocoon and got another hour’s restful sleep.

The experience was worth it. It reminded me of camping trips when I was a kid, when I used to throw down a sleeping bag anywhere and sleep with perfect comfort. I didn’t worry then about ticks or ants or mosquitoes, I just plopped down and didn’t care. But most importantly it reminded me of the life that lives on the periphery, of Earth herself, struggling to be a good home to us all, despite our virulent ways.

And now I’ve got another project in mind: a permanent dwelling, that I want to build somewhere on my six acres, fashioned after the example of the native Americans once of this area, the Creek Indians. A wigwam, if you will. A retreat, yes, but also a hub, a place to recharge and reconnect with primitive, fundamental elements.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Today when I was driving home from work I was stopped at the red light at the interstate on-ramp, and saw a man in a car next to me roll his window down halfway and throw out a napkin. Then he fired up a cigarette and sat there, pompously tapping his steering wheel to whatever Mariah Carey song happened to be playing. For a second, I thought about getting out of my truck, walking over and throwing that bit of trash right back into his car, right into his face. But the light changed, and I drove on, and so did he.

I’m sure I’m going to reflect on that moment quite a bit, maybe even for the rest of my life. I still remember one time about ten years ago that I witnessed a co-worker throwing trash out of the window of the work truck we were in, and laughing about it. I’m not perfect, I’ve done dumb things in my life, but it seems to me there should come a time when we should make a choice about how we’re going to live, especially when it means bettering the world we live in. Strewn garbage isn’t just bad for the environment, it’s bad for image, too, and I don’t want to live in squalor, especially when it would have cost the guy no time at all to put the napkin in the seat beside him and put it in the trash when he got home. I won’t even get started about landfills and the excess of waste already in this country, but you could at least put the trash into a trash can, right?

Would it have made a difference if I’d confronted him about his littering ways? Probably not. It would have just led to a confrontation between two people with radically different viewpoints. One who gives a damn, and one who doesn’t. It’s hard for me not to wish bad things upon the heads of people like that, especially knowing what we know about what we’re doing to the world.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

In the continuing saga of my life, I had an interesting experience I’d like to share, and one that again has awakened something inside me, something creeping and profound. Last summer I was with my mother and two nieces (aged 14 and 15) in my mother’s garden. She plucked a ripe tomato from the vine and smelled it, and then took a big bite out of it. My mouth watered. I’m used to the stock of vegetables we get at the market nowadays and I know how much difference there is between that and vine-fresh. It’s staggering. But my nieces had an entirely different take. One of them said, “Ew, gross!” And at that point there was exclaiming and proclamations on the wrongness of it all. What became clear to me in that moment was this: If something truly awful happened, and society collapsed, the human animal as it has evolved would be in a lot of trouble. Because a vegetable plucked off the vine is considered dirty, gross. That tomato was probably the cleanest, most pristinely perfect tomato those girls had ever seen, but since it wasn’t displayed in a bin at the grocer, because it was so close to soil and sky and life and segregated from any form of disinfectant by a good hundred yards, it was gross. Kids, it’s time to refresh your relationship with the Earth. Stop primping for a moment and watch the sunrise, let the rain fall on your face, stop fretting and just be.

Photo by bucklava.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

A few years ago I went to a Baptist church with my mother for Easter. This was something she wanted me to do (she’s worried about my soul), so I put on my suit and went. The pastor of the church was a high-ranking official in the Baptist administration in the state, so I at least thought he might give me a thing or two to think about. He definitely didn’t disappoint me. His sermon shook me to the core, infuriated me, made me realize many things…but none of the realizations were of his design. In fact, his sermon impacted me to a degree exactly opposite what I imagine he’d had in mind. But I sat silently, with a sick feeling in my stomach, looking around at the parishioners who were all nodding and saying their amens as the leader of the congregation nailed home the final nail in the coffin that would ultimately drive me away from the church. I have been to church since then, but I find that when I go I am very quick to shut down, to let my mind wander, to just get through this. Lo, I have seen the corruption of the corporate church, and I am sickened by it.

My religious background is muddled with a mixture of influences, from Primitive Baptist to Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Jewish and even a smattering of atheism. Ultimately, I found that if I was going to enjoy any comfort at all with religion I was going to have to figure things out for myself, because I was getting too, too much conflicting information. First, my disclaimer: I am a believer in a higher power. If that doesn’t jive with your beliefs, or lack thereof, that’s fine; I’m open-minded enough to refrain from criticizing, and I’m not as convinced in the essential rightness of anything to condemn anyone for anything. But it seems a lot of condemnation is handed out freely by a lot of people who think of themselves as righteous, and I’m not just talking about Baptists. It seems like every religion has a certain degree of “we’re right and everyone else is wrong so they’re all going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.” I find that Jews generally don’t condemn non-believers out of hand, which improves their overall belief system quite a bit in my eyes. So what am I, when it comes right down to it? I’ll only claim non-denominational believer status, and hope that people will leave it at that.

That Easter Sunday might have been the final nail, but it wasn’t the first. It wasn’t even in the top 100. It was only the last. The first happened when I was much younger, much more devout, and much less understanding of the human condition. Maybe I’ll tell that story one day, but for now, I have to tell you what that preacher said to me that was so controversial that it has stuck with me through the three years since and finally made me realize that I simply do not agree with the masses, and that religious doctrine (Baptist, in this case) was inherently wrong. He said: “Only a Christian can truly experience love.” Not only do I disagree whole-heartedly with that statement (and this spoken as a Christian), but I’m even going to go one step further and say that I don’t believe that someone is going to go to hell just because they don’t believe in any specific church’s doctrine. I know, I’m a radical. And I’ll go even further and say that teaching people a dogma based upon principles such as this is tantamount to sin itself.

So what doctrine do I believe in? Well, that’s simple: none of them. At least not if they were written by men (they were all written by men). I believe in a purity of soul, in a sincere well-wishing for our fellow creatures, and in a love that anyone can enjoy, any time the moment moves them. I would get into more specifics, but I’m done with this for today. Maybe one day I’ll share my beliefs in a bit more detail, but for right now I’m ready to let it be.