Month: August 2005

Hurricane Katrina is a little more than 663 miles away from me right now, which is a comfortable distance. The National Weather Service keeps insisting they know which way the storm is going to track and the general vicinity in which it will hit (the northern Gulf of Mexico). But their estimates keep getting moved westward. First, the Florida Panhandle was the likely target. Then Mobile Bay or Biloxi. Now the best guestimates put it somewhere in the central to southeast Louisiana coast. If it keeps moving westward, it will not be a good thing for us on the upper Texas coast.

I don’t find any fault with the weather service. Although it seems that forecasting hurricanes would be easier than predicting winter storms in this part of the country, these tropical badboys and badgirls sometime don’t go exactly as planned. Thus, we will just have to wait and see whether Katrina takes that northward turn that would put it somewhere in Louisiana. Right now there are hurricane watches for the New Orleans areas and tropical storm warnings back east to the Dry Tortugas. That is an odd name isn’t it? It sounds like some kind of ugly intestinal virus.

The photo is of some hurricane taken from the WC-130 aircraft of the Hurricane Hunters out of Keesler AFB, Miss. During the summers when I was stationed down the road in Gulfport, I used to see these big birds slowly make their way out into the Gulf. These folks who fly into the eye of the storms are heroes as far as I am concerned. Heroes and probably a little nuts. But the information they gather helps us have a better clue where these storms are going. Better them than me.

While going through some of my photos yesterday I came up with this picture of a fence. I took it in early April while I was visiting a friend who lives about 45 miles southeast of Denver. If you strain your eyes you can see mountains in the background. It’s not a very good picture. But that’s not the point. Fence posts are the point.

“Huh?” you might say/ask/exclaim/scream.

Posts. Great wooden posts. They yell for all the world to hear: “This is blah, blah, blah’s property.” Of course, I don’t know anyone named blah, blah, blah, as cool a name as it is.

Police officer: “Sir, what is your name?”
blah, blah blah: “blah, blah, blah.”

And off to the races you go for what is sure to be a fun-filled several minutes that most likely is capped off by being cuffed, fingerprinted and thrown in a filthy cell with a axe murderer.

I digress.

Posts. As objects go they are Daingerfielded, as in Rodney. They don’t get no (yes I know I’m using a double negative)respect.

For instance: Someone is dumb as a post. Well if you use the term pre-PC mode to mean unable to speak, then perhaps. But if you are inferring that someone is stupid, then that is just downright insulting. To the post. Posts aren’t stupid. Posts aren’t anything except a post.

I think we need to stand by our posts, now more than ever. The country can use a good post. Post oak post perhaps. A little alliterative but it should work. Keep me posted.

God how I hate to open the mailbox and see a SASE staring me in the face. Seeing in the pitiful pen work from my own hand as sender and addressee fills me with instant gloom. It’s like my parade was rained upon by a torrent of nuts and bolts, provided that I even had a parade to begin with.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, SASE stands for Self Addressed Stamped Envelope. It is what those publications which are still in the dark ages and want queries and submissions by snail mail require, so that two or three months later they can return the SASE and make some writer’s day a crap deluxe.

I will be honest here. I don’t like cold rejection. I hate it. I will walk through fire in a gasoline-soaked tuxedo to avoid rejection. And I’m not just talking about getting turned down by some publication.

What I have squandered in my life due to a fear of rejection I will never know. I have likely frittered away what may have been significant chunks of romance due to cold-shoulder-o-phobia. Chunks of romance, hmmm, I rather like that phrase!

So what the hell I am I doing trying to kick-start a freelance writing career if I have this unsettling fear of rejection? Well, it is something I’ve wanted to do for a very, very long time. It is a dream, just as I have had other dreams, some of which didn’t come true because I was afraid of being stuck in the reject pile like a fly in amber. Thus, I will just have to overcome my fear of rejection, at least insofar as publications are concerned.

I am taking a long weekend beginning today in order to recharge my batteries. Monday I will come back to the computer ready to go to work with new ideas and a determination to stick with the plan of some day making a living, however modest, at freelancing.

If I get past those fears of publications rejecting me then who knows? Perhaps I will get past my dread of rejection in other facets of my life. For now, I will just keep it simple.

Read some comments about man’s quest for immortality.

Apparently James Thomas Hughes, who died after a shootout with police in our fair city of Beaumont, Texas, yesterday, shot himself. The Beaumont Enterprise reported today that an autopsy showed Hughes shot himself in the chin. No word as to why this guy ran from police. He was out on bond for an attempted murder charge in Louisiana. Someone in a story this morning said Hughes, who reportedly received a dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps for beating up a subordinate, may have had all those weapons because he works in a local gun shop. Hmmm. Does that mean a cowboy rides around all day with cows in his pickup? Or does a wild animal trainer have a tiger in his trunk? I think not.