To sleep or not to sleep, that is the thoughtful question.

I shared this picture from the Facebook page of a friend to my Facebook page. Other friends clicked the heck out of the "like" button, which I assume indicates that they, as do I, have active minds interfere with the timeliness of slumber.  Agreement and commiseration by "like" button was not adequately satisfying for some, prompting them to offer their thoughts in comments. They inspired me to leave a comment of my own. The therapeutic benefit was so great that I had to elevate the status of the collection of words from comment to blog post. Here it is:

Just let an idea for a murder scene in your novel pop into your mind in close proximity to the moment your head plops down on the pillow. I call it the plop and pop school of murder mystery writing.

In terms of impeding sleep, it yields compound interest. After you lay there and work it out in your head, you are compelled to get up and make some notes. The older I get, the more important it has become to pay heed to this. Otherwise that homicide will become a way cold case.  Once you are up committing the details to a memory medium other than your faulty brain cells, you can very easily fall prey to your inner muse, who, by the way, has already gone to the Keurig and fixed himself a good strong cup of San Francisco Bay Gourmet French Roast coffee. I ask you, who on the planet resist the smell of fresh brewed bold coffee?  So, with that fresh cup of bean beverage Mr. Muse persuaded you to brew in hand, you sit down to stroke  the grisly crime into your keyboard.  With both muse and caffeine stimulation, yet another opportunity to greet the front side of dawn has been created.

Now, I know that all of you are not writers, but the writing piece of this is interchangeable with any number of other pastimes and endeavors.  A frequent inhibitor of log-sawing productivity is reading.  Mystery and suspense novels are the biggest culprits,  You know you have fallen victim when you hear your inner voice say "just one more chapter" for the umpteenth time as the glow of the rising sun begins to creep around your drapes or blinds.  Bless you my friends.  I understand.

All that said, one of my biggest goals in life is to write mystery and suspense stories that will keep sleepy eyes open. Have a Fireball sidecar with that bold cup of joe. 

Payin' the Weather Bill

I was inspired today by disappointments in the weather.  It’s April 1, yet our wakeup temperature in Fairway today was 30 degrees.  We still haven’t forgiven Old Man Winter for delivering the coldest season in 15 years to Tybee Island for our first snowbird winter there.  Consequently, a storyline crossed my mind ... probably a short story.  I'd hope it wouldn't take a whole novel.

So here's the deal.  The doer is a weatherman, maybe Bryan Busby from KMBC-9 in Kansas City or Pat Shingleton from WBRZ-2 in Baton Rouge.  The story begins just outside Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the doer is trying to locate victim number one, Punxsutawney Phil.  I’ll refer to the doer as Weatherman, since it is still a tossup between Busby and Shingleton.  Weatherman believes he must strike a blow for Americans from sea to shining sea by capturing and water boarding the evil groundhog until he agrees to cast a vote to end winter.

Upon succeeding in forcing his will on the famous rodent, Weatherman should make haste to find his next victim, Phil’s Southern competition, General Beauregard Lee of the Yellow Game Ranch in Lilburn, Georgia, near Atlanta.  However, since he’s just across the Keystone State from Pottsville, he decides to take a side trip to enjoy a few Yuengling Light Lagers, before heading south.  What a blessing that decision was and not only because of the cool, crisp deliciousness of the beer.  After two of the wonderful brews, the proverbial light bulb illuminated above Weatherman’s pate.  It turned out that being a good old boy from the South made General Beauregard Lee an easy target for beer bribery.  It only took two Yuengling Lights to coax the little guy to cast a vote to end winter.

Weatherman is now full of himself and his mission for mankind.  With two down and one to go, he’s ready to strike off in pursuit of the last impediment to the arrival of spring weather.  His research tells him the culprit, he who is supposed to pay the weather bill, is located in Washington, DC.  Some digging reveals that this bad actor, who for simplification purposes I’ll call Payer, has found a home in the Obama administration.

