The Fair Path

The Fair Path

Have you ever been alone in a crowd before?

More precisely, I should ask, have you ever felt alone in a crowd? A buzz all around that somehow goes past or around you, never quite sinking in. Smiles, conversations, jokes, eye contact – that never reach you. You feel invisible at best – shunned at worst.

You may want to run, but there is nowhere to go.

You must move away from this uncomfortable state. There must be a change.

There are two possible roads ahead.

You feel like a boulder rolling down a hill when you come to a fork. All the difference is ahead.

One path is within. The other path is without.

One option is to move outwards. To reach out. To force the situation. To attempt to becoming a part of without the need for an invitation. To take a risk. Stepping out from oneself. To extend a hand, an opinion, a thought – with the knowledge that it may be turned away from, shunned, unwanted, rejected. To take the risk of being a fool, a busy body, obnoxious. The geek trying to break into the click. To expand the bubble around yourself to include others. To open up and be vulnerable. To risk appearing stupid or a social misfit. Trying to gain friendship at the possible consequence of garnering distain.

The reward for this path is you may become part of the buzz. One with the crowd. Known and no longer invisible.

The possible downside is that you are no longer invisible and now all your flaws and awkwardness is out in the open for all to see. Perhaps you don’t fit in and never will. Perhaps being invisible is the best you can do, the most you can hope for.

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." – Abraham Lincoln.

Then there is the other path. The other direction. Instead of turning outwards in the hope of a connection, you can go inwards. Turning away from the trappings of the outside world. Moving toward self. To focus your attention to what’s inside. Your feelings and thoughts. To delve into your beliefs and emotions, to circle downwards deep into your personal cave. Trying to find you center and what makes you tick. What makes you unique. Searching for love of self and a deep inner respect. To find that place of knowing, that space of oneness. To seek the stillness, to explore through meditation.

The reward for this path, this direction, is pure radiance of being. Knowing that nothing can really hurt your pure essence. You are all. You will find that needs are merely flights of fantasy that we create out of the nothingness of fear. All is within and all is love.

The downside of this path is that sometimes when we go within we can spiral down and around until it becomes a narcissistic exercise. Self-worth somehow turns into self-importance. "We are one" becomes we are the one.

Sometimes seeing the beauty, weakness, and perfection in another is also the quickest way to seeing it within. Yes, somehow seeing the weakness in ourselves and in others becomes important. For it is only when we can see and come to terms with weakness and realize that they are just blocks, barriers to cover perfection. All weaknesses melt away in the light of true examination. Many times this is easier to see in others than in ourselves. Deep secrets become antidotes when the weight of darkness is lifted off.

Many times it is easier to move beyond judgment toward another than it is to do the same for ourselves.

So in the end I believe it’s the contemplative blend of reflective searching within and the reaching out, and shining out of our light towards the outside world in the hopes of connection that is our most beneficial and should be our ultimate goal.

Understanding ourselves and understanding others is a chicken or egg type of scenario.

Instead of asking which came, or should come, first – perhaps the real road to enlightenment comes from the realization that one cannot survive without the other. For if all is truly one… then there is no difference.

                                                           Sincerely signing off,

 

                                                                                             ò im Uhr

P.S. Again I am always playing the middleman. Walking the fence. Looking for that middle path. I usually end up in the ditch of the embankment that separates the two paths…

Ken Wilber

                                  Spiritual Path

  

                                                                         Path of thorns

Pandora's Path

A Brown Cleveland

A    W I N D Y    L O S S

The wind? The wind. The wind! The wind… ah, the wind. I was never so conscience of the wind. It wasn't unbearably strong, or cold for that matter. I just noticed the wind especially because it was… different. That's all, just different. How, I'm not sure. Trying to describe how the wind felt that day would be like trying to explain the feeling of love. Ah, but these unexplainables were so dissimilar. Unlike love, I understood that wind. I couldn't describe it, but yes, I understood the evilness of that wind. Just as you don't have to be a philosopher to feel love. I understood that wind without ever having felt it before.

Evil.

