So last weekend I decided to try out for a play at a small community theater here in town.  I wasn’t familiar with the show but the outline looked like there were a couple of small character roles that I used to do so well.  I was hoping to ease my way back into theatre after an almost 15 year hiatus.

Talked to the director on the phone last night and she wants me to play the title role.

I’m still in “Holy Crap” mode.  More later.

Blondie and I went out to what may be possibly the most marvelous permanently-revolving street market in a permanent place, this afternoon: Busey’s Flea Market, on 1-35 North, along about the other-wise invisible town of Schertz. It’s about fifteen minutes brisk driving outside the San Antonio city limits. As Blondie describes it, it’s a yard sale on steroids, a range of three long parallel sheds extending uphill from the frontage road. The front of Busey’s is adorned with a gigantic concrete armadillo. It’s been freshly repainted this year, business must be good, although one of the regular stallholders lamented that the rents had been raised, which drove out a certain number of old regulars. Damn if I could tell the difference, though. Actually, it seemed like the pickings were unnaturally good. The stall with the WWII and German aviation memorabilia was as unattended as ever. Will has tried to buy stuff there, and been frustrated because no one can ever locate the person authorized to make sales. The guy with the nice and orderly selection in books was having a going-out-of-business sale, but that was the only harbinger of immanent change.

See, there are a number of different tiers of vendor at Busey’s – the well-established ones with medium-deep pockets and long-term plans have a space in one of the sheds, with a locking door, although what sort of permanence that can mean, when the shed is roofed in un-insulated tin and the walls are made out of something-not-very-permanent-at all… 2 x 4’s and tissue paper, I suspect. Never mind - the permanent vendors have their stalls packed so full, and their premises so well-organized it is obvious they are not going anywhere soon. Not without the aid of a couple of moving-vans and some strong backs, at least. Carpets, hardware, antiques, military surplus, books, kitchenware, Mexican ceramics … and all that. And more. Much, much more. There are a also a good few vendors of fast food – ice cream, hot dogs, BBQ sandwiches, chili-cheese fries (an interesting and artery-clogging combination, sort of the entrée-course variant of a deep-fried Mars-bar) and thank god, cold water. There is also a curendera/palm-reader advertising her ability to tell the past, present and future, a pet store with an array of birds, and today a guy outside the venue, offering Chihuahua puppies – very cute, light-chocolate colored with white feet. Yeah, The Lesser Weevil would have liked them very much. “For me? Thanks very much for the lunch!” The cats, however, would have preferred the birds.

After the permanent, enclosed stalls, there are the tables, under one of three long awnings, rambling up the hill. People back their cars and pick-ups up to their pitch, and unpack what they have – plants, ironwork, DVDs, spurious folk art, tools, garden ornaments, house wares, small and large appliances— practically anything you could imagine. Blondie insists that the pros – who hit all the yard sales, swooping down with lightning fast-speed and scooping up the good stuff — they show up at Busey’s with their gleanings within a day or so. They also hit the various ‘everything marked down-absolutely must go! sales, and thrift stores instantly when the new donations are put out. Their stock must come from somewhere, after all. Some of this still has the original tags still on it. These vendors, although regular, have the chore of packing it all up and taking it away every Sunday afternoon. Be warned – they usually start at this by about 3 PM.

The last tier of vender must be those people who are not regulars, who have a table for a weekend only. Dad always said that those are the vendors whom are most likely to offer really good bargains – they just want to get rid of it for a so-so price. Unlike the regular vendors with a permanent pitch, with doors that can be locked, they are not canny and not particularly knowledgeable about what they have to vend. This is where the stunning coups are made, where people buy something for a couple of dollars, and turn up with it on “Antiques Road-show” a couple of years later. This afternoon, Blondie scored a pressed-glass bowl of deep black glass, nearly half an inch thick. She got it for $12 dollars, and according to one of the permanent dealers, something like that could sell at Busey’s for about thrice that. Deity only knows how much to an expert – but we liked it. It met the criterion of being strong and thick enough to kill someone if you hit them with it.

Me, I would only love to be asked to host a TV show where the challenge would be to entirely fit out a whole house with the gleanings from a place like Busey’s and assorted other local thrift stores. Furniture, linens, curtains, knick-knacks, wall art, kitchen fittings, china and glass – the whole thing, at drop-dead bargain rates .

I don’t have an agent – if the Home and Garden Network is interested, let us know through this website… Oh, and we were only going there to look for drawer pulls for the 1880-1920 dressing table that Blondie picked up for $25 dollars at a yard sale. She beat the pros to it. The backs of the drawers are all dove-tailed… but the front of it was such a wreck, that’s why the pros gave it a miss.

…and all over again, I keep choking up.

Work should be interesting.

So one of the guys I work with quit unexpectedly yesterday.  He’d given his two week notice on Monday after he’d complained about getting more duties without more pay and then when he came in yesterday, 15 minutes late because  they weren’t willing to accommodate his “need” of coming in and leaving a half an hour earlier than the rest of us because of heavy traffic…he quit.  Ummmm, isn’t that called “rush hour” and doesn’t the rest of the world live with it every day?