Excited to have found employment in this tough job market, Payer smoked some rope … and inhaled.  Apparently confusion ensued.  Overhearing talk in the halls of the White House such as “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” and being in his rope-a-doped state, Payer mistook the comment to mean,  if you like your weather, you can keep your weather.  Unfortunately for US citizens, this misunderstanding occurred in the dead of winter.  Since Payer’s singular responsibility is paying the weather bill and since not paying the weather bill in the dead of winter would enable Americans to keep their current weather, Payer figured he could take some time off, smoke some more rope, and keep everyone happy.

As you might expect, all did not go well.  Continued rope smoking, coupled with disdain from the many who believed he was shirking his responsibilities in a most cavalier manner, caused Payer to become paranoid and go into hiding.  Though Payer is not so good at paying the weather bill, he is exceedingly good at hiding.  After a lengthy search for the seemingly vanished Payer, Weatherman had no choice but to return to the newsroom and continue to make the big bucks for telling fictional stories about the weather.

Another Dimension (and Sundry Asides, Digressions, Departures, and Parentheticals)

We went to the theater to see "Gravity" last night.  Mmm ... popcorn for supper.



Okay, that makes me want to discuss a peeve.  When I was a preschooler in the South, I had dinner around noon every day.  I had a deprived childhood.  There was no pre-kindergarten or kindergarten for me.  I went straight from unfettered childhood to the regimentation of first grade.  It was there that I had to start going to a place called the lunchroom to have lunch, a meal that had apparently replaced my dinner.  (Later on, they started calling the eating place at school the cafeteria, but I was no dummy.  Piccadilly was a cafeteria, and what they had at school didn’t compare.)  It wasn’t all bad.  I discovered some things that I liked but which my mom had not previously purchased.  The first of these revelations was fish sticks.  Oh, what a ketchup enhancer those were.

I discovered yogurt years later while at a basketball camp with Junior Shelton at Louisiana College in Pineville.  Mom didn’t like yogurt, so it had never found a home in our refrigerator.  My daughter, Regan, pronounced it yergurt when she was a youngster.  In deference, I now sometimes pronounce it that way myself.  She and her sister, Erin, also used to refer to Baskin Robbins as Basket Robbins.  They liked to go to the drugstore with me, as they knew I was a softy when they tried to coax me into procuring candy bars for their consumption.  They suggested trips to the K&B Drugstore, telling me that we should go to the K and the B.

On one of those K&B visits, I found some Seven Up candy bars.  My grandfather used to buy them for me when I was a little boy.  He died in 1958 when I was eight.  The Seven Ups went away for a really long time.  But there they were.  I bought the whole box for Erin and Regan … and me.  What a trip down memory lane.  These bars had seven compartments within them.  Each compartment had a different filling.  Seven Ups were like a fancy box of chocolates in a single candy bar.  We looked for them at K&B after that, but they never had them again.  There’s a page on the web that provides the histories of products like that.  I found the Seven Up story there.  Sure enough, they were around in the Fifties, went away, had a brief rebirth in the Eighties, and quickly returned to their status as a historical footnote.

Anyway, Bob and Jake’s Supper Club in BRLA (If New Orleans can be NOLA, Baton Rouge (aka Red Stick as in Red Stick Writer) can have BRLA, pronounced Berla like yergurt.) recognized the correctness of having supper in the evening after having had dinner at midday.  I can remember when that venerable eatery was in bankruptcy, a sad day.  At the time, Senator Russell Long, when speaking about some legislation to help avoid a potential bankruptcy of The Boeing Company, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate why, if the government could come to the aid of a big corporation like Boeing, couldn’t it come to the aid of his friends, the Staples brothers, owners of Bob and Jake’s.

