It would be pretty cool to spend a billion US dollars. I bet I could build a thriving business in any industry anywhere in the world. I suppose I would put myself at the helm and draw any number of talented people to run different functions.
I started thinking about publishing when I tried to be honest with myself about what kind of firm I would build. I am not sure, however, if that would be the only fun. The future of traditional publishing in January 2023 appears uncertain to me.
Tech flitted across my consciousness. A line of desktop computers for gaming and a few game titles would be something I’d like to do, something tech-oriented and retro-feeling. There would be a first-person shooter set in a Martian-like alien world, and there would be a space battle game about building a colony in outer space and battling other colonies for control.
There seems to be a difference between blogging and becoming a publisher to me. It might be fun to create a simulation game where you can play as a publishing magnate right from home. Through this, I will be able to compete with rival media companies for control of the information flow in the first world.
A couple more games, it would be fun to do an action game which would probably be another first-person shooter where an Intelligence operative runs about in a Cold War era Planet Earth to protect the free world, and fifth, a game that helps players find their way into a metaverse, but a metaverse where the NPCs and the environments to run about within are pleasantly surreal homes for both AI-generated imagery and player uploads of their own detailed NPCs and art to increase the value of by searching for both historical relics and also rare ingredients that provide quirky special touches to art that players create on the fly for the game.
This would be a pretty rewarding way to impact the lives of many people.
Do you remember your earliest memories vividly? Even if they’re few and far between, these memories can sometimes feel like a time capsule that transports us back to the times of our youth. For many of us, this feeling of reliving every single detail is incredibly vivid and clear in our minds. What’s the earliest memory you have? Let’s take a journey into remembering those moments as we explore what it takes to recall childhood memories.
A few years ago, it was my girlfriend who drove me to remember being a young child in my bedroom. It was like I was there. On top of my bed were stuffed animals that were my friends.
I’d forgotten that I had that collection of stuffed toys. My best friend was a toy puppy I named “Snuffy,” inspired, most likely, by TV’s Muppet character Mister Snuffleupagus. Mister Snuffleupagus is like a furry mammoth elephant who lives on Sesame Street, a friend to Big Bird.
I could see my bookshelves on the opposite wall. It was like being a child again. I frequently played sitting on that bed when I was a small child.
My stuffed toys sat at the head of the bed. I’d forgotten that was a habit of mine until the time with my girlfriend reminded me.
I woke up from what was like a trance believing I was waking up in that house’s bedroom. It happens once in a blue moon that I awaken from sleep wondering where I am or thinking I am somewhere else. Even if it’s my own home.
“Read an old letter, personal journal, or newspaper article. Listen to an old song that you or someone in your family loved. Cook a meal your mom or dad used to make for you.
April 1, 2021, April Fools’ Day—celebrated on April 1 each year. Smell something that may prompt your memory. 160,000,000 results
My intuition tells me my favourite toy, as a child, was a plush Ernie toy, Ernie, the resident of Sesame Street who graces the TV sets of viewers.
Sesame Street-and I suspect it continues to run–is the public television series with both people and puppets as residents and visitors, on an unusual street, where it is normal to teach life skills like counting and spelling. I am not sure I gleaned a lot of learning from watching, but, when I was small, it could be I did. We had a set of Bert and Ernie dolls in our house.
Bert and Ernie usually disagreed on how they should be living. I am not sure there is a pattern that emerges from accepting that these two blokes live together in a weird, weird world, but perhaps one does. Anyway, I don’t think I am as small and round as Ernie, nor do I lend myself as much to being as silly. I suppose I’m silly much of the time, anyway, but I don’t think Ernie was a role model for me, just a toy that resembled a person.
I had a fair bit of intelligence, as a child, and I’m not sure I played with the Ernie doll as much as it kept me company, when I was entertaining my lonesome, in my childhood bedroom. It is, like I said, only my intuition that informs me of this. I am trying to be honest in the face of a somewhat challenging question about a childhood toy.