I don’t remember the last time I saw someone just “quit” a job.  Here before lunch, gone after.  Didn’t say I word to me…who’s getting all of his duties plus my own.  Quite honestly, I’m still kinda bored.  I don’t see where he was working all that hard, but he’s older than me and has a disability, not one that I can see effects his ability to do office work, but what do I know about his life?

Thank you United States Air Force.  Where other folks see too much work, I just see a quiet, normal day…kinda boring.

I used to say that the Air Force was the easiest job I ever had after being a drug store clerk, mover, roofer, tin man, bartender and a photo lab chemical engineer…not to mention the very few acting and other theatrical paying gigs I had.   Everyone’s asking me if I’m “okay.”  I keep telling them that most of the time in the Air Force I walked into an office weeks, if not months, after the person I was replacing had left.  I’m fine…really…no worries.  If I can’t handle it, I’ll let you know.

I want to giggle like a fool when they ask how I’m doing.  Seriously.  After a year in a call center taking up from 60-100 calls a night, making LESS than I’m making now, this job seems like an absolute breeze.  It helps that I’ve been doing this kind of work for 23 years.  It helps that I don’t have a list of additional duties a mile long to go with them.  The guy who runs the facility is also the safety and security guy.  The IT guy actually shows up, and I’m not kidding, within 10 minutes after calling him!  I KNOW!

So I’m getting an education in the civilian work force…I’ve already learned they can just fire you, even when you admit you’ve messed up, and you really can just up and quit without any notice.

Question for you all…should I just keep taking on more work until I’m comfortable, Air Force style, or should I pad my limit a bit?  I’m not sure I even know how to do that, but thought I’d ask.

There are a few news anchors who I honestly enjoyed watching and who I actually trusted.  On the top of that list was Tony Snow.

I don’t think I enjoyed Presidential press conferences more than when he was the Press Secretary.  When he gave his previous colleagues the look, I’d just giggle my butt off.

Rest well sir.  Well done.

So…when you’re working for an award winning customer service company, what’s one thing you don’t think you should do?  Well, you absolutely should not allow yourself to get frustrated and simply say, “I’m done.” and hang up on a customer.

Knew I blew it when I did it.  Copped to it right away.  Didn’t matter.  I’m now part of the unemployed.

I’m terrified but also relieved.  Which tells me a lot about how I really felt about the whole thing.  I’m good with people most of the time.  But I’m seriously not cut out  to be one of those people who can be “nice” 40 hours a week.  I tried.  Was even getting better at it.  Couldn’t keep it up.

For those of you who are the kind of folks who do the, “God doesn’t close one door without opening another.” thing.  I’m right there with you.  I know things are going to be okay, I’d just like a peek at the God’s plan every now and then.

And I seriously wish my sub-conscious would let my conscious head know when I’m done working someplace.  I would have been nice to have a new job lined up BEFORE I messed this one up.

There are people who come into our lives when we least expect them. People who have no business being there, actually, but thanks to a serendipitous moment in time, they are. A chance encounter when walking across a college campus over 25 years ago led to my friendship with one of the most wonderful women I have ever known.

Marge Robertson taught Social Work at my University. I was a social work major, so you’d think we’d meet. But the classes I took weren’t the ones she was teaching, and so she was never my instructor. But our paths crossed outside the library one day, and she stopped and listened to whatever was on my heart at that time.

She became a sort of mentor for me. I would go to her with my confusions about life and college and whatever, and she would listen, calmly and caringly, and when I left, nothing seemed as insurmountable as when I had arrived.

Life took me far away from my college town, but I always knew she was there, in the house where she and her husband raised their children. I tried to visit her on the times I went back to college town. It didn’t always work out, but those visits merged with our occasional phone calls and annual christmas/hannukah letters to help us keep in touch with each other’s lives.

I had the opportunity about 10 years ago, to tell Marge, face to face, exactly how much her friendship and encouragement had helped me over the years. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself, and she gave me a role model of how to be a human being, alive and caring in a world that often seems bent on destroying those who care.

That wasn’t our last visit, thank goodness. It’s just one that swam to the surface of my consciousness last Saturday, when I read the email I had hoped to never receive. I’ll have no more visits with Marge.

Marjorie Serby Robertson, 77 of Valparaiso, passed away Tuesday June 17, 2008 at the VNA Hospice Center. She was born November 15, 1930 in Chicago, the daughter of Abraham and Geraldine (Herzog) Serby. Marjorie was a Psychiatric Social Worker and Professor of Social Work at Valparaiso University and a member of Temples Beth El and Israel. Her other involvements included League of Women Voters, Planned Parenthood, Adult Learning Center board of directors, Whispering Pines board of directors, Porter County Mental Health Association, Chemical People Task Force, Juvenile Justice Advisory Board, and president of Moraine House board of directors. She was instrumental in the establishment of the school social worker program in Porter County and of the state-wide association of Juvenile Justice Task Forces.

Her funeral was today, 700 miles north of me. I couldn’t take a moment of silence at the appointed time, because I was in the middle of a conference call. But as soon as the call ended, I took time to reflect on my friend, and to thank God for our friendship.

