Category Archives: heroes

On "The Game of Thrones"

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I stopped reading this book on page 218, disgusted by George R. R. Martin’s total disregard for either his readers or his characters, so if that’s what you like about him, stop reading now because I’m throwing him under the bus. Perhaps some people find it refreshing to have every single good character in the book killed or maimed in some hideous way, but I find it boorish. Good characters do die sometimes, no doubt, verisimilitude has to be a part of any good novel, but Martin pushes the envelope just a little too far in dashing his readers hopes and expectations for any kind of happy resolution. In a certain way, he is a writer/conman who just keeps pushing his readers down the road of desperation and depression. Some readers like their novels dark and depressing, bereft of any hope or sentiment, maybe that’s what they expect out of life so that’s how they pick their novels. I don’t mind if my hero is in danger, that she has a challenge to resolve, that he suffers hardship or even dies, but there is a strange cruelty in Martin’s writing. His sadism as a writer transfers to a novel that makes people–his readers–suffer through all sorts of misfortunes and tragedies. The idea of dystopia is fundamental in the literature of the 20th and 21st century, and there is a long history of dystopic writings such as On the Beach, Brave New World, and 1984. Those are only three, but one might add Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to that list. Dystopia is certainly an important part of the Martin post-post-modern world, but it should be ingested in small dosis–too much, all at once, and it will make you a very dark person indeed. Martin’s world is a dystopia, no doubt, a decadent pseudo-medieval setting of wrecked castles, corrupt and traitorous rulers, and heroes who are not heroes. Martin’s dark take on his society was at first, for me, refreshing, mysterious, filled with interesting characters, but after 200 pages, the handwriting is on the wall. Why should I bother to depress myself with this kind of writing? Just when you think he’s letting one of his characters succeed, he kills them in some horrific way. He has a sadistic twist in his writing where he allows the evil people to wallow in their excesses while at the same time he punishes the good with nasty tragedies and unjust punishments. Novels, no matter how dark, need to allow their fictional inhabitants a chance to succeed and breath, and if the world does work, the evil will be vanquished and punished because in the real world we don’t get this kind of satisfaction very often, so we look for our heroes in books. The real world is a valley of tears, where the good people fail, our friends get sick and die, our relatives suffer from unemployment and exploitation. I have no doubt that many readers are right at home in Martin’s novels and do appreciate my comments, but I would have it no other way. Hundreds of thousands of readers like his books, but I am quite sure that there are plenty of readers out there who feel tricked, fooled, sad that they read all of those pages only to find that the bad guys have flourished, the good are all dead, and there really was no point in reading this in the first place. Life is too short to read novels that depress and sicken you. The ironic part of this is that when I started out reading this first novel I thought it was pretty good. No, I was wrong.

On "The Game of Thrones"

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I stopped reading this book on page 218, disgusted by George R. R. Martin’s total disregard for either his readers or his characters, so if that’s what you like about him, stop reading now because I’m throwing him under the bus. Perhaps some people find it refreshing to have every single good character in the book killed or maimed in some hideous way, but I find it boorish. Good characters do die sometimes, no doubt, verisimilitude has to be a part of any good novel, but Martin pushes the envelope just a little too far in dashing his readers hopes and expectations for any kind of happy resolution. In a certain way, he is a writer/conman who just keeps pushing his readers down the road of desperation and depression. Some readers like their novels dark and depressing, bereft of any hope or sentiment, maybe that’s what they expect out of life so that’s how they pick their novels. I don’t mind if my hero is in danger, that she has a challenge to resolve, that he suffers hardship or even dies, but there is a strange cruelty in Martin’s writing. His sadism as a writer transfers to a novel that makes people–his readers–suffer through all sorts of misfortunes and tragedies. The idea of dystopia is fundamental in the literature of the 20th and 21st century, and there is a long history of dystopic writings such as On the Beach, Brave New World, and 1984. Those are only three, but one might add Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to that list. Dystopia is certainly an important part of the Martin post-post-modern world, but it should be ingested in small dosis–too much, all at once, and it will make you a very dark person indeed. Martin’s world is a dystopia, no doubt, a decadent pseudo-medieval setting of wrecked castles, corrupt and traitorous rulers, and heroes who are not heroes. Martin’s dark take on his society was at first, for me, refreshing, mysterious, filled with interesting characters, but after 200 pages, the handwriting is on the wall. Why should I bother to depress myself with this kind of writing? Just when you think he’s letting one of his characters succeed, he kills them in some horrific way. He has a sadistic twist in his writing where he allows the evil people to wallow in their excesses while at the same time he punishes the good with nasty tragedies and unjust punishments. Novels, no matter how dark, need to allow their fictional inhabitants a chance to succeed and breath, and if the world does work, the evil will be vanquished and punished because in the real world we don’t get this kind of satisfaction very often, so we look for our heroes in books. The real world is a valley of tears, where the good people fail, our friends get sick and die, our relatives suffer from unemployment and exploitation. I have no doubt that many readers are right at home in Martin’s novels and do appreciate my comments, but I would have it no other way. Hundreds of thousands of readers like his books, but I am quite sure that there are plenty of readers out there who feel tricked, fooled, sad that they read all of those pages only to find that the bad guys have flourished, the good are all dead, and there really was no point in reading this in the first place. Life is too short to read novels that depress and sicken you. The ironic part of this is that when I started out reading this first novel I thought it was pretty good. No, I was wrong.

