My 2012 Wrap Up

2012 Wrap Up

  Well, 2012 is just about gone, and what a year it was. But like most years, when I come to the end of them, I’m not all that sad to see it go. It’s not that I’m rushing to get to the end of my life. Somehow I just don’t relate the marking off of days from the calendar with the passing of my life. A major disconnect there I know, but I think most of us might be a little guilty of that. We know there’s an end out there somewhere creeping up on us, but we don’t like to consciously acknowledge it. Anyway, here’s my wrap up of 2012. It was the first full year of my retirement from the working world rat race…I lost by the way…the rat won. But in my case it was probably because I let him - I’m a notorious underachiever. But with all my newfound spare time, I did manage to write two books and get them published on amazon.com. And I’m just wrapping up the third one as we speak. All those creative juices have been there all this time, but didn’t get turned loose until I retired. I traveled to the West Coast to San Diego this year to visit my granddaughter, Elyce. So now I have officially been to all three coasts of the U.S. of A. There’s still much of this country I would like to explore, but the chance of that gets slimmer and slimmer every day. But that’s okay. I love our little place in Ivanhoe, TX and am content to spend my remaining calendar days there. Now here’s a list of my favorite Movies, Books, and Music of 2012….

Movies: The Hobbit, The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, John Carter, MIB 3, Skyfall, Seeking a Friend at the End of the World, Looper, and Prometheus. And in the animated category: Tangled and Brave.

Books:  Prides of Sol, Flight of the Solar Archangel, A Nepenthean Solution, The Children of Danu – Imperator,  Last of the Chosen, Knights of the Chosen, Voice of the Chosen, Time Travelers Never Die, First Time, Lost Time, Some of the Time, Saving Time, All the Time in the World, A Thousand Miles Away, The Nice Guy, The Return of the Nice Guy, Up to Bat, Last at Bat, TimeKeeperS, The Second Ship, Immune, Wormhole, Season Of The Harvest, First Contact (In Her Name), Evolution of a Sad Woman, Mercury Falls, Mercury Rises, The God Theory, and of course my own two books: World of Destiny Book 1: Rescued and Book 2: Dissolution.

Music: I’m not that into music anymore…don’t know why. Only album I bought this year was by the Piano Guys and I downloaded only two songs and they were Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and Bruno Mar’s “The Lazy Song” which I quickly dubbed as my personal theme song.

Favorite Food in 2012: It’s still Lasagna but, since I’ve been on a diet this year, my wife makes it with eggplant instead of noodles. Yummy!

Favorite thing to do: Sit on the front porch in the morning drinking coffee with my wife.

Favorite thing that happened: Or didn’t in this case…The World Didn’t End!

So from the above lists it’s easy to see where all my time and money go. And the list of books above just represents some of my favorites and only about a third of the ones I read this year. I love my kindle!

I would have to say that 2012 was a good year overall. But out with the old and in with the new as they say.

Goals for 2013: Finish book three and get it out there. Write a private eye novel. Spend as much time as possible with my wife, kids, and grandkids. Make new friends…not that the old ones aren’t good ones…it’s just that I don’t have too many of them (my kids and grandkids joke that I don’t have any and it’s not too far from the truth).  Keep love and peace in my heart and try to stay positive about the world when I don’t see enough of it there. Happy New Year Everyone!

Being a Grandparent.

                                 https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=4616909253362

                                                             Grandkids & Great-Grandkids

  All of these kids call me Paw Paw. The above pictures are of my three granddaughters, Brittainey, Presley, and Elyce, and my great-grandson Jayden. Also are my granddaughter's two step-children Kody and Kinzley. The video link above is one of my nephew, Austin Landry's new baby boy, Liam being serenaded with a lullaby by his grandparents from Ireland. You know I've heard the phrase "the gift that keeps on giving". Well my two children, Krystal and Kaanan, were such a tremendous gift to my wife, Linda and I, and it has been one of those kind of gifts that just keeps on giving. The above little group of people give me so much joy every time I see them. They fill me with pride and love and so many magic moments. With them in my life, I would have to say that my life is complete. There is nothing else that I need to accomplish that is anywhere near as important or meaningful. I know that I have been blessed with the privilege of being Paw Paw to these beautiful people. I hope all of you have such blessings in your life. And I sincerely pray that all of mine and yours continue forward in the coming year happy and healthy.

