Category Archives: Uncategorized

Horizon line

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we’re in rented
beach chairs on
Pompano Beach,
it’s late November – two days
before Thanksgiving
when she asks me how far it is
to the horizon
and I tell her it is 3 miles
give or take a foot or two…

I further explain:

…that it’s 3 miles from the point
where her lavender painted
toes touch the water
to where the water touches the sky.

I go on:

That’s fifteen thousand
eight hundred forty
feet I say to her —
from your toe tips to
horizon line

then I say…

That’s one foot
for every year that
we’ve known each other…

she laughs

then she tells me that I am not
the world’s most renown

mathematician.

You’re no Euclid, she says
you’re no Blaise Pascal,
no Pythagoras, and
certainly you are no
Archimedes…

then she tells me that
we’ve known each other
much, much longer than that

The U.S. Government report on UAP

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This morning, I spent some time reading the U.S. Government’s exhaustive, nine-page report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This report was delivered to the U.S. Congress on the 25th of June by the ODNI – that being the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That said, I can hardly believe I have managed to use the ‘U.S. Government’, ‘exhaustive’, and ‘nine-page report’ together in a sentence. I think it is remarkable that this report, or at least the publicly facing report to Congress, can be contained in such an abbreviated document. I should think a volume of at least a couple of hundred pages would be required for a topic that discusses at minimum, the military and safety concerns of erratic objects of uncertain origin navigating our airways at blinding speeds, but if nine pages is all that is required, so be it. I will leave a link to the document here, so that you can read it for yourself, should you be so motivated.

For many of us, myself included, who have seen UFOs, this report seems to say it is finally ok to come out and discuss what we saw without fear of ridicule, or in some cases, jeopardizing our employment. Reading further in the report, it states plainly, that “UAP threaten flight safety and, possibly, national security”. Think of the implications of that sentence alone.

Further reading of this ‘acronym saturated’ report says that UAPs are likely not explained by any single factor. The report suggests that most will fall into these 5 categories:

  • Airborne Clutter: birds, balloons, maybe unmanned drones, possibly even high-flying plastic bags
  • Natural Atmospheric Phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, and other naturally occurring stuff that will cause a misleading radar return.
  • US Government, or Industry Developmental programs:  All kinds of things the government along with the private sector might be messing with that they can’t or won’t tell us about.
  • Foreign Adversary Systems: Stuff the Russians or the Chinese are doing that we don’t know about, but we are pissed as hell we don’t, so don’t even go there.
  • Other: Here is the big one. The words of the report explain this away as “We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”.

So, there we are. The report includes 144 cases of UAP encounters reported between 2004 and 2021. Of these only one has been attributed to a deflating weather balloon. It appears the rest are largely unaccounted for.

You are probably asking if I am going to wade into the deep dark mirth of whether or not we are being visited by beings from some other world, and I won’t do that, or at least not right now. I am not a scientist, or a mathematician. Not even close. But I do think that the government report is focusing on a very narrow dataset. Would we attempt to make assumptions about hurricanes, droughts or sunspots based upon only data gathered during a period of a few years?

As the report goes on to say: As the dataset increases, the UAPTF’s ability to employ data analytics to detect trends will also improve.

Perhaps the government is preparing another report which will further clarify the meaning of this phenomena. Or maybe not. Maybe we will wait for 80 more years.

Your thoughts are encouraged, but never required.

Happy 4th to all of my US readers.

On reading great writers

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If he were still alive, June 28th would have been the 122nd birthday of legendary author Eric Ambler. Ambler is considered by many to be the ‘father’ of the spy novel/thriller genre. Graham Greene called Ambler “the greatest living author of the novel of suspense”, and indeed his post World War II novels have withstood the test of time and make for fine reading today. Ambler had an uncanny eye for staring into the future and his great, 1935 prophetic novel “The Dark Frontier” discussed the atomic bomb and the rise of nuclear weaponry nearly a decade before the first atomic weapon was dropped upon Hiroshima.

Since his death in 1998 at age 89 his books remain as popular today as they were a half dozen decades ago. But this blog is not a bio about Mr. Ambler, but rather something that I read about him in a 1998 online obituary.