Evil like no man ever knew. Like no man could ever know. Without blood nor flesh, soul or heart. Evil could now be conceived to its fullest extent. To feel all the destruction possible, without ears or eyes, and whisper it in the night. The wind did not and could not talk, and yet was heard. It could not see, yet always hit the weakest side of the house and blew off the leaf with the thinnest stem. Lacking flesh and mass, not a day went by that its presence wasn't felt.

To blow from seemingly no source, to move about freely with no aim but its own ...

To be the first life giving gasp of a new born: to be part of the relief and joy after finishing a race; to pillow and support huge D-C 10'S; to give each bird it's flight; to cool a hot brow on a hot summer's day; to glide a ball, through the sky, with which the children play; to play with a kite above the trees; to carry a child's escaped balloon up and off to some place unknown; but also having the power and will to destroy any town.

To some days relax and simply play dead, to roll ocean waves and watch the seagulls overhead, to fly freely, to know no bounds, to have sinned, to shake and crumble, setting whole cities to rubble, to be the wind. The wind.

Tonight the wind is evil. Tomorrow sane. To be anything. At any time. Except plain.

Yes, the wind. It was the wind on that special night that caused such calamity and pain. A stream of oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules that had such a fateful result on the actions of a few, but the lives and hearts of many. An absolute wind that brought a final climax down upon the heads of those expecting more. Without wind this day might have ended better…

This wind had directly caused the watering of many people’s eyes by irritation, in a way not so subtle that had stopped progress short of reaching the goal. These tears were not from irritation, but from sadness. Tears wasted on grass that didn't ever need watering.

The loneliest creature in the Universe feel down to his knees with head in hands before the people that had put so much trust and hope in him. They offered him no condolence as they could only think of that wind. The dreaded wind! The wind that blew in that lonely man's face and carried his tears away in the breeze.

The man was now alone. Once the center of attention, now he stood alone. He hated the wind the most. For it was the wind that had stolen the chance of heroism from his grasp. Blame it on the wind. The wind, how it blew so cold today…

It was the wind that blew his straight, seemingly good kick back and stopped it from crossing over the goal posts, dropping inches short. The kick was strong and true, but the wind prevailed in the end as the football fluttered short.

On the last play of the game the field goal that would have won it was not to be. For the wind. Without eyes, ears, mouth, or feelings, it was the wind that made the choice. The wind chose the victor on that cold day in January and sent the home team and fans away with heavy hearts.

Intercepting your affection,

     èim  Uhr

P.S. I threw a party the other day. It was an all sports party, and all had a good time. I pitched my spiel about getting rich by raising foul (fowl) to the baseball players, but they walked away as I struck out. I passed a stock tip to the football players and they rushed right out to contact their brokers. The tiddlywinks player flipped when he received my invitation and thus couldn't make it suffering from a slipped disc. The hockey players checked out and made passes to the waitress, who claimed they had no goal. Polo players rode by but only waved from their cars, claiming they were hoarse. Some bowlers rolled in telling the sad story of their days in the gutter. Basketball players dribbled wine from their glasses and food traveled from their mouths to the floor as they talked. The only really bad thing that happened to upset me was when I served my best wine to the tennis players and they found fault with it, but no love was lost. The swim team came in and got carried away doing breast strokes, which was okay by me but the husbands of some of the women didn't like it. It was a party that lasted to the wee hours of the morning, except all the gymnastic people insisted on leaving precisely at 10. Some very suspicious money was changed hands but the monopoly players claimed to know nothing of it ­– yet were seen making token gestures of peace to the chess players, who had quite a knight in my humble castle. The baseball players, and basketball players dramatically ended the party by fighting over what a foul was. Finally a hunter ended the discussion by shooting them (the bird), and all went home happy. And so I said my goodbyes to a lot of gamey people.