I am a better person because she was in my life. The world is a better place because she lived. And I will miss her, in ways that I have not yet begun to realize. She was a constant in my life, always available, always caring. She will still be a constant, but it will be in my heart. But that’s ok - it’s where she’s always been, for as long as I’ve known her.

Shalom, Marge. Thank you for sharing yourself with the world around you, and with me.

One of the weirder parts of growing up is what stops being important as you grow older. Once upon a time in my life, I could tell you who was in what band in what year and if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t rest until I found out. Rock’n'roll took up a huge part of the data storage space in my head. Debating over which was a better album, “Greetings from Asbury Park” or “Born to Run?” was my version of, “who was the better player, Jordan or Pippen?” Some folks are into sports in a maniacal way where they can recites seasons and stats, I was good at bands and songs and who wrote what and what was happening when they wrote it.

Bo Diddley died on Monday and I didn’t know about it until this morning. I found out while surfing more blogs that I haven’t visited in awhile. Apparently he’d been ill for a good while. I didn’t know that either. I may have heard about it, but it obviously didn’t stick with me.

I’m sad about his passing. His shave and a haircut rhythm was stolen by just about everyone who tried to play the blues or blues rock. I’ve got four different versions of “Who Do You Love?” in my iTunes collection. I was relieved to find out that his original is among them, my favorite being from The Band’s “The Last Waltz.” I can’t begin to tell you how many songs I have that use shave and a haircut.

What hits me even stronger is the fact that it took two days for me to notice. There was a day when I’d be so tuned to what was going on in music that if I didn’t know about from the radio station I was perpetually listening to, then I would have found out because a friend would have called me to commiserate about the loss.

I’ve become one of those, “it’s just music” people. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t consciously think, “I don’t have time for all this music stuff. I’m going to listen to less music as I get older.” It just happened. And while the grownup I’ve become acknowledges that it’s only natural for such things to go by the wayside as “real life” takes up more of my time, my inner rocker is terribly disappointed in me.

Harvey Korman passed away last night.

Some of my fondest family television memories are of watching Harvey Korman and Tim Conway on the Carol Burnett Show.  The best sketches?  The ones where Conway cracked Korman up.

I remember my whole family, from my Gramma down to lil me laughing so hard we cried as those two clowns performed.

And can anyone forget the delightfully degenerate Heady Lemar (That’s Headley!).

Thank you for the laughs Sir.  You will be missed.

On a side note, there’s just no television show that the whole family can sit and watch and have THAT kind of belly laugh together with anymore.  I think CBS could play those old shows in primetime today and get a HUGE audience.

Today Beautiful Wife, Boyo and I took a long drive up into the mountains to say goodbye to one of our oldest and dearest friends. She has a real name, but for the sake of anonymity, I’ll refer to her by one of her sillier nicknames, Bambi. No…she was never an exotic dancer, she just played one on AF Dormitory White Boards. No…I won’t elaborate on that at this time either. Suffice it to say that she and my wife left me a note one day that got me razzed for weeks after.

Anyway…our friend Bambi passed away a couple of weeks ago. We’d known her almost 20 years. Now, I don’t have to tell you military folks how rare and wonderful it is to have a friend who stays in touch with you when you leave. I mean everyone SAYS they’re going to stay in touch and you might get an occaisional Christmas card, but you know, out of sight, out of mind. Bambi wouldn’t put up with that. She stayed in touch. From me in Korea, to us in Germany, Hawaii, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming…to us finally coming home last year. Bambi was our friend. She stayed in touch. While I was in Korea, she let Beautiful Wife crash at her place when she got too lonely missing me. Whenever we came home, she “borrowed” Boyo to go to movies, McDonald’s, the dollar store, you name it. I’ve got to say, quite honestly, she was a much better “Aunt” to our son than my sister or my wife’s sisters.

Now she had health problems. I’m not going to go into details, but she was getting better. She’d lost some weight, she found a job that she loved and was able to show up every day she was supposed to. She was happier than we’d seen her in a very long time. She was supposed to come over to watch reality shows and have dinner with Beautiful Wife and Boyo (I still work nights) but she called and said that she wasn’t feeling good, she’d be over the next week.

Her brother found her a few days later. She’d passed in her sleep.

So we went to her funeral today. A very nice ceremony in a small chapel up in the mountains, followed by a shorter graveside service. Bambi’s brother had asked us if we knew what the “The Reggae Version” of “Over the Rainbow” was, because Bambi said that was one of her favorite songs and after a bit of scratching my head I figured out it had to be the Bruddah Iz version of “Over The Rainbow/It’s A Wonderful World.” I burned a copy for the family and they played it at the graveside. If folks hadn’t been crying yet, the tears were fully flowing now. The kids and some grownups were also blowing bubbles (per Bambi’s request) through their tears and the scene was kind of silly-sad and surreal. Just like Bambi would have wanted it. We completely forgot how Bruddah Iz closes that song. He sort of does a Hawaiin scat at the end. Sort of silly, kind of whacky. Me and Beautiful Wife got the giggles. So did a couple of other folks though they covered it better than we did. Bambi loved that part of the song, did a silly lil dance to the “Hoo hah, coo coo cha chuwhaw.” and that’s all we could picture in our heads. She got us…one last time…just like a good friend should.

