rumbleHUM

I am forty-six.  I say it not as an indictment of the age, but merely as a fact. I can remember as a teenager when I realized that my parents were in their forties. I remember that, at forty, the aging process took hold.  White grew at the edges of your hair. A certain sullenness set into newly formed creases.  The home, your home, grew a little smaller, snugger, with accumulated items. There always were hurdles. Of course, as a teenager, I viewed the transformations through teenage eyes, undamaged, immature, reckless. Stress hung difficult on the house. I am forty-six now.  My parents have walked through the valley that I find myself in now.  I look in the mirror and recognize the white hair forming at my temples, blending into the colored hairs.  Movement is sometimes painful.  I walk through hours of stress, paying bills, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don’t have any children now, but it only makes me understand how much more difficult rearing a child...

Lethargy is a poor friend and associate. Lethargy will share its umbrella with you, protecting you from the torrent of life, though you are never fully protected.  You still manage to get wet. Lethargy lurches.  It peers around corners, spying upon you, as you sit upon a couch, screening movies and television shows on Netflix or Hulu.  It sends you messages through stacks of unopened mail.  It accumulates in unwashed dishes, unwashed clothes.  Lethargy keeps you company behind closed doors, reminding you that its cousin Exhaustion is never to far away.  Lethargy enjoys a good meal.  It always finds a place at the Thanksgiving table, hovering around the turkey carvings and selection of pies.  Lethargy often stays long past its welcome.  Even when you give it hints that you have things to do, an agenda, meetings to attend, places to be, people to see, it manages to remain obtusely ignorant and remains behind to distract you from living. Letharg...

Today is Labor Day, and my employer has forgiven me a day of labor. Valerie noted that the children were still required to labor at their studies. I laboriously slept the day away, waking just long enough to eat tight meals of leftovers and to grocery shop. At the grocery store, the aisles bustled with shoppers laboring to fill their carts with choosing food and other products. They labored over the fruit displayed, twisting it in their hands to discern any blemishes, to assess ripeness. Other shoppers labored over prices, scanning coupons, running fingers over price tags. Determining the best price on toliet paper is a Herculean labor only the most educated of mathematicians would able to accomplish. Valerie advised that we had run out of cat food and that we ought to buy more. I procrastinated the purchase because I didn't want to labor carrying such a large and heavy bag into the house. When we returned home, I addressed the dirty in the sink, offering my labor to wash them. Val...

When I was in middle school and high school, so much of my identity depended upon what I surrounded myself with, including, and most importantly, my friends. I remember early days when I listened to “dangerous” music, filthy, corrupting, loud, and sacrilegious, a habit I adopted from various friends with a collection of industrial, punk, and alternative music. I watched anime because my friends watched anime; played Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games because my friends did. To a teenager, who affectively lives their life mimicry, identity does not exist. As I aged, I found my own footing, preserving on to some of the tastes that I developed as a teen, but also developing new ones, reflective of truer identity. Regardless, times were different in the nineties. Mobile phones were a relatively new phenomenon and certainly not the media devices they are today. Television shows had to be watched on a actual television, as well as media events. Information was controlled.  ...

I got an email yesterday. I present it here for your full review: The first generation Nook, beautiful in its simplicity, an Ereader which utilized E-Ink Technology.  It was a selling point of product, the fact that the screen was not backlit, but that read closer to an actual book. You could even swipe on the bottom of the Nook to turn the pages, as if to give you the feel of turning the page with a wet finger. It also had a long battery life, something that the newer Samsung produced Nook’s didn’t have. Mind you, it is a dedicated ereader. Although it had the capability, it was very difficult to surf the internet on the device. Apps could not be installed on it. It came with only two games, sudoku and chess, both of which seem oddly appropriate for readers. It was light weight, could be carried in your pocket, pretty hardy, though I had to replace it once when the plastic cover cracked where you pressed to turn the page. The replacement has lasted me ever since. You could even do...

