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Diary Index
Home 22 January 2003 Mistaken Identity If everything goes well, then TheForce.net will post a new fan fiction under the alias Trevor47, hopefully by the middle of February. It would be my fourth story archived at the fan fiction site, for a total of about 16,500 words. This is not a record. To be sure, at least one contributor has archived seven stories. I'll leave it to you to search the database for the author and tally the wordage. I'm not planning to stop writing for TheForce.net, but I have had enough of being a beta reader. A five-page vignette can cost you hours of analysis and adjustments, of crafting gentle admonishments to the author, who, in many cases, has never submitted to TheForce.net before. It's not that I dislike the teaching aspect of the service; it's just that I don't wish to invest so much time in that particular instruction. I don't have a computer of my own. I use public access at a county library. I'm told relatives are planning to give me their old Dell computer. I'm under the impression that they have been receiving Internet access for free, and that this free access will come with the computer. I'm thinking this is probably a trial offer. I've never heard of indefinite, free access to the Internet, but I would use it while it lasted. I spoke briefly with my grandfather by telephone on his 90th birthday a few days ago. I couldn't tell that, weeks prior, he had suffered a serious accident when a motor vehicle grazed him. He had recovered better than anyone had expected. What constantly astonishes me is the degree to which drivers of motor vehicles ignore pedestrians and cyclists. Sometimes their passengers acknowledge the more vulnerable citizens, but it is often to blast them with a semi-coherent tirade of profanity, and I don't mean the ones obstructing the flow of traffic. I mean people who are staying out of driver's way because it's so dangerous to rely on most drivers to obey speed limits, to avoid driving in clearly indicated bicycle paths, and even to stay in the correct lane. In my case, it is not always kids who shout obscenities for fun, but adults who to me seem genuinely dangerous. What is the source of this recklessness and hostility? Certain statistics give me the idea that about 25% of the population is just impatient to get to the nearest fast food restaurant, but what I really think is that it is just impatience, which I suspect to be the source of many serious problems in the United States. The latest news from Matrix Institute sounds good. Not all of it, of course, but it looks as if 2003 won't be a cataclysmic year. Cataclysmic in the sense of tectonic upheaval, that is. War with Iraq seems certain, though not before March. I'm really looking forward to the publication of Mr. Scallion's next book, which will feature more information about a teacher named Ec-Kar, who lived in Atlantis during the last centuries before Atlantis submerged. The newsletter, Intuitive Flash, offered excerpts of Ec-Kar's lectures, but this didn't continue. To my reading list for this year I added my first book. It's called Star Risk, LTD, by Chris Bunch. I can't promote it with passion, but I've read far worse. I think Stephen King would call it competent writing. Now I'm reading three books at once. Once Upon a Galaxy, an anthology of short stories by assorted authors, presents classic fairy tale concepts in the form of science fiction--plausible stories. I say concepts because the stories barely resemble the fairy tales upon which the stories are based. T2: Rising Storm, by S.M. Sterling, is based on the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The third is Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman. Did I mention that I sent some stories to www.BewilderingStories.com? They posted two of them, so I sent two more. They wrote back, saying that they were debating whether to post them in the same issue. This was about five issues ago, so I don't know whether I will see these stories there. Another neat place to post stories is www.RedPencil.net. They'll take anything, literally, and the posting occurs the instant you press the submit button. You can even view feedback. You submit by pasting into a text area, however, and this tends to jumble the format. I had to repair the format of "The Reclamation" from beginning to end, and it is fifteen pages long. That's the only drawback, though. Nice. The night before last, an animal wandered through a neighbor's yard, leaving footprints, each of which features the imprint of three claws. I haven't seen them, but since this is a forest in Central Florida, a bear seems likely. The neighbor, I'm told, made a plaster impression of one of the footprints. I'm planning another visit to the dentist. In 2001, I spent over $200 on two tooth extractions. In both cases, I had let the decay advance to the point of irreparable damage. This time, the tooth, a lower left molar, had developed a cavity, which was filled when I was a teenager. I will be 35 in April, so I think that the dentist did a reasonably good job. Anyway, as far as I can tell the tooth lost a substantial portion of the shell that surrounds the filling. When this occurred I'm not sure. One night, while flossing, I managed to dislodged a large portion of that filling. I recovered it from the shag carpet, washed it, and used SuperGlue to replace it, thinking that maybe I could avoid another expensive trip to the dentist. At some point, I lost the piece of filling again, and have since been packing the cavity with a product called DenTemp O.S. I don't know what I'm going to tell the dentist, but I've procrastinated for the last time when it comes to my teeth. Yesterday, while in the local library and using a computer, I noticed someone leaning over my bicycle, which I had parked just beyond the entrance where I could easily view it by peering over the monitor. I quickly ascertained that he wasn't attempting to steal my only transportation, but since I didn't recognize him, and didn't perceive he was the police or something, I went outside to confront the guy, who was older than me by ten years or so. He was struggling to disentangle a plastic bag that was affixed to my rear reflector. Alarmed at this spectacle, I overreacted. A brief conversation ensued. "Can I help you with that, sir?" Continuing his project and not looking at me, he responded with politeness and calm, though I forgot what he said. "Could you do it somewhere else, sir?" "Oh, don't get so excited. The goddamned thing got tangled..." "Well, you're making me nervous." "Well, don't get nervous." He straightened, and I realized his physical stature surpassed my own substantially as he stood there, less than two feet away, replacing the items that had half fallen out of the bag. They turned out to be a bouquet of flowers and a card. As he wedged these into the frame of the rear of another bicycle parked nearby, I waited next to mine, fiddling with the lock. Without another word, he went to his vehicle and left. You know, he was right. People had warned me. The guy made an honest mistake. Ordinarily I'm not so aggressive, or brave. My responsibility here is the fact that, after years of experimenting with computers, I ought to have learned by now that half an hour of computer operation is enough to energize me for a run in the state marathon, and that I therefore need to proceed with caution. I'll write about this some more if we meet again. Time to wrap it up. Can't say when next I'll post here. I write in this journal when the notion to write grips me and I'm not feeling creative, which is often, but my life is devoid of very much that I feel would interest anyone. So I can't really post entries on a predictable basis. |