Meek the cat had to be put to sleep this week. He was one of Blondie’s cats, the other being Sammie From Across the Road – like Sammie, he took a look at my daughter and fell into deep, abject adoration. Unlike Sammie who did have a home (although it was overrun with small, yappy dogs) and people who wanted him, Meek was a dumpee. That is, someone who had him as a pet, and thought enough of him to neuter him… and then dumped him. At some point the veterinarian deduced that he had been hit by something which had injured one of his legs, floated a rib which nature did not intend to float, and left him with a small hernia on his chest. Those injuries were at least a year old and healed without the aid of medical care. Until last fall Meek was one of the semi-ferals who hung around Blondie’s workplace, a former little frame house turned office premise just off the I-35 in Selma, Texas. There was a small coterie of these cats, some of whom were tameable and whom my daughter fed and worried over, especially when one of her favorites was hit by a car and killed quite messily. Meek was the other one. He took to following her into the office, waited for her on the porch and generally gave every indication of deep and undying devotion. One morning she left to pick up office supplies and Meek followed her car down the drive, out onto the access road and appeared to have every intent of following her onto the highway on-ramp. Obviously, he had decided that if he couldn’t live with Blondie, he didn’t want to live at all.

So he came home with her, after a short side trip to the vets, where he was given all the appropriate shots and tests, judged to be clean of feline AIDS, intestinal parasites and fleas (not ear mites, which proved to be persistent). He tolerated the dogs, formed a pair-bond with Percival, the little Russian Blue that I tamed with great care a number of years ago, and generally lived the lush life as a cat of the First Degree.

He was white, with brindle spots, and had beautiful jade-green eyes, which were set off by dark eyelids, as if some cat-beautician had lined them with kohl. He was a talky, responsive cat, and zeroed in on any lap with the speed and precision of a heat-seeking missile. He loved to hang out in the evening with us, watching TV in the den – if not on Blondie’s lap, on the arm of the sofa next to her or on the window sill above her head.

Late one evening this week, Blondie thought he seemed lethargic – and most distressingly, was straining over the litterbox without producing any urine. We know what that portends in neutered male cats. (I lost one of my early cats to it – an awful, heartrending experience at the vets’ and the cat still died of it.) Meek was at the veterinarians next day. Since he had eaten and drunk normally that morning, and was able to produce a small dribble, the veterinarian had a very cheerful prognosis; yes, it looked like he had a tendency towards feline cystitis. They gave him the first of his pills, advised us to switch over to a special food for this kind of problem and were about to release him to go home when he crashed right in front of us.

It looked and felt for all the world as if he was having a sort of feline panic attack. I had my hands on him; he was shaking violently and his heart rate was through the roof. The veterinarian said “Oh-oh… that doesn’t look good.” She asked to do some quick tests. They came back showing nothing good. He was already in crisis. There was a surgical option, but it cost a bomb and there was no guarantee. It’s a chronic condition – it could have happened again next month or next year. His old internal injuries may have even exacerbated that condition . So, we did the kind thing. Blondie held him. He was so happy to be in her arms, he was purring up to the very end. The veterinarian, who was also crying as she put the drugs into the shunt in his leg said “At least you can say that you gave him the very best eight months of his life!”. Last night, when we related this to Mom and Dad, (who have had to do this with about half a century’s worth of beloved pets), Dad said very kindly, “You can’t save ‘em all, you know.”

Well, you can’t – but you can give them the best eight months, or eight years, or whatever.

Odds on, the first thing that anyone walking into any of the various places that I have lived- starting with the enlisted barracks in Japan in those dear distant days when female troops lived in a female-only dormitory was something along the lines of “Gosh – have you read all of those books?” To which the answer was some kind of polite rephrase of “Of course I bloody have! Did you think I had put them up as decorating elements?!!”

Yes, I have books. Lots of books; books in the bedroom, books in the den, books in the hallway, books in the living room and even a shelf of them in the kitchen – what better place for the cookbooks, pray tell? There aren’t any in the bathroom; first of all, the light isn’t that good and secondly there isn’t any place for shelves.

I used to buy books that I liked, just so that I could have copies of my own, which I could read any time I felt like it. Then I wound up overseas, where English-language bookstores were few and far between, and the Stars and Stripes Bookstore was pretty limited; if you saw it there and thought you might want to read it - better buy it quick, because it wouldn’t be there next time, and even though the base library did their best – well, there were other seriously committed readers out there. (When I moved from Spain, the packing crew had a pool going, on how many boxes of books there would eventually be; 63 and no, I don’t know what the winner got. Probably had many cervezas bought for him, after they finished nailing up the packing crates.) And then I came home, and discovered second-hand stores and services like Alibris, and the online behemoth which must not be named because they are behaving like total d**ks in regard to POD publishers… oh, off-topic. Never mind. Books, the topic was books, the love for (or addiction to!) and constant acquisition of such.