Now, Suzie and I belong to a wonderful dinner club that is populated with delightful friends.  That said, I have to say that the food would taste better if it was called supper.  We could do the meals at midday to make the dinner terminology correct, but we’d be less likely to partake of adult beverages.  That would be a shame because these folks are way fun when they’ve imbibed a bit.

But I digress.  So, I had the popcorn for supper.  Sandra Bullock was my dessert.  Do you remember how they used to tell you that you couldn’t have your dessert until after the meal?  They said that would be putting the cart before the horse, and that would spoil your meal.  Well, I can tell you that Sandra was in front of, the middle of, and on the backside of my popcorn meal.  And she didn’t spoil a damn thing.

Seriously, Bullock performed masterfully.  In terms of face time, the whole movie was just her and George Clooney, and George’s part was limited.  The story was interesting and generally kept you pretty tense throughout and, at times, very tense.  We would have chosen to see the regular rather than the 3D version, but there were only two sessions for that version.  One was a matinee, and the other was late at night.  I didn’t want popcorn for dinner, and I didn’t want to eat supper too late.  It was not lost on me that the price for 3D was a dollar fifty more than regular, and I repeat, we would have chosen regular if it had been at an acceptable time.

This was my first 3D movie since a 1966 sci-fi feature called “The Bubble.”  It starred the gal who starred in “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and one of the guys from “The Mod Squad.”  Not big box office, it was sort Rod Sterlingish and dealt with a couple in an airplane forced to land as a result of a bubble descending to trap them.  I thought of it when the Stephen King TV series, “Under the Dome,” came out recently.

Over the years, 3D movies have popped up every so often.  The first 3D movie produced by a major studio was the Warner Bros. 1953 flick, “House of Wax,” starring Vincent Price.  I never saw the 3D version of this, but when you watch it, you can tell the glitchy things they did to leverage their 3D presentation.  There was a scene regarding the opening of the House of Wax in which a barker in costume and on stilts was using bolo paddles in each hand while rambling on about the stupendous things you’d see in the House of Wax.  The rubber bands would stretch to full extension with the red rubber balls on the ends seemingly thrusting on a collision path to your nose.  There was some of that sort of imagery in “Gravity.”

My only other encounter with 3D was the 1989 Super Bowl halftime show sponsored by Coca Cola.  I thought it sucked like something manufactured by the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company.   

I’ll grant you that the technology has improved.  Personally, though, I find it distracting.  I don’t like wearing the glasses.  I was underwhelmed … except for Bullock. 

The salt isle soothes my soul.

I wrote that title as a Six-Word Memoir at sixwordmemoirs.com. When writing the back story to accompany it, I decided to put expanded comments about our relationship with Tybee Island, Georgia, here at Red Stick Writer.

 

According to Wikipedia: Native Americans, using dugout canoes to navigate the waterways, hunted and camped in Georgia's coastal islands for thousands of years. The Euchee tribe likely inhabited Tybee Island in the years preceding the arrival of the first Spanish explorers in the area in the 16th century. "Tybee" is the Euchee word for "salt."

 

Wikipedia also says that pirates used the island to hide from those who pursued them. Nowadays ordinary folk go there to hide from hustles and bustles. Life there is laid back. The locals speak of “livin' on Tybee time.” Those are the watchwords for the place and the culture. There is an apparel and accessories store there called Latitude 32, which refers to the coordinates at which Tybee is situated, 32°0′24″N latitude and 80°50′58″W longitude. Just so you’ll know, they have good company, as they share that north-south orientation with San Diego. I equate those watchwords with attitude 32 in the same way that “The Big Easy” and “The City that Care Forgot” speak in a like manner about NOLA, the queen of my Louisiana homeland.

 

Suzie and I made our first journey to Tybee in 2005 and found a place with the serenity and innocence of the late Fifties and early Sixties. That’s when our love affair with Tybee began. We’ve been back every year except two since then. Beginning with our second trip there, we’ve always rented a cottage with a pool through Jim Heflin, who claims to be the janitor at Tybee Cottages. We know better and just call him Saint Peter, since he has the keys to this delightful suburb of heaven.

