Last Friday

To say I was shocked upon hearing the that the conference my university represented was imploding would have been an understatement. Before the day was done, both Arizona schools and Utah requested to be put into the Big 12 after Oregon and University of Washington were invited into the Big Ten, leaving four schools, Cal Berkley, Stanford, Oregon State and WSU to fend for themselves. 

By Monday evening reports came in that certain people in the ACC were thinking of inviting Stanford and Cal to their conference. At this point it is just rumors circulating that this might be the future, if this, that, and the other occurs. 

If that should happen, of course, Oregon State and Washington State would either be stuck in limbo or have their respective athletic directors find a new conference themselves, leaving the Pac 12 the dinosaur distinction of historical archives. 

How did this happen? In its most simplest terms, money is what drove this decision. Television, and most importantly football that is televised brings in the lion’s share of the cash for these schools. The other sports programs don’t compare.  

The problem of realigning Washington State and Oregon State with other conferences is that they’re too big for most of the conferences in the west with the exception of Mountain West, that we would compete with Boise State, Air Force and UNLV. Is that going to be the answer? Then what happens ten more years down the road when another sudden realignment shift occurs? Like the automobile industry, are university programs going to be just three mega-conferences, like monstrous krakens covering this country just for the pure sinful pleasure of greedy athletic directors and television executives? 

Unfortunately, this appears where this country’s university programs are headed, academia be damned. 

Fire Fly 

I woke to an alarm clock this morning. I then smelled the unmistakable odor of wood smoke invading my nostrils. Two days ago, there was a brush fire east of my house. Last night I saw smoke billowing from a separate fire that started five miles southwest of here. This afternoon after getting off from work, I noticed heavy smoke billowing well south of here down by Sunset Hill.  

I am certain there’s a fire fly darting about from place to place and he or she is either bored or just plain dumb that wants to do something destructive. This fire fly wants to see the flashing red and blue lights and the wails of sirens echoing off the trees and hills. This fire fly wants to see aircraft and helicopters fly overhead depositing water and red retardant on the flames. He or she wants to see the first responders respond, fearlessly putting down the flames that lick at them, heedless of the dangers that they must ignore and save the innocents from the one fire fly that skitters about from place to place to start these blazes with such disregard to human life and property. 

It saddens me that people are so disrespectful that they feel this need to create havoc and chaos, start fires because they have nothing better to do than be a fire fly in the room. Maybe one day karma will come to their door and they will wonder as many others have why me? 

Stone Mountain Paradox

As I have told you my loyal readers I’m starting a new book about An African American Cowboy in the old west. Last night on PBS I watched an episode about a symbol of the Confederacy called Stone Mountain that both enlightened me because I do enjoy watching historical stuff like this and disheartened me because I abhor racism in all its shapes and sizes. 

The reality is that Stone Mountain which depicts two southern Confederate generals and its President, Jefferson Davis, glorifies this chapter in our history of the “Lost Cause,” theory that the north  started the war by depriving its citizens of its constitutional rights to property—i.e., owning Black Slaves.  

While I do believe that we as a nation cannot turn our faces to what happened, we also must cope with the reality that a certain aspect of our collective culture has to continue to survive the aftereffects this war generated. There will always be White supremacists out there who hate the Black man with so much passion he or she will always blame them for their misfortune, economic distress, and inability to move forward. 

Our culture will always have people distrustful of the government and willing, even praying that someone will come along and be their messiah, such as Mr. Trump tried to accomplish. Of course, had he won a second term, I doubt very much they would have stomached him declaring the United States Constitution invalid and making himself president for life. 

Stone Mountain is in our collective consciousness, whether we want it to be or not. Martin Luther King even wrote about it in his “I have A Dream” speech in 1963. Tearing down monuments that at one time glorified Confederate soldiers and generals isn’t the answer, though I personally thought it interesting that all of this was done in reaction to the George Floyd killing along with other brutal police killings in 2020 giving Black Lives Matter ammunition to show how our racist attitudes hadn’t changed.  

We have an obligation to learn from history, visit the sites, the memorials, the statues, not destroy them or revise our history to suit a political agenda. My worry is that if we destroy those relics of our collective past, then we certainly are doomed to repeat history. 