I don’t know what the likes of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would have made of my bond with Ernie, but I don’t recall taking him out of the house, or anything like that. I think he merely kept me company when circumstances dictated that I be on my own.
It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It's fine that he feels they are. They're not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to define people as only gay? There's much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.
When better to reflect on lunacy than when listening to Echo and the Bunnymen? That must have been a great five years in music. EastEnders cues it, usually on the stereo in the Queen Victoria.
I’m starting on what I hope is a humourous note, that what Spotify calls “early alternative” survives well and good on its own, forever having shaped itself into fashion like shells in the seaweed.
The Wolfman
Pivoting from TV soap to horror, like The Wolfman, perhaps, satisfying his need for power by drinking the contents of what could be a steaming glass cylinder. He is transformed, haplessly, into the guise of a monster, in order to confront what will transform him. That is wisdom imparted to me back in high school by the head of the English department.
One of the challenges, when I went to school in the 1990s and in the 2000s, was to comprehend the reading teachers assigned me as a student of theirs. To this day, I try to read the occasional paper to keep my mind energized–papers of errata, I sort of think of them. I am interested in how an education for our present Gen Z could relate to what will be going on in the minds and hearts of young people.
Today is my parents’ anniversary. I believe that my mother sometimes reads my blog, and I guess that is sort of stereotypically embarrassing, but I thought of some of my observations, and how they may seem naïve, even at my present age, when I try sometimes to explain how it was to be young, and naïve, when perhaps I’ve never really shaken that naivete. How can that be?
I resolve not to think about it too much. My mother can see something I value negatively some of the time.
I once read the observation that social media is like having a giant billboard showing you traffic on the highway, a plain strange metaphor. My Facebook timeline nowadays occasionally recommends me posts from the site for blogTO.
blogTO
The Facebook timeline, in case you’re new to Facebook, is the piece of your Facebook page that shows posts from both people you’ve befriended and from pages that you follow.
In addition to being a good read, blogTO appears tidy on Facebook, and likewise fresh on TikTok. https://www.blogto.com/ …if you want the link.
When my dad and I agreed to do business together, in what might have been 2011, we wanted a Facebook page. The church on the cemetery grounds had disbanded in ’06, so a good five years had gone as the church fell away from that. We decided not to let the cemetery go as well.
It hasn’t been that long that I’ve been thinking about blogTO. The individual who first brought it to my attention is our dear Pam, one of my mother’s cousins, and a true Toronto resident.
Pam shares blogTO posts typically to reflect how she feels about the weather, or how construction in the city is, or how her interest in TIFF goes. Our last face-to-face was at my maternal grandmother’s eightieth birthday party.
I have lived in a burb my whole life, with the exceptions of brief visits to other parts of the province, that the province Ontario, as well as a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Florida, and visits to my godparents in Tennessee, a 1995 visit to friends in British Columbia, school in Kingston, Ontario, and, in addition, beginning to really learn in England, when I was awarded a bursary to do a semester overseas, during which I even briefly saw Paris. If I were a priest, you might compare that semester to a sabbatical. I felt like Victor Frankenstein, I fancied.
Frankenstein
I wrapped up my schooling with a year taking classes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a very picturesque town nearby where I live. I could get a bus from the bus terminal to the campus twice a day, there and back again.
I have also travelled independently, to the Atlantic, the Prairies, and to Portland, Maine, as well as to NYC and to New Orleans, the latter perhaps for the jazz. These trips were all brief excursions. Thereby my impressions of the world were formed.
I felt overwhelmed during my first year of university, starting that up. It was mad to be young the year of Y2K. That was the fear, mostly mythical, that computers synchronized to midnight on January 1, 2000, would all crash, given that their computer infrastructure wouldn’t be able to handle the transition from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
Dad and I have a little cemetery that would be cared for only by the municipality if my dad never had taken the steps to bring it under his care.
blogTO is a tourism blog for the city of Toronto, helping people find out what things they can do if they visit or if they live in Toronto. When I was but twenty-nine years old, I inquired with Ontario March of Dimes, in Niagara Falls, if I would have any luck in a tourism job, an entry-level job.
