Dog Ear
November 21, 2019
s a member of a train club, about every couple of weeks someone comes in with a loved-one’s trains (usually stuff from the 80s or 90s) and asks if we are interested. And we usually aren’t (unless it’s free, and even then). Things (and technologies) change. Owning something old from a hobby isn’t necessarily better. That’s how it is. Still, this turned and bit me the other day. In the eighties I used to read comic books. I remember living in York PA at the time, and of walking over to the comic shop before swinging past the farmer’s market. […]
November 14, 2019
eople told me that after I retired, I’d end up with less time than ever before. Gotta say they were right. In one week, I will have had three cabbie jobs, taking people to medical appointments. Cycling, well, that’s down to one thirty-mile ride and maybe some afternoon scratch. Had a train show all last weekend. And I’ve got the paperwork for my model railroad I’m developing. And the cleaning of same. So, yes, busy busy. My writing output on the web is nil. Readers have been asking, but what can I tell them? And looking over, right now at […]
November 7, 2019
s you can see HERE and HERE and even HERE, I attended a huge model train operations session in San Diego. Had a lot of fun (and felt pretty good that people refer to me as “the writer guy”). I even sat on a siding for a few hours, chatting with my helper crew about literature and favorite books. However, writing (and the idiosyncrasies of such) always give me pause for thought. And I was really thinking about it when my butt started to burn. See, ops are about long hours on your feet, of climbing stairs and crawling under […]
October 31, 2019
’ve got a trip to make this weekend, a flight across the country to San Diego to run prototype operations at the La Mesa club, a sprawling layout with dozens of guys that work twelve hour shifts to completely model the workings of an actual railroad (here, between Mojave and Bakersfield in the 1950s) all the way down to the terminology and carbon paper. It’s a fun time travel game where you’ll stand around doing nothing (the railroad way) and grab food on the run. And why am I noting this on my writing blog? Did I select the wrong […]
October 24, 2019
etirement. I know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I think I realized what retirement was when I was on the wrong end of town with two hours to kill before a lunch date. Rather than run back home (for what – ninety minutes?) or run some compressed errands, I hung out in a coffee shop with a book (Infinite Jest, but hey, I had to get that mother read). The thing is, I’m learning this new phase in my life. When I thought about it last year, I thought I’d be writing every structured day. Not so, it […]
October 17, 2019
ou don’t have the right-of-way!” shouted an FUV driver who’d skipped a stop sign, come around a corner and nearly took me and my bike out while in the crosswalk. This is Orlando, a town made for cars, ruled by cars (in the grips of their chromed fists) and centered on cars. Motorists see the out-of-doors as a place only used for driving – it’s that void between their garage and their work parking lot and the mall. Pedestrians and cyclists are the ants that get in the way and must be horn-blared clear. A nuisance. Statistics back me on […]
October 3, 2019
o I’m doing that speed as best I can. Kinda. I’m still in the midst of Infinite Jest, a tale of tennis and substance abuse recovery. It’s a fine book, clever and insightful, but goddamn slow. When you are in the midst of ten pages of description of the most minute moves of a tennis game between two teenagers, and all the reactions of the people in the stands, and then you get pulled into a ten-page footnote, well, it makes for every distracting reading. Truthfully, this damn thing sometimes puts me to sleep. But I’m going to push through […]
September 19, 2019
‘ve mentioned that I’m reading a true monster of a book. The story itself is 981 pages. This is dense, small type. The notes in the back are another 100 pages (even more dense and small). But that’s not the long of it. The writer in this case (I don’t want to spoil it a few weeks from now when I review it) loves to describe everything. Every thought that every character has, every description that can be made, he writes it. Sometimes the writing doesn’t even seem to serve a purpose – like when two brothers chat on the […]
September 12, 2019
estroying books – it makes us think of jackbooted fascists pouring gasoline over priceless tomes (or school boards caving to the pressures of the few). It goes against everything I treasure. But as mentioned, my retirement made me question what we were keeping (and paying to keep). I have boxes and boxes of old books, things I read and enjoyed (or tossed aside with a meh). All of these went into boxes with the idea that someday I’d have a library where I could put all my books and say lookit me! Well, when I pulled the first box down, […]
September 5, 2019
retired nearly three weeks ago. It’s been very busy, all sorts of doctors’ appointments and linking up with a riding group. And then there was the first project (going through boxes of books and picking the ones I liked (more on that next week)). And then there was the hurricane which was going to sweep us off to Hell before it turned into a Sunday afternoon shower. But for that, all our loose lawn items had to come into the (newly cleaned) garage. So busy busy busy. Today was the first Thursday that wasn’t howling-busy, and for today, I wanted […]