On Sherlock Holmes

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There are few characters in the fictional world of literary creations that are as pure as Sherlock Holmes. He is driven to solve the crime, not because he necessarily wants to see justice administered, but because the puzzle must be solved at almost any cost. I wouldn’t suggest that Holmes is obsessive or compulsive, but in a way, he certainly is. He doesn’t care about moral philosophy or the structure of the universe unless either of those topics would help him solve a crime. His ideas about crime and punishment are black and white, so his objective of putting the criminal away is clear and obvious. At the same time, he hasn’t the least bit for popular news, discussions of the weather, or sports, beyond his own training in boxing and stick fighting. Like most people, he loves to eat, listen to music, talk when the talk interests him, but the one thing he cannot escape in this life is solitude–no man is an island and Sherlock Holmes is no different. His ability to discern the important from the mundane and casual stems in large part from his willingness to narrate the facts of a case, but he needs an audience, and most of the time his sounding board is Watson. Watson is the sieve through which his reasoning passes. If he can tell Watson the story, he can figure it out. Holmes functions because of the power of narrative. He can work through the logic of the clues by building a narrative that makes sense, discarding incidental clues that may be red-herrings, and see through the smoke screen left by the criminals. In the end, the stories are all very similar about shame and hate, vengeance and envy, greed and stupidity, or love and jealousy, and Sherlock must sort out the facts without getting personally involved in any of it. Emotion is all too often the downfall of many a criminal, and Holmes works constantly to see through the intentions, let the clues speak to him, and resolve the problem at hand. Yet, I would also suggest that Holmes cannot do all of this work, wade through so much human flotsam and jetsam, and still be the least bit normal as a person. He’s interested in bee-keeping; this is his only outside interest that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with crime solving. Bees can’t really talk back, they have a collective conscience, they have no crime, their objectives are orderly and pure, free from envy, sloth, and ire. He admires them. If Watson were not there to act as chronicler and psychologist/therapist, Holmes would go crazy listening to the irrational world which surrounds him explode. Watson is the perfect foil for Holmes because he is a walking case to be constantly narrated and resolved, but Watson is also the perfect uninformed audience who needs the explanations to make the world return to proper working order again. After all, isn’t that what the detective does? Return things back to their proper place, pass out punishment, get the world to spin on its axis again, make sure the bad guys are put away, give a solution to the problem. Holmes wouldn’t be Holmes, really, without Watson, and Watson would just be retired, boring, military surgeon with a bad shoulder without Holmes. A more interesting symbiosis in the literary world would be hard to find.

On Sherlock Holmes

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There are few characters in the fictional world of literary creations that are as pure as Sherlock Holmes. He is driven to solve the crime, not because he necessarily wants to see justice administered, but because the puzzle must be solved at almost any cost. I wouldn’t suggest that Holmes is obsessive or compulsive, but in a way, he certainly is. He doesn’t care about moral philosophy or the structure of the universe unless either of those topics would help him solve a crime. His ideas about crime and punishment are black and white, so his objective of putting the criminal away is clear and obvious. At the same time, he hasn’t the least bit for popular news, discussions of the weather, or sports, beyond his own training in boxing and stick fighting. Like most people, he loves to eat, listen to music, talk when the talk interests him, but the one thing he cannot escape in this life is solitude–no man is an island and Sherlock Holmes is no different. His ability to discern the important from the mundane and casual stems in large part from his willingness to narrate the facts of a case, but he needs an audience, and most of the time his sounding board is Watson. Watson is the sieve through which his reasoning passes. If he can tell Watson the story, he can figure it out. Holmes functions because of the power of narrative. He can work through the logic of the clues by building a narrative that makes sense, discarding incidental clues that may be red-herrings, and see through the smoke screen left by the criminals. In the end, the stories are all very similar about shame and hate, vengeance and envy, greed and stupidity, or love and jealousy, and Sherlock must sort out the facts without getting personally involved in any of it. Emotion is all too often the downfall of many a criminal, and Holmes works constantly to see through the intentions, let the clues speak to him, and resolve the problem at hand. Yet, I would also suggest that Holmes cannot do all of this work, wade through so much human flotsam and jetsam, and still be the least bit normal as a person. He’s interested in bee-keeping; this is his only outside interest that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with crime solving. Bees can’t really talk back, they have a collective conscience, they have no crime, their objectives are orderly and pure, free from envy, sloth, and ire. He admires them. If Watson were not there to act as chronicler and psychologist/therapist, Holmes would go crazy listening to the irrational world which surrounds him explode. Watson is the perfect foil for Holmes because he is a walking case to be constantly narrated and resolved, but Watson is also the perfect uninformed audience who needs the explanations to make the world return to proper working order again. After all, isn’t that what the detective does? Return things back to their proper place, pass out punishment, get the world to spin on its axis again, make sure the bad guys are put away, give a solution to the problem. Holmes wouldn’t be Holmes, really, without Watson, and Watson would just be retired, boring, military surgeon with a bad shoulder without Holmes. A more interesting symbiosis in the literary world would be hard to find.

