“Allright. It’s four in the morning, I have a screwdriver, and something in here is either dead or gonna die!”
Have you ever had one of those nights? I had been up a time or two in the night jiggling handles and checking plumbing parts, but the running water noise was both getting worse and keeping me awake.
And what does it have to do with the Bourne Identity? Well, let me explain.
Every so often, surfing around the Internet, I find a little nugget that is really worth keeping. If you enjoyed my link from this post, you’ll love this video as well. This film is a 1927 tour through London, in colour.
I think it’s fascinating to see very directly how far we’ve come in 80 years. My mother was 7 years old when this film was made. Oh – and you have to stay to the end to see the puppy!
Six million. That’s a big number. 6,000,000. I think it makes more inherent sense if you spell it by numbers instead of letters.
Six million people. That’s a lot of folks, right? I mean that is like 9 Indianapolis cities. Or three quarters of a New York City. Or almost two Los Angeleses. Or more than two Chicagos.
Or that’s like everybody in any of these entire states: Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, or Tennessee.
That is how many MORE Americans are hungry this year compared to last. Not on a diet mind you – hungry as in food stamps and hitting the food pantries and shelters for an extra meal if they have it.
Next time you’re in a group of any kind of people, count ten noses. One of those persons is possibly on Food Stamps. The latest projections indicate that about 1/10 of all Americans are on Food Stamps. That’s a LOT of people. And this is going to get worse before it gets better?!?!
This Thanksgiving I’m grateful that I’ve been employed most of this year. I’m thankful that I have a semi steady paycheck and that I can feed myself and half the neighborhood (stray cats, dogs, and raccoons anyway). I have some friends and family, and a quiet house that I can write in when I need to. I can afford not only food but the occasional computer game. Life isn’t easy but I’m making do.
Six million neighbors need a handout. That’s six million potential donors who can’t afford to give o charities this year compared to last. That’s a lot of money missing from the charity system! So while we have more Americans in need, those who are trying to help are having to get by with less.
So help me help them, won’t you? When you see the bell ringer outside a store, throw a dollar in there if you have it. Or five or ten. The Salvation Army are the first on the scene and the last to leave in major disasters along with the Red Cross, and they do a ton of good things. Donate online if you’d like. You can google the donation pages for many groups and contribute from the privacy of your wireless connection at home. You can even host your own online kettle. Can you get your whole office involved? Why not?
Find a local food pantry and donate some canned goods and whatever else they might accept (frozen meat or something would be great!).
Start thinking now about planting a garden next spring, and sharing the bounty with a food pantry or hungry neighbors. Yes, gardens take work, they’re not pretty, and homeowners associations hate them. But it is cheap food that is nearly organic, and something tells me this economy will get much worse before it gets better.
If we don’t all stand together in this time of uncertainty, we’ll be tearing each other apart. I hope we don’t devolve into class problems, race problems, and any number of other very conceivable problems. But we’re human and entirely likely to do exactly that.
And if you’re so inclined, a bit of prayer to whichever gods you choose wouldn’t hurt, either. It may not do anything immediately, but it doesn’t really hurt either, does it? Yeah. I’m really concerned.
* Forward the message.
* Talk about hunger instead of the weather.
* Do something positive!
If there are six million more Americans hungry, that’s probably four million children. This is the land of plenty, right? We just need to reach out more than usual for… I dunno. A few years?
I’ve added a couple of pages here to highlight the eBooks I’ve published this year (so far). There may be another page or two here before the end of the Columbus Day weekend. I like my sites compartmentalized to a specific project, but I also am trying to reduce the administrative overhead of having seven web sites (ooops) to write content for and manage. I like having my fiction in one page, my nonfiction in another book-specific site or two, and my poetry and oddball meanderings in someplace even further removed. It’s the trouble I get for not deciding if I’m a fiction writer who is working the nonfiction side of the aisle, or essentially a nonfiction writer who dabbles in fiction. I like my noms de plume. I don’t know how to merge it all.
