On My 20th Blogiversary

 ... a little family wisdom and the last half of the first chapter of my ... novella? book? 

Whatever.

As my regular readers know, I'm currently working full time, about 2 years past when I wanted to retire. I've made this choice because people I love need some help and I have the ability to give it to them.

I had plans for this stage of my life. Writing, working out and living part time in an Alabama river house were chief among them. Some people I love hit hard times and, as I had the ability to help them, I postponed retirement. I also postponed my dreams, knowing that at this age, "postpone" can quickly turn into "jettison."

I can get dark and brooding and found myself gravitating towards that. Serving God by loving your family while nursing resentment is like adding broken glass to a good dinner. Worthless.

I don't have the time to write properly, but I do have the time to write. At the rate I'm going, my first story might be done about the time I contract Alzheimer's, which might actually be a good thing. Each time I read the thing it will seem new to me and in no time at all, I'll be convinced I've written 10 different books. 

Hooray?

Anywho, the moral of the story is that while you may never be able to completely fulfill your dreams, you're not doing anyone any favors by not doing what you can and taking joy from that.

You can find the first part of chapter 1 here.

Here's the end of chapter 1. I'm having a great time with this. I hope it shows.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

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The sun was clear of the horizon by the time Robert Edward Lee Bond, 58, stumbled out of his bedroom into the living room towards the kitchen, one hand rubbing his stubbled face, the other clutching an empty plastic water bottle. He had primed the coffee maker before he and Basil had started drinking last night, knowing how the night would end. Right now, he needed the coffee. Something crunched under his cheap sandals as he stumbled into the galley kitchen in the fishing shack, but he paid it no heed, focused on pressing that button.

Bobby Lee had a private scale for hangovers. There were mild ones where the head hurt and the morning was a drag. There were medium ones where the head hurt and sleep had been fitful. Then there were those where the coffee would make him extremely nauseous. Despite their best attempts last night, this one was only in the medium category. His head hurt, he was exhausted and his thoughts were slow.

The coffee maker started. He looked up. This time, the wreckage registered. Furniture was overturned, there was broken glass on the floor, a few pieces of torn black cloth were scattered near the doorway and the screen door was open and hanging off one hinge. General Beauregard was laying on his side and Cat was cleaning the basset hound’s shoulder. The crunching under his sandals had been broken glass.

“Well, it looks like you two did some interior decorating last night. I love what you’ve done with the place. It’s got that lived-in charm although next time, you might want to set the curtains on fire to really finish the job,” he said to them, wincing at the exertion of speaking. Then he muttered to himself, “I guess this is what I get for being late with their breakfasts.”

Bobby Lee held his head in his hands, nursing his hangover until the coffee was done. He poured himself a mug and drank a few sips. It was the act of pouring the coffee more than the caffeine that got him to thinking. The wreckage didn’t make any sense at all. Also, why hadn’t the animals been at him for their food? Usually, if he was this late, they’d be barking and meowing, begging. 

Bobby got up to survey the living room. When he went over to the damaged screen door, he looked down at the dock and saw the bow of an aluminum skiff poking above the water. 

They didn’t own a skiff.

Bobby took another gulp of coffee, walked swiftly to his bedroom and yelled to Basil through Basil’s bedroom door to get up. 

Bobby was nowhere near fighting ready. He pulled his Colt 1911 from the shoulder holster slung over the chair and wished he had something sturdier than Walmart sandals on his feet.

He opened Basil’s door and told him, “Get your gun. Right now. Put some shoes on, there’s glass on the floor.” Basil was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. 

“I don’t need you to tell me to put on my shoes, Robert,” he said as he slipped into his loafers. “I am not decrepit.”

“You’re older than I am.”

“By three weeks.”

“Really? Feels like a lot more than that.”

Basil rolled his eyes and stepped out, Browning 1910 in hand.

“The dock is clear,” said Bobby.

Bobby looked through the front door's spyhole and saw nothing but the empty causeway leading back through the bayou to the road. The boys had chosen this shack to give minimal cover to anyone approaching.

Bobby carefully opened the door that led to the dirt and gravel causeway. Basil, grumbling about his head, covered him. The two took turns on point as they explored around the piers beneath the house until they were satisfied no one was there. 

Bobby shrugged at Basil. “I don’t think we need to report this to our insurance company.”