 

As a first adventure in my retirement which began on August 1, we spent the first two weeks of September there. On all of our other visits we flew and stayed a week. This time we drove and doubled the length of our stay. It was such a pleasure. We rented bikes for the two weeks and got three weeks worth of beach riding in during our stay. Most days we’d end our rides at Fannie’s on the Beach having what we think is the best version of the frozen concoction made so famous by Jimmy Buffet. His fans are called Parrotheads. Well, we never saw Jimmy or any members of his Coral Reefer Band on the Strand there at Fannie’s, but we did fall into the company of Roma Gene Harper (more about her in another post) and her delightful group of locals who call themselves Tybidiots. Their daily gatherings are called Meetings of the Bored, but I can assure you that these fine Tybee citizens are polar opposites to bored or boring. Either that or my judgment was clouded by the 'ritas.

 

We’ve talked in the past about getting a place of our own in Tybee, a home away from home. Last year we checked on a property we liked. It had been on the market for 570 days, and a contract was executed on it the day before our inquiry. On our last day on the island this year, we looked at another house that interested us, and this time things worked out. We closed on October 18 and from that moment forward have declared ourselves to be Tybidiots.

 

It is our plan to spend about four months of each year in Tybee with some time there in each of the four seasons. When we are not in residence, Mr. Heflin (By God, we love him even though he is an Ole Miss Rebel.) will help us rent it to other folks who want to have a taste of Tybee time. Between now and the 2014 rental season, we’ll be sprucing up the place with a fresh paint job and a new roof, and to add just the right finishing touch, we’re adding a pool.

 

It seems that most of the houses on the island have names, so we think it’ll be good idea to hang an appropriate sobriquet on ours. Since we are Dick and Suzie, the name we are currently mulling is The Doozy, which includes the first sound in my name and everything but the first sound in Suzie’s name. Merriam Webster defines a doozy as “an extraordinary one of its kind,” which is exactly what we intend to make our new home away from home.

 

If you have a hankering for a serene and innocent place to shed your stress, watch for a listing of The Doozy at tybeecottages.com around the end of the year or right after New Year’s Day. I speak with experience when I tell you that the boss man there will make sure that your dose of “livin’ on Tybee time” will cause you to have a hankering to come back again and again.

On the occasion of a dawning retirement

On my first day of retirement, I awoke at 6:00.  Watched Suzie sleep for 21 minutes.  Even though she looks cute when she's sleeping, it got boring after a while.  I should add that she's not always boring in bed.  So I got up and went to the study to read the many messages shouting out my reaching the finish line of my banking career.  As regards that, I'll make it simple:  I have found and am now gratefully consuming my cheese.  I took a picture out the window of the door that goes out to our screen porch to memorialize the image of the dawn of a new era.  I'll probably post that at Facebook.

Right now I'm enjoying our screen porch and my first cup of coffee from the deluxe Keurig coffee maker Suzie and Sarah provided in honor of my stepping off the merry-go-round ... Tully's French Roast Extra Bold K-Cup, a damn fine brew.  The machine is just like the one I fell in love with at the office, that faraway place in my past.  I had my blend of yogurt, sliced banana, and Kashi Crunch cereal out here earlier.  I'm facing the direction of our patio, which since the addition we put on last year, is surrounded on three and a half sides by the house, porch, and garage.  With Suzie's pots and gardens, it resembles the finest of the French Quarter courtyards, making this Louisiana boy feel right at home.

Oh, well, it is time to have cup number two from the miracle machine from Keurig.  I think I'll use the self-fill cup with some Community Dark Roast this time.  Now we're talking.  That will fuel the first writing session of my retirement, as I'll be adding some words to Tit for Tat:  A Novel of Retribution.

Drop by often, as I plan to spill words here often from now on.  Have a great day.