April 1, 2008
That Burman boy from last month didn’t work out. He drove too fast. He was too dashing. He had fans. So we hired Lonny here. Known as a super deliberate, no nonesense driver, Lonny might take a little longer, but he'll do the job with virtually no panache or flair. Perfect. Welcome aboard, Lonny!
April 2, 2008
Give 'em a couple of beers and they start cryin' in it... My buddies with issues seem to think I'm the go to guy. One by one, beer after beer, they seek me out with their problems. Terrible problems. Horrible problems. They all know my wife is the shrink, but none of them want to pay the money. What do I know? I tell one guy he watches too much TV, I tell another to pay more attention to his wife, by the third guy I start to repeat myself with the TV thing. They all go away with my 'advice'. Did I help? Probably. It’s all in the mind, remember. So yeah, I probably worked some magic there. Some might say I’m a hero. Or heroic. I’m just sayin’, you know.
April 3, 2008
I know I keep talking about this like it’s something unusual, but it’s starting to freak me out. I’m in constant triage mode. I have so many projects going at once, big projects, that I’m having time allocation issues. I never have time allocation issues. Curse you, multitasking she-devil! Sigh. Only hard work will end my travails, so I’m off to do some.
April 4, 2008
It's my hope that countries don’t boycott the Beijing Olympics. Years ago, I was with a girl who made the US women’s swimming team for the Moscow Games. She worked so long and tenaciously toward her task of making it to the Olympics, that when the US boycotted the Moscow Games, she completely changed the direction and focus of her life and became a medical doctor. So kids, don’t let this happen to you! Wait a minute...
April 5, 2008
This is pretty neat. I was on the phone with my sister (the power broker) who was of course doing other stuff including downloading her e-mail while she chatted, when she got one from our cousin who works for NASA. He sent her a Power Point slide show of these cool photographs taken from space by astronaut Sunita Williams. My sister sent it on to me. I thought maybe you guys might like to see it as well. If so, go here.
April 6, 2008
I found a small red rock up in our field yesterday. I brought it back and put it on the base of the computer monitor – looks quite smart, the red against the black. Anyway, I’m always going out onto our property, it’s nice to have some of our property come into my office.
April 7, 2008
What’s in a name? Apparently everything to Fred Jones, inventor of the Water Jones, an ice cleaning machine which was a spectacular commercial flop. Years later, Fred would lament to anyone who would listen, “If I had only been born Fred Zamboni! I’d be rich!” That’s what’s in a name.
April 8, 2008
I know that when I enter a website, they are going to have my IP address and the city of my ISP and what link I came in from and what pages I visit, but they don’t have my face. They don’t have a screen full of me in my bathrobe logging in. All they have is my data, numbers, pffft. It’s the same reason why the picture phone never happened. People like it that you can’t see them on the other end in all their private regular natural glory. The Net ever loses that, it will lose something precious.
April 9, 2008
What Bush and Cheney are professing to do:
After 8 years of us, look at how America has spread democracy around the world!
April 10, 2008
What Bush and Cheney did.
After 8 years of us, look at the mess America has become.
April 11, 2008
Self-help means just that - you are going to be first in your thoughts in the hope that by being a better you, everyone benefits. That’s so tight that not doing it sounds deviant. If you think it’s selfish to improve the quality of your own life, and that focusing on others at your own expense is a more spiritual thing to do, I need to point out that your life, and its experiences, are completely subjective. That means you, first and only. Others only see what you’ve made of yourself. And by making it good for you, it automatically becomes good for everybody else. It’s called self-help, it means help yourself. Yes? All right, my work is done.
April 12, 2008
Barry’s house was built like a tank. It had one way in and one way out. And Barry always kept a vigilant eye. Mostly for Lulu. Always for Lulu. When Barry was a boy, his older sister Lulu would hide under the bed and surprise him so badly, panic him so fully, that Barry had to wear goggles and a helmet. Barry’s house was built like a fortress so he would never be surprised by anyone ever again. Specifically Lulu. Especially Lulu. Exclusively Lulu.
April 13, 2008
To rebuild the barn, it will need to be emptied of its contents. Of all the things I dread moving the most, it is the 12 cords of fir and birch stacked 7 feet high in the 18’ x 26’ wood shed attached to the end of the barn. I’d have to haul the wood out of there, by hand, one piece at a time - my god! – move it, stack it and cover it somewhere else, and then when the new barn and woodshed are up, uncover it, move it all back, and stack it by hand one piece at a time again. Unless you’ve done this, you have no idea how much work that will be. Even though I’m stalling this out and am not quite ready to tackle it, I dunno, I guess now would be an appropriate time to cry me a river, for those so inclined.
April 14, 2008
Update on what’s going on site wise:
- The Best of KeithSpeak is entering the final stages of completion. I will brag all about the details when fully finished. But soon.
- There are new sections of the site coming, but not just yet. But not the distant future either. Somewhere in between.
- I am finally going to offer Write About Dogs as a download. Sometime this year.
- I’m toying with a sensational new marketing idea that will clearly benefit the readers of our material.
To sum: New content is coming. Obviously, this is cause for joy and a reason to celebrate – or more - it’s been rumored that Castro stepped down in Cuba because he wanted extra time to read this site once the new content arrives. That’s what I heard. Did too. But even Fidel will have to wait as nothing new is ready - just yet.
April 15, 2008
There were some favorite images from the old site that never made it into the new site. So I’m going to insert them here and there, every now and then, just for the record.
April 16, 2008
Do I consider myself a manly man? Why yes, yes I do. But my definition of manliness is personal and subjective and may not be at all what the media or the public thinks is so. For instance, I think it’s manly to be true to yourself. ‘Course I suppose that could be womanly too. It’s actually gender neutral, isn’t it? Huh, so much for that theory.