My contact at March of Dimes was scornful at that moment, given my reported age, and the nature of my request. In a way, I never lived that down. I have regrets, of course.
It is just that it was a difficult lesson to accept that the decade of life that was my twenties was almost completely finished.
My loving sister, Kaitlyn, encouraged me to try my hand at writing for the campus newspaper in our city. I wrote what you might say amounted to a portfolio of work, ten columns of film criticism that I wrote for the paper, coming out of my own pocket. She’s another girl to who I owe an apology.
Mind you I had the community support of assistance, with the rent, and funds allotted to maintaining a lifestyle. The thrill, and there was a word that a high school teacher had taught me that made it desirable, the word rush, was having to go see a film, typically, the Friday night, and then review the movie within twenty-four hours or so after the lights came up.
My mother was happy I was kind of following a dream, but I really was nothing, and nothing came of it. I was but an amateur.
Since then, the last several years I have done some more writing. I made a few bucks working for a mill, but discarding that perhaps shows foresight as my present advantage is that I can treat any theme I want at any time I want, rather than doing that rush I tried my hand in, to get credentials established. The chief activity that’s been on the productivity chart for me is the last ten years or so helping out my father operate the cemetery, with additional help from family and friends, like Dave and Gerard.
I have translated some of my “journalling” skills into helping keep us in the loop on Facebook, which my sister, thinking of herself as an “early adopter” of the social media platform, encouraged me to join perhaps in the year 2010–at the moment I am not completely sure when I got started. It may have been around the time David Fincher delivered his stellar film The Social Network. I enjoy that film, as do many others.
Kaitlyn’s been the real deal–when she was yet a single girl, she had a position as a bona fide newspaper editor. Kudos to her.
Lake Ontario
Twenty years before, about 1990, the soon-to-be-famous author John Gray finished his first book, which he titled What You Feel, You Can Heal. I remember that John Gray referred to taking your twenties to discover who you are, to find yourself. I wanted to quickly again establish, with this post, where I am at, which I do from time to time to keep it centered, I think.
I’m well older than that. In 2021, another famous figure, Jordan Peterson, himself a former university professor, has been bold enough to ask if university life will be finished.
It won’t surprise me if blogTO has his number.
You’re welcome to bang that “like” button, leave me a comment, or to follow the blog if any of that appeals to you. Thank you for flying with me, on WordPress. These are only the beginning of the days I am trying to take my work more seriously than I have in the first while, when I feel I had a learning curve.
https://twitter.com/findingenvirons?lang=en The latest Tweets from Patrick coholan (@findingenvirons). Rock music fanatic. Award-winning book lover. Introvert. Small talk evangelist. Internet fan.
1: to make as if for the first time something already invented and reinvents the wheel
2: to remake or redo completely
3: to bring into use again
Reinvention, in the year 2021, is one way to move out of our present circumstances. It is no mystery that the future will not be the same as was intended.
There is an undercurrent of happiness again these days. Just surviving has become like a triumph, and love may prove the order of the day.
A worldwide perception of a second chance come is rare, and the future is unwritten; here is an age of miracles. You should reinvent thoroughly and carefully.
Governance could at this time be set free by Big Tech, or it could be screwed down like a bench at a bus stop intended not to be stolen.
In Canada, it is debated whether Canadian media on the Internet could get paid, with Bill C-10 ready to put Canadian content front and centre on sites where it is not now automatically top-tier content, kind of a detriment if you don’t wish a Canadian flavour every time you want a user video recommendation. Nor should Canadian viewer recommendations get like the offerings of AI bots behind walls at HQ, or further like that, as I suppose they may already be.
Take the case of Canadian comedian and broadcaster Tom Green, who has lately been highlighting his YouTube channel with a vlog showcasing a drive he did from LA to Ottawa. It is a singular vlog.