Now, I review books, for Blogger News Network, and for iUniverse Reviews, with the result that I get a constant trickle of books from other writers asking for reviews through the Daily Brief or the IAG. But writing books myself is another splendid excuse for buying more; for the research, you see. The shelves of my writing desk (built by Dad for Blondie’s use, but too big for her room) are now crowded with Texiana and various books on aspects of the Old West. I had a fair number of them already – it’s as if I knew there would be an eventual use for that Time Life series about the Old West. It’s not so much the text in that case, but the pictures.

Blondie and I went to the library book sale on Saturday, at the Semmes branch on Judson road. There’s always a crowd for this, the room where the sale is set up almost instantly achieves a ‘black hole of Calcutta’ degree of heat and overcrowding. Fortunately, most of the people lined up for admittance –many of them armed with large plastic tubs and canvas shopping bags - are intent on the novels or the children’s books. I am on the lookout for more Texiana and western stuff – especially with illustrations, especially with contemporary – that is contemporary 19th century artists. I need pictures of all sorts of things; horses and wagons, of old forts and plains river valleys covered with buffalo herds, of buildings and animals and people, something for my imagination to fix upon, so that I can build all the other living elements around it.

I scooped up a couple of prizes almost at once – Don Troiani’s American Battles and a thick coffee-table treasure-trove called “The Art of the Old West: From the Collection of the Gilcrease Institute” which has color plates of practically everything, and a collection of Frederic Remington’s black and white magazine illustrations – all for considerably under 20$.

There’s enough pictorial stuff in those books alone to start me off with ideas for another book of my own. My only problem is that I am running out of shelf-space for all of my necessary research materials - but it’s a happy problem.

(Cross posted at the IAG Blog)

Being a child of the later baby-boom, of course I remember seeing Charlton Heston on the big screen – the very big screen at the drive in, when Mom and Dad packed JP and Pippy and I into the back of the trusty jade-green Plymouth station wagon for an evening at the double-feature. We were all in our pajamas for this sort of excursion, with our pillows and blankets in the back; lamentably, we usually fell asleep before seeing very much of the first feature, let alone the second.

But I do have a hazy memory of him as El Cid, in desert exile, seen through the windshield of the Plymouth, between Mom and Dad’s heads, as “Ben Hur” – especially the bone-crunching chariot race - a very much better one of him as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” – this one at one Pasadena’s gloriously ornate picture palaces, and of him as the devious and worldly Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lesters’ Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers. Mom always said it was because of his background in classical theater, that he could swish about in historical costume so convincingly.

So, he was about the biggest star that any of us had ever heard of, when he came to Zaragoza, Spain sometime in the late 1980s, and the Public Affairs office informed us that we had a chance for an interview. We were all of a twitter; Zaragoza was kind of a backwater – I used to compare it to Bakersfield – and whereas it had a lovely old downtown, a cathedral (two cathedrals), a Roman bridge and a Moorish castle, practically everywhere else in Spain had better, more beautiful, more historic and better preserved. Our radio and television broadcasters there had practically no chance of doing celebrity interviews; I saw more interesting and famous people come through Sondrestrom, Greenland than I ever did in Zaragoza.

What was he doing in Zaragoza, of all places? Filming the commentary for this program series, on location in the old Alcazar; of which he said jokingly during our interview that it was practically the only castle in Spain that he hadn’t been to before. We were the only news outlet to get a TV interview with him on that trip; he was terribly busy with the location shoots, and it wasn’t the sort of enterprise that needed additional publicity anyway. We all liked to think that it was because of his service connection that we even got in the door. He couldn’t have been more gracious or considerate to our two nervous young airmen who shot the interview.

No, I did not do the interview; I came up with the questions for our staffer to ask, since the ones suggested by the Public Affairs officer were embarrassingly amateurish. We all watched the raw video of the interview afterwards and marveled – because he was a pro. We could use practically every second of the footage we taped, he was that good. Most people we did interviews with were nervous, fidgety and stiff. They radiated discomfort; it came off them in little wavy lines that you could almost see, like those used in cartoons to signify a stink. We usually had to spend a lot of time putting them at ease, and a lot of video time and editing to just get something useable that didn’t make them and us look like idiots.

But Charlton Heston sat still, graciously playing to the camera – (Of course! He was an actor!) – he didn’t fidget nervously. His responses were thoughtful, smooth, as composed and literate as a small essay or sonnet. No awkward umms and pauses, no false starts; he was at ease, completely comfortable and polished to a high gloss in a way that most of us- even those who had interviewed various currently popular celebs before – had never seen. He wasn’t just a star –besides being a military veteran, he was a total pro in a way that you rarely see these days.

(Note - I am a bit off Amazon.com, and protesting their recent decision to pressure POD publishers into using their print service by sending all my links for books and DVDs to Barnes and Noble. Take that, Jeff Bezos!)

Topmost on my list of such thoughts is – oh, god, it’s good to be home! It’s good to be able to sleep in ones own bed, to stretch out and not have cold feet, cold hands, cold-whatever-body-part-winds up pressed against the side panel of the Montero and is just a thin sheet of metal and some miscellaneous plastic bits removed from the frigid, wind-whipped New Mexico or West Texas weather.

Oh, yes, it was bloody cold out there; there was no snow to show for all that cold, but some nice patches of blowing dust and sand. The winds kicked up the day before we left Mom and Dads and made such a racket we couldn’t sleep that night anyway – and followed us all the way across three states. Nothing says “I want to go home” quite so much as vacating the area at 2 AM.

