Happiness is a handful of water

The construct of happiness is the most perplexing that humans have ever devised. We each must grasp it, but the nature of it is like a heap of water, impossible to grab hold of, impossible to keep from slipping through our fingers.

We travel through this life, reaching for it again and again, enjoying its cool wetness momentarily, before it flees, taking our smiles as prisoners. If we are resolved and lucky enough, we might at least remember the feeling as it slips away, but we can never truly hold it in our hearts.

Thank God animals and plants never cultivated the notion of happiness, as an object, a thing to chase after. They just are happy. They never severed it from their souls, only to run after it forever, as we did.

Artillery Fungus???

As a Florida native, I am aware that all of Florida is trying to kill us. We have alligators, thousands of snakes including boa constrictors, burmese pythons, as well as bears, bob cats, poisonous Bufo toads the size of kitchen appliances, lightning, hurricanes, HOAs, spiders, sharks, jelly fish, zombies, mosquitoes larger and more aggressive than badgers and heat and humidity which can melt granite. This just for starters. 

I thought I was OK with all that, but today my wife informed me that we now have Artillery Fungus in our yard! What the hell??? Immediately I knew this was not good. I mean, the official name is Artillery Fungus!!!  It is also know as Shotgun Fungus. Wonderful.

Apparently this fungus grows in mulch, producing spores internally. When mature, the fruiting body splits open forming a cup-like shape. I guess that is the canon? And the canon shells are the mass of spores which is known by scientists as the glebal mass. Nifty name guys. About five hours after opening the spores are blasted into the air! The discharge mechanism generates 1/10,000hp and can shoot the glebal mass six meters!
 
The spores are fungus, and look like it. Black, sticky and gooey. They land on the side of your house, your car, the Amazon delivery guy, cats and dogs.
 
How to get them off the house? Power-washing may not be effective if you wait long, especially if you have vinyl siding. You might try scraping the spores off one-by-one with a scraper or steel wool. After that there will still be a stain left, which can be taken care of with an ink eraser or possibly bleach.
 
Your car is another story. You probably just want to sell it on Ebay and buy a new one.
 
Artillery Fungus. Amazing What next? Diarrhea spewing wasps??? 
 
I can’t wait.
 
 
 
 

 

Failed Meditation Attempt

Meditation is supposed to be really good to achieve a peaceful mind and center your soul. I have friends who swear by it. I had my first directed meditation session recently at the gym I am attending. Did not work out well.
 
I enjoyed it, and did the breathing and arm stretching as directed. The person doing the directing helped us to imagine a beautiful beach and then a nice boat where we casually drifted to a small tropical island with white sandy beaches.The lighting in the room was muted, pleasant meditating music was playing, and her voice was at the perfect tone and pitch.
 
The problem is my mind. There is a five ring circus in there, along with a NASCAR race and rabbits. Yellow rabbits.  With hats. A thousand thoughts and images are swirling about in there, every day, all the time. I’ve learned to hide it very well. Some people over the years thought I was just very observant, others thought I was bored and others thought I was easily distracted. One person at a university meeting diagnosed me as possible ADHD. I’m not sure if that is the case. I can fake concentration well. My career was very successful.
 
But I could not fake meditation. Sure, I was along for the ride, the boat trip, the beach, sunshine, forests. But everything else was going on inside my head at the same time. Songs were swirling about, a 1950’s Japanese monster movie was playing, and I kept wandering off to different parts of the island that the meditation leader had not described. But I faked it well. Afterward, everyone was commenting on the experience, thanking the instructor, and they all felt relaxed. I thanked her too. But since I had not commented on the experience she asked me about it.  Inhaling deeply, I told her that it was nice, comfortable and that she did an excellent job. She asked me how I felt and did the meditation create a calm moment.
 
That’s when I told her about the gigantic 30 foot tall box of elbow macaroni that plopped down on the white sandy beach. True story, it really did. She stared at me as other participants chuckled. She closed up shop and we all left. 
 
Oh well.
 
 
 

Lake Istokpoga Park

South Central Florida, actually, most of Florida, is filled with lakes. Thus so many towns with “Lake” in the name. I live in Placid Lakes, which is next door to Lake Placid. Anyway, we took a quick tour of Lake Istokpoga Park which is not a town but an actual park on Lake Istokpoga.

It is a county park in Highlands County.
 See map below:

 

Below are some of the photographs of the park.

Chasing Happiness

I find this quotation quite interesting.
 
“What man actually needs is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
Frankl, Viktor E.. Man’s Search for Meaning (p. 105). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
 
One of the happiest times of my life was when I was fighting hard to achieve a specific position at work, to earn my Masters Degree, and, at the same time, wooing my girlfriend to become my wife. I never slept for two years, and I loved it. Frankl was right, happiness or contentment is not the lack of problems but the struggle to achieve something.
 
Is it the achievement or the chase? That is an excellent question. I’ve experienced stress sometimes when striving to achieve some thing, but also a sense of fulfillment, a sense of purpose. Perhaps even meaning. Maybe I was too consumed by the struggle to achieve something that all my other “problems” pale. Maybe I just am too busy to think of something to worry about. Maybe it is the thrill of the chase?
 
