It’s A Kind Of Magic
I get a lot of feedback. And even though I rant about the anonymous fuckwits, they’re the minority. They’re an obnoxious minority, but they really are the 0.1% idiots. In reality, I enjoy 99.9% of my feedback. I’m very lucky to have such great readers.
But every once in a while, someone writes something that makes me feel really, really good about life.
Without further ado, I’ll share tonight’s message (suitably anonymized).
B4: the Update
(Why can’t I resist a clever title?)
I just wanted to post a quick update. After the holidays—when I didn’t get much time to write—and then a week-plus of just not being in the mood to write (the first week of the year), I’ve been in a writing mood lately.
I’m not up to my 10,000-words a week of the early days of B1, but I still managed to maintain a pretty good pace last week. The weekend has been different altogether, full of Honey-Do lists and personal projects, but next week should be good.
The Culture of Silence
My grandfather was a study in contrasts. As a child of the Depression, his family lost everything—the family restaurant, the car, the furniture, and finally, the house. Later in life, my grandfather didn’t have something unless he had two of them (or more). He grew up in a time when you could lose anything, including the roof over your head, so you’d better have a spare.
In the last twenty years of his life, he lived like Fred Sanford, with acres of junk scattered across his land. He had more Volkswagen Beetles than I could count, and none of them ran. He had all sorts of cars, trucks, and other machinery. Most of it didn’t work. My grandparents even had two houses. They were both on the same property (one had been moved from another location), connected by a big workshop and a hallway.
But I said that my grandfather was a study in contrasts. Imagine a junk man in tattered overalls, a cap that’s seen better days, maybe socks, and battered shoes. Now imagine that man with a college education, a Masters degree, and a career of military and public service.