Random Thoughts at The End of The World

Random Thoughts Before the End of the World

  Well, all my thoughts are a little random most of the time, right? So this is not so unusual. But with all this End of the World as we know it hoopla going on, I guess my thoughts are pretty scrambled right now. For one thing, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. Today was a gorgeous day here in Southeast Texas. Didn’t look like the end of anything. No earthquakes, meteors, asteroids, tsunamis, polar shifts, or rogue planets and hey look, I can see the center of the galaxy from here and…nothing. Well some have said that we might go out with a whimper and not with a bang. I have friends who are actually looking forward to Friday as being the end for various reasons. Most are because they think this is what the Bible prophesied, and they are ready “to go home”.  I don’t know what their hurry is. We will all get there soon enough. Why rush it? Anyway, I have already gone on record saying why I don’t think that particular prophecy will be fulfilled this Friday. Anyway, I wonder if now would be a good time to buy a house? My son just did, and my daughter is contemplating doing the same. Now there’s optimism for you. Anyway, it does seem that the whole world has their panties in a bunch over this thing…even more so than they did when the calendars rolled around from 1999 to 2000. I slept through that one like a baby - not worried at all. And I will do the same this Thursday night. One of my favorite lines from a movie was spoken by one of the Viking warriors in the movie “Thirteen Warriors”. When their Arab friend was afraid before a battle against tremendous odds, one of the warriors asked him what he was afraid of. His reply was, “Death.” The Viking laughed and said fear of death was a waste of time. He told him that he could dig a hole in the ground and pull the Earth over him to hide, but if it was his time to go, Death would find him still. So he might as well fight and be unafraid. Sounds like good advice to me. I will not seek out death, but neither will I hide from it or spend one minute worrying about it. I am deeply saddened by the headlines lately. But I’m not too surprised by them.  I read the works of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus a long time ago and knew that he was right. He put forth his ideas in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s when most people believed that society would evolve and continue to grow and perfect itself to the point of someday reaching a utopia. It was what most men believed, and a great deal of the impetus for men to leave Europe and come to the so-called New World was to set up just such a utopia. Today’s headlines are just more proof that Malthus was right and the utopians were wrong. Malthus pointed out that when man’s numbers became greater than his resources disease and famine would shrink his numbers back down again to a more manageable amount. If that didn’t happen fast enough, we would rend and tear at each other achieving the same result. There is a lot of rending and tearing going on in the world today. And you don’t have to be a prophet to see that it will only get worse. So if in the middle of all of this, you can still call yourself an optimist you are blessed among men. Or just plain bonkers! I’m not so sure yet which it is. But I will remain ever hopeful that we will somehow find our way. In the meantime, I’m not going to take life too seriously. After all, no one gets out of it alive anyway in the long run.

Karma (Part 2)

                                                             Karma (Part 2: Misconceptions)

 In part one; I talked about the common idea of Karma. But this idea is not the reality of what is believed and taught about Karma by Buddhists. To them karma is the accumulated effects of all your present and past actions upon the person that you are today. If you do or have done evil things, those acts of volition will taint your existence both now and in the future. Likewise if you have done good things. But there is no idea of being punished now or in the future for this behavior.  You just are what you are. But they believe that you can overcome bad Karma by always choosing to do good going forward. I’ve read things that sound very familiar when it comes to not being allowed in the presence of the Lord because your raiment is stained by sin and has to be washed clean by the blood of the Lamb before you can do so. Only in Buddhism there is no God who will judge you. Here is an interesting analysis from an article on Buddhism by Mahasi  Sayadaw:

“For instance, the table we see is apparent reality. In an ultimate sense the so-called table consists of forces and qualities. For ordinary purposes a scientist would use the term water, but in the laboratory he would say H 2 0. In this same way, for conventional purposes, such terms as man, woman, being, self, and so forth are used. The so-called fleeting forms consist of psychophysical phenomena, which are constantly changing not remaining the same for two consecutive moments. Buddhists, therefore, do not believe in an unchanging entity, in an actor apart from action, in a perceiver apart from perception, in a conscious subject behind consciousness. Who then, is the doer of Karma? Who experiences the effect? Volition, or Will, is itself the doer; Feeling is itself the reaper of the fruits of actions. Apart from these pure mental states there is no-one to sow and no-one to reap.”

