"If You Stop Right Now, I Promise I Won't Go To The Police..."

Hey, there, blog readers.
Just performing a search engine optimization experiment, based on a theory that I'm testing.
Wanna see how many hits this particular post gets...

In other news, the Uxi Duxi, as if through telepathy, or whatever the medium of transporting words off a blog page they haven't read, and into their minds, now has prominent (to the point of clashing with the aesthetics of the place) sings of the "smile, you are on camera" variety.
I'm sure Nathaniel will do away with the ones printed on plain white paper and taped to the glass of the front door and warping backward away from the edges, probably due to the constant puffs of humid air that hit it every time someone swings the door open.
But, really, someone could make off with a pillow sack of vials of things that are like ninety bucks an ounce.
Then, it would be part of my job as a friend to the establishment to perhaps help the authorities by hanging around the Quarter and complaining to everyone how I have all this money to spend but can't find any CBD oil.
It's kind of weird how, at least as recently as 20 years ago, I recall, an owner could operate two almost identical businesses, with their respective locations having made it so, in one store, the one near the bus station, the cashier is behind a plate of bullet proof glass and a customer has to speak through a grid of metal which is backed by another one offset in a way that the two combined would prevent any saliva from going through and hitting the cashier, or any other chemical agents, and then the person would have to place his money on a tray which slides out towards him and which is designed so you basically couldn't grab the hand of the cashier, and tell her that if she can reach into the register with her free hand and grab out all the money and place it in the tray then she could have her hand back, type of thing, while...
The very similar store in Tasty Flats, just about 12 miles from downtown, and where, if you see niggers they are usually getting out of pretty nice cars and maybe coming from a church picnic, has their cashier, a college girl who lives with her family in a nice house located nearby and convenient to her job, situated right out in the open, behind a flimsy counter and free to walk around right with the customers.

Other than that, Nathaniel has got it all under control...

I always wondered about that when I was in Florida. And those store would never have any trouble, the ones in the nice neighborhoods where it is cleaner and shinier and they have the more expensive kinds of snacks. It's almost as if the thugs of the types that rob stores can't get transportation out there, or that they really feel like they are going to arouse so much suspicion just by their presence in that particular area of town that they will be quickly caught because they would have already started to have been followed by unmarked cars, concerned citizens, etc.

But, I digress. The Uxi Duxi now has a hastily printed on an inkjet in the office piece of thin white warping at the edges, because its only held by a single tab of invisible tape that I can see from here, paper with the "convivium divinus" eyeball staring at the would be criminal.

But, I am pretty much convinced that a kratom user wouldn't rob a kratom place, and that nobody who would pull an armed robbery would find himself in a circle of people who all would buy kratom from him.

Reddit

I wondered if the day would ever come when I would have to re-direct my forty or so readers ("unique" visitors that come at least once a year and who are not robots) to a Wordpress site, or to my own domain type of thing.
I have found some sites that are geared towards writers and which, basically host their portfolios.
But, finding a niche is the key.
Unfortunately using my life as the general subject of a blog is not listed under any of the genres of writing that are mentioned.
If I start to divide my time between here and Reddit, than I can see this blog becoming a lot thinner, while I'm off pursuing getting paid to write by some entity.

Reddit, And My Road To Riches

I still haven't figured out where to find the dozen or so communities that I joined when I signed up for Reddit.Yesterday, I made my first post on the "subreddit" which is called writers prompt.
A land stone very short ending to a prompt which was something I paraphrase: You save a small frog on a hot day by giving him a full water bath, and it becomes your friend for life, or stays with you for life.
I wrote an ending similar to:

Only the frog is no longer small, and is in fact a scientific curiosity, weighing in at almost 700 pounds.
Late one night, you are being harassed by an aggressive panhandler: "What, you're not going to HELP ME?!?" when, with lightning-like speed, a huge tongue flashes into view from out of a nearby alley, and, just like that, the panhandler is gone, leaving only a cheap pair of sunglasses and a Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap on the sidewalk in front of you.

My first post, and probably the writers prompt enthusiasts first glimpse of me at my craft. Yes sirree!

I go now to see if anyone gave me, probably a "lmfao."

I might expect at least one lmfao out of a community that numbers in the 6 thousands. Plus, my ending is short enough so that it will be at least read by a lot more people than would have had I written a 3 page ending. The frog would have to be really magic to get people to read that much, I imagine.

I was vexed when I saw that out of the first fifty stories that I checked out, almost all of them had themes of magic or of different dimensions of time and/or space. There were alien stories, and it all seemed like R. K. Rawlings, or whomever it was that wrote the Harry Potter stuff, to me.

One pretty cool prompt was: You are sitting on a jury at the trial of a man accused of a murder that you, yourself committed.

I might try an ending for that one.

They warning against posting anything racial or hateful and the rest of the typical banned things, no pedophelia, etc.
There goes my story about the biologist who studies sickle cell anemia, and then reverse-engineers a germ that will kill all black people, but can't go through with his plot of putting it in the public water system, after he falls in love with a 6 year old black girl.