Hello            T.V.(I'll never watch another game)

Windy

A Light Beyond

A    L I G H T   B E Y O N D

Endings always come to fast. Indeed, I've heard it said before, but up until now I have never believed it. Throughout my life I have experienced that in most of my relationships, endings don't come fast enough to suit me. I have always pushed to reach conclusions, in movies, especially books, and even in relationships. But as I sit where I have sat for the past twelve hours, only the direction I'm facing having changed, alone, through a long night, I think about endings corning too fast. Endings always come at last, maybe that's why they seem to come too fast. If they are to truly come at last, then once you have an ending it has to be the end, there is nothing more. It seems the reason I have never before feared endings, is because I always assumed there would be more. After a movie ends, just take a stroll down to the next theatre and see Rambo #12. After turning the last page of a book, picking up another and starting on page one. After saying good-bye to a temporary friend, although they never seem to catch on to this fact until it's too late and they wind up hurt, saying hello to a new one.

But what if this is the last movie to be made? What if after this book I find that there are no others? What if the last girl I have said good-bye to, is also the last one I will ever say hello to. The word "end" never meant the same thing to me as it did to other people. This is a realistic approach, but is it the better? Have I been living my life to the fullest? I may be taking too many things for granted. Is it truly living if you don't die with every flower as the cool winter wind cuts through your petals?

I have been living like I know that I'll always be living. But all things must pass. Once I did believe that endings would come and go, flowers will die and grow, precipitation turns from rain to snow. But now as I sit here in this field alone, I'm not so sure I know. What page are the answers on? Although I finish the book, will I ever be given a change to go back and reread? Those pages I skipped over may be important…

I watched the sun set, hours ago. But time is nothing but what my memory makes it out to be. Did this memory ever really exist, or is it something that my brain manufactures just to make sense of the present? Do the people around me really exist, or do they just represent pages in my book, with no lives of their own, just waiting for me to read? Once I leave my friends, do they really do the things they say they do? Or does my mind just make them say that to fulfill the need I have to make them appear that they are real? Do other people really form opinions about me, or do I just think they do, pretending that they have any thoughts? Is this just a fail-safe system my mind has worked out to keep me sane? Am I alone?

It can be pretty hard to check your sanity when you're not sure if you're already insane. Is it the rest of the world that's crazy? Every person must feel that they are the only ones who is truly sane in this world, and those that don't feel this way are the ones locked up in the asylums.

As I sit here, waiting, in the grass, legs crossed, I wonder if we each don't, in our minds, build four convenient walls around ourselves. Forever safe, in our individual, custom-made, asylums.

The sky is much lighter than it was just an hour ago. The stars, already starting to fade, are completely blocked by a cloud that drifts overhead. It's a fluffy, average-size summer cumulus cloud, and for a moment I wish that I too were floating, unaware of time, with it.

But things are not always what they seem. The looks of this cloud are deceiving as I know that it weighs at least 550 tons.

So here I sit, expecting nothing except what I expected from the start.

I catch a last glimpse of the moon hanging in the sky, as it in many ways represents the opposite of the sun. The moon, slow and cold, while the sun is fast and hot.

Endings always come too fast. The sun, at first peeks over the horizon, then bursts into the now bright sky. Though its warmth seems immediate, it is not enough to dry a tear from my cheek.

Endings always come at last.

Though a new day is beginning, what can be said of tomorrow?

There's a fine line between the darkness and the dawn…

                                                             Lastingly True,

      èim  Uhr

P.S. Time doesn't pass too fast. It’s all relative. For along

        the Earth's equator, dawn arrives at 1,000 m.p.h.

        But along the moons equator, it comes at only

        10 M.P.H. — slow enough for a man on

        bicycle to keep up with it.

Sane?                    More craziness 

                          Many good Crazy songs!

Extremists and Other Extremities

Extremists and Other Extremities

                                                                                                     By Tim Uhr

            Follow your body… lose your mind. To lift weights -- or to read a book, my choice was as easy as the choice between a dumbbell and a scholar. My choices were clear, but my answers were opaque. As I wrestled the choice over in my mind, I grew weary and fell asleep.

Was my body seeking sleep as a form of rest, or was my mind searching to find new universes in the realms of sleep?