 What I get out of all this is that what they are basically saying is that you are ultimately responsible for your own actions and by them receive your rewards or misfortunes. And that these rewards and misfortunes accrue over many lifetimes. Bottom line is that this philosophy doesn’t sound all that great to me and, except for the recurring lifetimes, not very different from what the atheists would have us believe. And furthermore, it is overall pretty pointless if the ultimate goal is just to become a spotlessly perfect human being who is always doomed to die and gets to do it all over again.

  So no, I’m not buying into the idea of Karma. And as I said before, the idea of reincarnation may be tempting, but I’m not selling the farm just yet to invest in that one either. I believe something else may be at work here that we don’t fully understand. I will keep my jury in the box and await further evidence. For now my faith in God will have to do. And with that comes the feeling that his plan is so much more and better than anything we can even imagine. 

Karma?

                                                            Karma (Part 1)

My wife jokes that she has bad key karma. It is true that she loses her keys a lot. But I hardly see where she could have done anything seriously wrong to a key in a past life so that she's having to pay for it now. Now as far as the idea of reincarnation - I've read many case studies of kids and people who remember details from past lives that are pretty convincing. So just maybe there might be something to that whole reincarnation thing. And all my life, even before I read the Bible or went to church (I sure didn't get any kind of religious indoctrination at home and never went to church until my aunt insisted when I was about twelve years old) I always felt two things that just seemed to be given without the need of proof or even questioning. First, I felt that there was a God, and secondly that I had lived many times before. In fact, I always had the feeling that I was here on my last go around and wouldn't be coming back here anymore after this one last time. Even as a five year old child I felt like an old person – tired of life and ready to get on with the next thing. Don't ask me where those feelings came from, but I still have them to this day. So although I may be tempted into believing in past lives, I'm not so sure about the karma idea. Let's say that I hit Johnny with a basketball and broke his arm in eighth grade (I did by the way), so that means in the next life lots of bad things will happen to me because of that. What would be the point of that? Its not like I can take back in the current life what I did in a past one. And where's the lesson I'm supposed to be learning? That bad things happen when you do bad things? Gee, don't you think your average run of the mill new soul would have learned that lesson in, oh I don't know, say the first two minutes after it was first created? I'm sure that simple lesson doesn't take many lifetimes to learn. At least I hope not. So okay, maybe that's too simplistic of a case. Let's say I killed someone in a previous life. So the idea is that in this one I'm going to live a life full of grief, pain, and deprivation? Maybe I'm missing something here, but don't we all go through periods of that kind of stuff anyway? So did we all kill someone in a past life? And what is the Earth shattering lesson we're supposed to learn from that...ah, if you kill someone...bad...you will suffer for it. Duh, that's not exactly rocket science you know? Are karma advocates saying that souls are basically stupid? And that it takes them many lifetimes to learn something that most children already know by the time they're five years old? So, okay, I guess you get my point by now. I'm not really buying into the whole karma notion any more than I do to that of predestination or fate. And before all you religious people out there start jumping on me about reincarnation have a look at what the Bible hints at on the subject. Isn't Jesus reincarnated? He was dead. He came back. And apparently in the flesh, wounds and all, because he let Thomas touch them to prove that it was him. Okay, technically he wasn't reborn as another person. So we won't count that one. But wasn't it prophesied that Elijah would come back which is who the Hebrews thought first John the Baptist and then Jesus was? And doesn't Revelations hint that Elijah and Enoch will come back and proclaim loudly on the streets in Jerusalem the truth about the Antichrist? Which will promptly get them dead again by the way. I'm just saying that maybe we should keep an open mind here. And forget about karma. Just do the best you can with what you have in the here and now. The way I see it, life was meant to be experienced and enjoyed surrounded by all the love and happiness you can manage. If that's not how you find it, then maybe you're just doing it wrong because you're too busy chasing material things. And in that case, you might have to come back again until you get it right. For the record, I'm not so sure that I have gotten it right yet either. I think Linda and I have been doing this tango for a long, long time and we keep screwing it up. Opposites do often attract, but they can be mutually destructive in the long run. Therein lies our challenge. But we're working on it.