The obituary noted that in a conversation with Eileen Bigland, herself a well-known, serious author, Ambler told her that he had been reading a lot. When she asked him what he was reading, he said that he was reading Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and James Joyce. Upon hearing this, Bigland offered this advice: “Never read very good writers while you are trying yourself to write good trash. You’ll only get depressed.”

At first, upon reading this, it appears to be a nod to mediocrity. But upon further examination, Ms. Bigland’s words hold some worth. I recall talking with a member of our Ft. Lauderdale writer’s group a number of years ago. She was writing a romance novel set in 1940s New Mexico. But she had been reading a lot of Nicholas Sparks and Nora Roberts and she didn’t feel like her work measured up. She had become so disillusioned with her work that she had walked away from her writing project twice. At the time of our conversation, she had just picked up her novel where she had left off months earlier, and she really wanted to see it through to the end, just for the sake of completion. I told her that it might be wise to resist comparing her work to that of the great writers of the genre. Another member of the group said that she should avoid reading romance novels by anyone until her novel was complete.

So, can reading the work of great writers be detrimental to our writing projects? I think that if we compare our work to theirs it can, and in the case of my friend from the writer’s group, such comparisons had caused her to lose focus and discontinue a project that she really wanted to complete. A painter who compares her work to Rembrandt or Picasso will surely be disappointed if she is trying to paint like Rembrandt or Picasso.

I recall a radio interview with singer songwriter Jimmy Buffett many years ago, Buffett told the interviewer that he was aware of the fact that he was not the best singer in the world, or the best guitar player in the world. But he went on to say that he was the best Jimmy Buffet in the world. Maybe that is the key to it all – being the best that we can be without comparing ourselves to the best of the best.

So, all of that said, I will not be reading Eric Ambler for some time. Not until my project is complete.

Post-pandemic remorse

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The company that I work for in Florida shut down one day in March 2020 with a single email from our corporate office.  The email announced that due to the corona virus outbreak, our local office would close,  until further notice. All employees were told to work from home until otherwise instructed. It was a short email and it said that further directives from corporate would be forthcoming.  In a conference call with management a day or two later, we were told that the closing could last as long as two to four weeks.

Should I go on?

Today, as I sit in my home office, I think a lot about the past year and a half. Now as businesses are starting to open, travel restrictions are being lifted, and employees are being redirected from dining room tables back to corporate cubicles, I think of the past year more in a blur than anything else. Will we return to normal, I mean, completely normal anytime soon? In doing a bit of research on this question, I came across something that seems to fit well with some of the time use/management/ topics that I have been writing about on this blog the past few weeks. I am talking about post-pandemic remorse.

Post pandemic remorse is a feeling many people are experiencing which is akin to guilt. Guilt over squandering time. Time which had been awarded them to produce, to create, to do something they have always wanted to do. Now many are feeling that they have wasted this ‘gift’ of time. They are thinking that this negative pandemic experience should  have been parlayed into something positive. They are thinking that they should have written that screenplay, novel, or deeply researched non-fiction essay. Maybe they should have become certified in something, learned a new skill, mastered something…anything.

As I look at my own, incomplete, novel, I am tempted to fall into the pandemic remorse trap myself. I mean, with the restaurants all closed, what did I have to do but write a best seller?

But maybe we are being way too hard on ourselves. Maybe our desire to achieve and create needs a reset. Maybe on the other side of this whole pandemic lies fallow soil in which to plant. Do we really need a worldwide shutdown to inspire us to sit down at a keyboard and write something we want to write? Is our time such a commodity that we need rely on global disaster to access it?

How about you? Are you dealing with pandemic regret? Or were you far too busy coping with this worldwide disaster to consider self improvement?

This afternoon as I was writing this, I was listening to a fine song that I hadn’t thought of in some time. It is a song by Chuck Mead called “On a Slow Train to Arkansas”. It is a great song to listen to if you want to forget all about post-pandemic remorse. It is also one of the few songs that I know that talk about Arkansas.

Yeah, I know… how about “Uncle Elijah” by Black Oak Arkansas, so don’t go there.

But Slow Train is a great song so I will leave a link to it here.