The best thing about departing in the wee hours on New Years Day – no traffic, once you finish dodging the drunks. There was one suspiciously careful driver, weaving gently down the Valley Center grade, which Blondie felt obliged to try and call 911 about – but all we got was it ringing about twenty times and then an answering machine. On 911; I guess they had their hands full. And the driver we were worried about didn’t look to be the reckless sort of drunk driver.

The “Starbuckifaction” of the coffee-drinking element has spread it’s what some would claim is an insidious influence far and wide, yea my brethren even to the truck plazas and gas stations along the interstate highway system. The Flying J/Pilot stores provide a surprisingly excellent selection of coffee… and have half-and-half on tap. Not just exclusively that ghastly powdered chalk non-dairy “cream” muck, thankyouverymuch. Extremely drinkable and for about a third of the cost of an equivalent at a Starbucks. No demerara sugar, though, but I expect that to appear by the next time I do a long, long road trip.

Oh, and speaking of coffee in the wee hours, I must pour scorn and derision upon the Carls Junior, just off the 1-8 in the eastern suburb of San Diego where we attempted to purchase some handy breakfast comestables and coffee at 4 AM. Yes, I know it was 4AM on New Years Day and the single unfortunate young person running the place was so junior as to make drawing fuzzy end of the lollipop and working that shift inevitable… but still; no breakfast items? We were told that only lunch items were available… oh, and sorry, the coffee brewer wasn’t fired up. And payment could only be made in cash. Yeah, so he wasn’t senior enough to have the keys to the debit-credit card processor or the coffee urns, but lunch items at 4 AM? Jesus jumping key-rist on a pogo stick, the whole damn reason for 24 hour fast food places is to dispense coffee!

Gas prices – not to shabby once outside California, and Blondie’s Montero got very good mileage on the highway. We filled to the top four times and came in well under budget, having allowed for gas at $3.25 a gallon when we planned the trip. Most gas stations along the interstate in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona had it within a nickel of $2.90, either way.

What to call the road-kill count – Bambi Bits? Bambicide? Whatever it is, the deer population takes a hell of a beating; that stretch of 1-10 through the Hill Country is a veritable holocaust for them. As a stratagem to keep ourselves awake and amused after coffee ceased having the required effect, we counted road kill from Mile 300 to Mile 511 in the median, on the roadway and off on the shoulder. Not counting various nasty looking smears and blots on the paving, our grand total was 49 deer, 8 raccoons or opossum, 3 skunks, 3 large birds (turkey or guinea-fowl of some sort) and 23 U-L-O-M, which is our acronym for “Unidentified Lumps ‘o Meat”. At that, we probably missed about a third as many, off-sight on the opposite side of the highway.

So – we’re home – and when I get home, the first thing I find is that Eric at Classical Values posted a lovely review of “To Truckee’s Trail” and Da Blogfaddah linked to it. With a resulting uptick in sales through Amazon. Maybe I should go away more often. Oh, never mind – provision of good bloggy ice cream will commence as soon as I finish going through my email in-box.

Strictly speaking, unless your last name is Grisham or King, Steele or Rowling or any other scribbling royalty lurking meaningfully on or near the of the NY-Times best seller lists, life is bleak and full of frustrations. And also very short of people who are nice to you as a writer and welcoming to you and your books. No wonder so many of them turn to drink, or otherwise crash and burn. Even the flash in the pan overnight successful ones fall to this– Grace Metalious, anyone?

Those of us at the bottom, toiling and marketing in obscurity take our little successes where we can, lonely beacons shining in a dark and generally frustrating world. Everyone who reads the Book and loves it, or recommends it to a friend, or drops a favorable comment in an on-line forum; that’s a light like Erandil in the dark places of the day. Not quite up there with royalty checks in three figures, but the trick to being happy is to be happy with what you have.

Last night I found a comment in a discussion forum about off-road vehicles; a contributor quoted a bit from “To Truckee’s Trail” about storage arrangements in Dr. Townsends’ wagon and drew a very neat parallel between that, and how modern off-roaders now install storage for long treks – that just about made my evening. Such crumbs as do nourish the writers’ ego on these long winter evenings after looking at my ranking on Amazon.com. It’s available in the Kindle format, by the way. Or so it appears. I think. Even if there is no picture of the cover or links to the reviews for the paperback edition. No idea from the admin responses in the author forum as to why… just another way that the non-royal scribblers are incessantly kicked in the teeth by a cold and unfeeling world.

Ah, yes – reviews; absolutely necessary to have in order to market your book. Think of them as word of mouth, made solid and permanent in print. In the grand halls of the literary industrial complex, competition is fierce to review the books of the scribbling royalty and the well-connected commentariat; even so, it will take months. Almost always, the book is made available to a select few way in advance, and rumor has it that sometimes reviewers are paid and quite healthy sums too. It’s a necessary step in marketing the book, think of all those lovely complimentary quotes on the back jacket, or in the first couple of pages. At a lower level – naturally the one occupied by other indie authors – are also paid… by getting a free copy of the book. It’s one of those nice little freebies available to those in the loop and I confess to having scored a nice little collection thereby. (I asked to review a book last month for no other reason that I looked at the description and thought what a wonderful Christmas present a copy would make for a certain friend.)