Watching Green offer reflections alone in the US desert, about the planet getting back to to a pre-pandemic normal, Green, whom I remember in Road Trip directed by Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, raised the point of how adaptation, not the adaptation of literature to film, but the adaptation you can utilize, being how you could save the endeavours you want for yourself to succeed in the face of unknown days. You start confidently and your handle on what we are facing will strengthen your resolve. I think Green is going, possibly, from the field of comedy, into music.
Without being afraid of having dropped the ball, I am having some trouble relating to the concept of schools as we understand them now, leaving behind their classrooms on campuses without that experience. Goodness, excited about the future opening up for us, if it is not ultimately restricted by forces that we neither foresee coming nor welcome.
There must sometimes be a natural intelligent design for learning–that there could never be would be a very remote possibility. Intelligent design occurs frequently enough that I can not be discouraged from believing what we have is merely a happy accident.
I sometimes wish that, when I once considered affording myself some of the opportunities youth brings, I could have opted for hard work, in light of the big picture. At age seventeen I could have begun to become marketable for the reason, chiefly, of challenging myself to appeal to social norms. Opportunities most frequently available are now changing in nature, while content, as Bill Gates said, could well remain king.
Recently, last year and this year, my posts, each to a recollected song, under the nominal tutelage of Jim Adams, were rejected, when Adams decided he no longer welcomed my participation. That is fine, as my reflections helped me get better organized, and of my several posts for Song Lyric Sunday, even if the posts were finally met with dismay, most of them were useful in their own right.
Beginning again the last few weeks, with a new temperament, how now in the days of yesteryear, when I came up with observations that grew from insights that author Jeff Goins introduced, bestselling author of The Art of Work, with notes on Facebook about how to blog. They never demanded a lot of work, but by now with a little work, they keep my little readership alive.
I don’t mind resuming the approach with which I began in 2012. Without a proper book, or even trying to write a proper book, I might be accused of taking in a blog of this shape and style, mine, without effective longtime goals.
But The Art of Work is the bestseller in Jeff Goins’ hand, about people who carved out singular paths for themselves, and it’s a wonderful book. I doubt it was written in the bathroom at parties.
If this does not work, then, let this be Finding Courtesies in Handfuls of Garden Flowers.
For Jim Adams’ blog bounce, for Sunday, January 10, 2021, Jim has requested MA, meaning a tune with a title that begins with either the letter M or with the letter A.
I thought of a song with an unusual title, that begins with A.
“And Then (The Hexx)” is a song by Pavement, a b-side on Pavement’s “Spit on a Stranger” single in May 1999, I read somewhere. It sort of provides a conclusion to the 1997 Pavement album Brighten the Corners. Quietly now, that’s the Pavement record where the entire quintet is performing–it’s sometimes known as “dream pop.”
A second version of the song “And Then (The Hexx)” is again the conclusion to the next, and last, Pavement album, Terror Twilight. Strictly speaking, to the best of my understanding, the song is “And Then (The Hexx)” for the Brighten the Corners b-side, and simply “The Hexx” for Terror Twilight.
Rock musician Steve Malkmus, who around the year 1990 put together ideas for what became a classic all-American rock record, Slanted & Enchanted, while the young man was in high school in Stockton, California. Nice work if you can get it.
“And Then (The Hexx)” is eerie, and it has happiness to it as well.
Malkmus has reinvented himself twice since Pavement folded. First he played as Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and more recently, since 2018, just Stephen Malkmus. I’ve seen video of Malkmus performing his songs by himself for the groove denied tour.
Terror Twilight producer Nigel Godrich was keeping active on Twitter in December 2020, when he tweeted on the thirteenth of December, 2020, that, despite what Godrich called “the dark” of December, Godrich preferred the advice,”get your SAD lamp out and party!” SAD indicates seasonal affective disorder, mild depression brought about by lack of sunlight, in a cold climate.
The feeling echoes what Steve Malkmus said for the 2002 documentary Slow Century. Godrich’s observation is certainly deliberate.
“Get your handkerchiefs out,” Malkmus says, “and party.”
