Happy fiftieth anniversary to Jaws!

Making us afraid to go into the water for a full half a century.

One of the greatest scenes in film history: Quint (played by Robert Shaw, who practically rewrote his lines) telling the tale of the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

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Laz A. Mataz presents his debut novel: Dimensions of Essence

Hey gang!  Got something special for ya...

A very dear friend of mine, Laz A. Mataz, has been working on his first novel for awhile.  Dimensions of Essence is a science-fiction story about what happens when a mysterious disc of otherworldly origins suddenly appears in a field in Ohio.  I was honored to be one of the first to read Mataz's book and I was thoroughly entertained and also made to think a bit deeper about some things.  Dimensions of Essence strikes me as being part Tom Clancy, part Philip José Farmer, and a dash of Christianity.  And it works quite well.

Well, today is the big day!  As of a short while ago this morning Dimensions of Essence has debuted on Amazon for purchase to read on Kindle and its associated apps.  Click here to purchase it for $5.99.

Congrats Laz!  And I'm really looking forward to the sequel and where you take this tale next :-) 

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Book status report for June 2025: Proposal, agents, subtitle

This was supposed to be a weekly feature.  That notion has obviously fallen by the wayside.  But many of y'all have asked how is the book coming along.  So here's an update...

The manuscript is in as good a shape as it's likely to be, barring someone with a better mind than mine for this kind of thing going over it and marking places where it can be improved upon.  I'm looking forward to working with such a person.  Writing this book has been a process that is germinating enormous growth of mind and spirit within me.  I'm eager to experience what else might be coming along in that regard.

The search for an agent has been erratic, I must admit.  This also has been a growth experience.  In looking over the query letters I've sent out across the past several months, I can tell that there has been drastic improvement.  There's a lot of confidence that has been built up about this project.  The other week I shared what a friend had to say about the subject of humbleness.  I've been called humble before but I wonder if I've had too much of that.  My queries are reflecting much more boldness now, and that's been building up for awhile already.  I believe that I have written a heck of a book, and I believe that somewhere out there is someone who is going to take notice.  My looking for an agent has been re-invigorated.  I harbor no delusions: this part of the process is tough.  And my project was already going to be a hard sell before I ever set my hands on the keyboard.  But I believe in it.  The people who have been reading along the way believe in it, and they have been very honest and forthcoming in their judgements about it.  And now?  Now... there is a manuscript as mighty as any that has come along for a memoir.  So I'm going to keep sending out those queries and be praying that something will result from that.

One thing that has really gotten better is the nonfiction proposal.  That's a formal document that the author uses to present his or her project to the agents and publishers.  It's a business plan for the the book: who its audience is intended to be, what titles are comparable to it, a summary of its contents, a biography of the author... anything that can be done in the space of fifty pages to pitch and sell what the writer is presenting.  My first attempts at writing a proposal were, well... bad.  For much of March and April I spent some time studying proposals that others had put together.  Then I started fresh and worked on and off for a month and a half.  And now, I think I've assembled a pretty solid proposal.  People who've seen it have said they are impressed by it.  So I've started sending that out to agents who ask to see a proposal.

Here are a couple of pages of the summaries from my book's proposal (click to enlarge):

Okay, now finally: a lot of people keep asking me what the title of the book is.  Apart from the agents I've been querying with, less than ten individuals know the title.  It's something I'm keeping close to the vest for now.  There should be some mysteries in life, yes?  It's had a title for a year and a half now and I believe it's a beautiful title.  A team of wild horses couldn't tear it out of me though.  But I am looking forward to sharing it with the world in due time.

What I can share though is the subtitle.  It took awhile to settle on one.  But I believe it has at last presented itself.  Although it seems too easy in retrospect.  It doesn't really portend much more than has already been known: that this is a memoir about someone who is very much a child of the Eighties (a decade that gets a chapter all its own).  I think that right now I can tease y'all a bit.

So here is the subtitle: "A Generation-Xer's Quest Through Life".

It says what it means.  It means what it says.  It might still change though.  But that's the subtitle that's going out on all the queries right now.  It's as good as anything I suppose.

And that's pretty much all for now.

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Father's Day 2025: Pictures of Dad

Today is Father's Day.  And more than usual I'm feeling melancholy.  This is the eleventh Father's Day without Dad.  There's not a day that comes and goes, that I don't think about him.  He always had great advice.  What he liked to tell me often was "Always think positive!"  He told me that even though he knew I was struggling with a mind turned against itself.  He may not have understood what it meant to have that but he still abounded in empathy.

