You might be part of the problem...

Please don't blame Jeff Foxworthy for this. That incredibly talented comedian came up with the fantastic series "You might be a Redneck..." that I've often laughed at while traveling cross-country in my truck. Many people have posted "You might be..." things crediting Foxworthy, who probably has never even seen them. This one is all mine and he's not to blame for something he could have done a much better job with.

In my exhaustive tests and research, I have determined that I can offend about 95% of my friends and followers with this post. The other 5% can't actually read. If you'd rather not risk it, just scroll down and look at the pretty pictures of Hawaii where I'm spending the winter.

YOU MIGHT BE PART OF THE PROBLEM...

• If you can’t tell the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than’…
• If you think corporations are people…
• If you believe safety is more important than freedom…
• If your religion is better than everyone else’s…
• If you think Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen and Barack Obama isn’t…
• If you believe we would be safer if the weird guy who talks to himself on the bus, the boss who pinches his secretary’s butt, and the 16-year-old hormonally driven teen dating your child were armed…
• If you think ‘gun-free zones’ reduce crime…
• If terrorism is a sensible alternative to you...
• If two guys having a wedding can affect the sanctity of your marriage…
• If you think Obama is coming for your guns…
• If you intend to end homelessness with a ten-year plan…
• If you believe a wall will keep out problems…
• If you think Bernie Sanders is a Democrat…
• If you post clever memes that show how outraged you are…
• If you think everything is binary--yes/no, black/white, good/bad, plus/minus, saved/damned...
• If you can only speak one language (and that, not very well)…
• If you think Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton are opposites…
• If your god is the only one of the 3,000 or so that have been worshiped in human history that is real...
• If you’ve decided the antichrist lives in Washington DC…
• If you think any computer manufacturer or software publisher EVER calls customers to offer help…
• If you've never traveled outside your own country...
• If you believe everyone is equal but you or your group are a little more equal...
• if you think vaccinations pose a greater risk than epidemics...
• If you think drug companies care about curing diseases...
• If you think "The Bible Belt" comes with a quick-draw holster...
• If your Christmas was ruined by someone saying "Happy Holidays"...
• If turning the other cheek means applying makeup...
• If you didn't check the expiration date on the "fact" you are quoting...
• If you'd rather argue than think...
• If you don’t know the difference between a sheik and a Sikh…
• If you think there is a difference between cops killing innocent people and people killing innocent cops...
• If you’ve forgotten (and/or are ignoring) Jeb’s last name…
• If you think school violence didn't occur in the 60s...
• If you think U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are fighting for our freedom…
• If you think Europe is right next door to North America and the Middle East is way over on the other side of the world…
• If you've forgotten all the words of the Pledge of Allegiance except the ones added in the 50s...
• If you believe 'one good man with a gun' will ever help against terrorism...
• If you think Africa is a country…
• If you think Ben Carson is a sensible alternative…
• If you don't think there is 'enough' for everyone...
• If you post pictures of kitties to counteract the evil in the world…
• If you think Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Dalai Lama is going to give you $1,000, $5,000 or $1 Billion if you share his post…
• If you believe Muslims are a bigger threat to freedom than Christians...
• If you think peanut butter and banana sandwiches taste good...
• If nothing in this post offended you...
• If you have a clever, pithy, witty thing to say in response to this blog post…

YOU MIGHT BE PART OF THE PROBLEM!

 Now here's those pretty pictures I promised of life in Hawaii for the past two months.

730 Days

Today is the second anniversary of the day I hitched my wagon and drove out of town.

Wow! Two years. I should say something profound. I have achieved enlightenment. I am one with the world. I hate humanity. Something profound. Well, none of those.

I've written in past posts about what I've learned on this journey. My observations. My adventures. I guess that there are some other things I've discovered.

I have discovered that I can be friends with people who hold vastly different beliefs than mine about the meaning of life, justice, and faith. People I would never have sought out to be my friends. They're nice people. Some of them are even relatives.

I've discovered that regardless of political, religious, and personal beliefs, most people are nice people. There are some who simply hold so firmly to hatred that you can't get to the nice part, but even these have some aspect of love and kindness for someone. I've stopped demonizing people. I just take them as they come.

Fundamental to these discoveries is the discovery that we human beings are capable of holding two or more conflicting beliefs and ideals at the same time and adhering to them equally. Me, too. In the midst of a divorce, I honor no ideal more highly than the love of my wife and child. It's the way we are.

We can expound on patriotism and honor for our soldiers while flying the flag of a defeated enemy of the United States. We can denounce government or church interference in what goes on in the privacy of a bedroom between two consenting adults and demand that the government invade the privacy of individuals to regulate how they keep their guns in their homes. We can espouse love for all humanity, hatred for our enemies, concern for our environment, and denial of global warming at the same time.

