Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 2
January 18, 2022
Messengers from beyond
Photo 209507985 / Cardinal © Howard Nevitt, Jr. | Dreamstime.comA cardinal perches in the tree outside my window. If the legend is true, and a cardinal is a soul who has left my world, who is this crimson bird come to visit? Mom? Dad? My brother? Willow The Best Dog There Was? Brother of Red? Tom or Diane Brooker? It was at the Brookers’ funeral that I first heard the cardinal legend, after all.
A second cardinal alights, then dashes away. A pair, then.
Or perhaps this is just a genera...
January 17, 2022
On the imperative to hold that line
At the end of “Revolution 9,” the experimental sound collage that is the penultimate track in the Beatles’ white album, a crowd is chanting “Hold that line! Hold that line!” in what is obviously a sports event of some kind. There’s a flurry of sound, followed by a chant of “Block that kick! Block that kick!” Clearly the opponent has scored a goal or a touchdown, and now the imperative is to prevent the extra point.
We live in an era where it seems the line is not holding. Fact-checkers d...
January 16, 2022
Better time’s a coming
It’s going to be all right.
No one wakes up in the morning wanting to hate their neighbor. No one wants the world to go to hell in a hand basket. People want to believe the best of others — the worst of us depend on that instinct and get rich exploiting it.
People (eventually) know when they’ve been duped and made fools. People remember; they may not remember the details but they know who they trust and who they don’t.
At some point, the fear mongers will rise up and say, “Be afraid...
January 15, 2022
W.B.’s Book Report: The Echo Wife
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey tackles a lot of the questions raised by the idea of cloning — Is a clone human? If you could make a near-exact duplicate of a person, would you and should you? And oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Evelyn Caldwell is a bristly researcher whom we meet as she is being presented with a prestigious award for her ground-breaking work with creating copies of human beings, while also coping with the aftermath of martial breakup. Hus...
January 14, 2022
Write the next word
I told Red I would be home by sunset, and here I am, an hour from home, a half-hour before sunset, with Saturday morning’s blog post still not written, and no clear idea about what to write.
I leaf through my journal looking for something decent I haven’t used for a blog post yet, and my eyes fall upon this, which I wrote one day when I was stuck in much the same way:
WRITE THE NEXT WORD.
It’s a forest-and-the-trees thing. A person (that would be me) gets so caught up in worrying about ...
January 13, 2022
Reclamation project in progress
I gave my fedora to the moose on the top shelf, and he wears it jauntily, a stuffed Indiana Jones retired from the field and grateful for the respite.
Dark forces are at large in the world today, waiving an undercurrent of despair and the death-fear, trying to make us lose hope and abandon faith that life will ever be normal again. But this IS normal. The cowards who deign to run our lives have always used sky-is-falling scenarios to fool us into doing their bidding. This latest attempt i...
January 12, 2022
On writing every day
Photo 42761895 / Once Time © Ayse Ezgi Icmeli | Dreamstime.comI got a new “Like” on Sunday night for “It’s a secret project. OOoooooooHhhhhh,” a post I posted Nov. 10 when I had an idea for a way to start a habit of writing fiction every day. I didn’t say what it was, but I concluded, “But most likely you’ll see something on Jan. 1 — or I’ll post a link to it from here — and you can say, ‘Oh, that must be that idea he had in November come to fruition.’ And the rest will be history, or not.”
...January 11, 2022
Ancient pack names
Summer walks in as I write in my journal and lets me stroke her head for a few moments before circling and laying at my feet. I asked her, “Should we have lived with you for a while before naming you, instead of picking a name and finding a dog to fit it? Is your real name Goo-Lack-a-Poo, an ancient pack name passed down through the ages?”
And now Dejah has come and laid down behind my chair, and here are the three of us, sharing a quiet moment.
Are their minds as full of thoughts and ...
January 10, 2022
Letters into words into sentences
I have been writing more on my fancy new MacBook Air laptop, but something feels more authentic when I go back to my pen and journal. Perhaps it’s the physical act of forming the letters, and the letters into words, and the words into sentences, that make it all feel more real.
Can the reader tell the difference between something I composed with a pen, then transcribed, and something that sprang straight from the keyboard? I would, at first glance, think not.
But now the words come out and...
January 9, 2022
Siesta
Here I am, taking up pen and paper again after a long winter’s nap. The first part of the day, before I slept, felt like being in a haze, under water — but at the time it felt normal. Not until I woke up from the nap did I realize how clear my mind is in comparison.
How often do people just plow through their day, making choices and decisions in a befuddled haze, when they just need to take a good nap?
But enough. What is it that my more-clear brain wants to share with the world? “Take...
