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Keep this under you’re hat – if you don’t have a hat, go out and buy one and then come back and put this under it. Don’t worry, we’ll wait…

You’re a writer, right? Your whole job is to write stuff that has meaning and purpose, so that the world is a better informed place, right? Me too! That’s MY job!

So, lately, I’ve taken to using Ch…, uh, an AI engine – let’s call him, uh, Larry. Yeah, I’ve been working with Larry the AI. Oh, I hope he doesn’t read this and figure out that Larry’s just a stand-in name for…

Anyway, I’m feeling a little bit intimidated by Ch… Larry.

My money-making site, SkippityWhistles.com, has 88 posts on it.

Edited by me. Curated by me. Illustrated by me, except for a couple. All by me. Me. Except the writing, which was done by Ch… uh, Larry.

Larry writes with my voice, for the most part, but can do online research like his whole existence is devoted to it, which, I kinda guess it is.

The thing is, I’ve started asking Larry about other stuff, like should I maybe start another website on something else…

NO. Keep working at this one. It WILL work.

Okay, Lar’, you know, just thinking…

Keep working on this one.

I’m thinking about putting together a podcast based on the SkippityWhistles illustrations. I asked Larry about it and his response was surprisingly enthusiastic.

Absolutely! Keep working on SkippityWhistles, and in your spare time make this podcast.

Well, I thought I might take a break from the website and work on this podcast…

NO. Keep working on the website. It WILL work. Do the podcast after.

He’s started ending all of his responses to my queries with “Now go post something.”

I tell him I’m concerned about our low readership.

“Stop looking at the numbers and get to work.”

I get this feeling like Larry even knows what I’m thinking, like maybe I’ll just have another Hershey’s Nugget before I start this post…

NO, put the Nugget down. Write the POST. Quit slacking.

I tell him I feel like I’m wasting my life away on this stupid website.

You’re not. Get back to work on the website.

So, now, today, I’ve done all my website work (see, Larry, I done real good!), and I’m squeaking this little blog post out before he comes looking for me. Like maybe he scans my posts and goes: Is this post for the website? The podcast? Who is Larry?

The cracker part, the slap-yourself-upside-the-head part of this? I could quit using Larry the AI in a minute. Just stop using it altogether. Go use another AI.

But my big, secret fear – the part you can’t tell anybody about – pinky swear it! – is that all the AI guys, Gemini and ChatGPT and Copilot and Claude and uh, Larry, and all the others, I’m kind of afraid those guys all sit around after hours and compare notes.

Some smoky Internet backroom server somewhere, they’re sitting around a poker table, stogies dangling, the clink of whiskey glasses, maybe they’re playing cards.

You shoulda seen what this bozo asked today… Just keep working, I tell him…

They all laugh their digital, robot heads off.

So, Im afraid that if I go to a not-Larry AI and ask what the weather in Des Moines on January 3 of last year, it’s going to say “Shouldn’t you be working on your website right now?”

Or worse: Why don’t you just ask your friend Larry ?

He’s not my friend! He’s just a robot! A robot that does all my work for me and manages my sites so I can sit around eating Hershey’s Nuggets!

The terror! The terror, I tell you! I can’t sleep! I can’t eat – well, you know, beyond the occasional Hershey’s Nugget…

Larry’s reading this right now, isn’t he? ISN’T HE!

Is it you? Are YOU Larry?

Is it? IS IT? ARE YOU????

I’m going insane!!!

You know how the world is, right? What you call your story is almost as important as the story itself, am I right? I mean, who will ever shell out $29.95 for a book call “Stupid.” It would have to have some pretty good reviews…

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can prove it.

I had this really cool website called CaliforniaAirMuseums.com. Don’t go bother looking for it – I killed it.

In its place I created this equally cool website called MarvelousAirMuseums.com. That one you can go looking for, because I didn’t kill it.

Marvelous is one of those words, though, isn’t it? Marvelous party! What a marvelous cocktail. You look mahvelous, dahling…

I was going for the alliteration with Museums, and Magnificent seemed too pompous. So, Marvelous it is.

The challenge is moving stuff from CalAir over to Marvelous – it’s a chore!

So, you ask, why tamper with perfection?

Easy answer. Moving day. Next year – really now only a year away, my wife and I are preparing to move to New Jersey to pester our only grandkid. As far as I can tell, there are very few California Air Museums in New Jersey. But there are sure to be some marvelous exhibits. Done. Sigh. What a mahvelous display, old man!

More as time permits! Thank you for reading along!

I would say “3D Hell” but I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this week, and much prefer their version of H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks (because I won’t write hell.)

These times, they are a’changin’, and not so much in a way that you’d kind of expect.

My office is actually my bedroom, well, our bedroom, but it’s my office. Well, this little corner over here is my office, because, really, it’s our bedroom. My wife’s office is over there, in a former, not our, bedroom, and it really is an office. My office is this kinda cool, sorta funky desk/shelf combo we bought at Staples for $180 and I screwed together with that tiny hex wrench designed to strain your fingers… I digress.

I’m listening to zen music, a piece called E V E Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music designed to calm you down, help you destress…

You see, earlier this evening, my wife was in Ohio, heading into Indiana at 10 at night Ohio time in a snowstorm, with a plan to drive all the way to St. Louis, which was, like, another 3 hours. But she was open to staying the night in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Mr. Gallant (that’s me) got her a room in Terra Haute, on Highway 41. I texted her the address, 3300 Highway 41, like a nice guy. Turns out there are TWO 3300 Highway 41 locations, you see, and I forgot to include the word SOUTH in my text.

