ARE YOU JUST RENTING YOUR THOUGHTS?

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

How much of you is really you?  Your thoughts are your true essence.  But do you really think thoughts or do you replay the thoughts of others?

B.F. Skinner thought we were merely programed bundles of learned responses.


“5% of the people think; 
10% percent of the people think they think;
and the other 85% would rather die than think.”
― Thomas Edison



The general goal of thinking is to “figure out the lay of the land” in any situation we are in.

We all have multiple choices to make. We need the best information to make the best choices.

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House



What is really going on in this or that situation? Are they trying to take advantage of me? Does so-and-so really care about me?

Am I deceiving myself when I believe that . . .? What are the likely consequences of failing to . . .?

If I want to do . . . , what is the best way to prepare for it? How can I be more successful in doing . . .?

Is this my biggest problem, or do I need to focus my attention on something else?



"The world is what it is.  It don't pay no never mind to what we think it is.  We mistake a shark for a guppy, we get ate."
- Samuel McCord



What have you learned about how you think? Did you ever study your thinking? 

What do you really know about how to analyze, evaluate, or reconstruct your thinking?

Where does your thinking come from? How much of your thinking is vague, muddled, inconsistent, inaccurate, illogical, or superficial?

Are you, in any real sense, in control of your thinking? Do you know how to test it?


Do you have any conscious standards for determining when you are thinking well and when you are thinking poorly?

If anyone asked you to teach them what you have learned, thus far in your life, about thinking, would you really have any idea what that was or how you learned it?



“Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits...”
― A.A. Milne

 

Be on the lookout for questions. The ones we ask. The ones we fail to ask. Look on the surface. Look beneath the surface.

Listen to how people question, when they question, when they fail to question. Look closely at the questions asked.

What questions do you ask, should you ask?

Examine the extent to which you are a questioner, or simply one who accepts the definitions of situations given by others.

Be on the lookout for reasonable and unreasonable behaviors — yours and others. Look on the surface. Look beneath the surface.

Listen to what people say.

Look closely at what they do. Notice when you are unwilling to listen to the views of others, when you simply see yourself as right and others as wrong.

But above all, try to stay a child in your heart and mind ...

This post is dedicated to the genius of Bill Watterson.

In true gratitude. 

The extended GOTHAM trailer:

 

BORN IN ANOTHER TIME

"Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time."
 - Hebrew Proverb

 Have you noticed how the world is changing so fast and things are not the same anymore

in terms of technology, lifestyle, education and, especially, our social and spiritual lives?

The Californios in the beginning of a small town named Los Angeles thought things would always stay the same for them.

Then, the Anglo bankers arrived and years later, they found they no longer owned their ranches.

For 5000 years, life went on much as it always had for the common man in Egypt. 

Then, in the 1700's, the Europeans "discovered" the land and decades of blood and fury followed.

Native Americans learned the same lesson.  The industrial revolution ravaged the countryside and rural lifestyle of Western civilization.

The internet has eliminated music stores, book stores,

coming close to doing it to cable TV

and opened the information highway in astonishing ways.

Now, politicians are laying the groundwork for the destruction of the internet as we know it.

In teaching students how to read books, we have them analyze the authors' arguments.

But we fail to connect the process and learning to the students' personal lives. It is an exercise limited only to the classroom.

Huxley’s vision in BRAVE NEW WORLD did not include a Big Brother to eliminate our ability to think,

it was technology that would undo our desire to think.

He felt we would have so much information, that we would become passive in our quest for it. That was in 1931.

Technology is changing faster than our ability to think the consequences through.

Our politicians are playing the same old game, worrying the world's monetary leaders. 

Should the dollar be replaced as the world's standard,

we could find ourselves paying prices 4 times higher for gasoline.

That would destroy the trucking industry.  Cities could find themselves having to be self-sufficient.  Our nation could very well fragment into city states.

