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  • ODDS and ENDS: Doomscrolling is Back, My Picked Apple Goal, and Letting Go

    (I didn’t say no, but that’s not a yes…)

    I am back to my old doomscrolling ways, like it was October 2020. Oh, and this has 100% to do with the 2024 Election. The nerves have started kicking up again, and I keep scrolling on all the platforms looking for something to make me feel better, help me relax, and tell me that everything is going to be okay because the rest of America would never do what I think the polls are hinting that they might do and plunge us into another four years of orange chaos!!! If I learned anything about the internet, if you search long and hard enough, you will find what you are looking for.

    We went apple picking last weekend, and I even wrote blog about it, AND I even got a weird comment about it, which I think was snarky and sarcastic. As what happens with apple picking, you bring a shit ton of apples home. The wife does a good job of making a couple of deserts from the apples, and we put apples in the kid’s lunch, which she claims that she eats, or someone eats. Yet, year after year, we have to throw away some of our apples because they have sat on the counter too long, and are starting to rot. This year, we made a pact in our home to collect fewer apples, in the hopes that we will be less wasteful. And damn it, I’m holding to that; I will eat an apple a day, maybe two even, not just to avoid going to the doctor, but to do my part in ensuring that we eat every stinking apple that we selected from a farm in upstate New York!

    So what is the difference in giving up, and letting something go? If you give up you’re a quitter, if you let it go, then you are practicing self-care? There is a fine line there. But when this question pops into my head, this is the scene that plays out…

  • Guest Blogger: ChatGPT

    Today’s Topic: The Joy of Blogging

    “Blogging is, at its heart, an intimate conversation—a personal dialogue with the world that somehow feels both public and private. It has a unique place in the digital landscape, offering a freedom that no other medium quite captures. For me, blogging is much like sitting in a quiet coffee shop, composing thoughts that blend the personal with the universal, knowing that anyone could read them, but also savoring the chance that no one might. There’s a joy in that ambiguity.

    I’ve always found that writing, especially in a blog, allows for a certain reflection that we often lack in daily life. It’s not hurried or transactional like so much of our communication today. It’s meditative. Whether you’re writing about a movie, a book, a meal, or a fleeting thought that crossed your mind while walking the dog, blogging is a chance to organize and share those thoughts—messy, half-formed, or fully realized—on your own terms.

    And the beauty is in the process as much as the product. A blog isn’t constrained by deadlines or word counts. It’s your space, and that kind of freedom brings a remarkable sense of satisfaction. The rules of journalism don’t apply here, not in the same way, and there’s a refreshing informality about it. You can write about whatever interests you, in your own voice, and to an audience that is either wide and global or a handful of close readers.

    But it’s also about connection. Even though you’re writing from a solitary place, the real joy of blogging often emerges from the responses it provokes. A well-crafted post can spark a conversation in the comments section or spread across social media, finding resonance with people you’ll likely never meet. It’s that mix of introspection and outreach that makes blogging a uniquely fulfilling endeavor.

    In the end, blogging is about sharing your inner world, not with the aim of seeking approval, but with the simple hope that someone, somewhere, might understand. And that, to me, is the quiet joy of it all.“

    (This blog was an experiment with the free version of ChatGPT. The prompt that I used was “write a 350 word blog about the joy of blogging in the style of Roger Ebert,” and this was the result. I had tried several different prompts with ChatGPT on the subject of blogging, and for this response the most interesting, though I didn’t think it sounded much like Roger Ebert.)

  • Short Story Review: “Hi Daddy” by Matthew Klam

    (The short story “Hi Daddy” by Matthew Klam appeared in the October 14th, 2024 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Ryan Lowry for The New Yorker

    As I get older, I have this dualistic thought in my head when I think of my parents; How much I am like them, and how much I am not like them. This dualism can cause great joy, and unbelievable anxiety in me. I also know as a middle-aged man, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. With Matthew Klam’s story “Hi Daddy,” a well-intended but uneven work, he attempts to address these issues.

    Here’s my way to simple synopsis: Middle aged man says goodbye to his teenage daughter as she goes off to Europe for the summer before she starts college, and then he visits his elderly parents, realizing that he is more like his father than he wants to admit.