While I slept I dreamt of chocolate covered army ants. They were still alive. Helplessly struggling in waves of chocolate. They were almost cute, with their little blindfolds. You had to shoot them before eating. I didn’t have the heart, or a small enough riffle…

So much to do, and so much time. I only lack the energy to succeed at everything.

From networking to needlecraft, each stated phrase speaks to the coming phase that leads to a craze, which can only bring me more grays.

Which train do I board?

Any nice tunnels ahead?

With so many openly going on the wagon, while multitudes of others coming out of the closet, and still more standing for this, or sitting for that, it all makes me kind of dizzy. And with my head spinning will I miss my turn?

Right of Left? Sure we should all vote, but when I finally make my mind up—the light turns red. Leaving me faced, with red. And I’m not bluffing, just blushing.

But I try to fit in. I bought an exercise bike, a self hypnosis tape, a computer, went to karate class, bought a crystal, a fax machine, a gun, a pair of one hundred and fifty dollar tennis shoes, a cell phone, a case of Dove bars, three jazz records, a flower, and meditated in my spare time. That was last week.

Needless to sat I never actually got around to meditating, and my list wasn’t quite as long as I wanted because my sixteen charge cards were all over the limit.

I soon found out that you can’t have it all. I was getting close but I was robbed and left with nothing but the bills. When they say “You can’t take it with you” I hope there talking about the debts.

Life is full of little choices: You can exercise the biceps or the brain cells. There is no middle ground. One side detracts from the other. It’s like a balance scale where one side is physical and the other is mental. On this roller coaster we call life – hills abound and the scale is never balanced.

Physical fitness seems to be winning the war—every where you go there are muscle men and women. On the beach the muscles have become more important than the tans. I call it the “parade of chests.”

But is this fitness thing just a fad? Will it go the way of hula-hoops, pet rocks, and mood rings? One can never tell. Who would have ever thought that rock n’ roll would still be around after more than a quarter of a century? The Who indeed.

Staying in shape is an important goal, but anything taken to extremes scares me. Just as Hitler went to extremes in trying to rebuild Germany (rebuild it into the whole world????), as did Diane Witt of Worcester, Mass., by letting her hair grow for eighteen years. Her hair was measured at ten feet, nine inches in 1989.

I guess I never did believe in being an extremist. I have never allowed myself to get wrapped up in anything. I like to spread my interests around, this keeps me from succeeding at anything and thus I don’t have to focus my attention on any one area for too long, keeping me from ever growing bored. People well-rounded are like balls that bounce from one thing to another, never coming to rest in any one place long enough to be at the top.

Specialization is the modern way. If one puts their concentration in any one area, chances are they will become very good at it. It can be very gratifying to be able to say that at least you were good at one thing.

It used to be called “having a one-track mind,” but that was before it became “in.” Perhaps that’s why there are very few athletes who play more than one sport. It goes against the grain of specialization. Sometimes it amazes me that so many people are baffled when someone tries their hand at two different sports. You think that there aren’t a lot of baseball players that can’t play football, and visa-versa? But I like it. I think it’s healthy. I wish we could bring back a little of that “jack-of-all-trades” philosophy. There are exceptions. But most likely it will never become common. Try finding a handy man these days.

Nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. Muscles turn to fat, which eventually turns to dust. Even taxes, which grow, eventually get so large they explode into the controlling government’s face. This isn’t what the government.

Health and fitness is slowly replacing the couch potato mentality. Don’t believe for a minute though that TV will suffer, because soon it will be that instead of eating potato chips and drinking beer in front of the tube, it will be lifting weights and exercising while watching your favorite TV show. TV is the base of all modern human life.

I once succumbed to the fitness frenzy. I bought weights. They were heavy. Hard to lift. Lifting them made me tired.

After lifting the dumbbells a few times, I actually felt weaker! So I immediately ran to a mirror and I swear I could see no difference in me. I didn’t think I looked at all like one of those body builders I see on the beach. When I’m with a girl and I come across a muscle man I always try to point out that I’m probably smarter than they are. Maybe.

So, if after lifting a weight, I don’t see any improvement in my physical stature, what is the sense?