Are we preparing our young to face surprising, unexpected economical, sociological changes?

Increasingly it appears that the NSA knows everything —

that it has access to all phone calls, all emails, all texts, all tweets, all address books, all visited websites, all downloaded photos, all purchases made, all comments posted.

There are no secrets anymore.

One of the potential places that the NSA can steal data is at the transfer station where the undersea cable meets land.

 Apparently Google has its own undersea cables.

How many of you use Google?  The NSA is watching.  With me, they are getting bored!

Was Huxley correct?

 

I don’t know about you, but the subject exhausts me.

I think I will go watch the Cartoon Network for awhile.

A WOMAN NAMED BARD

ONCE UPON A TIME ...

There was a woman named Bard.

Lily Bard decided to bury herself after a season of violence, brutality, and media scrutiny branded her not just physically but mentally.
 

Where to go? 

Her finger hovered over the map and stayed over the city of Shakepeare, Arkansas. 


What better city for a woman named Bard to find the peace of oblivion?
 

Never again will she be helpless.  She studies martial arts. 


 Never again does she want her scars gawked at.  She becomes a cleaning lady, someone no one notices as anyone of worth.
 

She cannot sleep.  She jogs at night until she is so exhausted that fitful sleep finally comes.
 

One night, she spots a figure pushing a garbage trolley ... HER garbage trolley.  That person dumps a huge garbage bag into the town green.
 

She waits until the person is gone and investigates.  Opening the bag, she shifts the huge burden under the street lamp to get a good look:
 

It is her landlord ... dead.  Her fingerprints are on the bag, on the man's clothes.
 

Lily doesn't care who did it, but when the police and local community start pointing fingers in her direction,

she realises that if she doesn't unmask the killer, her new life will not simply crumble.
 

It will end.
 

Unless the real killer ends her life first.
 

The first of five sterling mysteries written surprisingly well by Charlaine Harris.  Read the slow progress of Lily's bruised soul into a whole woman once more.

 

QUOTES

 

***

“I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.”
 

**

The children were probably not demonic.  But massed together like this, they were definitely hell.
**

THE BLUE GIRL

ONCE UPON A TIME ...
 

There was a bad girl who wanted to be good.

           A good girl who wanted a friend.

                    And a lonely ghost of a murdered boy.

This is not going to be the story you expect.
 

***

QUOTES
 

“Have you ever noticed' I said, "how everyone says they want to be different, 

but as soon as they meet someone who really is different, they ostracize them?” 

 **

 “The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. 

It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.” 
 

**

Maxine got an odd look. "You must have seen Ghost."

       This was good, I thought. A nickname was a start.

"How'd he get the name?" I asked, though I could guess from the way he kept disappearing on me.

"Because he really is a ghost. People have been seeing him for years."

I waited for a punch line, but it didn't come.

"You're kidding," I said.

"Why would I joke about something like that?"

"I don't know."

"If you don't believe me," she said, "ask somebody else. Though I should warn you. Popular wisdom has it that only losers ever see him."

"Oh, great."

***

 

You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.

***

 

“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree.

Or under a hill.

I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.”

 ***

 

 This is the story of Imogene, who’s just moved to the Canadian city of Newford,

a place where the barriers between natural and supernatural are gossamer thin,

after spending a few years as part of a gang in Tyson (and before that growing up on a hippie commune). 

She makes friends with Maxine, the “loser girl” at high school, 

and starts trying to live a normal life for the first time. 

But when she attracts the attention of the high school’s ghost, Adrian, 

 and then the attention of Adrian’s malicious fairy friends, life becomes more than a little hellish.
***

DO NOT READ THIS POST

HORROR

 

 

What draws an audience to stories of horror?

I think often it is the "What would I do in such a strange situation?" frame of mind.

I found this trailer on IMDB and watched because it was set in Louisiana:

All right -- D. G. this is for you:
Beneath the streets of Paris are the catacombs:

Take this evocative trailer.  I chanced upon it looking for videos on vintage Hollywood. 