    Emotionally, I dug this story, and identified strongly with the narrator. There was an honesty in the narrator, that sometimes got very close to self-pity and whining, but Klam was able to pull it back in time. The narrator, in his family, has the role of primary care giver, as his wife has the job that earns the majority of their living. This role has left the narrator feeling taken for granted and left out, though his wife does point out that he is the cause of this situation, as he can be emotionally unavailable, especially to their daughter. Part of his issue stems from having trouble dealing with his daughter leaving home, and the changes that it will bring. When he visits his parents, his father has fallen and has dementia. The dementia means the father no longer recognizes the son, and the fall means that the once stoic and distant father has become feeble and dependent. Again, the theme of change, and the act of dealing with change, gives the story a weight here, and the narrator’s inability to know how to deal with these situations and emotions has a melancholic honesty to it.

    Yet, I had issues with this story, and they were all technical storytelling issues. When I finished the piece, I was left feeling unsatisfied, and that was due to none of the story threads felt wrapped up. Many emotional tangents are cast about in this story, but they don’t come back or lead to a resolution. The narrator says that he doesn’t like his parents, but the issues are with his father, so why is the mother put in the same bucket with the father? When the narrator realizes that he is becoming like his father, will that influence future actions of the narrator?

    That last one was the kicker for me, for that was the driver for the unsatisfying feeling the story created in me.

    If this is a normal “Hero’s Journey” story, then the narrator’s realization that he is like his father would then influence an action in the climax of the story, therefore allowing the hero to defeat the obstacle and view the world in a different way. The best that I can tell, the hero’s obstacle is himself, the climax has to do with the horse getting free (horse also metaphor for father/son,) yet the narrator’s actions in dealing with the horse are not influenced by his realization. If this is a normal “Rising Action, Climax, Resolution” story, then I’m not sure what to make out of the last two sections as a resolution; the thoughts the narrator has about his daughter’s choice in boyfriends and her actions towards them, and final section which is a “Dead Chick in the Basket*” cliché. That left me to believe that this whole exercise was just a meditation on the narrator dealing with a rough two days, and the narrator is the same person at the start of the story as he is at the end of the story. And if that is true, the narrator doesn’t change, then why are we being told this story?

    I will say this, “Hi Daddy” has some very fine points, and some crisp, honesty imagery and writing. Matthew Klam is writing about a character who is flawed, which is just ripe for storytelling. And it almost gets there. He just didn’t stick the landing.

    *  “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. The first known use of this device was in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”

  • I Went to the Gym Today

    I sure did. I went to the gym. I had this thought in my head that I wanted to add a fourth day of gymming to my life. (I have decided that “gymming” is a word, and that it is spelled with two m’s.) I don’t know what came over me last night, but as I was going to bed, I said to myself, I can go to the gym on Tuesday, and now work out four days a week.

    See, at least since 2022, I have been going to the gym three days a week, Wednesday thru Friday. The thought here was that Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to doing all of the stay at home dad stuff. Not that there weren’t other stay at home dad stuff things to do during the rest of the week, but Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were my days to work on my stuff – writing, art, time with the kid, and those were my gym days, too. On the whole, it’s been working fine.

    But of late, I have started to think that I could and should be doing more. I could be writing more, working on more projects, doing more around the house, more work on our family’s finances. And that just led me to think that I could do another day at the gym. I would find an extra hour, somewhere, and wedge in some treadmill time.

    There is a very important fact here, you need to remember – I hate working out. I equate the gym to eating your vegetables as a kid – you don’t like it, but you know you need to do it. That’s the gym for me. My doctor told me that as I get older I need to do at least 30 minutes of cardio workouts, three times a week. So, I have been doing that. Eating my vegetables and staying in the good graces of the doctor and the wife. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be healthy, and have as much time with my wife, kid, friends and family as possible. If I could do that without the gym, I would, you know.

    So, for this thought of adding a gym day, to do extra gymming, seemed surprising to me. And I was surprised that I was open to this idea. That I woke up this morning thinking that it was still a good idea. That I put on the running gear and headed out to the gym, got on the treadmill, and was surprised at how fast the time flew.

    I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I might be making a positive change here.