On Minnesota nice

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Those of us from the North Star state will often joke about a thing we call “Minnesota nice.” You walk into a store, ask for something, a very nice person gets it for you, they smile, take your money, put it in a bag and send you on your way. It all seems so obsequious, so fake, so phony, that you really have no idea what the person in the store is really thinking–or do you? Is Minnesota nice, as many people not from Minnesota would have you think, just a bunch of passive aggressive baloney? I, for one, think not. Somebody drops an armload of books, and six people stop to help them pick up the mess. You spill your change at the grocery store and the same thing happens. You get a flat tire, and a highway patrol stops with lights flashing to make sure you not only don’t get run over while changing your flat, s/he may even lend a hand. A young lady had forgotten her wallet the other day and couldn’t pay for her coffee, so I did. Perhaps none of this is out of the ordinary and just reflects a kind side of human nature that just wants to help out, and you might encounter this anywhere in the world. Yet, I would venture to say that this helpful side to human nature is taken up a notch when you are in Minnesota where people are polite, helpful, and kind to a different degree than you might it in other places. When lost and disoriented in a strange grocery store, I’ve had managers take me straight to the thing I’m looking for, and they do it with smile on their faces and song in their hearts. The ethos of living in a place like Minnesota, where hardship in winter is real, where the number of hearty souls never really goes up, is a little different. There is a sense of community in Minnesota that I have not really experienced elsewhere. I think that “Minnesota nice” stems from a difficult common experience that leads to a great sense of community and social identity. I saw this in church, at school, out in public, everywhere. You may think I’m idealizing this all out of proportion because I live in exile in Texas, but I’m not comparing Texas, which has its own ethos, to Minnesota. Once you’ve experience life at minus 30 degrees below zero, you have a different perspective about what makes your ornery and cranky, you have different perspective on hardship, suffering and difficulties. If you can help someone out and do it with a smile on your face, why not? Certainly, all places have cranky, egotistical people, and Minnesota is no exception, but if you visit Minnesota, and you encounter kind, smiling people, who are willing to help you solve a problem or get out of jam, think about it. Why are they helping? Minnesota nice is not phony, although you might suspect it is. Why should someone do anything for no other reason than to help you? Perhaps our own cynicism regarding philanthropy says more about the sad state of our social relations than it does about the person offering to help. Self-interest should not be the only thing that drives our interactions with others. Last night at the grocery store the guy in front of me needed three cents so he wouldn’t have to carry off a ton of change, so I gave it to him. He was so startled and surprised, he didn’t know what to say. The clerk was flabbergasted. I was just trying to be nice.