Thanks for reading…

Ed

Planning with Seneca

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A few days ago, I was cleaning out an old Franklin Planner, prior to disposing of it, looking for any phone numbers, business cards, etc. that I might want to save. Now if you aren’t familiar with the FranklinPlanner company, they are the makers of some of the finest time management tools anywhere. I was a devoted user of the Franklin system for over twenty years, and during my all too many years in Corporate America, I have gone through more daily planner pages, binders, and calendar pages than I like to think about.

But that said, I  hadn’t used my old paper calendar planner in a couple of years. Being a home worker, I found a big spiral notebook and small desk calendar provided the same time management results for a fraction of the cost, so my old planner sat on the shelf collecting dust, until I decided it was time to clean house.

In the process of cleaning out my planner, I ran across a quote that I had copied from the internet and pasted on one of the monthly divider tabs in my planner. I read this quote daily for a very long time, and since it seems to dovetail in with some other things I have been blogging about here on EEOTPB, regarding mindfulness and our time and how we spend it, I thought I would pass it along to you.

The quote comes from Seneca the Younger, the stoic Roman philosopher (b 4BC – d 69 AD). If anyone’s words can be said to have real staying power, it’s Seneca’s. They are as true today, as they were in the first century:

“No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing, or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.”

Talk about a guy who has a way with words…that Seneca…

Longhand: thoughts on cursive writing

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Lately on this blog, I have been talking a lot about time, and how we spend it, and which things are worth spending time on and which are not. In keeping with that flow,  I came across this topic on a social media platform regarding whether or not it is a good idea to teach ‘cursive’ writing to kids, or whether it is a waste of valuable classroom time.

I soon discovered that few topics raise the hackles of my fellow baby boomers faster than the suggestion cursive writing be removed from school curriculum. (If you don’t know what ‘hackles’ are, they are the short, erectile hairs on the back of a dog’s neck that rise when the dog is angered. So yeah, people really get worked up over it.)

The hoopla seems to surround the fact that what most of us learned in elementary school penmanship class, a style known as the “Palmer Method”,  is now deemed out of date. The Palmer Method being the ornamental handwriting technique developed by Austin Palmer back in the late 19th century. Today, 41 states have declared that schools are under no obligation to teach ‘cursive writing’, saying it is a waste of time. A handful of states, California, and Tennessee among them (go figure that), have said no way. Kids have to learn penmanship. So, do they, or don’t they? Mr. Palmer’s method involves exercises that teach kids to write a highly stylized form of scripting that probably has little (maybe no) value in today’s keyboard driven world. Or so they say.

So maybe that makes it a waste of time. I don’t know. I do know that few of us follow the rigid composition structure that we learned in school, and develop instead, a bastardized form of longhand writing that pulls from both printed lettering and a cursive script, into a style that we make our own.

To illustrate, see the photo below of my own handwriting as I began work on this blog post a few days ago:

So maybe writing from my beach chair did not afford me the opportunity to construct my script in accordance with Mr. Palmer’s instructions regarding method and execution:

… the movement of the muscles of the arm from the shoulder to the wrist, while keeping the fleshy portion of the arm just forward of the elbow [held] stationery on the desk. This movement should be used in all capitals and in all small letters, except the extended stem and loop, where a slight extension and contraction of the fingers holding the pen is permissible.”

Whew…

Proponents of teaching cursive cite brain stimulation and teaching focus as two primary reasons for keeping such training in place.

My personal feeling is that longhand writing of some sort (not necessarily Mr. Palmer’s brand), is vital in connecting words, word patterns and sentence structure in the writer’s brain.

It is an often-told story that the late Hunter S. Thompson, who was a huge fan of Hemingway, once transcribed Hemingway’s classic, “A Farewell to Arms“, in its entirety, in longhand, on yellow legal pads. He wanted to capture Hemingway’s pace, structure, and style so that he could bring the technique to his own writing.

I am not sure if Thompson succeeded in emulating Hemingway. But I do know, that as a reader, the first chapter of “A Farewell to Arms” and the last chapter of HST’s “Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” are still, to date, my favorite first and last chapters of any books I have ever read.

Now back to work on a book I am writing.

Thankfully, I will be typing.

Thanks for reading.

Time misspent

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A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned to me that whenever she started reading a book, she always finished it. No matter if the book was good, or bad, she always finished the book before starting another. The act of finishing the book was of greater importance to her than the lost hours of time spent on the task. I told her that I felt exactly the opposite. I feel that time spent on a task that reaps no reward is time misspent, and the older one gets, the more one starts to look for misspent hours. They are slices of time that cannot be returned to us.