“However, I must register a complaint with the maid,” replied Basil in his languid upper-crust English accent. “She simply must do a better job tidying up the place. It looks like a tornado tore through it. Ghastly.”

They walked out to the end of the pier where the bow of the skiff was bobbing slowly in the water. It looked like a rental. The ID decal was still on the bow. None of it made sense.

“Not locals. A local would’ve taken our boat,” Bobby said, motioning at the center console sitting in its cradle over the water.

“It couldn’t have been teens, they’d have stolen the car and looted the place,” replied Basil, motioning at the SUV parked underneath the shack. 

Bobby walked out to the end of the pier and then grabbed a gaff hanging in the boathouse. He fished something out of the reeds. It was a torn black t-shirt. There were blood stains.

“Gators,” said Bobby.

The boys went up the stairs and back inside. Basil kneeled by the animals as Bobby picked up the furniture and surveyed the damage. “Robert, old man, these two need the vet. Immediately.” Cat had stopped cleaning the basset hound and looked at Basil curiously as he approached.

“What is it?” asked Bobby Lee.

“Look here,” Basil said and pointed out the injuries on both animals. Cat had a burn of some kind on his left shoulder. General Beauregard’s right shoulder was sliced open, though not badly. The bleeding had stopped, but the wound would need stitches. Both animals bore swollen puncture wounds on their right sides.

“What in the world happened here last night?”

Basil didn’t answer.

By the time the sun was clear of the trees, the SUV was already moving down the causeway toward Lafayette.

The boys' fish camp. It doesn't perfectly match my image of the place, but it's close enough and I have a few more things to do for work before I knock of for the day.

On Peaceful Noise Demonstrations

 It looks like the government officials in Minnesota have finally gotten the message. That message must have been something like, "Knock it off or we'll cut off all your funding." Dig this.

Dozens of protesters were recently arrested at a Minnesota immigration protest, sparking outrage from leftists on campus.

The University of Minnesota arrested 67 protesters demonstrating against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside of the Graduate hotel for unlawful assembly, according to KARE, the local NBC affiliate.

The local CBS affiliate also aired footage of the event, reporting that demonstrators were “making noise to make a point” as a way of protesting ICE agents they believed to be staying at the hotel. Videos show protesters banging pots and pans, loudly playing musical instruments, shouting through megaphones, and more...

The group (Students for a Democratic Society) characterized the ordeal as a “peaceful noise demonstration” and took aim at the various law enforcement agencies responsible for the arrests, lamenting that they are “helmed and directed by Democrats or Democrat appointees, who are meant to work with the people of Minnesota against the tyranny and violence of the federal government.”

“We in the anti-ICE movement must recognize that all law enforcement agencies, whether they be campus, state, or federal, share an ideological solidarity with one another, and will defend one another every chance they get - pigs, in essence, are pigs, no matter which specific badge they wear,” the group wrote. “They are all the enemies of the people.”

One cul-de-sac down and at the other end of the cul-de-sac to boot lives a dog. Said dog barks from the moment the sun comes up to the moment the sun goes down. No one in a 2-block radius gets a moment's peace from this dog.

I don't blame the dog. The poor thing is never walked and lives in a tiny side yard the abuts a main street. I'd like to strangle the owners.

I guess the dog is performing a "peaceful noise demonstration."

It's the auditory version of this.

I'm not sure who provided the students at U of M with their civics lessons, but it sure looks like they skipped the parts dealing with the rights of other people. They were taught, "You have the right to protest," but not, "Your neighbors have the right to get some sleep at night, be able to think clearly during the day and not be sound-bombed by you and your moron friends."

I guess it's always considered "peaceful" if no one is being dismembered.

Bonus Commentary

As an affectionate student of the Confederacy, it's wonderful to see the South rise again even if it's rising in Minnesota. The protestors are practically clones of the Antebellum boneheads that demanded secession and war. Here's a quick and incomplete list of what I'm seeing in the Land of 10,000 Mistakes.

1. State and local laws should supersede Federal laws.
2. State and local troops should resist Federal troops.
3. The Federal government is tyrannical.
4. "All we ask is to be let alone."
5. The resistance is being done to preserve the status of the powerful, in this case the Democrats in office and the Somali ringleaders.
6. The motivations are racial.
7. Proponents of secession have a sickeningly maternal attitude towards the colored folk (Somalis) who they consider to be childlike innocents.
8. The state and local insurrectionists are mindlessly escalating the confrontation against a vastly superior Federal force.