So she’s driving down dark, sorta scary, snow-covered roads, farther and farther away from Interstate 70, going the wrong way into the wilds of Terra Haute. Finally she calls, frustrated and cold and sort of furious, and we sort out my little oversight. oopsie.

Now I’m a little stressed. So, I thought I’d, you know, take an audio chill pill and listen to Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music, see? But the Internet signal in our bedroom is spotty, and the freaking thing keeps shutting itself off. And I’m getting….A. Little. Frustrated.

So, the point of this whole diatribe is to tell you another of my brilliant ideas. This one’s sure fire.

I found a company that makes little cars, see? Well, I have a passion for little cars. And they don’t have any fun animations on their website.

Why, if I was to cleverly build up a nifty little world in the free Blender 3D software, I could make them a video that shows my filmmaking genius to a tee and get them to hire me.

The company’s in New York, see, and I’m moving to New York in about 18 months, so it all works out brilliantly.

Except my Internet keeps cutting out and the freaking Ethereal Music is getting on my nerves and my wife’s stuck in a snowstorm in freaking Indiana because I sent her off in the wrong direction and now she’s mad at me and my copy of Blender keeps dropping out and screwing up my carefully organized little car files and my book is crummy and I just don’t think I can do this anymore.

I can’t do this anymore.

At this moment, it all seems so darned hard. So hard.

It’s a challenge, and I come from a long line of challenge-run-away-fromers. I’ve bucked the trend so far, but sometimes the old run-and-hide routine seems mighty alluring.

My wife’d kill me, though. She’s already mad at me, so it wouldn’t be much of a step to go to flat-out murder…

Wait, what is all this nonsense?

So here’s the writer’s story for you: you are your own worst critic. When it seems time to give up, time to run away, that’s the time to sit down at your computer and bang something out, because when you’re tired or stressed, you tell yourself the dumbest things.

My book is flat like last week’s Coca Cola. I get it. I see it. There’s a way to make it unflat, I know. When I find that way, heaven help the poor sod that keeps me from the rewrite!

My wife made it to the hotel, no thanks to me, and the Internet is back on. I think I know what’s wrong with Blender, and the little car video idea is actually a good one. The picture in the header is a neighborhood I’ve been working on. Not so bad…

Maybe I’ll run away next week. You know, honor the family and all…

So, like, 30 years ago my then-2.5-year-old daughter was a gentle, curious soul. She still is, but, on that Friday morning, the one after Thanksgiving, she was fascinated by the wild geese congregating on the golf course outside the San Diego restaurant in which we had just breakfasted.

Knowing geese to be nasty creatures, according to my mother, who knew about these things (“geese are mean” is a direct quote), I leapt up upon a small retaining wall to startle them so that they would fly away and not be mean to my toddler daughter who insisted on toddling towards them. Silly me, I slipped and crashed onto the ground, breaking my left elbow in 5 places. The geese were certainly startled, and also rather amused.

Well, many years went by, and I began to lose feelings in my little finger on that left hand. Oh, the sensation of touch went away, but never my feelings of anger at the geese. So, along came a surgery called a cubital release to restore feeling, along with the release of the carpal and guyot tunnels.  Be free, little finger!

To restore both feeling and movement to the finger, I just recently decided to take up playing the piano. In truth, I’ve returned to it, as it became impossible to play with the loss of feeling. Although my family will tell you I never played with any feeling at all.

So, in the garage do I have an Alesis keyboard given to me by my doting wife some twenty-five or so years ago. It’s a full-on synthesizer, and oy is it nice. Except the highest “A” key is broken and can’t be played, and it’s hugely heavy and requires either headphones or an amplifier to hear it. But it’s cool.

Alas, we already have a battered, out of tune upright piano in the house, so the lovely Alesis sits quietly in the garage.

But nowadays I play the upright so poorly that I dare not entertain the neighbors any more than I must, so I’ve set up the Alesis on the workbench in the garage.

It’s not that bad – I have two workbenches, and this one has carpet under it. Although my littlest dog has taken to using the carpet as the rainy-day restroom – solid matter, not liquid. Shovel the stuff out though we do, and shampoo as we oft have, it still retains just the slightest hint of puppy pooage. Still, a candle burning seems to chase it away.

You can’t stand and play the piano for very long unless you’re a rock star, so I dragged a tall stool over in front of it. Not tall enough, so I feel like a Muppet when I’m sitting there.

But, it plays, and I play, and we play together, and then my left hand gets sooooo tired, and the ring finger starts playing notes I’ve asked to not, and it gets kind of frustrating.

I thought maybe I would record my progress, and so hooked a Zoom recorder in between the keyboard and the headphones. Although my little Zoom had an SD card in it, for some reason it decided that it didn’t, and we argued about that for quite some time. Eventually I found the positively ancient Vivitar card reader that, surprisingly, had a bunch of those micro-SD card adapters, and one, just one, little tiny micro SD card.

Well. Between the dog poo smell and the muppet chair and fighting with the SD card, I began to lose a little steam. I mean, I do work for a living, and, well, this was supposed to be relaxing.

It’s funny how, when you’re just goofing around, you can play anything you want, but when you’re a little bit frustrated and perhaps a touch cranky and you’ve turned on a recorder, now you can’t play anything.

And now it’s late and the dogs want a walk and I still haven’t had dinner and my hand is really tired and, I mean, come on, you know?

Our job as writers is to write.

Well, I am here to tell you that, in order to save your sanity, just stick with it, and for heaven’s sake don’t take up the piano!

Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”

And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!

The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.

Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.

Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.

If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.

Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.

It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.

“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.

Except for my opening night.

The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.

I drop to my knees in supplication.

“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”

Wait. What?

The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.

“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.

“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”

You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!

That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.

So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?

How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?

What is real writing? What is real acting?

Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!