Thought I'd share some photos of him.  This first one dates to November 2006.  It's of Dad in his favorite place: his beloved knife shop.  It was really rainy and cold that day and I went by the shop to ask him something.  This is how I found him: reclined back in a chair with his pipe, thinking up new projects.  It's classic Dad.  Click to enlarge:

This next one is one of the best taken of him ever.  This photo, taken in February of 2012, was published in newspapers and websites across America.  It depicts Dad and his friend John Ashe.  This was for a story about John being an independent farmer.  Someday I'm going to get this photo blown up, printed, and framed for my wall.  Click to enlarge:

This is from the day we brought Tammy home in May of 2012.  She was six weeks old.  Click to enlarge:

A look at Dad's more whimsical side. Wearing his Camp Carefree Chili Cook-Off cap:

This was taken for the church photo directory.  I've got this picture framed and on display in my living room:

And then there's this one: Dad and I together on my fortieth birthday:

There is one other photo that I'm trying to find.  I'll post it here if I can locate it.

Edit 06/16/2025: I knew I had it somewhere!  For many years this pic hung on the wall in Dad's shop.  On the left side of the photo is George Herron, a master of crafting folding knives.  At center is Dad  On the right is Bill Moran, the gentleman who rediscovered the art of making Damascus - that is, folded - steel.  This picture was taken during a knifemaker's meeting and as you can see it depicts Dad, George, and Bill standing outside smoking their pipes.  There's a real sense of belonging and camaraderie among the knifemaking community.  It comes with sharing a love and passion for the art.  This photo captures and conveys that beautifully.  I've come to know a lot of knifemakers over the years, they come in practically all varieties of people.  George and Bill were some of the best and Dad was very honored to have gotten to know them.  A few days after Dad passed I was in his shop and saw this picture up on the wall, and I couldn't help but imagine George and Bill and now Dad up in Heaven with their pipes in their mouths and talking about their mutual love for the craft.  Anyway, here it is:

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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four now has a trigger warning

Of all things 1984-ish, this story about Nineteen Eighty-Four itself might be the most 1984 in the history of anything.

Image from the motion picture Nineteen Eighty-Four

Out of all the books that have ever been published, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (I prefer to spell it out like that when referring to the book or movie instead of shortening it to its numerical equivalent) is the one screaming most against attaching an advisory before reading.  It doesn't need anything so ridiculous.  Nineteen Eighty-Four speaks for itself, from the first sentence on through the final four words.

I wonder if people like Dolen Perkins-Valdez have ever bothered to try to understand what Orwell was conveying, what his underlying message was, when he first wrote his classic novel about totalitarianism and absolute control of the human spirit.  Perkins-Valdez is the one who has composed a new foreward to Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Which ordinarily isn't something too unprecedented.  There is a foreward by Walter Cronkite in the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of the book and I am sure there have been others.  But I could readily accept that Cronkite at least had sincerest appreciation for the novel.

The same cannot be said for Perkins-Valdez, whose foreward is actually a "trigger warning" of the kind slapped upon all works that fringe leftists declare to be "problematic".  After all this time, since Nineteen Eighty-Four's first publication in 1949, it has finally been revealed that Orwell''s book is misogynist and not sensitive enough to racial issues.  Perkins-Valdez, like too many others, demands that this most classic of warnings about absolute government must be perceived through the lens of those obsessed with identity politics.  "A sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity," she writes.

These people just don't get it, do they?

I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four during spring break of my senior year of high school, while recovering from a second-degree burn inflicted during a part-time job.  That book completely absorbed me far and away from any pain I might have otherwise been feeling.  I had just recently finished reading Stephen King's The Stand.  Nineteen Eighty-Four was even more of a horror novel.  It wasn't altogether beyond the imagination that a realm like Oceania really could come about.  It was about language: the alteration and mutating and ultimately obliteration of words and the ability to verbalize an idea.  The destruction of language was an act of obscenity, one that tyrants and regimes and entire nations of their supplicants had perpetrated since time immemorial.  Our own times have proven to be no more invulnerable.

The destruction of thought.  That was the greatest crime that Nineteen Eighty-Four described.

And that is the crime that Dolen Perkins-Valdez and too many who describe themselves as "liberal-inclined" are guilty of not only aiding and abetting, but thoroughly advocating.  They are attempting to take apart books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and indict against them with the very same tools that the books utilize in their admonishments about totalitarian thought.

These people have never had any real jobs, I am sure of it.  They sit in their ivory towers and think themselves masters of all that they survey.  Putting a trigger warning on Nineteen Eighty-Four is how they justify their notion of having a "real" career that in the end does nothing to serve anything but their own egos.

