Robert

I see that the on-line novel I've been following page by page appears to have deleted after a few pages.
That's cool. I start novels all the time, and then I lose my limited vision and have to abbreviate them. I then call them "poems". Not so heavy on images, but lots of good turgid plotting. But note to future novelists: (a) if you are starting an on line novel, please let me know; and (b) if you get bored of it, please write a quick ending anyway.
The End. Post script: I love on line novel journals that are friends only--heaven forbid that actual third parties *read one's work*, isn't that so?

1. In law school one reads lots of actual appellate cases. 2. The cases are read less for what rules they teach than to illustrate to the student how to pierce the maze and fog of facts to glean the rules which the court is trying to teach. 3. One is taught to "outline" the cases read to distill them to their legal essence.
4. One law school study truism is that the factual portions of the case should always be distilled to seven or fewer essential sentences.
5. The key three or five or seven sentences are all that matter--any more and the student has missed the forest for the trees.
6. Sometimes I believe that my livejournal posts should also be stated in seven sentences or less.
7. But so many times the irrelevant asides in someone's post are my guideposts to the inner truth of the post; the God is in the details.

iambliss let me draw her a userpic, which I call "Bugs Ate My Fern". Now that's a true act of kindness, given my lack of art skills and her otherwise flawless good eye for userpix!

"Oh ain't there some kind of answer?
Yeah, but no question was posed"
--Steve Wynn, "Tell Me When It's Over"

Last night insomnia set in, unrelieved even by staunch Maeve Binchy reading. Then I got carried away playing with the sound of my two electric football fields. Later than I had hoped this morning, I grabbed several CDs and headed to the office a few moments behind. I listened to Chicago's Live in Japan, and thought about what it must be like to go from cutting-edge "jazz rock" to being played on stations with names like The Wave or the Seashell; I listened to Marshall Crenshaw's CD, and wondered again how a man could write something as wonderful as "Someday, Someway" and still not be in the pantheon of pop greats. Then I lost myself in several listens of the first Buggles album, and the refrain from "Living in the Plastic Age" resonated for me inexplicably when it talked about how the Thought Police would put me under "cardiac arrest", which is puzzling, because I really dislike Thought Police thinking except in fun, but really like the melody.

My law partner, our friend and fellow attorney, and I went to the nice Austrian cafe in our business locale of Garland (a.k.a. the "Arlen" in the TV show King of the Hill). We all had Hungarian goulash, but I longed for the bratwurst plate instead.
I hate being overfed and discontented about nothing.

On my way home, I tried to stop by to drop off a package to send to a postcardxer, but I missed the postal closing time by five minutes, and the package is bound overseas and requires the post office to be open (or me to understand the system better).
Then I drove home while the AM country radio station played "Delta Dawn" for the third time this week, and I thought to myself that
being 41 and still called "Baby" *is* a bit odd, but I remembered my friend who in personal settings is "Missy", and that's cool, because she prefers it. I wonder if the woman in the song went to the mansion in the sky, but I don't remember the conclusion.
Tanya Tucker is a metaphor for something, but I don't know what.

I passed two LDS missionaries biking the sidewalk, resplendent in their black slacks, white shirts, dark ties, and bicycle helmets.
They turned into a parking lot just before the lot marked "Freedom Plaza" and skirted right by the "Special Achievement Center".
I think the Book of Mormon is fascinating reading, but I do not much care for the storyboard presentation format of the missionaries. I'd much rather have either structured exegesis, or felt characters. I found as a child that Bible school in fundamentalist churches was often preferable, because felt for literal stories needs to look real.

I must unearth some of my books from the garage. Some need to be sold off, some shelved, and some given away. I am a book-hoarder, but enough is enough. I still haven't decided what to do with my one "precious" book--an autographed first edition of Fischer's 60 Memorable Games of Chess. Mr. Fischer's personal problems and anti-semitic and anti-US statements in recent years disquiet me.
At least nobody ever has to write a book or poem about chess, because the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" pretty much hit the nail on the head. Perhaps I'll donate the book to the Cleveland Library Chess collection, or ebay it off, or try to put it in a conventional auction. What would I do with the proceeds, though?
I have enough things. I wonder if I still have that 100 dollar store credit when my wife turned in all those books to the cool used book place in Mesquite a decade ago. Maybe I could get MORE books with that.....

asphalteden, sorry it's taken me so long to reciprocate your extreme kindness (the John Campbell thing alone, not to mention the "break my heart" submission, were priceless and deserving of immediate response), but the box is now packed and taped, and heading to post office tomorrow.

gregwest98, old reciprocation times with you are gone but not forgotten, and if you'll just look away for a moment, something will issue from
this particular stretch of dixieland.

My wife and I went looking for that box of CDs which had gone walkabout when we moved from CA to TX.
We found many--I'll soon be awash in Cocteau Twins and Sunburst Finish and Buddha Head--but key CDs remain
undiscovered. Due to the location of Be Bop Deluxe and Cranberries and Duncan Sheik empty jewel cases, and this investigator's memories of CDs being played in days leading to the move, current focus of the investigation is on finding one of those plastic multi-CD changer thingies, accompanied by a gun moll and two bodyguards.

Meanwhile, I have finally figured out how to get people to offer me nervousness exchanges. Merely offer a corruplast card in return for *anything* in the mail. I am learning slowly.

Ebay sales ratio for bad chess poems book this month:
3 hits out of 7 postings. But we have a bidder this week already! The bidder bid 2 cents, which is twice intrinsic value! Formsheet fans predict that bidding will top a dime by auction end!

I need to mail that notebook out to TN. You'd think that something which costs 2 dollars at the store and requires only insertion of a poem would have gone out already. But tomorrow all wrongs will be righted, and justice will return to our world.