Peace. Joy. Love. Hope. Faith. And above all Love to all of you. And Happy Holidays.

Will We Survive?

The Tragedy We've Become

One tragedy after another hits us like sledge hammers, wounding our collective psyches. We shed tears and our hearts bleed. But we soon forget and go about our business...until the next one. In the movie Matrix Mr. Smith tells Neo that humanity is a virus, a disease on the planet poisoning our environment and devouring our resources. When those resources get scarce we turn on each other. A sad commentary on mankind, but pretty accurate, nonetheless. Our religions don't save us from it. Our morals and ethics don't save us. Our laws don't save us. Science and rational thinking don't save us. In fact a very large percentage of our scientists and money works towards coming up with bigger and better ways to kill each other. We are our own worse enemy. In December of 2012, everyone is distracted by prophecies of doom brought about by, a comet, asteroid, rogue planet, solar flares, polar shifts, or Biblical Armageddon. All outside agents of disaster that we would have no control over. The sad truth is that the one thing that will probably take us down the path of extinction is mankind's own insanity. Something that you would think we should have outgrown or evolved away from by now. After all isn't self-preservation one of our fundamental instincts? Yet as a species, we seem hell bent on destroying our habitat and the whole human race. We – not God, not “it”, not “Them” but us. We are destroying us. And we are getting pretty good at it. I used to dream about how marvelous it would be to go traveling around like Captain Kirk having adventures all over the galaxy. But now the thought of us out there scares me more than anything else. We're not ready to be out there. There's something seriously wrong with us. We're flawed in a way that we don't seem to be able to fix. I know, you're sitting there thinking, “I'm not flawed. It's those guys over there. They're the ones that are flawed. I'm one of the good guys.” Hitler was definitely flawed maybe even insane. But what about a whole nation of people that followed him and allowed so many atrocities to occur. Were they not flawed as well? Surely a few million good people could have stopped one madman. But they didn't. Twenty five thousand people die every day from hunger on planet Earth. Gigantic grocery stores are filled to the max with food. Warehouses and granaries overflow, yet still they starve and we do nothing. Wars rage all over the world non-stop in one part of it or another and the threat of a total all out nuclear war is always a possibility. Are we insane? Maybe as individuals we're not. But mankind when weighed as a whole would definitely tip the scales in that direction. So do we deserve to continue? Should we survive? If I were God looking down upon the Earth, I would say absolutely not. I would get rid of humanity and let the dolphins have their turn. Will we survive? I would never count mankind out, because we have this amazing ability to adapt. But we cannot survive as we are today. We must change. And we don't have time for something like evolution to do it for us. We have to take charge of our own evolution. We must change ourselves before it is too late – before we join so many other species that have gone before us into oblivion.  

Believe it or Not

Believe it or Not

  I’m often challenged these days on my reasons for believing in a creator or God, if you will. I’m not ignorant when it comes to science after all. I’ve read Darwin and his theory of evolution. I know the universe has been around for over fifteen billion years and the Earth has been here for a good portion of that. I do agree that micro evolution or adaptation of species occurs. But I don’t see any evidence of macro evolution and strongly disagree that it happens. I think that scientists assumed that it occurred even without the evidence because they didn’t want to believe in something they couldn’t test in a laboratory and they find the notion of God abhorrent. But like I’ve heard many times, you know what happens when you assume things? It makes a you-know-what out of U and Me.The popular notion is that random mutation is the impetus behind macro evolution. Yet every experiment I ever read about where fruit flies or what-have-you have been purposely mutated, the mutated subjects are ill-equipped for survival and die out quickly. And, at any rate, said mutations are always unable to reproduce.  Anyway, I don’t want to argue the point here. But it is the season after all when such matters come to the forefront. I see many of those same people, who argue with me about my beliefs, celebrating Christmas. The attempts to separate Christ from Christmas are really pretty ludicrous to me and are mostly done to promote rampant commercialism so you can HO, HO, HO your way to being PO, PO, PO. It represents a sad state of affairs to me, and would be a prime example of devolution rather than a case for evolution as far as I’m concerned. And yes, I’m aware that even while I’m shooting holes in their theories they can shoot just as many in mine. And that they can point to history and say look what religion has caused in the past. I would have to agree with them. Evil things have been done in the name of religion. Evil things have also been done in the name of science and are continuing as we speak. Neither of which has anything to do with God. Rather it’s only a sad commentary on Man. So why do I believe? I looked at both sides of this argument for all of my adult life and pitched my tent at various times in one camp or the other. But after years and years of wrestling with the issue, I finally realized that there is no easy answer. The question will never be completely resolved by reason alone. Perhaps it was meant to be that way on purpose. To me, it seems that this is why we’re here in the first place – to make a choice without concrete evidence. For if you had concrete proof handed to you on a silver platter, you wouldn’t be choosing. You would be given the facts and just have to accept them whether you liked it or not. I hope my children choose to love me, and don’t just do it because they have to. Once I realized that the choice was simple, I just chose to believe. Once I did so, it took away a whole bunch of fear and anxiety that my life is better off without. Peace of mind is not a bad thing to have. I will never tell you that your choice is wrong. It is why you’re here and you are free to make it either way. But I am happy with my beliefs. And I will wear them like armor against all of life’s slings and arrows not to mention a few barbs occasionally flung my way from those who have chosen the opposite side.  