I will say that, the impression I get from seeing all the resources out there for the aspiring freelance writers is that they are like the general stores that set up in California back in 1849, that sold pens, paper, I mean pick axes and mule saddles and the like, to the fools who would then go out and bust their asses (excuse the pun) for about 2 dollars worth of gold dust on a typical day.

Here is a list of where you can "pitch" your writing. Now spend hours writing something and perfecting it and then a couple more pitching and pitching.

I do believe though, that since I have devoted probably an average of something like 2 hours a day writing for the past 12 years, I would have at least developed my skill to some degree, or at least have instilled in myself the discipline to write for 3 hours on any given day; to set aside all of my other "obligations," to get something produced.

I think I'm writing better stuff now than a lot of what I have recently read of what I wrote ten years ago.
Excepting what I wrote ten years ago about things that happened way before even then. My stories about things that happened in my youth are about the same quality now as the ones I wrote ten years ago, in my opinion.

Quitting Music

The notion of quitting music has occurred to me.

Recently, I became kind of depressed after listening to a Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G minor, and I realized that I would have to take my composing skills to somewhere in the stratosphere of where they are now, just to be able to write a symphony like that one,  which I wasn't really enjoying.

That was one symphony which I became introduced to back at the age of 15 and which I approached the listening of with the attitude that this was music that I had to learn to enjoy and appreciate, otherwise, I would never gain the distinction of being classically "trained," or to be able to speak in musical terms at the highest level. It was an "educate your way into becoming a great musician" approach to things.

But, then I meet Travis Blaine, who said: "Great music" to me when he saw a "Mozart's Greatest" type of CD on my coffee table.
Surely he knows great music when he hears it.

I can remember when I made a recording of the first movement of the 40th symphony in my studio, back in 1988.
I had gotten the score from the library and had multi-tracked the parts, playing the bass notes on an electric bass, the violin melody on an electric guitar, and then using the settings on a Casio keyboard, such as "clarinet," and "flute" to play those particular ones off the sheet music.
He's a great composer, I concluded. I especially liked the way he brought the instruments in a particular points within the measures. But then the symphony goes into the parts where he modulates in and out of just about every key and.
Well, maybe the purpose was for me to exorcise that "you need to enjoy this before you can say that you like real music" demon.
It wound up being slightly liberating to exclaim "I don't like this symphony," even though it's Mozart, and despite my high school music teacher, who dismissed The Beatles songs that we played for him: "It's just simple block harmony; that's just a dominant seventh chord, you want to hear dissonance, listen to Stravinski..." and who lectured over the heads of us students about Symphony 40, and how the tonic sought the dominant whereas, in almost every other piece of music in existence, it is the other way around.

Of course he was also one of those Catholic priests who liked to fondle young men, and who used the lure of his vast knowledge (he held degrees in Philosophy, Psychology, Theology, Music and Scripture) to attract any boys in our school who might have been dreaming of becoming musicians, to his cell, which is what he called the rectory where he lived.
He infamously challenged my friend Ted and I, to take off our clothes, to demonstrate that we lacked the inhibitions that hold so many musicians back, and which you could hear in their music, upon what was perhaps our dozenth trip to his cell, to see if we could learn anything from the guy who referred to Leonard Bernstein as "Lenny," and who wasn't impressed at all with the "that's just a sharp five resolving a half step to the dominant seventh" in the recording of "Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite," by The Beatles that I had brought to him, wanting to know what kind of chords John Lennon used to get that calliope sound.

More on Father Shauris, er, the Reverand Robert A. Shauris, might be forthcoming in this blog. But, for now, suffice it to say that it was liberating in a sense to proclaim: "This is the least of my favorite things that I've ever heard from Mozart!"

So, Can You Do Better?

The next night, I decided to write a piece called: "How Good Is He?" which basically asked that musical question of myself. With lyrics like: "Daniel McKenna, how good is he? Can he keep a steady beat, can he make a piece swing? Does he play lovely melodies or is he just trying to show off...?" type of stuff.

As if to answer that question, It came out terribly.

It just hadn't been a good go of playing something random and trying to make it a demonstration of how good I was, as a musician.

The title had come to me from a Football Digest magazine, something I had a subscription to in the seventies. On the cover was a picture of Franco Harris in action in his Pittsburg Steelers uniform, with the headline of: "Franco Harris; how good is he?"

That just struck me strangely as an 11 year old. "What do you mean, how good is he?, I wondered. I suppose the article argued that he ran behind outstanding blockers and had coaches drawing up effective plays, and, well, maybe Franco Harris isn't really as good as a lot of people might think.
You've just seen him run for a hundred yards in a playoff game and score two touchdowns, but, how good is he really? type of thing...

"How Good Is He?"

My new strings and harmonica have come in, and the Uxi Duxi closes shortly, so I guess I'll go out to play, to add to the less than 2 dollars in my pocket now.

It's Friday night, but it is about ninety degrees out, and humid. I'll take 13 dollars and be out of there, gladly.