I was thinking of this today – time and how we spend it, when I remembered an online article that I read some years back. It is one of those (very) few online pieces that has stuck with me. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark it, or I could share it here today.

The piece was written by an inmate on death row in Texas who was about to be executed. The article detailed the last 24 hours of the inmate’s life in excruciating detail. He described his transfer from his cell in one prison, to a cell outside of the death chamber in another. He described the food he ate, the people he talked to and the black and white television that was set up just outside of his cell, so he could entertain himself in his last hours. He described a table of snacks that was set up just beyond his cell and he described a final cigarette that was given to him by a kindly corrections officer. The detailed execution protocol commenced to the point of securing the inmate to the lethal injection gurney before the phone rang and it was announced that he had received a stay of execution. The inmate was returned to his cell, his date with death delayed.

I don’t know what happened to this inmate, nor do I want to begin a conversation about the pros and cons of capital punishment (so don’t even go there in the comments section). But what happened next made me stop and think. The inmate said that after he had been returned to his normal, day to day prison life, and he’d had time to reflect on his near execution, he came to see how the scripted execution protocol being followed by everyone involved in the event (if you can call it an event), was designed to distract all people involved from the actual execution. It was designed to fill every single minute until his death with an activity. Something to be signed, watched, written, eaten, smoked, drank or in some way sensory consumed. It was designed to keep everyone occupied so that there would be no time to consider what was really about to occur until after it occurred.

Few of us, apart from condemned prisoners, know the exact day and hour of our demise, but I do wonder how much time we spend upon meaningless pursuits as the clock ticks down. Are we all guilty of time misspent? Will we wish to retrieve portions of it one day? Are we too involved in social media (an easy target, I know), pointless relationships, unfulfilling tasks, or reading uninspiring books? Have we all fallen into the twenty first century ‘protocol’ of life? That is what I am thinking today. As always, your comments are welcome.

Thoughts from the road

. Florida travel, Uncategorized, Writing . . 2 Comments

Yesterday, I took a break from my day job as a technical writer for a large corporation, a corporation with many technical writers on three continents, so I am really just a small cog in a large technical writing wheel. But I took a day off to drive for two and a half hours down the Florida peninsula to visit my dentist in the leafy, family-friendly (their words, not mine), Ft. Lauderdale bedroom community of Coral Springs. I have always been averse to the term ‘bedroom community’ as it infers that little else happens in those communities, other than that which occurs in the bedroom, and I find that very restrictive and narrow. I have never heard of a community described as a ‘kitchen community’ or a ‘garage community’, or God forbid ‘bathroom community’. So, I cosign ‘bedroom community’ to the list of words and phrases that I dislike (‘bucket list’ being another that comes immediately to mind, but that’s another blog).

But I digress, and it’s not the trip to Coral Springs, Florida, nor the expensive dental work that I will soon require that I am thinking about today, but rather the journey on the highway, Interstate 95, an especially neutered stretch of road that strays just far enough from both the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and Florida’s Everglades on the other, so as to give the traveler a taste of neither. The great New York to Miami artery pumps commerce in both directions (north and south); there are big trucks, little trucks, Lexus, Hyundai, Fords, Silverado trucks, and ninja bikes all on their way to everywhere, and to nowhere.

There are no named rest areas on I-95 either, just numbers – MM 302 St. Augustine; MM225 Mims; MM133 Ft. Pierce. No need for snack bars or fuel. Take care of yourself fellow traveler. This is America, learn to fend for yourself. Look for your bootstraps cowboy, they’re right where you left them. Check the names of the missing teenagers on the bulletin board by the restroom and move along. Do your business. Say your piece and get out. South Beach waits at the end of the road. The mouse is an hour to the west.  A couple of  hours past that, sultry Tampa Bay hoists a subtle middle finger, asking us not so politely to  stay away.