Free Chapter

                                                            

Here is chapter one of my third book in the World of Destiny series:   

                                                         CHAPTER ONE

   “What?” Trevor asked incredulously as they climbed aboard.

  Mary repeated the message and relayed the sketchy details as they came to her.

  “I don't think I “heard” you right, Mary. There must be something wrong with this thingy you put in my head. I think it’s malfunctioning.”

  WE HAVE FOUND GOD, Mary reiterated.

  Trevor told the others about Mary's message. They looked as dumbfounded as he was. None of them quite knew what to say.

  Apparently, one of the ships that had been long-lost had recently returned to Mary’s world--Trevor noted that they needed to stop doing that...Mary's world needed a human name too. It reported meeting with the Supreme Being, aka God. A delegation was being put together to retrace the ship's steps and meet face to face with the Creator of all things. Georgia and Mary had been asked to join the delegation.

  “Can we go, too?” asked a skeptical Trevor.

  Mary only hesitated for a few seconds and then replied, Yes. You may go with me.

After a brief discussion, it was decided that Trevor, Harella, Amir and Sarah would go with Mary to see what all this fuss was about. Flint, Freddy, Wynnie, Jovi and Alex were pretty much of the same mind. It had to be some kind of mistake or misunderstanding. At any rate, they were not up for another space adventure just yet. They were only too glad to stay behind on this one. It was too good to be home to think about running around the universe looking for some mythical character that none of them even believed existed in the first place.

  Jovi opted to go back to stay with his father again, while Freddy, Alex, and Wynnie would go with him so that they could reunite Alexander with his long lost brother. Freddy was actually looking forward to seeing the look on his father's face when he showed up with his uncle.

 Trevor asked if they had time to swing by Father Joe's for a couple of reasons. First of all, Trevor wanted to share his future plans with Father Joe about building a house near his. Secondly, he knew the good Father wouldn't want to miss this trip for the world (or worlds!)

  Father Joe was thrilled to see them all. When he heard where Trevor was headed, though, he didn't hesitate and insisted on coming along for the ride. Although he was certain that the ships had made some kind of mistake, he still wanted to go along and see what this was all about.

  “You can't just get in a space ship and go see God whenever you feel like it,” he chuckled. “This is just crazy.”

  But there was no persuading him to stay behind. He was going, and that was that. Mary seemed to be in a rush to join her companions, so it was determined that they would leave everyone who wasn't coming there at Father Joe's place. Freddy and Alex seemed to be the only ones a little disappointed by this since they were in a hurry to get to Dardie's place. Flint, however, was delighted with the idea. He promised to lead them to Riverside and get them there safely.  After that, Flint told them he planned on striking out from there on his own. Flint wanted to do some exploring and felt the need for wide open spaces once again.  Father Joe told the ones that were remaining to stay as long as they liked in his home. They assured him that it would only be for the night so they could rest up and gather a few supplies. They intended to leave first thing the next morning. Father Joe told them to help themselves to any food they wanted to take from his stores since most of it was perishable anyway and would be spoiled by the time he got back.