Tony Bennett Died

Even though it was expected, it was still a shock that I saw on the news of Tony Bennett’s passing. After all he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and he was ninety-six. 

I never really thought much of him growing up. After all, that kind of music was for my parents, along with Pat Boone, The Kingston Trio and Perry Como. His music wasn’t my music. According to my dad he proposed to Mom from the song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” 

But I found out that couldn’t have been the case since the song supposedly came out in 1962. Dad proposed to Mom in 1957. So, it must’ve been another crooner of that era. It was still a good song and it obviously got him the fame and money to launch his career further. 

At any rate the fact he got of these accolades in his career in such a short span, I thought, seemed monumental. It came to my attention, like every other entertainer of that era, he also had a drug problem and had to walk away from the business, making a comeback later in appearances with Conan and Letterman. 

I saw the episode earlier this year when 60 minutes aired him doing the final tour with Lady Gaga. I was impressed that he could remember the lyrics and the beat to each and every song he performed, acting as if he weren’t stricken with that awful disease at all. It was in those interviews that one could see how he withdrew, his confused expressions when the interviewer asked him a question that I saw how Alzheimer’s indeed tainted him. 

Expectations of a MAGA 

I’m a member of a social media site called Quora. I’m sure it has more to do with my reaction to the regiment of loyal followers of Donald Trump who called themselves Trumpian or MAGAs. 

To blame this on one person is giving Donald trump too much credit. As one author pointed out the idea of populism has been around since William Jennings Bryant and Adolf Hitler. The idea is to create power in the masses that for years did not have power. Then someone like Trump comes around and tells these frustrated people they too have a voice and all they have to do is stand up to those in power—the elitists—and overthrow them. In the minds and hearts of these people it’s about scapegoat and separating them from those true Americans. 

In 1967, a social studies teacher created an experiment called the Third Wave. It was a social experiment designed to teach high school students how easy it was to fall into fascism and Nazism from a stable democratic government. The entire emphasis of the experiment was that democracy focused too much on the individual and not on the community. 

If Trump’s own political views weren’t so out of my beliefs then I too might have shared in his rhetoric 

But, I have views that are more in line with the individual not the populists who rather have a dictator telling them what they want to hear and going with the flow. They want to believe that their voice matters and the elitists, the journalists, and the minorities, who they believe are the enemy need to be silenced. 

Eventually populism will fade away from our social consciousness, as did many other voices of the past that believed in change. We as a society can’t blame the MAGA populists for wanting their voices heard. Obviously for too long one party catered to one group that promoted all these changes that didn’t fit in their belief system and another group that pandered to the Wall Street tycoons, the doctors with their million-dollar mansions and other elitists who opposed changing the status quo. 

As I have stated in past blogs, there needs to be a middle ground where everyone can have a voice and affect change that means something for all.  

My Writing for This Week 

My loyal readers, as I write this my beta reader is reading Blood on Poinsettia that I finished writing last week and did an initial edit this week. 

My next project which starts a new series is a Cowboy western with a lead character called Nate Turner. As many people don’t realize, African American cowboys were more popular than first thought. Hollywood of course didn’t want to portray a black man as anything but a train porter or hotel baggage handler. Nate Turner was a run-away slave from Mississippi who among other things is a long shoreman on the Ohio River in Cincinnati, a Union calvary soldier during the Civil War and a wrangler and cowboy doing the cattle runs from Texas to Kansas on the Chisum Trail . 

I haven’t decided how many books will come from this series but suffice to say it’s all in my head at the moment. I’ll need to do more research and go from there. The history of an African American cowboy would be quite fascinating.  

I’ll also be using a pen name, Hyrum Guilderbund, as I will pen my actual name as the editor. As many of you know, Chrystal Guilderbund, one of the main characters in my books is Hyrum Guilderbund’ s granddaughter. 

On the marketing front I am going to be trying to get a book signing or two going here in Spokane. I’ll use both my recently published books, A Man’s Passion, and I Albert Peabody.

The Conundrum of AI 

I remembered that movie 2001 Space Odysseys where Al or Hal, I can’t quite remember, oh yeah I got Google it will tell me. It’s Hal. Anyway, the problem I find with AI, artificial Intelligence, for those of us who aren’t millennials or gen zees, is our reliance on these things that enslaves us to this regardless if we want it or not. Anyway, the line that Hal stated was about how we were now his slave when before we were his master. 