Words are powerful.  They are.  They can be wielded as weapons.  They can serve as a antidote for the most serious of illnesses.  They can move and inspire nations, countries, and the world.  Words predominate our day.  We cannot go hours or even minutes without speaking them.  Words can infect us, so much so that we repeat them over and over again, especially when they are placed to music.  We may even say them when do not mean to, or when we are not aware that that we have said them.  With such power, words ought to be utilized with precision so that meaning is clear. Amazingly, words are not utilized with precision.  I have noticed that most people have a relaxed view towards diction, i.e., word meaning.  Recently, I spoke with a pre-teen child, intelligent and well-spoken, during a dinner with friends.  The juvenile was attempting to compliment the host stating, “The dinner is tasteful.”  I pointed out that the word th...

One of the most enjoyable thing about Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is the detailed sketches of John Tenniel whose exaggerated images of normal items highlighted how ridiculous everyday life could be.  Those exaggerated images perfectly serviced the manner in which Lewis Carroll twisted the logic of so many of everyday social norms such that between the two of them, a mirror was held up to insanity of Victorian English society and government. Positions would be reversed, turned on their head, and be turned backwards so that the positions would be rendered meaningless. I hate to say this, but the United States of America has become a Wonderland, where values held by certain political parties or by political positions have been twisted, turned around, flipped, so that they have become meaningless.  Amongst all the deformity, I have come to find myself empathizing with Alice, caught in a strange world, wanting to wake up from the nightmare or t...

I think at times I am a horrible person, and, I mean horrible.  Just recently Hurricane Harvey barreled through a number of Texas coastal cities, including Houston, causing devastation amounting to billions of dollars of damage and years of clean-up and reconstruction.  Twenty-one people have already died. The first response that a normal person ought to have is empathy and sympathy for those who are suffering.  I have a brother-in-law who lives in Houston who is right now in limbo about whether or not he even has a home to come back to.  My wife and I have reached out to him and extended our offerings of help, to clean-up his house, to watch his beloved pet cat, to have him stay with us while the way home is blocked.  I have sympathy for him, and it hurts to for me to see him hurt so much.  I can sense the helplessness in his voice when I talk to him over the phone. There is also a certain amount of appreciation of the blessing that Hurricane Harvey did no...

I wonder if its worth having an opinion anymore. Basic supply/demand economics indicates that a commodity’s worth depends upon the demand for such a commodity. The higher the demand, the more the commodity is worth. The inverse is true; the less demand, the less the commodity is worth. To a certain extent, opinions are commodities. They have value. Professions are founded on the sole basis of the value of the opinion. Doctors are often paid to provide an opinion on the proper diagnosis and treatment. Attorneys are paid for to provide an opinion on the merits, or lack thereof, of a certain case or a certain course of action. Politicians are paid for an opinion on the proper course or direction of our great nation. But, it appears that the value of an opinion has lost its value. The only reasonable explanation for the devaluation of the opinion is the decrease in the demand for opinions. In the infancy of television cable, CNN came to be channel synonymous with news. Programming centered...

I am a provocateur of arguments, a perceiver of personally held beliefs, the erosion of which can cause the most violent reaction, the raising of voices and blood pressure, the defense tensing of minds, the arrangement of apologetic excuses for why one side is wrong and the other right.  I think that people should not be too comfortable with themselves.  I target those most sure and certain of their own world view as it is those people whose idealism and moral high ground is despicable, a perception that there is a right way to view an issue and a wrong way to view an issue without consideration of the complexities of the general issue as well as how perspective shifts when wearing the shoes of someone else. My wife and I recently watched the documentary called the Red Pill which explores the Men's Rights Movement on Hulu.  A local theatre has planned to screen the film in the next week, but curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to view it earlier.  I could exp...

  I. Ronald sat cross-legged in the middle of the coliseum on a floor of sand and blood, bone and tattered clothing. Above him stretched a black night pinpricked with tiny yellow-white twinkles. ‘Around one of those twinkles spins Earth,’ he thought. Around the top of the coliseum, a set of mellowed lights hummed a low intensity blue providing just enough illumination to show a crowd of humanoids of various shapes and sizes. They rumbled in a foreign language, something Ronald believed to be a hybrid of Chinese and bear. In addition to the language, they all shared similar skin tone, a pale yellow akin to sun-bleached daisy petal, large eyes which fell deep into their misshapen skulls, and long thin digits attached to a pair of meaty palms. Although most of the beings had hair, it grew in odd places and in odd ways. Some had long tails, for that is the way that Ronald thought of them, growing from the hollowed cheeks and from the thin arms. The hue of the tails varied in every ...