Alas, it has taken months and months to assemble my collection of reviews, and pushed back my marketing plan by a considerable period. Good thing that it is a POD book, as a traditional publisher would have pulled the plug by this time. On the other hand, a traditional publisher would have been able to squeeze a review out of the San Antonio Express News, whose book editor informed me snottily that their policy is not to review POD books of any sort, not even by local authors. Don’t know what their reasoning is, probably afraid of getting literary cooties or something. God knows there are some simply dreadful books out there, but last time I looked, quite a lot of them came out of the traditional publishers. Indie writing may be the next wave, just as indie movies and indie music have offered an alternative to the traditional Hollywood blockbuster and the manufactured and wholly synthetic mega-hit.

Next – why it’s an uphill fight to get the book into traditional bookstores, and why do I bother anyway?

Two essays for this day, the eleventh day of the elevenths month: First - Austin Bay and second, my own reminiscence of my great-uncle William

Later: from Youtube, via my computer genius friend who sent it to me this morning - “A Pittance of Time“.

And someone throw another quart of liquid soap in the bubble machine, the madness of the writers’ life waltz has just been ratcheted up another couple of notches. No, wait… that’s the Tylenol cough syrup kicking in… that blue stuff does have a kick, doesn’t it? Yes, sports fans, I seem to have contracted the current misery of a very sore throat and hacking cough. Fortunately our vast collection of over-the-counter medications seem to be kicking in at long last. The cats didn’t mind… much. Not with something warm to curl up next to, 24-7 but the coughing rather disturbed them. Whenever I started hacking like Camille, I would get this dirty look from Sam and Percy – like “Do you mind keeping it down?! We’re trying to sleep, here!” “Well, don’t mind me, fellas, that’s just me and part of a lung.”

Finished the first draft of the Civil War volume this week; next stop, revisions, but only after reading… a lot. Went and ordered some books from Amazon, bought some more at Half-Price and picked up an armload at the library, including a local history of the town of Comfort, Texas, written (I kid you not) by a gentleman named Guido Ransleben. Is this a great country or not? I went to school with a kid named Sean Nardoni, though, so maybe I am used to ethnic collisions when it comes to names. My stack of required reading is as high as an elephants’ eye, metaphorically speaking. I did some work for Dave the Computer Genius early in the week, but was too damn sick to do anything else but read or sleep.

One of the library books turned out to be damned fascinating: “The Civil War in the American West”. Sort of an overview and very well written, I thought… of everything that happened west of the Mississippi River during those years; in Arkansas and Missouri and Minnesota, in New Mexico and Colorado and Texas; all those efforts to secure the overland trails to Santa Fe Trail and Sacramento. How the regular Army troops were withdrawn, and so many of their officers resigned their commissions and declared for the South, while local companies of volunteers assembled; not to go off and fight in Virginia or Tennessee, but to take the place of the regular Army, in securing the frontier forts. And the frontier went up in flames during those years for two reasons… the Regular Army stepping back and the Indians seeing an advantage, while the local volunteers were much more accustomed to conditions and much more eager to settle the Indians’ hash for them. Which is how we wound up with the Sand Creek massacre…

Fascinating stuff… also found a compilation of short biographies of women in the Texas cattle business, who trailed herds of cattle to the northern railheads, or to California. Some went along with their husbands; some did it as a business after being widowed. Most of them seemed to have enjoyed the experience terrifically; and I am taking serious notes on this. Volume 3 of Adelsverein, or Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a lot of Sidearms will get into this territory. I am still pretty amused at the difference between how the cattle bidness appears in Western movies, and how it really looked in people’s memoirs.

Always fun to land a blow on an ever moving target, with a wobbly lance. And no horse to speak of, just me at a dead run across the hillside, this being the perils of the low-budget POD author, when cleverness and creativity try and make up for not being able to do what the big playas in the literary-industrial complex do… which is to throw pillowcases of money at the providers of advertising, reviewers and air-time.

Progress in the case of transforming “To Truckee’s Trail” into a best-seller feels as slow and torturous as a slug crawling across a twenty-acre parking lot on a Texas afternoon in August. It’s endless and frustrating, every bump in the pavement is a nearly insurmountable obstacle… and it’s very, very hot.

On the other hand, successfully negotiating them, one by one by one allows me the illusion that I am getting somewhere, after all. Those readers and fans who ordered autographed copies from me last month have received them, and I have a couple of cards and emails assuring me of their utter delight and enjoyment. Pure nectar to the writers’ ego! And very welcome too, but must be careful not to soak in it too much. Or to be battered by its’ obverse, all those various stripes of criticism. Note to self, suggested response when encountering this: there’s a bajillion other books out there; If mine doesn’t send you, one of them surely will!

I sent a box of review copies last week to KC in Sparks-Reno, who aside from being one of those readers who encouraged me to even write the book in the first place, also is connected in various media and publicity outlets there. Quite a lot of the book happens in that area, so she can scrape together enough of the ‘local interest-local history’ attention-getting machinery.