   “Just water all my plants and garden before you leave. Oh, and feed the meercat that comes around every morning. It loves cheese. On your way out of here let my one and only neighbor know where I'll be. He will take care of everything after you're gone,” Father Joe asked.  He was a little worried about leaving his new pet to fend for itself. The small mongoose-like animal reminded him of a meercat even though its fur was a dappled red in color. He had been feeding it for a month now and hoped to eventually domesticate it. Father Joe missed his pet tabby cat from back home on Earth and thought this species would make a good substitute house-pet if he could get it tame enough. He enjoyed the way it stood up and begged for food. It had taken him quite a while to earn the shy creature’s trust to be able to get close enough to feed it by hand.

  After many hugs and good wishes, the two groups parted company. Flint and the ones remaining disembarked and waved to their friends as the ship’s ramp pulled up and the door closed slowly. Mary rose up into the brilliant morning sky majestically, and then waited for Georgia to join her. When her sister ship showed up finally, they whisked off together into the heavens gleefully headed to the portal singing their mission to the stars. They would be rendezvousing with several of their companions on the other end of this wormhole.

  Just after they drank down their sedatives and snuggled up together in the bed that Mary had provided, Trevor put his face near Harella's ear and whispered, “I think I love you!”

  Harella smiled, and whispered back, “It’s about time!”

  They were both asleep within seconds. The deep, chemically-induced sleep was necessary to protect them from the built in backlash of the wormhole. Mary still wondered about the engineers who built the wormhole system that permeated the galaxy. They had obviously been very advanced and adept psychics who didn’t wish anyone but fellow psychics taking advantage of their handiwork.

  Mary could sense the presence of the wormhole entrance when she got near enough to it. The wormhole broadcast a psychic hum into the ether in every direction. It was only necessary for her to send a telepathic thought back towards it for the wormhole to blossom open before her like a flower opening to the morning sunshine.

  Mary dove into the mouth of the wormhole without a moment’s hesitation. She was followed by Georgia moments later. The two sister ships disappeared from this region of space, and the wormhole closed up again behind them.

Killer Robots

                                                           The Three Laws (+ one):

     0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Sounds like good rules to live and let live by, right? A rational society beginning to build intelligent, independently functioning robots would be bound to incorporate such laws into the basic programing of their artificial creations. A society who would build such devices without such restrictions would have to be insane and hell bent on their own destruction. Isaac Asimov was one of the first visionaries to explore the ins and outs of human/mechanical relationships. Though these three laws sort of evolved over the course of some of his earlier short stories, they came to full fruition in his The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire series. These were my favorite books growing up and inspired me to write my own sci-fi stories. Although I’ve already gone on record saying that I don’t believe we will ever create a totally self-aware robot, it seems we are on the verge of creating some that can at least function independently from human control. It appalls me to learn that no such laws as the above are even being considered to be part of these robot’s programing. And that they are being specifically built for the monstrous purpose of unsupervised combat by DARPA. You can read about this outrageous endeavor here: http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2012/12/05/nowhere-to-run-or-to-hide-from-the-new-killer-robots/

  Now I ask you, is it too soon to start a grassroots movement against such insane use of technology? We need to get a petition going to stop this development in its tracks, and to insist that any independently operating robots be hardwired with the unbreakable directives listed above. If we don’t stop it now, someday we will be fighting that war against Sky Net and its machines. And we will lose!

Please go to the "We The People" website and sign my petition against independently operating killer robots:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-darpa-or-any-other-organization-creating-and-using-robots-can-function-independently-human/cwnBlrgg