Writing for a Chicago online mag highlighting music, motion pictures, and TV, consequence of sound’s DAN CAFFREY says, “‘Spit on a Stranger’ looks back on a relationship that’s gone kaput — maybe a relationship with a band.”
I have the impression that, of the five band members in the band in 1999, that other than Steve Malkmus, they wanted to hang it up.
When touring the Terror Twilight record, Malkmus often hung a pair of handcuffs on stage, from his mic stand, to illustrate how he felt making a living in a rock band.
Dissected: Pavement BY DAN CAFFREY ON AUGUST 11, 2015, 3:00PM
“Terror Twilight,” Caffrey writes, “has a reputation of being Pavement’s tamest album, and that’s true, musically speaking — the tempos are sturdier and there’s much less yowling, despite a ripping harmonica solo (?!) from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.” Wikipedia says Jonny Greenwood, from Radiohead, played harmonica both for “Platform Blues,” and for “Billie,” both of which are Terror Twilight songs, Billie penned about Billy Graham.
Whether the various elements of Terror Twilight, Caffrey says for consequence of sound, scare the shit out of you or not, the lyrics prove that, even when they had run out of momentum and had to be practically forced by Godrich to come up with new material (the band reportedly was more concerned with playing Scrabble than recording) — even when music didn’t sound quite like itself, Pavement was still Pavement.
I saw in a more recent interview, it is somewhat eluding me where I heard this (I think it was organized by Vanity Fair for Seattle radio not too long ago), when Malkmus was talking about getting ready to play shows with Pavement, Malkmus said that to this day he enjoys the game of Scrabble.
I presume that’s Pavement fandom knowledge. Malkmus has said publicly he got really quite good. In a round of Scrabble, you make words on the game board utilizing letters, which add to the score.
Anyway, some fans consider “And Then (The Hexx)” to be a Brighten the Corners song, because of the 2009 rerelease of Brighten the Corners with the second CD with “And Then (The Hexx).” It is also the conclusion to Terror Twilight, which when discussed is usually just called “The Hexx.”
I still like to think of “The Hexx” as “And Then (The Hexx),” and that’s why it fits into Jim’s MA prompt challenge. However, the true release date of “And Then (The Hexx)” should be 1997, not 1999.
Pavement And Then (the Hexx) Composed by Stephen Malkmus
A TikTokker followed me, this weekend, with the offer of a shoutout if I were to follow her account, and to tag three friends and to share her video to get an upswing startedhttps://vm.tiktok.com/JN4odUw/
“Are blogs still popular in 2020?”
“Yes, blogging in 2020 is still popular and is serving even more purpose than ever before. …68% of marketers now see blogging as a useful marketing tool.”
Just so we’re on the same page. 🙂 It’s a decent rivalry.
It is now summer. Even though the winter doesn’t usually get too severe here in Southern Ontario, we have summer which feels pretty scorching, and that is surreal. That aspect is well-intensified by strange circumstances. Writing this, in July 2020, I am beginning year no. 9 of writing my blog.
A blog, as you know, is long-form writing. It’s the opposite of microblogging, like how blogging is on Twitter. A Personal Plan on WordPress, an option on the blogging platform, lets you design a blog by choosing from among a variety of special themes, that shape how your blog looks.
On WordPress, as mine is, a regular domain doesn’t look bad, but a more ambitious blogger might start with a Personal Plan if you want a more professional-looking blog. In fact, in WordPress, the Block Editor is the design page that helps you put together blocks of paragraphs, to make writing a post easy.
I use a lot of white space, to keep my blog readable, and to keep it feeling like typewriter text transported to a computer screen, which is what early word processing programs were like. If you know about adventure games in the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, like, for example, the game company Infocom’s game Zork, or a different, earlier, hit game called Adventure, you know they consist of a paragraph of descriptive text followed by a blinking parser, at which you would enter a two-word command to play. I have that period of gaming as a primary concern, one wellspring of motivation.