And I sent a box of review copies to my parents. Mom is one of those retirement-age busy-bodies who is well-connected in Northern San Diego to the local artistic and literary circles. God love them, Mom and Dad are also sending me my Christmas present early, on the very good grounds that I may make better use of that check now than in three months. Out of that, I’ll get another box of review copies, and some advertising, of the kind that has to be paid for.

Sent a review copy to a reviewer for Blogger News. Net, and another to the editors of “True West” and to the California Oregon Trails Association. No results to report, yet.

Sent out about 65 postcards to an assortment of independent bookstores, and frontier/pioneer museum bookstores, following up with emails. So far, only a bookstore in Truckee, and the Truckee Donner Historical Association have nibbled, that I know of. Just not enough demand, not enough people have read it, liked it and said so very loudly!

And Cpl. Blondie has chatted up the manager of a chain bookstore, who is agreeable to ordering three or four copies, displaying them prominently, and if there us enough demand, ordering more, and even staging a book signing. Now if I can only get it reviewed by the local newspaper, I could make a bit more of a splash here in San Antonio. So far, I haven’t gotten an email back from the person who allegedly edits the Sunday book section. Honestly, these people are always wondering why no one reads the paper any more…

Off to crawl across some more parking lot, and stick some more stamps on post-cards!

“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day.”

Or so saith the Queen, and I can just completely relate, because in the mad writers-life waltz that is my own life these days, there is always the hope of jam tomorrow. The bread today is plain and budget, and naked of jam, but tomorrow it may be miraculously spread with finest-kind Confiture Bar le Duc.

Or so we keep hoping. I think the cats are holding out for a can of nice juicy salmon, hold the toast hold the capers, just plain, thank you. The dogs will be ecstatically happy with anything edible that has only bounced once when it hit the floor.

Tiny tastes of jam include the fact that “To Truckee’s Trail” is in Booklocker.com’s list of top-ten print best-sellers, and I did get an email from this bookstore in Truckee City thanking me for my query and noting that they had ordered some copies from the Ingram catalogue to stock in their bookstore. I am testing out running an ad here; home central for all things Western… and I finally got paid for the magazine article that had been published several issues ago. (What a goat rope… I’m not really sure I want to submit any more articles, not when I have to wait to get paid for months and then throw a temper tantrum. How demeaning is that? And do publishers do it because it’s a hell of a lot easier to stall writers than suppliers and printers?) But I had some paid work at Dave The Computer Genius’ place of business, and he let me use his computer and soft-wear to tweak my book-website, so my need to buy my own copy of it is put off for at least a little while. All good, all jam., or at least a tantalizing expectation of same.

Still haunting the mailbox though; last week I ordered a box of copies from the publisher; these are the autographed copies which readers have ordered, and some are to be sent out to reviewers. I ordered another box this week; more review copies, and one for the kid in the sandwich shop where I get a smoked-chicken sub every Saturday… and I have promises of all kinds of linky-love and reviews in the very near future. As soon as I have the books in hand. And mail them out.

There was that saying about promises and pie crust, though…
(more…)

Just wanted a list of first impressions that I can look back on later and remind myself when I get tired of showing up every day.

- It’s not the Air Force.
- The dress code is very laid back. Jeans allowed. Hell I could wear shorts and sandals if the place wasn’t kept as cold as a meat locker. That’s been nice.
- It’s only about 6 miles away from home.
- I’m driving away from the city while most of the traffic is driving in to the city.
- While I’m starting out at the entry level, there’s plenty of chances to move up and even out and about in the company.
- I’ve got about a year to learn the ins and outs before I decide which track I want to take.
- There’s every fast food joint and grocery store I could possibly need between home and work.
- The Cafeteria rocks!
– The breakfast burrito I had yesterday morning was made on the grill while I waited. It was great.
– The salsa for said yummy burrito has never seen the inside of a can or jar.
– It’s got a great dollar menu for lunch.
– The condiments’ tray includes, and I know you all are going to appreciate this, TWO bottles of Rooster Sauce along with four different types of Tabasco and similar hot stuff.
- You know those promotional pamphlets you see about someplace being a “best place to work?” and all the people are grinning like idiots? The people that work there seem to be honestly happy to be there with the exception of all the kids wearing black with their iPods vibrating their heads during breaks.
- With all of the benefits, the total package is actually about $5K more a year than I was making in the Air Force. The 401K is SWEET. If I put in 5% of my paycheck they match my contributions by 150%.
- Even if I go with less insurance, between work and my my mil benefits, we’re so covered it’s kind of weird. You might say we’re too covered, but with our health stuff, I’m okay with that.
- We’re going to save about 70 bucks a month on our cell phone plan and we’ll have every feature on the menu, even stuff I don’t understand yet. Why would you send a fax from your cell phone?
- Foosball, pool table, Air Hockey and a TV Lounge in the break area.
- You can still smoke out back and no one tweaks. Yeah, I know, shuddup.
- Everyone is VERY friendly.

All in all I think I’m going to be very happy there until I burn out, and then I’ll just have to move up.
Cross Posted at Faster Than The Blog.