So now I have pages here that will need updating, as well as the sites they describe. I don’t want to get rid of the domains because that was a small cash outlay as well. So… Oooops. Now what? I need to finish my nonfiction jaunt so I can get back to some fiction ideas that are swirling around right now.
The Creative Penn tells me that it’s all about branding. (Hi, Joanna!) I’m trying to learn some new tricks. A brand? I have one of those? Does anybody have an artist in their back pocket who can do a logo? Yeah, well maybe.
I don’t disagree, but I’m really mystified by the marketing process sometimes. I wrote some copy in my college years and got compliments, but I never really felt like I knew what I was doing. I’m really too introverted to make a splash comfortably in any case. I’ve tried Twitter under a couple of accounts with mixed results. There are gigabytes worth of pages around the internet of marketers trying to explain this stuff – and it’s all for free unless you really like what you’re reading and then they require the plastic card to come out for the rest of their secrets. No thanks.
In other words, I’m fighting myself. I go through these cycles at times. I’ll figure it out eventually.
In the event you’re interested – I’ve also added a minor update over here. It’s a couple of months old, dating from some troubled days that you should recognize. Not a biggie, just a creative exercise.
People pay attention to Glenn Beck, and I don’t know why. In case you live in a cave, he’s a television commentator known for “crying for America”. He’s known as a conservative, an illogical gasbag and lots of other things as well.
But now he is known as a faker. His tears are all completely manufactured. In the clip below, listen for him to say, “I think my eyes are getting used to it”.
Case closed. Why don’t you try getting some real news instead? There ya go. Knowledge being power and all that. Actual facts. Fancy that!
Among some of the web reorganization I’ve done among my pages, I moved some old poetry and other musings to over here. That, and the autumn equinox has me ruminating about this old post that I still love.
No, I don’t know why. I’ve just always been able to mine the melancholy streak for material, and the wolf mode seems to work well for me. It’s not high art, but I think it communicates.
As adults, I think most people discount dreams. We don’t pay attention to them, don’t put any significance in them, and don’t bother remembering them.
I’ve always been glad that I have never had that tendency. I dream often, vividly, in color, and I remember my dreams.
Today it paid off. I dreamed up a whopper, that is still vivid enough for me to think about writing it up as a test thought or two. It starts off with some boxes found in the sand on the shore of a lake that contain odd things, and as an investigator I am tasked with figuring out if there was a crime or not. Yeah! I love puzzles, and I love them when they come in my dreams. The problem is, this was not a puzzle. This was a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago, and the evidence in these boxes is a very sad tale that implicates the father of a friend of mine. We had heard that he was dead, so it should be all over, right? Right?!?
Maybe. Will I write it? I don’t know. I’m a bit busy with other stuff at the moment, but I may very well come back to this one. I’ve never tried a murder mystery.
So take it as a cautionary tale, my scribbling friends. Don’t discount your dreams. Write them down. Mine them for ideas. Follow where they lead.
This is the odd juxtaposition of finger painting, animation, performance art, technology, and a dose of awesome.
Some people have talent. Other people can do THIS.
I’ve spent the entire DAY today moving blogs and web pages. Once again, I’ve confirmed that I have too many, but I’m at a loss as to which one(s) to consolidate.
I started around 9am. It is now after 11pm. Aside from about an hour of lunch or so, this is all I’ve done today. I have just finished tweaking NS records on my domain service account, which is something I’ve not had to do before (thanks a lot, WordPress, for having your own hosted name servers!) and I had to make some other changes from memory trying to get here from old links.
The domain names work, the basic content made it over. Some sites have more pages to create… ugh. But hey, I can moderate all of my stuff from one dashboard now, and that’s a good thing. Check the links -> and let me know what’s busted, eh?
Thanks. Time for a nap…..
If you’d like to help me get the word out about my eBooks, and you have a blog or other web page, you can join the affiliate program at Smashwords. https://www.smashwords.com/account/affiliate
For every click you send my way that ends up in a purchased download, you will earn 11% commission. If the program is successful, we can adjust that rate up too…. You don’t need my permisison – just link it up and go!
Thanks!