My intention presently is to reach several dozen people or so with each post, possibly a hundred visitors per post, which is the typical reach I have at present. I appreciate that the odd post I’ve composed gets a couple of guests, to boot. With WordPress, the stats dashboard gives you an idea of how many visitors have turned up for your blog posts, and what they are saying their country of origin is.
I have had this blog for eight years. That’s the level of expertise I have with it, Level Nine, you might put it.
In the first edition of the former game company TSR’s classic game Dungeons & Dragons, Level Nine was known as Name Level. That is the famous tabletop game. It features in the plot of the Netflix hit Stranger Things.
Name Level means that your Dungeons & Dragons character has made a name for himself, as in “Merlin” becoming “Merlin the Wizard,” to take from Arthurian mythology an example. In Arthurian mythology, Merlin is the wizard who helps King Arthur rule at Camelot. Like Merlin and King Arthur, here on WordPress, I am leet.
Likewise, with different parts of life, you have goals with your blog, and blogging makes unobtrusive notoriety for yourself (as it is the Name Level guidelines in Dungeons & Dragons sway interaction.)
On occasion, I draw extra thoughts from patterns I see via web-based media, stages like Twitter and YouTube, and TikTok. On WordPress, I get to blog as much as I make time for it, which is a luxury I know many aspiring writers would enjoy themselves if they had it. With that sort of extravagance, I am happy with the opportunity to continue without too many time limitations. I am not too hard on myself.
My intentions, also, are to keep posting in a way that other people might relate to. When WordPress offered a fourteen-day prologue to composing verse, quite a long while back, I composed through that fourteen-day arrangement. Actually, at the time, I was kind of pleased with a few of the ideas I came up with, as I think my approach is a touch singular.
I in some cases loan support to other little bloggers. I have seen that quite a few bloggers do that. Those are probably the kind of people that I am trying to reach.
Another source of inspiration, outside WordPress, is the real world Nashville Tennessee writer Jeff Goins, an inspiring voice in blogging circles. I think Jeff Goins worked in marketing when he decided he wanted to begin writing. In fact, for his first book, he presented the title You Are A Writer.
The Art of Work is a book that explores all kinds of inspired case studies, of people who bring a special touch to the work they do. It became a bestseller. I think Goins wrote that unless your heart is in your work, it isn’t right.
As well, my father’s sister’s husband, Rick, and his wife Sue, both residing in Nashville, have written some books. They are my godparents.
To the reader, if you have ever read my blog and are returning, by all means, thank you. Such a great hobby. You’re welcome to comment or to follow.
Have a wonderful day and a terrific summer. I wish you well!
This has been a different kind of month for me in the blogosphere. Obviously, the province which is my home is on lockdown, but as you may know, Ben Huberman helped devise the WordPress Discover challenges again for April, which were lacking for some time as, I suppose, the nature of the beast changed. Don’t take it from me.
I finally began to rest where most previous days of the month I published something in response to the challenges, and it isn’t because of them, it is just a lot of work to keep those up again and again. That’s why it’s a challenge, though.
I looked today, and the test was distributed the previous evening. I weighed my options and decided to read what the challenge had to say.
The WordPress Discover day by day challenges has been important for developing as a blogger. It is pleasant that this was available last night, and I looked at what the challenge is, and I noted that Ben actually went so far as to say in the post that the decision to put it up early was deliberate and that he hoped participants are making good use of the time.
I made a mental review and weighed how effectively I actually did spend last night, against what would have been best. The list challenge had what I perceive was the intended effect, of jumpstarting interest in the winding down Discover challenges.
The word last night for today is List, so I took a dice game score sheet that I was keeping on hand for an occasion like this, and made a random list of the some of the more effective pursuits I made in the time between last night and this morning, that was, perhaps, shaped by the continuing interest in being part of the blogosphere, and of being motivated by the Discover challenges. I could hypothesize whether I am attempting exercises because of the endgame of searching better for being in the blogosphere, yet I don’t think so. The activities I was, you might put it, afoul of, were only what I might pursue with an interest in amusing myself.