Walking down memory lane, I see that the pattern holds. When I am striving to achieve something in my life, struggling even, I am most happy. When I experience moments of “peace”, pools of time when I am technically in a calm peaceful position, I am not happy. Or peaceful inside.
 
I am not sure where this comes from. I know I have always been like this though. I was born into a home with alcoholic parents, death and fear. I suffered from a speech defect, anxiety and fear. But I always was striving to get better. Maybe this is a survival thing. Maybe an arrogance thing.

This is why I detest the word “Retirement”. Where is the achievement? Where is the struggle, the successes along the way? This is why I don’t tell people I am retired. I tell them I am on sabbatical.  Or that I am between jobs. Or, I am an undercover CIA operative infiltrating the Grey Panthers terrorist group. Do they still exist? I don’t know.The need to chase something meaningful is strong within me.

Dart
 

Best Laptop for Writers?

Good luck. I have not found one yet. A Google search will bring up dozens of websites that rate laptops, but all of them are making money off your clicks. Few of them even attempt to answer the question. They rate laptops on speed, hard drive access, software, CPU speed and screen brightness. Most anything they recommend have links they earn money off of, and the laptops can pretty much do everything from type a letter to launch a rocket to the moons of Jupiter.

Not what I want.

I’m a desktop guy, because I have more freedom in keyboard selection and other items. But often a writer needs to be outside, in a park, at the beach, in the mountains or a crowded cafe. We sometimes need external stimulus to light our creativity. I tried hauling my desktop and 22 inch monitor to a coffee shop but there weren’t enough electrical outlets for my setup. And the baristas kept tripping over my cables.

For me, what I need in a laptop for writers is the following:

  • A very comfortable keyboard. Large enough, the setup sensible, the touch of the keys just right, and no extra number keypad. I rarely run excel routines when writing a poem or short fiction, so I don’t need that. The keyboard has to feel good. For typing.
  • Enough power to run Word or similar office writing software.

That’s it. I don’t need a 15 GB solid state drive. I don’t need 32 GB of memory. I don’t need a $1,600 state of the art motherboard.

The key is indeed the keyboard. And since laptops today are designed to be used by writers, lawyers, astronauts, senators, business people, military intelligence officers and whatnot, laptops are designed to do EVERYTHING. And their keyboard is designed that way too.

I would love to find a simple basic laptop with a great keyboard for writers. Not gonna do math. Not gonna mail merge a thousand forms. Not gonna do photo processing or art. I just want to write. Keyboard is the key for me.

Yes, I can hook up a separate keyboard, but that sort of defeats the goal of having a light and easy to carry laptop. Don’t want to have to drag accessories about.

I’ll keep looking.  If you have one you like, leave a comment and I’ll check it out.

 

 

Finding Fiction Markets – A Tedious Task

I want to write a nice interesting story and then have elves whisk it off my computer to submit it to the exact proper publication instantly. It would be nice if the story was automatically accepted and published for the world and galaxies to see within nine days.

Sadly, and for me, regretfully, there is no such service. To be published as a new writer, one has to first discover publications that might be willing to consider your particular type of fiction. I stayed up all night once with a bottle of Dewar’s and counted every possible fiction publication and I lost count at 37 million, three hundred and seven glasses of amber liquid. What? Oh hell, there are more places to publish fiction than I can count, even sans Dewar’s. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection and three functioning brain cells can put up a website and call it a “magazine” or “review” or whatever.  There are way too many of those, as well as the “pay to be published” magazines. Not counting them, there are still thousands of legitimate markets out there.  A website that helps writers find markets, Duotrope, currently lists over 7,600 publications! Thankfully, they have a search screen so writers can sort out the type of publication that might, maybe, perhaps, you never know, match your style of writing. 

The task of identifying a legitimate market that might publish my little gem of fiction is extremely challenging and can we say more tedious than I am capable of managing. Since I live in 2021 I naturally demand instant gratification, so those publications that will respond in six months I eliminate. Who wants to wait a half of a year to get rejected?

This is more me whining than an actual article about the process. The process is what the process is, so I need to stop being lazy. I’m thinking of finding writers who are similar to me, and seeing where they were published. Or just dedicating an hour a day looking for markets, reading their stories, checking their submission guidelines and so forth.

Tedious.

Wish me luck.

Northern Cardinals

This is my Northern Cardinal page. As I photograph them in my back yard or other places in Florida, I will share them here.

Per Wikipedia, “The common name, as well as the scientific name, of the northern cardinal refers to the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, who wear distinctive red robes and caps. The term “northern” in the common name refers to its range, as it is the northernmost cardinal species.”

There are no Cardinals in Boise, Idaho where I spent the last three and a half years. I missed them very much.

The Cardinal have a special place in my heart as they were my mother’s favorite bird. I rarely saw them in our Pembroke Pines, Florida neighborhood, but in Placid Lakes, Florida we seem to have at least one couple residing in the trees around our home. So thrilled about that!