As for what Perkins-Valdez is claiming, I've always thought that Nineteen Eighty-Four already addresses the racial issue.  Oceania, and its adversaries Eastasaia and Eurasia, are multi-ethnic states.  But that isn't a distinguishing factor in those nations' demographics.  The three super-states of Nineteen Eighty-Four have no "ethnicities" at all.  Why should they?  Each of them has de-humanized the lives of their individuals to such a degree that things like "race" are absolutely meaningless elements.  Yes, there are black people in Nineteen Eighty-Four's world.  For all we know Syme, the much-too-smart-for-his-own-good colleague of Winston's at the Ministry of Truth, is a "black person".  We don't know.  We simply aren't told.  It doesn't matter.  One day Syme is there and the next day he is not: just another "unperson" vaporized by the Party as if he had never existed at all.

Any person who thinks Nineteen Eighty-Four, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird has to pass the muster of leftist racial sensibilities before they can be experienced by the reader, is himself or herself attempting to destroy a thing.  In the end works such as these are the product of their respective authors, above and beyond the demands of modern ideology.  Indeed, if there is any book that preaches against the fruits of such ideology, it is Nineteen Eighty-Four.  It is a warning that we would do well to heed.

I close this essay with something very special to me.  It's the copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I bought in the spring of 1992.  I have kept it all this time, in remarkably excellent condition.  I take good care of the books that mean most to me.  I try to read Nineteen Eighty-Four every few years, along with Fahrenheit 451 and Atlas Shrugged.  Maybe that will suffice as a peak into the mind of this writer.

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Donald Trump, the Confederacy, and Honor

Over the weekend I watched Gettysburg, the 1993 Civil War epic film about the Battle of Gettysburg.  It's one of my most favorite historical films, although at more than four hours long it's really not one I can afford enough time to watch often.  But for some reason or another I felt led to see it again.

Maybe I sensed that I was needing to watch it anew.  That the time was coming soon to bring it up in conversation.  That opportunity comes tonight, after reading how President Donald Trump is restoring the name of seven military bases back to their original names that honored Confederate officers from the Civil War.  The bases had been re-named by the Biden administration to be more "neutral" or "politically correct".  The venerated Fort Bragg became the vacuous-sounding "Fort Liberty", f'rinstance.

Now, to be accurate about it, the Trump Administration is not directly restoring the original Confederate namesakes.  Fort Bragg was originally named after General Braxton Bragg.  Fort Bragg 2.0 gets its monicker from Army Pfc. Ronald Bragg, who earned a Silver Star for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge.  It's a clever way to re-brand the forts to their first identities.  And I think it's a magnificent end-run around an ideology that cares not for the things that matter, like history and heritage.

And honor.

Something that has struck me every time I've watched Gettysburg, which was based on Michael Shaara's richly-researched 1974 novel The Killer Angels.  It's how the men of the Union and the Confederacy respected each other.  That, despite how they were on opposing sides of a bitter conflict.  The Civil War was ultimately founded in the few errors made by the Constitutional Convention: namely the issue of slavery.  That manifested itself in time into the issue of states versus federal government, but I greatly digress...

The Civil War was going to happen.  It's a wonder it didn't break out thirty years earlier during the Nullification Crisis.  But there is not a doubt in my mind that conflict would break out eventually.

But that isn't what the men, and women, on either sides of the fighting wanted.  They each wanted the right thing to be done.  Unfortunately it took a violent thrashing-out to decide who would determine that.  It was an unenviable situation that truly pitted brother against brother, literally and figuratively.

Back to Gettysburg, the film and what it depicts.  The officers of each side, and on down to the basic soldiers, don't necessarily hate each other.  They didn't in real life either.  As I said, they respected each other.  How could they not? They had too much nobility.  They had too much honor.

If those men could honor each other, I don't see how I can't honor them all, either.

I've heard the screeds: "they were a foreign country fighting America!"  "They were traitors!"  "They were the losers and we don't pay tribute to losers!"  Ad nauseam.

Those things are said by people who have no concept whatsoever of honor.  They couldn't care less what honor means.  They barely ever use the word at all.  "Honor" is a thing almost dying.  It seems more fitted for an earlier time, somewhen that doesn't factor in to a world of thoughtless replies and cruel memes.

The men and women of the Confederacy and Union alike, they didn't ask to be drawn into war against one another.  They were doing the best that they could with the hand that was dealt them.  It was their lot to participate in the very worst of family disagreements.  And the men of the Confederacy loved their countrymen no less than the Union loved theirs.