I wasn’t deliberately mindful that the test had just begun. Ben included the line “we hope you make the most of the extra time!” regarding the decision to present today’s challenge early. Indeed, even without the cognizant exertion of setting up a post, I thought about whether I could make the contention that I was getting ready for the post by attempting typical kinds of exercises I embrace if I was effectively mindful.
The challenge is good, too, and even though I stated previously that I expect the reason for the early availability is to galvanize participants into writing, I also think Ben felt he had a strong idea on his hands and he wanted to give a solid opportunity to address it, by making bloggers interested in it more eager and more thoroughly than they may have if it only became ready this morning. I can’t say for certain, but I know at least that he is aware that we’ve been looking at these Discover challenges all month and now we are beginning to wrap up, and he felt we all merit a strong finish.
I would prefer not to state an excessive amount, however, I might rehash my appreciation for having gotten the open door for WordPress prompts every single day of April. I haven’t written this in a while, but you are welcome to follow and/or to comment.
To help out bloggers, Ben Huberman at WordPress has reopened the Discover challenges. Each day, for April 2020, a Discover challenge is going up first thing in the morning. Today’s challenge is the subject “dish.”
Funny, I think of “dishing it,” giving dirt.
What Huberman means is food. In high school, I took Tuesday noon hours at my grandparents’ house, that is, the house of my mother’s parents. Each Tuesday I went for a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of chocolate milk, and a candy bar.
My grandmother and I would sit at her kitchen table, with the company of the dog, a black Schnauzer named Ebony, and my grandfather emerging from the rec room in the basement to grab his lunch and take it back down, to where he could watch TV. A charmed life.
It’s a powerful memory because a meal like that, though simple, got me out of the high school mindset, and into a family role. Other days of the week, I’d sit in the cafeteria to eat, and then make my way into the school library, perhaps, or to one of the classrooms.
My grandmother enjoyed seeing me. She felt I was brilliant. My grandparents were getting on in years, so evenings for them meant watching television themselves.
I think we sometimes talked about the kind of thing we were watching. I didn’t mind. I liked the dog.
It was energetic and friendly and enjoyed the scraps. Maybe more time inside the high school would have been better, and maybe less time, too.
The time went fast, as time often seems to. I personally think I was terrible, nurturing the wrong interests and similarly foolish pursuits.
If I could relive those years, I’d do things differently. Hindsight is 20/20.
I visited my grandmother every week, for years to come. Even in her senior years, she was a lively old lady about who people cared.
I am glad I didn’t do worse in life, denigrating the family line. She bid me not to worry.
When asked to address a “dish,” my grandma’s grilled cheese plate is what I remember. I was glad for it every week.
Even if summer crowds at Disneyland were on the “light” side, I have a hunch they have been reinvigorated by Rise of Skywalker on Christmas Day.
Since Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in 2015, I’ve realized it’s very interesting to look deeper into how Star Wars is going. The people who are dismayed by what has happened, The Fandom Menace, observe all manners of affairs characteristic of the unparalelled sci-fi film franchise, and I thought I would point attention here and now to Star Wars Land.
In the summer, Disney theme park enthusiasts were only beginning to look forward to the Rise of the Resistance attraction.
The Geeks + Gamers vlog showing Star Wars fans embracing the Rise of the Resistance exhibit could well be read as an admission, finding Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker suspect, referring to the likelihood that the film will be wild.
As I understand it, Disney+ includes the existing ten Star Wars films, two directed by master film director George Lucas, seven by others, and the brief series The Mandalorian. If the franchise pales, Star Wars could be more of a hindrance for Disney rather than a gold mine. Never mind Annual Passholder blackouts.
Photographer: Park Troopers
I wrote a few words about a couple of leaks for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that are kind of characteristic of what the Internet is doing in terms of how perceived discontentment with Star Wars will return to the same passion that other Star Wars have generated.
This is better than eighth grade arts classes. Thanks for reading. You’re welcome to “like,” follow, and/or comment.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 