Two things happened in Texas over the past couple of weeks that made international news: the fertilizer explosion in the tiny town of West (in Central Texas), and the official dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library here in Dallas ( Read more... )

I have received my first rejection from a potential literary agent. Which I was completely prepared for, but it's still, you know, bleh. At least I had a non-threatening, non-panicky experience, as it was a friend of a friend, but now I'm going to have to crack open the Literary Agent's Market and get back to researching people and send stuff out ( Read more... )

Hello! Did you know there is a Wikipedia entry for "bum wines"? As in wines that bums drink? Well, there is. I stumbled across this important tidbit after I saw this 1967 ad for Mogen David wine that appeared in the pages of Ebony magazine:


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Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. I'm still here, feeling a little less gloomy and disillusioned -- probably because the weather has finally cooled off and it's actually been cold -- it even snowed on Christmas!

Nothing interesting to report other than a brief rat scare (I'm not sure they were rats -- I prefer to think they ( Read more... )

I've been out of work for eight months. EIGHT MONTHS. This is shocking. It feels like only a few weeks. It also feels like forever. I no longer have any sense of the passage of time. Sometimes I think my memory is failing, but then I realize that I've done nothing in this time worth remembering. I honestly don't know how I've managed this. I have ( Read more... )

I misjudged the timing of the cotton harvest again. I drove down to my favorite cotton trail Saturday, but, as I'd feared, all the fields were empty. Still, it was nice to pick up a couple of kolaches and drive around the countryside, spending time not inside my house.

Life gets quieter and quieter.


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Sometimes I wonder if a person can have a full mental shutdown and not be completely aware of it. Or have a sort of functioning breakdown -- like walking pneumonia. If you have a nervous breakdown and no one is there to witness it, does it really happen ( Read more... )

I found out today that a man I used to know and whom I really, really liked died a few months ago. He was a close friend of another man I really, really liked who died a couple of years ago. They were probably both in their 60s (maybe their 70s) when they died, but I knew them when they were in their 40s or early 50s. I only ever saw them together ( Read more... )

I took a drive last weekend to put some miles on my new car, because, I'm barely leaving the house these days, and it's like having a thoroughbred racehorse locked up in the barn. I headed south again, in the direction of Hillsboro, because it's pretty around there. I decided to get off the highway at Carl's Corner, the famed truckstop where Willie ( Read more... )

I continue to find a self-imposed work ethic very difficult to maintain, but I managed to get my first experimental round of books researched, written, photographed, and uploaded, only one day past my initial half-hearted and poorly-enforced deadline ( Read more... )