Well, I finished a short story.
It's full of sadistic monks with swords, terroizing a small colony of Unitarians on the planet Boo-Yah, with lots of metaphors relating to the present political situation and hot monkey love with aliens. It may need some editing, before it's released...or tunnels under the wall and escapes.
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In the mean time, I want to draw your attention to an excellent post by my friend Mokie Joe.
I've had the distinct priviledge of getting to know his Dad, as well as some, but certainly not as well as most, nor as well as I would have liked.
I do know that he is one of the luckiest men I have ever met.
He was lucky enough to make a living in music, doing what he loved best. Knowing it would be tough supporting a family just playing piano or organ in a mid-sized Indiana town, he went into business for himself.
He opened a music store.
It was the kind of place that every town once had, that sold instruments and sheet music and set aside rooms for lessons. From a guitar pick to a grand piano, folios to fake books, if you couldn't find it at Larry's store, you just weren't looking hard enough. No matter, as he was always happy to special order something for you. He made friends easily, and kept good contact with his suppliers.
My own Dad, also a salesman born in the Midwest, liked him immediately.
Most nights, he would be playing a live gig somewhere in town. He had that showman's ability to size up an audience within the time it took to play the first song, and play just for them from that point on. I'll bet he knew a thousand songs, and could play each one by memory if asked to do so.
I suspect most of his audience never knew just how lucky the guy behind the organ really was.
By his own admission, he was a cocky kid. By my own obsevation, he must have been no more than 5 foot 6, so I always marveled how this gentle man did something downright foolhardy before he turned 20.
He volunteered to jump out of a perfectly good airplane while people shot at him.
While I never got the full story, the facts are that he volunteered for the paratroops during the early days of America's involvement in World War II.
He passed jump school, joined the 101st Airborne, and jumped into German occupied France during the early hours of June 6, 1944. If you have seen the movie "The Longest Day" Larry's in there somewhere. You can also look for him in the Tom Hanks/Stephen Spielberg series "Band of Brothers". They may not mention him by name, but the actors are trying their best to bring his story to life. He survived Normandy, Bastogne and the final push into Germany without a scratch!
Like I said, he's a very lucky man.
There's an old axiom about combat veterans, that those who have seen the most talk about it the least. Perhaps his family knew more, but all I knew were the basics. When Mokie Joe and I sat and talked with him in his shop after 5pm, he was much more interested in the present moment than the 10 terrifying months he spent years before.
I was always conscious of that fact that I was in the presense of an historic figure...and that I was drinking his Scotch.
So now, as he prepares to sing in other worlds, or at least accompany the singers, I am struck by the same thing that has amazed me for over a decade.
You've seen the pictures, and they only begin to illustrate what five kids and countless (for me) grandchildren think of the man. With such a fine family around him, Larry remains a very lucky man to this day.

So, as another WWII vet of similar age (but far less character) would say;
"Now you know...the rest of the story."

I live in a ever more crowded suburb of a growing mid-size city.
Today, being Saturday, I had places to go and stuff to buy.
Some of it, like groceries, had been planned for in advance. Some of it, like a way to fix a backed up toilet, had not.
I also managed to see my Dad briefly during his hospital stay. He had his knee replaced a week ago, swapping bone for titanium, in something that had also been planned for in advance.
During my stops at Publix, and Home Depot and Borders Books (not on the schedule, but hard to resist) I met a number of people...but didn't actually know any of them.
I imagine some of you who live in smaller towns would find that odd, if you think about it. Where you live, you would expect to say hello to people you see in the stores you go to. I'll bet you can usually call them by their first names.
You might also think it's a pain in the butt.
I've lived in small towns, and the biggest down side is that everyone seems to know your business...or thinks they do.
You could live the most exemplary life, constantly doing good deeds, or ministering to the sick; the friend and benefactor of every widow and orphan on your street, and still be the subject of gossip.
It's a short step on the rumor treadmill to having a sick relationship while doing the deed to benefit that widow up the street (never mind the orphans!).
Of course, you have to have a certain noteriety in town. Gossip is no fun if you have to spend fifteen minutes defining the subject of a five minute story. You might be a member of one of the wealthier families in your town, or a family that has headed a business for years.
Sometimes you are a member of the media, like I was.
I remember I had been working for a small-town radio station for a couple of months, probably not the station you're thinking of, when a rumor got back to me by way of my boss.
Without going into a lot of detail, he called me into his office, and asked me if it was true.
"I've never actually met the woman", I told him.
He shook his head in a way that silently indicated that this sort of thing had happened alot with his on-air staff, and never mentioned it again.
Within minutes of our brief conversation, I made a vow to myself that I would never again be the subject of a false rumor. Clean living was, obviously, not the answer.
So, like the Bonnie Raitt song says, I decided I would give them something to talk about.
I found that the rumors would continue...but that now I would, at least, get some of the benefit. Surprisingly, I found that I became less and less interesting to the community, less gossip worthy, as time wore on.
Since there was nothing all that interesting about someone doing what the rumor mongers said he was doing all along, I became boring.
Which leads me from small town USA, to big town Florida, to the small community that is Blogstream.
Since I began posting in November of last year, I have tried my best to guard my anonymity in the blogs. I have been using a pseudonym, albeit one I have come to despise, and have been using a 20 year old photograph (a profile, no less!) to identify myself visually.
The blogging has helped me become a better writer, with a couple of posts approaching a decent level of journalism.
Some of them make me laugh...usually for the right reasons.
But now it's time to move on.