Ignore the hokey face.  The beginning will hook you. 

The end will leave you feeling as I felt when I read MOCKINGJAY:

"I could write something better with that premise than that!"

 

 

And Robyn, you keep writing humorous reasons to be celibate on your blog, here is the movie for you!

 



BEFORE KATNIS EVERDEEN THERE WAS

ECHO SACKETT ...

 Judging by the size of his stomach, he was a very important man.
 –Echo Sackett in Ride the River, Ch 4
***

“How many are there? Of the Sacketts, I mean?”

“Nobody rightly knows, but even one Sackett is quite a few.”
–Echo Sackett in Ride the River, Ch 19
***

"Who the devil are you?"

"Not the devil, Mr. Sardust, but like him, I can open the gates to hell.  I'm Echo Sackett. You ready to go?"
***

It is 1840 ...
 

Sixteen-year-old Echo Sackett had never been far from her Tennessee home —

until she made the long trek to Philadelphia to collect an inheritance.

Echo could take care of herself as well as any Sackett man, but James White, a sharp city lawyer,

figured that cheating the money from the young country girl would be like taking candy from a baby.

If he couldn't hoodwink Echo out of the cash, he'd just steal it from her outright. And if she put up a fight?

There were plenty of accidents that could happen to a country girl on her first trip to the big city or on the journey back to her home miles away in the wilderness.

But never bet against Echo Sackett.

ARE YOU ONE WHO WAITS EAGERLY?

Are you one who awaits eagerly the next book in a beloved series?

I am.  I have three series like that.

{SHIFTING SHADOWS cover by Dan dos Santos}

SHIFTING SHADOWS is a collection of short stories in the Mercy Thompson universe:

the modern world as if the beings of the Brothers Grimm existed unknown to civilized Man.

Mercy is a Volkswagon mechanic, the daughter of a Blackfeet Indian and a white teenage mother.

 She is a "Walker" (a Native American shapeshifter not linked to the moon) who turns into a coyote, a gift she inherited from her father.

A rodeo man, he died a few days after consummating his relationship with her mother.

One day, not too long after Mercy was born, her mother went to her crib only to find a small coyote pup in her place.

Afraid and unsure how to raise her, her mother took her to the only place she knew was capable—

friends of an uncle, who had been a werewolf.

This is how Mercy came to be raised with the pack of Bran, the Marrok of the werewolves.


Now, she is on her own in the Pacific Northwest. 

The local vampire seethe collects protection money from the non-humans in their city. 

Mercy has no money, so she repairs the car of one of the vampires, Stefan ( the Soldier, born in Renaissance Italy) --

whose van is painted like Scooby-Doo's Mystery Machine.

She falls in love with the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, who detests her as a coyote.  She is paying monthly payments to the Dark Smith of Fae legend whose shop is now hers.

Her keen sense of smell allows her to pierce Fae glamour -- an act punishable by death from the fae should they learn of it.

After a life of staying to herself, Mercy finds herself coming to the aid of supernatural outcasts, though her strength is but that of a human's.

But be you Uber-Vampire, Faerie Queen, River Demon, rogue government agent, or volcanic elemental,

you hurt those she loves at your peril. 

Mercy will keep on coming as long as there is breath in her body and gambits in her sharp mind.

MOON-CALLED is her first book.

Oh, and to make her life complete ...

Mercy's just learned her rodeo rider father was actually ...

Coyote, the Trickster.

***

"Mine," growled Adam from the open door of my mechanic shop.

"Mine," rasped Mac, his eyes the yellow of the change, his arms wrapped tight around my waist.

It would have been flattering, but at least one of them was talking about lunch.

***

 On this day in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped began serialization in Young Folks magazine. 

Although begun "partly as a lark, partly as a potboiler," Kidnapped was an instant and huge hit.

***