Failure to Communicate

Failure to Communicate

 “What we have here is…failure to communicate.” That was a line from the 1967 movie “Cool Hand Luke” starring Paul Newman. I find it odd in this day and age of computers, cell phones, ipads, etc. that we still seem to often have a “failure to communicate”.  I bought my first computer in 1994 (Windows 3.1) and it was an amazing thing to me. It opened up a whole new world. I was living in Nashville, TN at the time and most of my family still lived in Texas. My father was the first to get a computer and encouraged me and my brother to do the same. We were fascinated by how easy it was to keep in touch via e-mail. Then my brother and I discovered MIRC. It was a chat platform quite a bit better than AOL’s chat lines. At first we loved chatting with people all over the country and even the world. But then they came out with tons of these little pictograms which were pictures made from the characters on your standard keyboard. That got annoying enough after a while. Then they came out with something called .wavs. These were bits of songs or music that you could post in your chat room and everyone else could hear it. Soon that’s the only thing showing up in the chat rooms. My brother and I created our own chat room…no pics or wavs allowed! Only chat. It was great for about a year, but it dwindled until my brother and I were the only ones still going there. I moved back to TX in 2000 so face to face communication was back in. I heard it talked about a lot around that time about how e-mail was killing the U.S. Postal Service because everyone was just writing emails and not sending letters anymore. I got big on email too for a while. Then all I kept getting was spam and forwarded “joke of the day” that I never read. I have the same email account I had back in the ‘90’s and it’s still mostly filled up with spam. No one writes anymore. I don’t think the Post Office needs to worry about that. E-mail got replaced by texting on cell phones. And so obviously did spelling and grammar. Now those will probably get replaced by something like Skype and writing will disappear altogether. There are already computer programs that let you talk to your computer—no need to type anything ever. I have a feeling that someday, my machine will talk to your machine and leave you and me out of the loop completely. The biggest problem I see, though, with communication these days is that if you take away idle gossip, most people don’t have anything else to talk about. Or they are afraid to express their opinions because there is a need to be “politically correct”.  People are afraid to talk about Religion, Philosophy, Politics, or even Current Events for fear of offending someone -- except on the internet where they can do it anonymously. And then they are called crazies. So if we communicate at all, we prattle on about nothing but mundane things. If you could put together a book with all your text messages in it from over the past year, do you think it would be worth reading?  So it seems to me, even though we keep coming up with better and better ways to communicate, we’re doing less and less of it.

Bowl of Cherries

A BOWL OF CHERRIES

  You know, my life hasn’t been a bowl of cherries or a bed of roses. All my picnics featured heavy doses of ants, flies, or mosquitos. And all my best laid plans just about always went awry. But looking back, I don’t think I would do too much of it differently.  If I did do things differently, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. Yeah, right! How many times have you heard that said? Well, there are a whole bunch of things I would do differently, starting way up at the beginning of this rodeo. And yes, everything would be different, and I wouldn’t be where I am today. Maybe. Hindsight is 20-20, but after all the pain and grief I lived through and put some other very important (to me) people through, tweaking a few things here and there sounds like a good idea to me. So bring on that time machine, and let’s see what happens. I was a very shy kid growing up, and most of my childhood was miserable. Not too much I could change there except that if I could go back, I would slap myself so hard and make myself get over the shyness stuff. I had to do it eventually anyway. Not being shy would have at least made high school and dating much more fun. Next, and this one’s the biggy, is I wouldn’t give in to peer pressure and break up with my girlfriend before I went into the Army. I didn’t break up with her because I didn’t love her. I broke up because my buddies convinced me that no one would wait around for four years for me. She proved to be totally devoted to me, and I have no doubt she would have waited. She didn’t give up on us until I married someone else. I won’t go into details here, but from that point on my life was one big rollercoaster ride. It had its ups and positive things (my kids!). But it also had some terrible downs with long lasting consequences that affected me and everyone else that has ever been in my life. So yes, there are plenty of things that maybe I should have done differently. But since I know that you can’t go back and change not even one little thing, I resolve to just enjoy the rest of the time I have and try not to make too much of a mess of it. After all, life is messy, noisy, and very unpredictable. And maybe that’s the point of it. I often hear people complain and ask why God allows it to be so messy? Why does he let bad things happen? And since they do happen, those people chose not to believe in a God at all. I still say that heaven on Earth would be…well…boring as hell! So if your life is messy, and things always seem to go differently than you would like -- I say pull up your boots, plaster a smile on your face, and get on with it the best way you can. The rollercoaster always pulls into the gate sooner or later.

                                                 Life is just a bowl of cherries;

                                                 Don't make it serious;
                                                 Life's too mysterious.
                                                 You work, you save, you worry so,
                                                 But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

                                                 So keep repeating it's the berries;
                                                 The strongest oak must fall.
                                                 The sweet things in life
                                                 To you were just loaned,
                                                 So how can you lose what you've never owned?
                                                 Life is just a bowl of cherries,
                                                 So live and laugh at it all.

                                                 (by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson, sung by Ethel Merman in Scandals -1931)