After a week of depression from my failed foray into musclebound mania I came up with a solution. A plan. A blueprint of success. Thinking power to solve the mystery of the physical:

Instead of lifting these artificial weights, I decided the smart thing was to go natural. I found the environmentally sound solution. It starts with drinking beer and eating potato chips and ice cream. With this strict regiment I figure I could gain an extra twenty pounds around my mid-section within a month. Then, by lugging this extra twenty pounds around all day, instead of just a few minutes with those artificial weights I would get fitter more quickly. Naturally. (Isn’t he the shortstop?)

Life is what you make it. Adversity is how you take it. And to get to the top you sometimes have to fake it.

I have a problem with faking anything. The only one I can ever fool is myself. What fun is that? Probably rates right up there with exercising. And with this thought I finally hit upon my ultimate solution—I will fake exercising. Therefore killing two birds with one stoned. And everyone must get stone. Or is that rock?

Remember: A beer in the hand is worth two bushes…  Or is it buds?

No. No. No! “A dead bird in the bush is worth two hands.” Or is it, “A rolling bird gets stuck in the moss, and thus can’t fly.”

Anyway, you get the point. I hope.

I think it’s time to run (I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt to run around the block a few times to clear my head) before I start mixing metaphors or something equally as revolting. Because it is important to remember that when you mix a metaphor improperly the cake batter turns out lumpy.

End.

Did I just awaken my spirit?

Can it Dance?

Where am I now

that I am awake?

Let me know which of the above links you like the best...

On Writing

Funny Things: Like Rain, or Writing Mistakes (Like Too Long of Titles Which Take Up Two Lines, Instead of the Usual One Line, For Most Titles.)   P.S:  Three lines for a title are okay.

Rain is a funny thing.

What is rain? Be it beast, person, or mineral. Surely it is not living, but if this is so then why do we say “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and not ‘it’s raining like cats and dogs?” Of course these cats and dogs could be dead, and even if they were alive before their descent, I’m sure that would no longer be the case for long after a fall from a cloud to the impact with the ground. It’s a long fall… Yet, winter seems to come quick, and last long, but spring, unlike fall, or, I should say autumn…

Rain? Oh right, back to the subject…

Is rain good? Is it bad? Is it indifferent? Is it necessary? Is it wet?

If you faithfully answered, “Who cares” to the above questions, chances are that you won’t read on. So now all that I have to do is figure how many people are going to express that universally common, valid feeling, so that I can determine if I should go on writing. Read on. Right on. Write?

Well, let’s see. A quick review… I started off by saying that rain is a funny thing. That is a pretty catchy thing to start off with, but does it make sense? (I would rather make dollars than sense any day!) I mean, is rain really funny? Have you ever seen anyone looking out a window on a rainy afternoon and laughing hysterically? Has anyone even chuckled politely at rain?  Has rain ever been a punch line? Well, actually I can picture a line for punch, especially if it’s spiked! But who would wait in line for rain? Would even being caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella make anyone giggle?

I bet not.

No, maybe I didn’t get off to such a good start… It isn’t good policy to start off and article with a false statement. It works much better if you slip them in somewhere in the middle. This isn’t political writing but I would at least like it to have the same semblance of deception.

So change the first sentence to “Rain isn’t a funny thing.” There! That’s true enough and still catchy enough to satisfy for an opening. It may not be brilliant, but remember that there aren’t too many who can squeeze water from rocks, and I would rather have rocks upstairs that a totally empty belfry. That would drive me bats!

Then I ended the first paragraph. Should have I have ended it? Yes, I think so; it’s complete by itself. Also I don’t want this article to be run down by long, tiring paragraphs, and especially long sentences which seem to drag on and on and on with no end in sight, making the reader’s eyes water, and wearing down, his or her, which ever the case may be, brain to a point where he or she, again – which ever the case may be – doesn’t feel like reading on, and the whole point is lost and the readers begin to wonder if maybe the keyboards period key is broken, or some possibility such as that, if they are tenacious enough to make it this far, which most people today have the attention span of a teensy-fly, so they probably baled out long ago and are now watching funny videos on You Tube of people falling down, which all tends to draw from the whole message the writer, me, is trying to make, even if it is a worthwhile cause. So I’ll try to stay away from that.