We humans are masters of believing whatever we damn-well please and ignoring that the pink blouse simply doesn't go with the fuchsia pants.

We are fundamentally driven by greed. Whatever is good for me at this time is what is right and everyone should adhere to. We are more human than ever before in history.

I have found as I've traveled around the country that we like to erect monuments to events and that those monuments inherently defeat the purpose that we declare for them. The 911 Memorial does less to honor the brave men and women who lost their lives in self-sacrifice to save trapped people that it does to  keep alive the hatred for people who caused the event. The Rebel Battle Flag does less to honor brave men who fought for what they believed than it does to keep alive divisive issues that continue to separate north and south. The longest undefended border in the world is not between The United States and Canada, but between The Union and The Confederacy. We memorialize the holocaust to increase division between Jews and the rest of the world, not to honor people who lost their lives. We memorialized black lives in order to demonize police and honor police in order to demonize the media.

It makes no difference whether we are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian, Jew, or Muslim. We will continue to support the social, political, and religious leaders who give us an outlet for our hatred, a reason that we are suffering, a scapegoat for our pain. We will continue to base our allegiance on anecdotes, soundbites, and slogans.

We will continue to believe that one person's honor, conviction, courage, love, or evil invalidates another's.

That doesn't seem like much to have learned in the past two years. In fact, it seems like I should have learned it in the previous sixty-four.

But I'm only human.

Atheist, Agnostic, or Eh...

Sometimes the characters in my stories speak louder than I can. I excerpt this little gem from a statement by Brian Frost in Living Next Door to Heaven:

"I think that to be an atheist or an agnostic, you have to care. I don’t. I don’t care if there is a god or not, or if there are twenty of them or hundreds. It’s irrelevant. There are good people and there are people who are not as good. I won’t even call them bad, though I do believe that the pain we inflict upon each other is evil."

I Believe the Lies of Handsome Men

Isn’t that beautiful? I’ve been thinking about Cleo a lot recently. I first saw her in concert back in 1975 with the Johnny Dankworth Trio (her husband) at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. I’m going back there this summer to see three shows and one at the neighboring Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I love her bell-like tones and the soft soulful melodies she weaves. Not bad for a 90-year-old.

Of course, this post isn’t about Cleo Laine or Stratford or music.

It’s about believing lies. I think we all (me included) believe the lies of handsome men. Let me define my terms. ‘Handsome’ might also mean beautiful, clever, charismatic, popular, rich, erudite, holy, or whatever else you find attractive. ‘Men’ might also mean women, corporations, churches, books, political parties, schools, philosophies, or any other person, place, or thing that influences our thinking.

After writing thousands of words and discarding them, I finally got it down to one sentence.

We believe not what is true, but what resonates with who we are deep inside.

In fact, we are fundamentally unable to identify truth. In an age of virtual reality, we cannot even trust what we witness with our own eyes. We cannot trust experience, the Internet, ancient holy books, science, the media, or what others say. Not even the person, place, or thing that is most attractive to us—the lies of handsome men—can we know to be true.

This has always been the way of things. Unfortunately, far from fulfilling its promise of giving us instant access to all knowledge, the Internet has obfuscated truth, and has given equal weight to the words and thoughts of everyone. If for no other reason, this in itself has made it impossible to ascertain what is true and what is false. Instead, we have only what is believed and what is not believed. And that is different for every person.

Understanding it is all lies, has caused me to look inside myself at what kind of person I am. When I find myself angry, hateful, bitter, ready to kill, it is a reflection of who I am, not of what is true. When I find myself filled with joy, love, compassion, it is also a reflection of who I am. And the neat part of it is that I can choose what kind of person I am deep inside. I can choose whether I am a hateful, resentful, angry individual, or whether I am a loving, kind, and compassionate individual. I might fail to always live up to that ideal, but I renew it daily.

I am not going to attempt to relate this to current events. The association is too obvious and my analysis would be redundant. Each day, though, I ask myself if my response is the response of the kind of person I choose to be. I choose the lies I will believe based on what resonates within my soul.

I tell lies for a living. It’s called writing fiction. But I will cite two of my characters and the principles they live by as my own code for living. From Tony, “Leave the world a better place than you found it.” From Brian, “Treat everyone with kindness and respect.”

This is all I aspire to. These are the lies I choose to believe.

And here’s another beautiful photo from down in Southern Indiana where I enjoyed the hospitality of my friend and childhood neighbor, Mike Brown.

The Meaning of Life

I have not posted on my travel blog for quite some time. I've been sitting in one spot for the past three months, contemplating Life, The Universe, and Everything. I have not been idle. I have also written nearly 300,000 words on my various books and serials. I've designed three books for authors, have a current eBook project, and am releasing a book a month on Amazon this year. (If I can get this one formatted and out before the end of the month!)

