Blog

  • You’d Better Watch Out

  • Closing Out 2022

    This will be my last real time blog post for 2022. I have some posts in the can that I have scheduled for the next couple of days, but for all intents and purposes, I am done blogging for the year. Christmas is right around the corner and I am intending to spend time with my family, reading, and napping as much as my kid will allow.

    Looking back on this blog, I will clock 255 posts, with a word count well north of 101,200, which means I was writing on average close to 500 words a post. I find this stat rather amusing as when I started writing here, way back in 2017, my original goal was to only write 250 words per blog. In five years, I have doubled my word count. Quality might still be questionable, but quantity has increased.

    Looking back at this year of creative writing, I have to admit that I did not get published, nor did I earn any money from my creative endeavors, which had been two of my goals. Was I overly ambitious? Well, obviously. But what’s the point in playing the game if you don’t swing for the fences? Yet, I did write more in this year than I ever have. Not only with the blogs, but I kept up my pace of journaling daily, and working on my fiction. I think what I accomplished this year was creating the habit of writing. I gave myself weekends off, but I was at this computer every weekday, putting something down, trying to get better at expressing myself and ideas.

    Maybe I’m looking for a silver lining, and so what if I am. I’m looking back on 2022, and I’m feeling good about it, which is a feeling I haven’t felt in sometime. Since 2018, when my mother died, I feel like I have had this feeling of sadness wrapped around me. Not depression or mourning, even though those two have stopped by and hung out with me often in the past several years, but a sadness that makes it difficult to get excited about anything. I don’t feel sad about 2022.

    And I’m looking forward to 2023. And that is important, and it means something.

    So, thanks for being a part of this, all 4 to 9 of you, who regularly stop by. But, before I go, I wanted to pass on;

    Watch ANDOR!

    Peach Pit is a new favorite band of mine.

    Call your mom, she misses you.

    See you next year.

  • World Cup Dispatch: The Final

    Was it the greatest World Cup Final, ever?

    I would say so. Mind you, I have only been paying attention since 2002, which means I only have six Finals under my belt, but nothing in my memory compares to what happened on Sunday.

    Argentina controlling the match for 80 minutes, then France came roaring back to life. Then Extra Time drama; Goals and Fouls! All of it ending with Penalties – terrible, unfair, gut-wrenching Penalty Kicks. It was a show, and Messi and Mbappe didn’t disappoint. Those two guys played like the superstars that they are. And in the end, either outcome would have been impressive. France winning back to back Cups would have been amazing, and something to truly celebrate. But Messi winning it, that was the ending everyone was hoping for; what a cap to end a career on? (Though rumors are already flying that Messi has changed his mind.) At the end of that match, no one could say that both teams didn’t give it their all.

    And because of that, I was left feeling that FIFA and Qatar didn’t deserve that Final, let alone this tournament. Let’s not forget the bribery, the intolerable working conditions for the migrant workers building these stadiums, the authoritarian government, the lack of civil liberties, the inability of players and fans to wear a rainbow. I was left feeling that the bad guys got away with it. Like FIFA was saying to me, “You were entertained, so it wasn’t that bad to get here, right?”

    And I was entertained. Morocco was fun to watch, and made you think that anything was possible, like Brazil losing when they looked unstoppable. Don’t forget about Japan never giving up, and fighting for every ball. The drama of Team USA having to beat Iran to get into the Round of 16. I mean, I could go on and on…

    What I am left with is loving the show, and hating the producers.

    I’m still not happy about that.

    Yet, Tottenham picks up play again on the 26th of December, and there still is the Champions League. And, don’t forget that July 2023 is the Women’s World Cup in Australia/New Zealand.

    Lots of football left to play.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Trump Trading Cards, School Holiday Concerts, and World Cup Prediction

    (Elon is watching…)

    Trump released trading cards yesterday. It was a big announcement, if you haven’t heard. A great number of people who are funnier and fast than me have already jumped on this, and created some spectacular comedy from this shit show. I only bring it up here, because I wonder how many people will be receiving these trading cards for Christmas? And of those who received them, how many actually wanted them? And I also wonder how many cards were given because the giver knew it would piss off the recipient? We do live in polarizing times.

    I love school concerts and recitals. I never thought about them in conjunction with becoming a parent, but it is a requisite activity that parents are required to take part in, or at least sit through. And for the record, it normally is a very cute hour of your life. Having gone to several now, I want to give a shout out to the kid, who is always in the back, who refuses to take part. You know, the kid that just stands there; not mad, or angry, or afraid. They just stand in the back and don’t move. I look forward to seeing who that kid is every year, for sometimes it does change. One year my kid stood in the back and didn’t move. Then the next year she was up front and singing as loud as she could. Tip of the cap to the kid not moving in the back!

    Argentina.

  • Short Story Review: “The Other Party” by Matthew Klam

    (The short story “The Other Party” by Matthew Klam appeared in the December 19th, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (Do I still need to say, SPOILERS?)

    Photograph by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New Yorker

    About a month into the Covid lockdowns, so this was late April 2020, on a Zoom chat with friends, someone asked the question of how Covid will be depicted in movies, tv shows, novels, and so forth. Would there be stories about anxiety, existential doom and gloom, or would some media just act like Covid never existed? It was a lively topic for discussion, and with two plus years on now, more and more stories are beginning to show up, and try to deal with what Covid has meant. It is my belief that “The Other Party” by Matthew Klam sprang from such a thought as well.

    In a nutshell, this is a story about a middle-aged guy who lives comfortably in the suburbs. The protagonist has a neighbor who is suffering from the early stages of ALS, and this neighbor and his wife are hosting a block Holiday party at their house. Juxtaposed to this adult party, the protagonist’s teenaged daughter is hosting a party for her friends, which devolves into taking edibles and going to other parties and places. All the while the middle-aged protagonist waxes on life over the last two Covid years while living in this neighborhood.

    Sadly, this story is a structural mess, and too smart for its own good. A large amount of the prose is dedicated to describing clothing and background information on the people who live in this neighborhood. Though colorful, it makes the piece feel bloated, and longer than it needs to be, and this was a longer story. Also, the story had a point of view issue, which seems to have been focused on the middle-aged protagonist, but then the story jumps to what his daughter is doing, but is presented as happening at the same time with no explanation of how the protagonist has come to know the events of his daughter’s evening. This decision makes the story feel incongruent to its internal logic, like Klam wanted this structure more than he thought through how it could happen in this world. But sadly, the great sin of the story is that the protagonist doesn’t go on any sort of journey, or learn anything. What we are given is a character that thinks his life isn’t so bad at the start, and then by the end, he still feels his life isn’t so bad. You know, Dorothy has to think life in Kansas sucked first, so that her realization that there is no place like home has some weight to it. These three issues all feel like unforced errors, like another draft could have addressed and solved them.

    It’s too bad about this piece, as I do think we are just in the beginning of the Covid story era, which will address all of the emotional trauma it caused us. It still might be years before we wrap our collective heads around what happened. But at least people are trying.