Personal reflections on my life and experiences.
It’s Saturday morning, and I am out of creativity for this week, so for today’s post, it’s just “whatever” stuff this morning. I tried to be a little more creative in my writing exercises this week, and as with most of my writings, I wasn’t super thrilled with the results. I started another short...
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In 1351, a year after the Black Death finally let go of the village of Nérac and its surrounding estates in southwest France, a gentle young monk named Colinus went through the ravaged region and collected every orphan he could find, bringing them back to live by his brothers in Orphan Hall. In a...
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Transcription, Captain’s Log, USS Bozeman, NCC-1941 “Captain’s Log, Stardate 41114.4. We are running at warp 6 to rendezvous with the science vessel SS Brezhnev which has been routinely monitoring the collapse of a yellow midget star into a white dwarf. Unfortunately, our efforts to approach the craft and system have been marred by the...
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Last Saturday, as I meandered south from Albuquerque, I ended up driving the main drag through Socorro, New Mexico, and as I passed through an intersection, I looked to my right and saw the face and bell towers of a mission church. I am unable to resist the pull of such New Mexican cathedrals,...
Read more →Tonight was the last class in Dr. Gish’s four week course, “Writing Short Stories”, and I was the worst prepared for a class I have been in a long time. Luckily, it was not a course of great academic consequence- I was supposed to show up and learn, for myself. Still, I didn’t read...
Read more →I have a lot of memories from that one trip. Mostly, because it was the trip of my life. I remember planning it, us boyhood buddies, us distant friends, acting as if five years hadn’t passed since we last talked, as if we weren’t adults now, grown and changed and different people. I remember...
Read more →I touched on this before, but for me, that’s part of my struggle. Whenever I write, I struggle with details. While I was writing an my account of yesterday’s Plaza encounter, Tim wrote another, which you can read here. What stands out for me in comparing the two versions is Tim’s attention to details....
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At about noon today, Tim asked me if I was ready to go, and I pretty much was. He had asked me earlier in the day if I wanted to go over to the Civic Plaza across from the Convention Center- a few blocks from work- and “make joy”, meaning, let him take a...
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It’s been a mixed bag today. It was warm out and the sky was blue this morning, and then it grew colder and gray as the afternoon advanced. I came home from work and turned on the gas fireplace so the cats could curl up in front of it, and then I sat down...
Read more →Tonight was class 3 of the UNM Continuing Education course, “Writing Short Stories”, with Robert Gish. As usual, as soon as Dr. Gish entered the classroom, his anecdotes began, followed by a barrage of review questions about the last two sessions. Naturally, his questions were meant to dredge up in my elastic brain correct...
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There are a number of times I have marveled that I am not yet dead, and tonight is one of them. A week ago, the sister of a colleague brought in an order sheet for Girl Scout cookies. Her daughter has to sell them, she brings the sheet to the office, I buy some...
Read more →“You’ve made agreements”, Clarisa said. “You’ve made agreements, and you just keep them without thinking about it.” “What do you mean?”, Jennie asked her. “You made some agreements a long time ago, and they drive you around- like rules for certain truths in your head- and you don’t question them and they keep you...
Read more →There was a time I delighted in taking the Holy Book and thumbing through the pages to that pertinent particular passage which was bracketed by history and philology and sociology and hermeneutic and anthropology, and diving into the lines of words I swam in the text, opening commentaries and the Brown-Driver-Briggs or the Lidell-Scott...
Read more →“The man drove his car to work.” “Michael Jones was nervous and thought about the Play Doh in the toilet as he weaved his Ford Focus through traffic, late for the staff meeting at his office at Plexo Industries.” The more I read the writings of recognized authors, the more I am reminded that...
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When the plumbers had our floor opened up in the back of the office and the smell of sewage filled the building yesterday afternoon, Tim and I went for a walk around downtown. We walked over to Central and then walked a few blocks west on it, until we crossed the street and headed...
Read more →Tonight was the second installment of the Writing Short Stories class with Robert Gish at the UNM CE campus on University. I wrote about Gish and week one here, and tonight continued to be more of the same, where “the same” is a whole stew of tips on writing and the sharing of definition...
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