The particular journey that I was on yesterday was only a couple of hundred miles, but it was enough to remind me of longer road trips I have taken, and the therapeutic benefits that I have achieved while on such journeys. And there is therapeutic value, believe me. Try driving from Spokane to St. Paul and you’ll see what I mean. Nothing can connect you with the voice inside your head like the high desert. The current buzzword, ‘mindfulness’, or being extremely aware of the moment and focusing on it and living in it is a close description but does not do the experience justice. Hearing yourself can be achieved through use of a number of relaxation techniques, but actually paying attention to what you are hearing is quite another matter and becoming excited about what you are hearing is still another.

Frederic Will, in his classic 1992 book, “Big Rig Souls” explores this phenomenon among America’s long-haul truck drivers. In this book, which is a short, but scholarly look at the American truck driver, Will strips away the media conjured myth of the truck driver as the last American cowboy and explores their relationship with their jobs, their families, their machines, the trucking industry, and more importantly, their personal journey both in and out of the trucking world.

In one chapter, Will interviews a driver who says that it is not unusual for drivers to stop at a coffee shop after a long run on the road and begin to unload with a plethora of ideas to anyone who will listen. ‘Foolishness’, this talk is described as being, and the driver will often continue to unload his thoughts for several minutes until realizing he has made no sense at all.

But what if this phenomenon is not nearly as foolish as it first appears. Maybe these long-haul drivers have simply tapped into a source of creativity that is lying just beneath the surface ready to be revealed. Maybe this type of mental brainstorming is not detrimental at all and may in fact be more transformative than it first appears?

I have always found writing and long-distance driving to be compatible partners and I have felt some of my greatest bursts of creativity while ‘on the road’. So, don’t go out and push yourself on a nonstop Seattle to Atlanta cannonball run just to finish the last chapter of your novel, but if you have had similar experiences with this type of focus and clarity coming to you while driving, I would like to hear from you. Disclaimer: Of course, obey all traffic laws, don’t drive when you are too tired, buckle up and most importantly — no drinking (until you are safely back at the keyboard).

In which I buy Bitcoin

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I received my first investment advice from my grandfather. Granddad was a stoic Midwesterner, deeply religious, and a man of few words. He fought in the First World War and then went on to see the Great Depression, followed by World War II, so he experienced both good times and bad.

But regarding his investment advice:

Granddad was fond of telling a story of a man who lived in our town during the years immediately prior to WWII. The man was a well-respected tradesman. Of what trade, I can’t recall, but he was a carpenter or a bricklayer, or something like that. He had a wife and a couple of small children and he provided well for them. When he was in his middle years, he decided to abandon his trade and purchase a local restaurant that had come up for sale. He sank all of his hard-earned carpentering/bricklaying money into the establishment and he worked night and day to make the place a success. Sadly though, in spite of all of the man’s hard work and best intentions, the restaurant floundered. Within months, the man had lost all of his money and the restaurant soon went under. Devastated and financially destroyed, the man began to drink heavily and soon thereafter his wife moved away, taking the children with her. I forget the rest of the story, but I don’t think things ended happily for this guy.

“Never put your money into something you don’t know about,” was Granddad’s advice.

He didn’t have too much use for the stock market either, having lived through the ‘crash’ of 1929. He had a similar distrust of banks, although he came to tolerate them, but the stock market he told me was controlled by fast talking businessmen who were out to gouge the common man.

Granddad believed that real estate was the only investment worth making. He once told me that if I were to ever invest money into anything, to make sure you could “build a fence on it”.

So today, as I am considering my first cryptocurrency investment, I am wondering what Granddad would say considering the tiny smattering of knowledge I have regarding Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency I am considering buying. He certainly could not build a fence on the Blockchain. Yet today, I find myself sitting in front of my newly created Coinbase account ready to invest my hard earned cash (not much of it really), into a marginally understood form of digital money that was created by a mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto, who may, or may not, even exist depending upon to whom one talks. Still, I am intrigued by the concept of the ‘digital wallet’ that I am about to deposit my newly minted crypto funds into. I am more intrigued by the fact that this currency exists outside the realm of banks or government (Granddad might like that part).

But I am concerned about the environmental impact digital mining is taking on such fragile eco-systems as Iceland where a huge amount of cryptocurrency mining is taking place.

But I am going boldly forward anyway. More on my investment later.

Shortly before he died, Granddad cautioned me one more time. “Never buy a restaurant,” he told me. “It’s not in your blood.”

I told him I would never consider it.