It’s this prospect that I am certain is why the government and many high-tech corporations are so alarmed at this point. It’s as if they freed the genie from the bottle and can’t figure out how to put it back in. 

Last week during our writer’s meeting with Inland Northwest Writers’ Guild, we discussed this very topic. What we touched upon was how AI may affect our careers as writers. Open AI Chat GPT is one aspect that researchers claim can revolutionize our economy in ways not thought possible. 

I see great potential for AI say in the realm of STEM—SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING AND MATH. I’m not so sure how it would work if one wanted to use AI to write a novel, short story, or poem. Afterall, AI is at its core a computer generated algo rhythm based on 1s and 0s. It cannot by its very nature create prose or poetry or a painting. 

While AI may accelerate cures for cancer or Alzheimer’s, can influence climate change models to where we become ninety percent carbon emissions free, prevent catastrophic climate change, it is still incapable of creating a science fiction novel in which the antagonist is a computer on a space station. 

So, while we writers and editors can sleep better at night knowing our jobs are mostly secured. Will AI enslave us as Hal may well hope to do? Unlikely unless that computer has feelings, emotions, and creative thought. 

A  New National Pastime 

Hello my loyal readers. My latest book I’ve been working on is getting really close to completion. At the moment I’ve called it Blood on Poinsettia. As I mentioned when the news story broke that the book I’m writing is based loosely on the four murdered college students at the University of Idaho. I changed a good portion of what is relevant to the plot as opposed to the actual events that took place back in November 2022. 

It brings me to the point of this thing we all have delt with, dwelled upon, and debated over since Columbine, our new national pastime of open season on human children here in America. You see, my loyal readers, I’m beyond angry, upset and helplessly hoping that someone somewhere decides to do something tangible about what has been going on for nearly thirty years. 

It has absolutely nothing at all to do with our rights to bear arms. If anybody who knows me can vouch I am in favor of law-abiding citizens owning and possessing firearms to protect family, life, and property. What I have a problem with is this attitude where every time someone wants to do something that makes perfectly good sense, someone else blows a gasket because somehow this idea will take away their gun rights, and then the cycle repeats itself with another school shooting somewhere. 

I’m frankly tired of turning on the news and crying for the children caught in the crosshairs of some lunatic that somehow got himself possession of a firearm—no firearms that he apparently got legally because no one questioned him about what he intended to do with four AR-15 or AK-47s with six hundred rounds of bullets. CHA-CHING.

Excuse my French but I’m tired of the connerie. How many mass shootings so far involving school children? It doesn’t take a mathematician any time at all to rationalize that too many children die needlessly every year. Mass shootings may be a small fraction of the horrors one must face with a child being struct down by gun violence. Do you want to be that parent who is informed that Bobby or Shirley or Charlie won’t ever come home from school by a police officer, a doctor, or your clergyman? I don’t want to wish that on any parent. 

It was tragic enough for my sisters and me when our mother died tragically in an automobile accident going on fourteen years now. My sisters and I were emotional wrecks for the better part of a year. Let’s figure out a way to closed down this open season on our children, this new national pastime. 

Happy Publishing Day

Today Austin Macauley has made today publication day for my newly released book I Albert Peabody.

As you my loyal readers are aware I have been working on this project for the better part of two years now. I am hopeful it will succeed both critically and financially.  Mostly because I have many more projects coming in the future and as everyone knows, success in this business can blossom into something quite special.

If I hadn’t said so enough before I’ll say it now to everyone of you who believed in my efforts, thank out from the bottom of my heart.

A New Beginning

Sunday morning my step daughter gave birth to Ethan James Viscario. He quite literally is a miracle. 

I truly think he looks like his father. 

I won’t get into the particulars but Emily had a very hard and complicated labor that started Friday night. 

Suffice to say, the medical community still lacks the philosophy of caring that we all feel we deserve. There was an argument about her pain and the doctor’s concern he might be over-medicating her. I will leave it at that. 

He is a beautiful boy and will undoubtedly be a shining light in his parents’ eyes.