They were admirable, every one of them (okay, except for those like the ones in charge of the prison at Andersonville).  They played the parts given them.  And after the war, they reconciled.  They embraced again.  Decades later at the reunion at Gettysburg battlefield, the survivors of Pickett's charge went up the ridge to meet the Union defenders, only this time they met and shook hands and hugged one another.

I really can't see that kind of thing possible among people today.  The people of today like bitterness.  They thrive on hate.  They despise all vestige of honor.

The people who tore down the Confederate monuments in recent years have acted like animals of base instinct.  They have no notion of respect for those who came before us in generations past.   How could they?  Honor is an alien notion to them.

I have no problem whatsoever with a fort being named for a Confederate officer.  Or having a Confederate statue erected.  Or something like a school named after Robert E. Lee, arguably the most beloved general in America's long and illustrious history.  There can be monuments for North and South alike.  If the United States federal government came to reward pensions to veterans of both sides, we can still abide by that.

Union and Confederate.  Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.  The blue and the gray.  They both fought with honor.  And we can honor them both.

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Bleeding-edge ChatGPT artificial intelligence beaten at chess by Atari 2600

I love this story!!

I'm impressed by ChatGPT.  But I've also got a healthy respect for Atari Chess, a cartridge for the classic Atari 2600 Video Computer System from 1977.  I got Atari Chess when I was nine years old in third grade.  I'd just learned how to play chess and already wanted to get better by having a computer opponent to practice with.  Atari Chess beat me EVERY time.  Then again I've only won a single time at chess but that's beside the point...

Anyhoo, a Citrix engineer set ChatGPT against the Atari 2600 in a game of chess.  And the Atari from almost fifty years ago clobbered the modern AI.

Here's the full story courtesy of Futurism.

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It's the fortieth anniversary of The Goonies!

The perfect movie about young adventure.  Released on June 7th, 1985.

My family saw it in the theater about a week later, at the long-gone Janus Theater in Greensboro.  Watching it made me wish, not for the first time, that there were other kids living closer by, instead of us being out in the country.  It would have been fun to have others my age nearby to have adventures with.  The best we could do was have friends from school over on weekends, when we could use our imagination and make our family's farm into something more than it really was.

Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, Data, Brandon, Andy, Stef, and Sloth... you are just as "Good Enough" today as you were four full decades ago.

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A lesson on humbleness

Had some very good news today!  Wish I could share it but I had to sign all kinds of non-disclosure agreements and whatnot.  But trust me, it's awesome!!

During a discussion about how good a turn this is, a dear friend shared something that I thought was rather profound.  It's a notion I've never considered before and it's already greatly impacted my outlook on life.  Here it is, in his own words...

Stay humble, but let me tell you a story: When I first came into the Twelve Steps program, I was saying to my sponsor how bad a person I was.  His response was, 

"Wow. What an ego on YOU."

I replied, "That's the opposite of ego."

He smiled and said, "No it isn't. Do you know the Latin root of the word "humble"? It is "humus".  To be grounded.  Humility is the act of being neither greater NOR LESS THAN who you truly are."

Light bulb went off over my head.  Now I try to be humble.  Neither greater nor less than.

If nothing else I have learned something new to me: the word "humus" and how it's the basis of "humble".

I have been told before that I am humble.  Maybe I've been trying to be too humble.  Hence, something other than grounded.

It's a good notion to meditate upon for the rest of this evening.

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Release dates announced for Stranger Things final season

Well, I know what I'll be doing from Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve in another six months...

"RUN!!  RUUUUUUUNNNN!!!!!"

Volume One at Thanksgiving.  Volume 2 on Christmas.  The finale on New Year's Eve.

Stranger Things has been the only show that I've followed at all during this past decade. I seriously don't know what's going to fill that void in my life.  It's one of the few things pop culture-wise that I've been interested in all this time.  I haven't watched Star Wars: Andor though I keep getting told that I must see that, it's supposed to be the best thing that Disney has done with that franchise since it took over.

But Stranger Things will forever have a very special place in my heart, just from when it started.  When I was on the road going across America for a year.  That it's ending this coming holiday season, well.. it's almost like that extended life journey since 2016 is finally drawing to a close for me.  Maybe something else will come along now.

EDIT: Netflix has released some pics from season five.  The kids don't look that much older than they did in the previous season three years ago (though it's good that the show is wrapping up now cuz this is no doubt the last time they'll be able to pull off that trick).  Click each image to embiggen it.

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