On Minnesota nice

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Those of us from the North Star state will often joke about a thing we call “Minnesota nice.” You walk into a store, ask for something, a very nice person gets it for you, they smile, take your money, put it in a bag and send you on your way. It all seems so obsequious, so fake, so phony, that you really have no idea what the person in the store is really thinking–or do you? Is Minnesota nice, as many people not from Minnesota would have you think, just a bunch of passive aggressive baloney? I, for one, think not. Somebody drops an armload of books, and six people stop to help them pick up the mess. You spill your change at the grocery store and the same thing happens. You get a flat tire, and a highway patrol stops with lights flashing to make sure you not only don’t get run over while changing your flat, s/he may even lend a hand. A young lady had forgotten her wallet the other day and couldn’t pay for her coffee, so I did. Perhaps none of this is out of the ordinary and just reflects a kind side of human nature that just wants to help out, and you might encounter this anywhere in the world. Yet, I would venture to say that this helpful side to human nature is taken up a notch when you are in Minnesota where people are polite, helpful, and kind to a different degree than you might it in other places. When lost and disoriented in a strange grocery store, I’ve had managers take me straight to the thing I’m looking for, and they do it with smile on their faces and song in their hearts. The ethos of living in a place like Minnesota, where hardship in winter is real, where the number of hearty souls never really goes up, is a little different. There is a sense of community in Minnesota that I have not really experienced elsewhere. I think that “Minnesota nice” stems from a difficult common experience that leads to a great sense of community and social identity. I saw this in church, at school, out in public, everywhere. You may think I’m idealizing this all out of proportion because I live in exile in Texas, but I’m not comparing Texas, which has its own ethos, to Minnesota. Once you’ve experience life at minus 30 degrees below zero, you have a different perspective about what makes your ornery and cranky, you have different perspective on hardship, suffering and difficulties. If you can help someone out and do it with a smile on your face, why not? Certainly, all places have cranky, egotistical people, and Minnesota is no exception, but if you visit Minnesota, and you encounter kind, smiling people, who are willing to help you solve a problem or get out of jam, think about it. Why are they helping? Minnesota nice is not phony, although you might suspect it is. Why should someone do anything for no other reason than to help you? Perhaps our own cynicism regarding philanthropy says more about the sad state of our social relations than it does about the person offering to help. Self-interest should not be the only thing that drives our interactions with others. Last night at the grocery store the guy in front of me needed three cents so he wouldn’t have to carry off a ton of change, so I gave it to him. He was so startled and surprised, he didn’t know what to say. The clerk was flabbergasted. I was just trying to be nice.

On sleepiness

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Is there a more powerful feeling in this life than overwhelming sleepiness when your body aches for sleep, but you fight it, fighting to keep your eyes open and stay awake? We’ve all felt it after a particularly large meal, or during the Sunday morning sermon, or in a boring lecture class (with a boring powerpoint on the screen and the lights turned down low), or at a boring play, concert, or ballet. Your eye lids are heavy and want to swing down and turn off your lights. Sometimes there is no known force of will that can keep your consciousness from slipping off into the dark abyss of sleep. Your body knows you better than you do. There are times when your mind wanders, you start to think of waves lapping on the shore, of a clock’s regular ticking, of sheep jumping over a fence, of a soft wind blowing gently through the trees, of the regular whine of a huge jet engine, and before you know it, you have detached yourself from reality. You can no longer hear the pastor’s voice, you don’t know what song the orchestra is playing, you no longer care what day it is or where you are, you realize you are fishing on some unknown lake and sunlight glints gently off of the waves. You fall asleep, and the transition from awake to asleep has occurred seamlessly, realities intermingle, drift apart, mix, but you are now constructing a different reality, and the body is ignoring what is going on around you. You can try to fight sleepiness by drinking coffee, sitting up straight, focusing on what is being said, but most of that fight is just putting off the inevitable. I don’t think there is a person on earth who hasn’t fallen asleep at the wrong time at some point in their life. I am particularly bad because I like to stay up late, but this has got to change. Falling asleep during the sermon is particularly bad, but I fell asleep at the dentist office the other day while I waited for the dentist to finish some part of the procedure. What can I say, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before and the weather channel was boring that morning. I have fought sleep while listening to conference papers that were a little less than interesting. The thing is that we run from thing to thing like crazy people, but when we stop for two minutes to sit down and listen to some complicated rhetorical argument, the body takes advantage to shut down all systems for a short restorative nap, whether we like it or not. That’s the problem with sleepiness: it isn’t something that one can always control. People are killed, tragically, every day because they have fallen asleep at the wheel of their vehicle. They never intended to do that, kill themselves, but sleepiness is a stealthy adversary, and we are often asleep before we ever realized we were sleepy in the first place. I would like to say that this never happens to me, but it’s happening to me right now, and the only thing that is keeping my eyes open right now is writing this short note on “sleepiness.” If I were to put this down and walk away from the computer, I’m sure I could sleep for a good hour before ever noticing.