Gerry woke to the sun pushing on the white curtains covering the one of two windows in his bedroom. He laid on his side as he was wont, two pillows cradling his cropped haircut. Another pillow he hugged in his arms, and another he placed between his knees so that his knees didn’t knock as he slept. The large flat screen television he purchased at a Black Friday sale a few years back when his older, fatter, more compact television started to act like it wanted to be retired and started showing odd lines across the screen like wrinkles and when the images became distorted like looking through cataracts. He wore only a pair of underwear, one of fourteen he had in his possession, although he had three pairs of pajamas in his drawers which he could utilize if he needed to. They were rather large on him due to their being purchased prior to a period of time when Gerry was liquidate his weight. However, recently, he had began packing on the pounds again, reverting to old bad habits, i...

In the past, I would occasionally lag behind in my weekly reading of the comics I had bought.  By the time that Wednesday arrived, there were still a few issues still left on my read pile.  The temptation for the comic reader is to submit to the lure of the new comics, there covers suggesting so much that you betray those comics from the week before.  They can wait; there’s time; the next issue doesn’t come out for another thirty days. But reading comics is like running on a treadmill stuck on one speed.  If you don’t maintain the speed that your reading, you can trip up and fall off.  Comics build up in small piles and then larger piles. To avoid the clutter of having one or two books laying out, I bought a short box in which to keep the unread issues.  And after I filled that short box with unread comics, I bought a second one as well.  Now, at the side of my bed, I have two short boxes with multiple issues of runs that I have not read. One of ...

I’m giving fair warning.  This post will ramble, the result of series of encounters with an theme that flowing around inside my head for some time, all centered around the term “hipster.” The other day, at work, while conversing with a friend regarding music, he made the comment that he thought that I might be a hipster based on the music I was listening to and the fact that I had chosen to wear a bow tie that day.  We’ve only known each other for only a short time, and, really, only in a professional manner.  I mean how much can you really know anyone if you’ve only seen them in work clothes.  See a person when they are not restricted in what they wear or how they comb their hair, you’ll know who you’re dealing with.  See a person in the shoes they wear when they are not required to be anything, and you know the person. He had only seen me in the suits that I wear to court and the khaki’s and blazers I wore on less formal days, not in the jeans and t-shirt a...

Apparently, Marvel’s Hercules had a book.  And, apparently, Dan Abnett wrote the book.  I hadn’t known this.  Or perhaps, I did, only I didn’t pay attention, filtering it out of my sphere of comic books that I read or consider, much like a husband might filter out his wife.  The last time I read a Hercules book was years ago, back when Marvel “killed” Hercules off.  (Like you could really kill a God.)  I enjoyed the book then as something I might pick-up as a distraction from the more prominently advertised titles.  It was not memorable, but it was fun. When I discovered that Marvel intended publishing a Hercules book that “tied-in” to Civil War II, my interest was peaked, and I picked it up.  And as I had done in the past, I enjoyed Gods of War, and thought that, compared other titles Marvel and DC has released recently, it was a strong offering by writer Dan Abnett and artist Emilio Laiso. The reviews I read after reading were not so kind....

Science fiction and fantasy are tricky genres, simply because there is such a wide disparity between the quality of the science fiction and fantasy stories that are told.  In addressing his writing being slotted as scien ce fiction, noted the bad reputation that science fiction writers receive from critics: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” As Vonnegut suggests, perhaps science fiction, and by association, fantasy can be quality writing.  No one would dispute the strength of story of the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings.  I personally am aware of the former being used as “literature” in a middle school reading class.  I also recall a number of Ray Bradbury works being used as well.  I personally taught a class in which Dandelion Wine was used, and not by my choosing. But at the same time, anyone who...