There are many writing problems. I come across them often enough. Because I write them down when I see other writers make them, I totally avoid them.

The worst mistake that I can think of is not necessarily the run-on sentence. The incomplete sentence can also very often get on a person’s nerves, and don’t think that for one minute, or maybe even two, that just because a sentence happens to be extremely long, seeming to run on and on forever with a deluge of words, like standing under a waterfall looking for a drink of water, turning the trusting reader blue without a chance to take a breath (which may actually be the most healthy thing for you). I promise to avoid them, too.

Another thing I try to do is to keep my printer heads clean so that the e’s and o’s are not all colored in. That can also be a great strain of the reader’s eyes. Yes sir, I really try to keep up with my e’s and o’s.

But I guess that as long as the article is interesting and makes sense with a strong ring of truth to it, that either warms his heart or conversely chills his soul, the reader can put up with a few extra long sentences, along with some extra short ones, and maybe even a few colored in spaces. As long as the piece in question draws a solid conclusion and doesn’t just sort of ramble on at the end as if the writer doesn’t exactly know how to end the article. Possibly because there was never any purpose to the whole mess and no final conclusion could be drawn from his work on a day when he really had nothing to say, you may know that I’m a fanfaron, but I don’t like to boast about it. You may feel embarrassed spending your time with no form of remuneration, trying to grasp the meanings of niggling prose scattered throughout. You feel especially obtuse if you went through the trouble of looking up some unmomentous words that he tossed about, because you felt left out in not knowing their meaning. You find no punch line at the end because the writer really had little to say throughout the whole mess of words except a few fragments of thoughts that he never really tied together. Tying ideas together is sometimes like tying your shoes, if the stings are weak, nothing’s going to hold. By the end it becomes obviously clear that these random thoughts could never possibly be joined in a conclusion understandable to anybody, especially the writer.

So as not to do any of the above mentioned I will end this article right here and now and leave you in awe of it.

                                                   Mistakenly yours,

                                                                                                     .                                                                                èim  Uhr

            P.S. Next time I won’t try to write about rain on a sunny day...






South Central Rain                    England Rain?
               Madonna                         Is your reign wet?                             When Wet --- Sing!
   Drops                      ...and Mondays                              whatz dis bout?

Bad Breath

B A D    B R E A T H

Take a breath. Make it a deep, long breath ... Now try it without coughing. Do it again. And again. See that? I bet I got you to do that for the rest of your life now. Breathing is a habit that is hard to break, and now you're hooked!

Why do we breathe? I have my own theories.

Breathing is only done when bored. It's a fact. And I'll be the first to prove it. Now think about it, isn't that the only time you have noticed your breathing, when you're thinking about it? Most of the time you don't even think about breathing-- and that's because you're not! People just sit there with nothing to do and they happen to think about breathing, so they start. They take a deep breath, then another, and soon end up gasping for air. But that's only because they are thinking about it. You don't need it!

You can prove it for yourself. Now take your mind off breathing, totally. Think of something else, say… air, for example.

O.K. Ready? One, two three, four, fi… Now stop! Are you breathing? Oh yeah, sure, now you are, because you're thinking about it. But at that second, when your thoughts returned from that other thought to breathing, were you breathing? Think about it. No, of course you weren't. Because there is no need to breathe. It's psychological. It's all in your mind (which at least proves there's something up there amongst the cobwebs.)

I may go down in history for this great realization. This could be more important than my stand against the typewriter companies. I'll be labeled as a genius. Millions will come to hear me speak at Bingo tournaments. My name in all the history books. My picture in coloring books. I may even get an academy award!

Air is stupid anyway. You can’t convince me that it’s in water, because when you take a fish out of water and let him breathe pure air – he dies! So if there was air in water, it would kill him. Who needs it? H20. H20! H20? What a dumb way to spell water. Why can't those crazy scientists be like the rest of us and spell this normally? If the had to write it in symbols couldn't they have at least made it WeT2r. How come air has no chemical symbols, if it did would it be A1R? Where “A” would stand for airline exhaust and “R” would stand for Refried beans.