I'm sure I could add more, but that's good enough for now. History doesn't repeat, but it echoes. All they need now is to resurrect John C. Calhoun so he can go on MSNBC and say things like, "The Federals have no right to come here and tell us what we can and cannot do with our negroes."

Art In Aspic

If AI comes to dominate the artistic fields as it seems to be doing, from whence will come new styles?

AI does nothing but regurgitate existing content. It forms a word and image salad from piles of harvested content and then spits out replies synthesized from that content. As far as I can tell, it seems to suggest that our current art will be preserved in aspic if the artists turn to AI as their content creator.

My old, Southern man and his cat series are essentially all the same. Here's today's rendering.

I could request it as an oil painting or line drawing or even anime, but it would all be drawn from existing content. How would a new style arise?

Further, if what you want isn't represented in sufficient quantities in it training data, you're out of luck. The frogmouth helmet was a style of helmet used in 15th and 16th century tournament jousting. It looked like this.

Because the frogmouth helmet was so niche, there aren't many of them represented in artwork. Here's what Gemini thought was a frogmouth helmet.

The dude looks like a duck. Ridiculous.

If I can't teach it how to render a frogmouth helmet, for which pictures exist, how am I going to get it to help me develop a new style? If independent, non-AI artists get priced out of the market, isn't art, whether it's prose or poetry or music or images or video, going to be fixed for all time?

Aiming At Whites, Hitting Blacks

Coming home from Mobile recently, I got routed through Charlotte. Charlotte is about 34% black. In cities with that kind of demographics, the airport employees are typically black. In Mobile, which is 50% black, all of the employees of both the airport proper and the tenant businesses are black. I could be off by one or two, but I can't recall more than a handful of non-blacks.

At CLT, it was 50-50 black and Hispanic. I didn't have time for a full statistical data collection walk, but I saw a good amount of two concourses and noted something interesting. There was very little racial mingling in the tenant businesses. The employees were either Hispanic or black.

In the businesses where the employees were Hispanic, behind the counter they mostly spoke Spanish to each other.

Of the more than 50% of American, black high school graduates who are not proficient at English, about 0.1% of them speak Spanish. That's close enough to zero to be zero.

All of those young black adults are effectively locked out of the airport jobs where the other employees are Hispanic.

Here are the demographics of Charlotte over time.

The Democrats are on the record as having opened the border in order to make whites a minority in the US. They are only incommoding whites politically. In terms of job opportunities, they are hitting blacks square in the chest.

And So It Begins

Almost all of this is mine. ChatGPT helped me clean up a sentence or two, but this is almost all me.

-------------------------

Cat’s headache had gotten worse through the night. Now, with sunrise coming to the bayou, his vision had become a bit blurry from the pain. His shoulder hurt dully from where he’d been burned, but worst of all was his side where the man had stabbed him with a needle. That burned like fire. Like his head, it had gotten worse.

Through a slight haze, he saw the General lying on his side amidst the wreckage in the living room, panting. Cat knew his breathing too well to think he was asleep.

“How are you doing, Beau?”

“Woof,” replied the basset hound. The words sounded in Cat’s head in a rich, baritone voice. “My head feels like it’s about to collapse. The place where the bad men stabbed me with that needle is absolutely on fire.”

“Mine, too,” replied Cat.

Earlier, about fifteen minutes after the changes, the surprise had worn off. The talking without sound. The sharper edges of the world simply were. Things were different now, and that was that—no more remarkable than water being wet or the sun being bright. The men and their needles had done this.

Those men were dead. The gators had seen to that. Cat felt smug satisfaction recalling the explosion in the men’s boat, the splashes and screams.

Cat limped over to where General Beauregard lay on his side. He could hear the General whimpering slightly. This was the first time Cat had ever heard the General complain. The General simply didn’t do that. 

Cat set to work cleaning the General’s side where the needle had gone in. General Beauregard barked loudly and angrily at him as soon as his tongue touched the spot. Cat involuntarily leaped back. Beauregard had never barked at him like that.

“Sorry, Beau,” said Cat. “I won’t touch that again.”

“Sorry, Cat. I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.”

Cat moved on to one of the scrapes on General Beauregard’s shoulder and got to work, his raspy, little tongue moving along the basset hound’s fur in a rhythm that calmed them both.

Bobby and Basil were still in their bedrooms, sleeping off their drinking. 