I'm not leaving Blogstream, but I am going to try and expand my writing with your help.
Here's the deal;
I will offer a certain amount of honesty now, and you have to agree to put up with a whole lot of BS later.
Here goes....

My name is Tom, and I look something like this;




...and I want to write fiction.
Hopefully, the posts will continue to be fairly short...did I mention that I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (un-medicated)? I know I will get bored before you do...as a matter of fact, I'm really pushing my limits right about now.
What I write may often have little to do with my real world...or yours, for that matter. You can expect characters and situations that will exist only in my own mind. People who live in places that are far away, in a time that was long ago.
I will try to limit my use of space ships.
So let's call this little experiment a partnership between you the Blogstream reader/writer and me...a real person just making stuff up.
I may still post the occassional left leaning observation, but I think it's time for me to expand a little.
This may be a very bad idea, and I am quite aware that some of my upcoming postings may be impregnated with "eau de gym sock" until I figure out what I'm doing...but I still hope you'll come along for the ride.

We've all seen it...
We're going along, minding our own business, when we come upon the accident. We are horrified, yet fascinated, by the mangled syntax, the split infinitives, misspelled words and participles that seem to dangle by a thread.
We also see the bad similies, awkward metaphors and sentences that run together.
We see the wreckage of fuzzy thinking that has collided with bizzarre punctuation, and we can tell instinctively that this was no accident.
This was the direct result of another drunk blogger on the internet.

We've all done it...
A beer after work, or a glass of wine with dinner isn't the problem.
It's when it gets to be late at night, and the wine bottle seems more comfortable on the computer desk, or the beer bottles begin to stack up next to the printer.
The problem begins when we've had a few too many, and still decide to get behind the keyboard.

At first, we can still use all our fingers to type, so we don't feel too impaired. It's almost exhillerating to start off with what appears to be an interesting turn of a phrase, or some laser like insight! You feel like a modern day Ernest Hemingway cranking out art for the ages.

"Yeah!, what about Hemingway?", you ask. "He drank like a frat boy, and I still had to read his stuff in High School!".
Well just because Hemingway did it, does that mean YOU should do it too?
I mean, if Hemingway decided to blow himself away with a shotgun, does that mean you...wait...sorry...bad analogy.
What I meant to say was, if Hemingway and his friends jumped off the bridge at San Luis Rey, would you...aww, forget it.
The fact is, this is the age of the INTERNETS, my friend!
Hemingway used a manual typewriter (something he didn't have to plug in) and wrote his stuff on actual paper, back before World War II.

Imagine a late Friday night, and Ernest Hemingway is click-clacking away on what he believes is the best work of his career, bourbon bottle close at hand. As his reflexes begin to slow, he delves deeper into a dark tale of intrigue and betrayal under the Andalusian sun. And the girl...there's always the girl...He will call her Mildred.
He staggers out of his bedroom around noon on Saturday, with his head beating like a bodhran, and takes the time to read the piece over. He immediately realizes it is the same kind of derrivitive, incoherrent crap he's written a thousand times. This will not be sent to his literary agent, or even to the Saturday Evening Post.
I can easily picture a hungover Papa wadding up every last page of "For Who the Bell Rings Really Loud" or "The Old Man at the Seashore" and tossing it into a roaring fireplace. Perhaps a manuscript titled "The Snows of Kankakee" hung around for a while, until he got drunk again and sliced it to pieces with a regulation sized Bowie knife.
What I mean is, his really bad or embarrassing stuff never got across the threshold of his cottage in Key West or his cabin in Idaho.

Today, thanks to technology, everyone in the world can read what you wrote almost as soon as you've written it.
And nobody cares if you were sober when you wrote it...but they can tell if you weren't.

Unfortuneately, rather than write fiction, many of us prefer to report about our own lives in a factual way.
Troubles at work? Troubles at home? The affair you're having, did have or are going to have?
Put it in the blog!
As soon as you hit "submit" everybody in the world is potentially in on story.
There are few secrets in blogging, and fewer still if the booze has knocked down the old inhibitions.
It is the virtual equivilent of sitting at the end of a gloomy bar and saying to anybody who sits near you, "hey...hey buddy...yew wanna know wass wrong with my life? Lemme tell yeh."

Perhaps you believe you're safe in your anonymity...and you are... unless you've told at least one friend: "Hey, hey buddy...check out my blog!".

I was thinking there should be some kind of law against drunk blogging...with one possible exception.
We strange people of Celtic descent, should probably be encouraged to be BUI (blogging under the influence) at every opportunity. It seems to act as an enhancement or neural lubricant to our postings...that is, if you can even understand them in the first place.

Long before there was an internet, James Joyce wrote in Finnegan's Wake;

"Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughtersons..."

I would love to write like that myself...but for me to begin to approach the genius of Mr. Joyce, I fear it might take more than a few ounces of "inspiration". Given that much influence, I would soon be typing with two fingers...very slowly...before abruptly falling asleep, with my head on the keyboardddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd...

Remember...friends don't let friends blog drunk.

Unless they're Irish.
Then it might be interesting, despite the carnage.