Month: March 2026

The Adages of Terror

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You spend the minutes and hours and days of your life writing something somebody will read, someday. Maybe that someday is today, or tomorrow! Maybe!

Because, you know, winners never quit, right? And quitters never win, so…

Sooo… what about the guy who is building that moon rocket out of paper soda straws. It’s recyclable, see, so when he comes back from his trip to the moon, why, he’ll just toss the whole thing into the blue bin.

Should he keep trying, because winners never quit, or should he seriously think about it and abandon the idea, in which case he’d be a loser because he certainly wouldn’t be a winner? Winners don’t quit, do they? Ipso facto…

Those adages don’t take into account what the thing is that you’re quitting, do they? Making a quilt out of live bees, roller skating over Niagara Falls, walking from New York to London? Must one, once started, continue to do these things?

So, obviously qualifications are in order.

Winners with good ideas should never quit.

Quitters with bad ideas could be winners, but only if they quit a bad idea.

See, my problem is, I fall for this empty-headed jingoism.

Live, love, laugh. Okey doke! Sing like no one’s listening – “To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe…”

“Must you?” my wife calls from the kitchen.

The challenge I face with the winner/quitter conundrum is: what IS a good idea?

I’ve spent over 30 years chasing out what I thought were good ideas, only to find them not so much, and eventually had to quit them. Quitters never win.

I’m running down a few good ideas right now. But, are they?

Am I building a soda straw moon rocket? Am I, in fact, making Mr. Peanut Yard Art?

If you ask an AI, like ChatGPT, they tell you it’s a brilliant idea. That’s a clever plan – no one has thought of that. It’s what sets you apart from everyone else. Your niche.

No help there.

My wife is, like, meh. I know what she’s actually thinking: “here we go again…”

Or, is it all a question of time? Is there a time limit until you reach that point where you should just quit?

Anybody with a brain will tell you building a moon rocket out of paper soda straws is absurd (plastic, well, now, that’s different…).

So, does the guy throw his soda straw rocket plans in the dustbin now? Or must he carry it all out until the rocket collapses under its own weight or consumes itself in a waxy fireball? At what point does he not be a winner any more?

I had a friend who followed the adage “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

These things are crippling, aren’t they?

Of course, the answer is that other adage – the one that says it’s the journey, not the destination.

THAT adage screws up the whole mix.

It’s okay to quit, because it’s the journey. It’s okay to never quit, because that’s the journey, too. It’s okay to be first, or last, or somewhere in the middle, because… let’s just be you and me, okay? You could spend your whole life sitting on the John, because, hey, that’s the journey.

From now on, I’m disregarding any jingo statement that comes my way. Today is first day of the res…ehhh. You’re only as happy as y… ehhh. No turn on red… ehhh.

Nope. My new plan is to take my advice ONLY from fortune cookies…

Because Clouds Aren’t Clouds

You’re no dummy. You’re a writer, and although stupid people can write, well, now, there’s no way I can actually finish that sentence, can I? So, suffice it to say, you yourself ain’t no dimwit, but are far from being the dimmest light in the socket.

The concept I’m about to share with you has huge ramifications for all of us, most especially the dreamers, poets, and giddy-hearts among us.

Yes, I’m talking to you. 

As you know, I’ve seen people with advanced meteorological degrees on TV, so I’m quite qualified to make the following bold statement. Believe me, I’ve studied this:

Clouds are not clouds. Trick o’ the eye? A mere phantasm that we all see? 

No. Just not clouds

I was sitting in my faded plastic Adirondack chair sipping tea in the spacious backyard of my recently moved-into house on New Jersey’s Chemical Coast. An airliner had just flown over, as we’re on the flight path for Newark. And a trainload of oil tank cars had just rumbled past, as we’re on the rail line between an oil tank farm and a refinery. It was, for the moment, relatively quiet. Of course I could hear the murmur of the New Jersey Turnpike a couple of miles away, but, hey,  who doesn’t, right?

And there was this cloud, just a’scootin’ across the sky all by itself. Nifty little guy at first glance.

At second glance, however, I noticed something I’d seen but never thought about before, a two-plus-two-equals-WTF? kind of moment. Something was up with that cloud.

Here on the coast the clouds often move west-to-east on what seems to be a never-ending wind conveyor that blows from the Pennsylvania mountain ranges out over the wild Atlantic. This little guy was riding the waves.

But the leading and trailing edges were boiling and roiling like a pot on a stove, and I realized the cloud was not a cloud at all, but just the condition of the wind up there at that moment. The moving cold air mixed with the warm local air to create a dew point right there. As the cold air moved west, the dew point traveled with it. 

I wasn’t watching a cloud move overhead. I was watching a moving atmospheric condition.

So, was that a cloud, or was it just a temporary dew point? 

You know I’m talking about because when you’re landing in the airliner and you see clouds below you and then the plane descends through them you never see the clouds, just thick fog, and like all of a sudden you’re underneath the clouds. and you’re like where did the clouds go?

From where I’m sitting at my desk right now on this rainy New Jersey day, the sky is pale gray – nothing but cl… moisture moving from the highest icy altitudes through warm air in such a great mass that it obscures my view of the sky.

Time. It’s always time, isn’t it? 

What is an ocean wave, really? It’s a temporary rise in the ocean’s surface caused by the passage of an energy wave from far out in the depths, itself created by tidal and tectonic movement and by the wind.

And you know that’s true because the empty plastic Pepsi bottle some idiot tossed out there rises and falls with the wave but doesn’t come in to the beach. Why? Because the water’s not traveling in a wave, it’s the energy traveling through the water that causes the uppity-down movement we call waves. That surfer’s riding on the edge of an energy wave, transmitted through the water, not the water itself.

My wife rolls her eyes when I explain this. Look at that chair, she says. It’s just a temporary arrangement of resin molecules, isn’t it? It’s gonna melt, or decay, after 10,000 years, isn’t it? Whatsamatta wit’ you?

Because it’s all time. 

For this second, that’s a wave, that’s a cloud, and that’s a chair, isn’t it. It LOOKS like a cloud, and that’s what we’ll call it. 

What does all of this mean for us writers, we giddy-hearted poets? 

When those guys with the super loud motorcycles rumble past my recently-moved-into New Jersey house, making so much noise that granma’s self-portrait on the kitchen wall trembles and threatens to fall and crash onto my cherished Love Is porcelain collection, I remind myself that this can only happen here.

Here. Nowhere else in the known universe, NOWHERE, is there that sound, that cloud, that wave. NOWHERE else. 

The entire universe has arranged and coiled and unsprung itself to the point where that guy’s motorcycle threatens my porcelain figurines with granma’s self-portrait, and that cloud looks like a cloud, and that Pepsi bottle rises towards the stars, and the surfer’s thinking “cowabunga.”

Only in that second, and only here. 

Wow. Mind blown, right?

And I lean too far back in the Adirondack chair and the back leg breaks off and I tumble over backward, spilling my cup of tea.

And the second is gone.

Stupid chair.