April 17, 2008
You know what I thought would be a good idea (for somebody else but not for me), would be for a well known writer to have webcams set up in his work space (one focused on his chair, one on his computer monitor, one showing the whole office so you could watch his avoidance behaviors) and show him at work. That way, everyone who is interested could watch the creative process, the inspirations as they happen, the rewrites, the hard work, the staring off into space thinking, the formation of terrific lines that unfold before one’s eyes and the clunky ones that don’t make it to the end of the paragraph. It would be way better than taking a writing course at school, because that addresses the mechanical and not the inspirational or the practical. Watching a famous writer write, would show all that and more. Don’t you think? Now I can’t do this personally, mainly because I don’t want anyone to see the magic - stand back! or me in my underwear at 4 in the morning, writing and raving and maybe even drinking. You know?
April 18, 2008
I know what you're thinking. You’re probably wondering how you ended up here, eh? Maybe it’s because you stumbled upon an original guy with a rich inner life who refuses to follow? A comfortable guy who really really loves the life he’s living, has looked at why that’s so, and writes about it? Maybe some of what's said is applicable to you? Maybe you could really really love the life you’re living? Maybe that’s why you’re here?
April 19, 2008
Hockey goalies are different human beings. There are only certain people in the population who would prefer to be shot at rather than shooting. I ran into a guy I used to play hockey with, a quirky netminder - imagine Keith Moon in goal. He was with his wife. I couldn't get over how normal she was. He was anything but. Yet standing there together, you could see why they were with each other, each being something the other wasn't and finding that attractive. It was the most balanced I’ve ever seen him. He just looked weird in street clothes, that’s all.
April 20, 2008
Our yard
has two gates
for your entering or exiting pleasure.
April 21, 2008
Pictures You Can’t See
It was like a fashion shoot or something. Striding purposefully down the street smoking a cigar and being trailed by three sycophant type guys in suits with briefcases, was a hot, powerful looking woman dressed in a very chic business outfit, walking with the gait of a champion. She looked important, sexy and formidable advancing rapidly and smoking like she was, oblivious to the bumbling three behind her scrambling to keep up. It would have made a great advertisement for a cigar brand. As it was, it just pointed out to me that if people like her were here, maybe our little town wasn’t so little anymore.
April 22, 2008
It’s Earth Day. Why not Earth month? Earth year? Why isn’t it Earth first all the time? I mean, after all, what could possibly be a bigger priority than the literal thing that sustains our lives? Making money? Corporate interests? Government malfeasance? Jeez.
April 23, 2008
If you were given the choice between knowing the exact day you were going to die (but not how), or knowing how you were going to die (but not when), which would you choose?
April 24, 2008
Howard would cheat on her no more. Betty made herself some guns and had plans to use ‘em.
April 25, 2008
Within the last half hour it has rained, snowed, and now there is bright sunshine. There is the tendency to analyze the weather mainly as a global thing, but really, it’s a local phenomenon. It’s what you personally experience in your ambient neighborhood that constitutes the weather for you. Well what if I told you that we humans make the weather? What if I told you that and completely meant it.
April 26, 2008
Here is Howard (in beard) shamelessly regaling his office cronies with stories of his heroic debaucheries at Betty’s expense, all of them having a good chuckle over Howard’s whorish defiling of that old saw - what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Little did any of them know, at that very moment, that Betty was polishing her guns...
April 27, 2008
The barn project has been put on hold until all the birds living in it, mostly swallows and flickers, finish nesting and the young are dispatched. Right now it’s a beehive of aerial activity down there. Which is just as well as suddenly I've got major repairs to do on our perimeter fence thanks to some fool who drove their vehicle through our metal fence panels, ran over a bunch of trees, and then busted back out through another series of steel panels and left the scene, the results of which are 5 mangled sheets of steel and 6 dead trees. I hope the vehicle repair bills are in the thousands.
April 28, 2008
Betty missed! Her gun calibrations were off and instead of giving the cheating Howard what he deserved, hit this man in the quad, Alfred Eleven, a talk show host in his native Austria, causing him to have to use a real cane, even though he always used a fake one for the posh effect it engendered when he was healthy.
Betty was charged with attempted Howard murder, but in a massive twist of fate, she hired her shooting victim's brothers, Manny, Herve and Gino, to defend her, even though they weren’t lawyers and lived in Austria! (The press would later hail the move as nothing short of brilliant.)
Even though the incident took place in Ohio, the brothers Eleven sued Howard in Europe because Herve was afraid to fly over water. Howard was blamed for inciting Betty to invent, machine and assemble her own humongous guns because Howard was such a gigantic letch that she needed the big ones to do him in, but that these powerful but necessary monsters proved to be too hard to calibrate down in her basement workshop where the lighting wasn’t very good and she could only shoot them so far to practice killing him accurately. Therefore, the brothers Eleven asked for life and got it. Howard is currently serving time in an Austrian prison while Betty has become a celebrity heroine to cheated on wives everywhere and has appeared on Oprah twice to show these women how to build their own big guns. The end.
April 29, 2008
I got a call to write an original screenplay. I’m pretty busy so I asked him when he needed it by. Tomorrow, he said. I laughed. It’s a one day, one page screenwriting competition, he said, and I want you to enter it on my behalf. On your behalf? Under my name, he clarified. Why would I do that? Because I will pay you a lot of money, he replied. No way, as I was already offended that this guy would see me as some gun to hire to ghost a screenplay for him and not some genius, original writer who could enter the competition on my own under my own name and blow this guy and whomever he does hire out of the water just to teach him a lesson. Take that! If only I wasn’t so busy and this guy meant anything to me. Because I was and he didn’t. So I thanked him for his time and wished him well.
April 30, 2008
Self-portrait.
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KeithSpeak May 2008
