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Musings on anything. |
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My blog was filled up. I'm too lazy to clean it out. So I started a new one. |
| DAY 2737 May 15, 2020 Places are opening back up as the restrictions are lifted. How do you feel about this? Do you think we'll be able to return to the way things are? I have mixed feelings. I want people to work again and earn a paycheck. Not everyone had the option to work at home. I want to visit more businesses, but I'm afraid. That leads to why I don't think we'll ever go back completely to the way things were a few months ago. The grocery store seems to have it under control. Both customers and employees are wearing masks and gloves. People are waiting courteously for others to get through the entryway before pushing their own way in or out. But the home and garden stores are just masses of crazy people. No masks, no gloves, brushing up against you. I'm afraid that people will think everything is okay and they won't practice precautions. They will get reckless. And this is pollen season, so people are sneezing and coughing a lot. My next door neighbor is a doctor. She's self-quarantined herself from her family. She's living downstairs, and they live upstairs. They don't eat together or stand in the same room. They meet outside at night around the fire pit so that she can see them and talk to them. She doesn't want to risk their health, especially since her husband is past retirement age. She is exercising caution, so I think we should, too, not to that extreme if we don't work in a medical practice. When the vaccine is available, and there are no new reports of illness or deaths from it, we can begin to relax. But we will have this little fear inside us forever. We can never regain the carefree attitude we once had. I've developed some new attitudes, too. I don't want to play hand bells any longer. I'm going to let my hair grow long again and let the gray come in naturally. I may color it gray once I figure out what my natural gray shade is. I'm rather pleased with my yard work and want to maintain it. And a "company ready" clean house isn't a bad idea either. |
| I don't usually review books . But this one is so bad, I have to get it off my chest. I met the author, at a gathering of older actors. He and his wife were both quite lovely. He had announced plans to write the book, so I promised that I would read it when it came out. I never saw any announcements, but recently tried looking up books by Don Quine. Mind you he's an extremely nice person, and I felt obligated to fulfill my promise to read it. It's called The Dream Virgin, and is available from Amazon. I'm not recommending you read it unless you have particular tastes. It's quite graphic from the very beginning. I barely made it through the prologue, except I remembered my promise to someone I would never see again. The characters were disgusting, ugly, abusive to children, and sick. The first chapter was totally different and introduced the teenager who led dream sessions that the advertisement and book cover led you to believe was the protagonist. It was hard to tell, Not a lot of time was spent on her, but I got the feeling from that chapter that this was going to be about spiritual warfare. I have read some of that before, and it did involve children, and unicorns, and dreaming. So I kept reading. But I was wrong. No spiritual warfare. In fact, the dreaming part wasn't well developed. There were so many characters that I felt I needed a list with names and descriptions to keep track of who was who and how they fit in. There wasn't a lot of character development, except maybe the grandfather, and unseen by the reader, he made some changes and went from almost empathetic to unlikable again. The truth is I never felt any empathy to any of the characters. Too much happened too fast and was sometimes confusing. Even if the gross stuff weren't there, it was simply poorly written. The gross stuff just kept coming. Cannibalism, violence, drugs, nudity, etc. If you like a series of events like that, this might be your book. There was certainly no one working for right or morality, no real heroes. There weren't any direct sex scenes, unless you call mutilating a naked body sex; it doesn't count in my book. There was lots of profanity. This was obviously self-published. Although four people were acknowledged as proofreaders, professional proofreaders would have known the difference between quite and quiet, which form of a pronoun to use, and the rules of objects of prepositions. They'd know how to use commas, too. I suppose every writer needs to read a bad book occasionally. I learned that characters need to be more in depth. There shouldn't be too many story lines to follow, unless you're doing a James Michener style epic. Regardless of the genre, this one wasn't mine, the story should be cohesive and have a satisfying ending. This one left things dangling, so another could follow in a sequel. I won't be reading it. |
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I marvel at the things I'll be able to tell my grandkids about someday. Life is accelerating - or maybe it just feels that way!
I completely sympathize with your desire to declutter. I have more stuff than you can shake a stick at that didn't actually belong to just my wife or myself throughout the house.