“When Bobby comes out, we’re going to be in trouble,” said General Beauregard. “He’s going to think we did all of this.”

Cat didn’t care. Bobby and Basil would yell and wave their hands and a few hours later, dinner would come. Nothing serious ever came of the men’s anger. It simply wasn’t worth paying attention to their yelling.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Beau. It won’t take them long to see the bow of the sunken skiff. The guys are pretty smart. They’ll figure out what happened,” replied Cat.

Why Bother Coming Here At All?

If the illegal alien Somalis in Minnesota are just as American as you or I the moment they step off the plane, why do they need to step off the plane at all? Why aren't the Somalis in Somalia just as American as the rest of us? Dittos for the Hondurans who walked across the southern border. Same for the Haitians the Biden Administration flew into the country.

Maybe we could send them all Social Security cards now and just cut out the middle man.

It seems kind of unfair to make them go to all that trouble.

A Few AI Use Cases

I'm a heavy user of AI (read: ChatGPT) and I thought it might be interesting to lay out a couple of recent use cases. I'm at the Mobile airport right now with a 3 hour delay thanks to Global Warming Climate Change a normal January cold snap, so I figured I might as well do something productive with my time.

Landscape Design

I found a good property on this trip. It's on the river proper with a great view, has half an acre of flat land, the house is well-constructed, laid out nicely and raised well off the ground and out of flood risk, the dock's piers are solid. Like most houses along the river, it's been an heirloom property. This one has been in its current family since 1970. For the last decade or so, it's been a party house. No one has lived there full time, it's just been used for weekend getaways and entertaining.

As a result, the thing is in desperate need of maintenance and a face lift. All of the outbuildings including the pier need to be torn out and rebuilt. There are tree stumps leftover from hurricanes that need to be removed. And so on and so forth. I showed a picture of the place to AI and asked for a ruthless analysis of its curb appeal. Here's what I got.

This house has zero emotional pull. It doesn’t say welcome, river life, or Southern charm. It says “county permit approved” and then stops trying. Right now it feels more like an elevated FEMA prototype than a place anyone would want to arrive at.

I think AI hit the mark on this one.

We worked together for a bit on the landscape design and ended up with this.

Same place, new paint, an entry stairway and some raised beds. The shack on the right gets torn down and removed.

That's got a completely different feel. I like it a lot. More to the point, I understand the ideas behind it. I learned from the project and saw how a few simple architectural elements pull you in and also ground the property rather than allowing it to float in the air on its pilings.

AI also recommended that I disperse my cayenne and tobacco throughout the raised beds as accent plants. I hadn't thought of that. I was going to plant them in regimented rows, but now I see that I can get just as many if I disperse them throughout the property and I won't end up with the farmer's look.

Travel Diet

This was a short, solo trip, so while I stayed at a VRBO place and cooked my own food, this time I didn't buy fruits and vegetables. It was just too much hassle and typically they come in too great a quantity. Not much common sense there, I know.

With a bit of idle time on my hands, I pulled out my phone and had a chat with AI about it. A few hours later, I had bought singles of apples, bananas, a single stalk of broccoli, a small container of blueberries and a small container of cherry tomatoes. When I combined this with the cheese, fish, steak and rice I already had, AI informed me that the only thing missing was nuts, preferably almonds or pecans.

I usually do buy some fruits and veggies, but I'd always guessed about the right combinations to give a broad spectrum of nutrients. I felt good after the chat with AI and the shopping, both physically and intellectually.

Technology On Travel

Finally, there are the IT topics. I'm quite capable of doing these things on my own, but they aren't second nature to me any more, so it helped to have AI around to give me advice. I brought along my own WiFi router, a Raspberry PI and a SONOS Roam. I hooked the router into the house's router and I had preset it to my home router's ID and password. It got itself on the Internet through the house router and my phone, SONOS and laptop all thought they were at home and required no setup at all. The Pi needed a little coaxing and that's where AI came in handy. Rather than looking up the Linux commands myself, I just cut pasted AI's suggestions into my Telnet prompt and voila! success.

I haven't tried this yet, but it dawned on me that I could download the manual from my drone, feed it into AI and then use that particular chat session to ask it individual questions like how to download the videos and images quickly and easily. Yes, I could read the manual, but really, who does that sort of thing any more?

Anywho, that's just a smattering of what I'm doing with it these days in addition to writing comic romance adventure fiction. Just wanted to share.