The thing is, I have been doing a lot of deep thinking this year, as well. That has resulted in more than one headache. (Or perhaps it was the wine.) As a result, much of what I want to say is not related to my travels and is also not appropriate for Facebook. At the same time, here's a great picture of my daughter when we went to Fort Myers Beach a few weeks ago. I'm not only contemplating the lint in my navel!

I thought about writing a post that boldly declared that everything we think and believe is based on the fantasies or outright lies of handsome men. I might still write that when I can keep it from becoming too depressing. Instead, I chose to expose you to my thoughts on the meaning of life.

You see, I've come to the end of my search for meaning. I was never very good at it, anyway. I realized, in a conversation with a dear friend this week, that I stopped searching for meaning some time ago. I have, over the course of this journey, discovered contentment in simply being. I am certain there are names for this and that greater minds than mine have discoursed on the topic (Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Descartes, Bonhoeffer), but I've either ignored them or shamelessly plagiarized them without knowing.

In case this is getting to be too much, here's a picture of my daughter and me in front of my tiny trailer home. I so loved having her visit!

The essence of the search for meaning is to sow discord. The search assumes there is an answer. Of course, if one has found the answer, then it is within our nature to attempt to convince everyone else that we are right in our answer. If I am right, then you are wrong, and that creates a division between us. The antidote to answers is the lack of questions. I'm simply not asking them any longer.

I certainly consult my GPS and maps when I am going someplace. I ask for recommendations in a restaurant. I inquire about the health and well-being of my friends. I entertain philosophical discussions. It's fun. But it does not affect my acceptance of others or my outlook on life.

Life is the meaning of life.

Really, how could I not end that without a picture of a beautiful sunset in the RV Park where I'm staying?

I am being.

It's not for posterity

1/2/2015
Did you think I was never going to post again? I have difficulty with it, I admit. It always seems like such a big task to post on the blog. After all, this is the official record, right?

And there's always the problem of having to download my photos and edit them and pick the right ones and make up a story to go with them. And then what if I'm not clever or profound. What if it's all just a description of a rather common and dull daily life. I might as well post it on Facebook.

Well, actually, I do. I snap a quick photo with my cell phone and post it to Facebook because something was funny, the sunrise was beautiful, or I made a particularly beautiful pan of cornbread. It's just common stuff. It's not for posterity.

I guess that's part of why it's been so difficult to keep up this blog. I approached it as if it was for posterity. "These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. It's five year mission: To boldly go where no man has gone before." My life isn't like that. I'm timidly going where everyone else has gone at least once.

Since leaving Seattle on October 14, I've been across Washington, into Oregon to visit Ava and Ross, across a corner of Idaho and down to Salt Lake City, across northern Colorado to visit David and Tressa, up to Laramie to do research and launch NaNoWriMo. Then I cut straight down I-25 through Colorado and into New Mexico. I stopped at Capulin Volcano and then on to Ruidoso where I spent two weeks in a condo pounding out my new novel. I spent the next weekend in Las Cruces where I finished this year's novel and then went up to Mule Creek, NM and on up into the mountains to have Thanksgiving with Liz and Gary, friends that I met online. Great time. Cathy, another friend I met online, invited me to spend a few days in Alamogordo and attend the Lion's Club volunteer recognition party. I got to volunteer in the thrift store and see some of the local sights, as well. Then I started Eastward and got to Fort Worth where I met first with my editor, Jim. Then Cousin Nigel met me and we had a reunion as she headed for Waco and I headed back northwest. It was a great time and I've connected with a whole bunch of Everett cousins that I've been out of touch with for a dozen years. Finally got to my Sister Sharon's house in time to celebrate the holidays and get frozen in. The Texas Panhandle just isn't all that hot in December/January.

Monday, I'll be wandering generally eastward, planning to spend a week in Branson MO and then wandering down into Florida and hoping I'll find some warm weather during the coldest months. Nothing definite on that yet, though.

Along the way, I've published Jason Black's, new book Blackpelt. I designed templates for Larry's set of three books and for Karlene's new novel, Flight for Success. I'm about to release the second edition of The Gutenberg Rubric. I'm deep in the layout phase for Mary Driver Thiel's new book, Twelve Thousand Mornings. I wrote my November Novel, Blackfeather (by Devon Layne) and hope to release it by the end of February. I continue to write my long serial at Stories Online.

I can't say that I'm making a huge difference in the world, and so there really isn't much to put down here "for posterity." It's only about today. And today there are no pictures. I'm going to see if I can make short photo posts from my phone.

Happy New Year!