On sleepiness

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Is there a more powerful feeling in this life than overwhelming sleepiness when your body aches for sleep, but you fight it, fighting to keep your eyes open and stay awake? We’ve all felt it after a particularly large meal, or during the Sunday morning sermon, or in a boring lecture class (with a boring powerpoint on the screen and the lights turned down low), or at a boring play, concert, or ballet. Your eye lids are heavy and want to swing down and turn off your lights. Sometimes there is no known force of will that can keep your consciousness from slipping off into the dark abyss of sleep. Your body knows you better than you do. There are times when your mind wanders, you start to think of waves lapping on the shore, of a clock’s regular ticking, of sheep jumping over a fence, of a soft wind blowing gently through the trees, of the regular whine of a huge jet engine, and before you know it, you have detached yourself from reality. You can no longer hear the pastor’s voice, you don’t know what song the orchestra is playing, you no longer care what day it is or where you are, you realize you are fishing on some unknown lake and sunlight glints gently off of the waves. You fall asleep, and the transition from awake to asleep has occurred seamlessly, realities intermingle, drift apart, mix, but you are now constructing a different reality, and the body is ignoring what is going on around you. You can try to fight sleepiness by drinking coffee, sitting up straight, focusing on what is being said, but most of that fight is just putting off the inevitable. I don’t think there is a person on earth who hasn’t fallen asleep at the wrong time at some point in their life. I am particularly bad because I like to stay up late, but this has got to change. Falling asleep during the sermon is particularly bad, but I fell asleep at the dentist office the other day while I waited for the dentist to finish some part of the procedure. What can I say, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before and the weather channel was boring that morning. I have fought sleep while listening to conference papers that were a little less than interesting. The thing is that we run from thing to thing like crazy people, but when we stop for two minutes to sit down and listen to some complicated rhetorical argument, the body takes advantage to shut down all systems for a short restorative nap, whether we like it or not. That’s the problem with sleepiness: it isn’t something that one can always control. People are killed, tragically, every day because they have fallen asleep at the wheel of their vehicle. They never intended to do that, kill themselves, but sleepiness is a stealthy adversary, and we are often asleep before we ever realized we were sleepy in the first place. I would like to say that this never happens to me, but it’s happening to me right now, and the only thing that is keeping my eyes open right now is writing this short note on “sleepiness.” If I were to put this down and walk away from the computer, I’m sure I could sleep for a good hour before ever noticing.

On writer’s block

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Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.

On writer’s block

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Obviously I don’t have writer’s block. Yet, there are many things I will never write about because either I don’t care or it’s none of your business. Writer’s block is really about shutting down the creative process and convincing yourself that you have nothing to say, which, given what I know about the human race, is blatantly false. Those who complain about writer’s block are just looking for an excuse to not write, and if you don’t want to write, you really don’t need an excuse, do you? Writing is about both creativity and a lack of shame. If I care what people think about what I write, then I would never get two words on a page, ever. Writers who write do so because they cannot imagine their world in any other way–ink, pens, keyboards, monitors, notebooks, scraps of paper, moments lost to the world while hammering out a haiku. Writing for some of us is just as vital as the blood that runs through our veins. If we couldn’t write, we wouldn’t be able to understand either our lives or our passions. We read, we write, we breathe, we live, and when we have trouble or troubles or concerns or worries, we write to try to figure it out. Writing is not a perfect catharsis for what ails a person, but it does help. When we feel the knock of eternity at our door–someone dies, a love moves on, the world changes–we write in order to listen to our own heart beat, to know that we are still alive, still vital, still worthy, still marching to our own drummer. The world is alive with the smell of fresh ink flowing onto a virgin white blank piece of paper, creating a new way of loving or hating or perceiving or longing or eating or losing or playing or enjoying the whole world. There are times when you hit a perfect phrase–just two or three words that sing, that shine in the darkness, that illuminate a dark area where the monsters come from. And when you do find those two or three words that sparkle in the fog of the mundane existence of an everyday routine, you create magic, and life is really worth living all over again–you understand why you put up with crap, why you try to do better everyday, why you risk failure, why you don’t fear criticism. You write to find your way out of the labyrinth, to understand loss, to contemplate beauty–physical or mystical or ephemeral, to know the unknowable, to experience the inexpressible. Writing is life and life, writing. The blocked writer has given up to frustration and failure, given in to the idea that they have nothing to say or worse, that it has all already been said and that there is no possibility of writing anything new. Poor devil. It has all been said before, but that is not precisely the point–it can always be said again. Humans have very short memories, and writers depend on that so that each generation might rewrite everything again. I know that a writer about six thousand years ago complained that all the good topics had already been written about and that there was nothing new under the sun. He was both right and wrong: there is nothing new under the sun, but that is totally irrelevant because each generation must write their own discourse–political, social, religious, historical, poetical, fictional, polemical. So I write. The muse comes in the door, drinking bourbon and smoking a cigarette with a funny smile on her face. It looks like I’m going to be busy for quite awhile and that my writer’s block will have to wait for another day–tonight I am busy writing, again.