I guess the reason scientists call water H20 is because of the hydrogen and oxygen in it. Which is another reason I also believe drinking or bathing aren’t good. After all, who wants the impurities of air in the forms of hydrogen and oxygen creatures to climb all over them or even to enter into their system? I think the hydrogen creatures are more neutral in and upon the system – it’s definitely the oxygen creatures that are the worst. Just breathe once and, before you know it, you have millions of oxygen creatures crawling around inside you. The hydrogen creatures aren't quite as bad, they pretty well stay put. But you have to watch those little oxygen buggers, they're so restless! Oxygen creatures breed faster too…

It’s a new-age fallacy that we have to breath. You have all those gurus out there trying to teach you to breathe – that’s because you don’t – not unless you’re thinking about it. So many charge you to teach you how to breathe, I think it would be money better spent to learn how not to breathe. Free yourself from your unnecessary addictions!

When you weigh the validity of this axiom please do not consider the source, just try to pretend that someone half sane is putting forth this idea. Remember, as Don Marquis once said:

"An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it."

Changing the subject, without deferring far from the original idea of this article, I wanted to answer a common type of letter I'm always getting. People from all over the world write to me and complain (usually at the end of their long, complementary letter). I figure they suppose they must throw in one complaint, because if their letters were all complementary then they would seem false praise and not be taken sincerely. The one, and only, complaint  by the adoring public is that my articles are always too serious. They are tired of crying and gnashing their teeth. It is said I should try to show the lighter side of my meaningful topics. Even though I take my writing very seriously, I think it is also important to comply with the wishes and whims of my readers even if it's something that I feel ruins the article.

So, in cooperation with the whims of my readers, in my never-ending attempt to be everything to everybody, I would like to cover not only the heavy, deep side of my topics, but also the lighter side. I would like to show that I can be light headed as well as hard. This is the first article I am to attempt this endeavor. If it goes well, and has a good response and makes me a lot of money, who knows, I may sellout many times in the future ...

So, on the lighter side of… hmmm. What was I talking about earlier? What was the purpose of this article? You don't remember either, huh? Or possibly you never knew! Well, let us just turn back a bit. No, I promise you don't have to reread it.

Oh yea! I was talking about air and all its advantages. So…!

On the lighter side of air -------------------------- Helium!

                                          Thinking (lightly) of You,

                                     èim  Uhr

P.S: HaH! I caught you not breathing again!

But, proving that you are a hopeless creature

of habit, I bet you started again as soon as I

brought it up again. This concludes another

one of my breathtaking articles .............................. gasp …

____________________________________________________________

Girl in a bubble.

Catch her breath.                Breathe in Breathe out...

                                             Do machines breathe?

Breathing in cement

From the archives... "What's next?"

WHAT'S NEXT ?

I'm not sure I will ever write another word again…

After years of rolling dice and drawing lots, of struggling with characters and plots, to just trying to think of something that I haven't already said, I just may shut my mind off and go to bed.

Starting approximately ten years ago with cartoons and puns, I realized I couldn't draw, and grew bored with tangled verse. I dropped the comics all together, or maybe they evolved into the never-ending scribbles present on every single long land first draft I have ever written on any topic. The puns turned to poems and satirical verse. I envisioned many of the poems with music set to them, to someday be heard on the radio, although I can't write music. Eventually, I realized it was all for naught, they would never be set to music because, despite my "long piano fingers," I was never musically inclined. Though I hummed the melodies in my head and pictured each instrument flowing with the words, I knew all along that I lacked the know-how to make other people understand. So I set my poems aside for a day when I finally decide to take advantage of my "long piano fingers." Someday I'll take lessons ... someday.

In my search to find ways to waste ink I described imaginary battles and football games on paper. I ran in literary circles just to help me jog my memory.

Then a thought occurred to me, "Wouldn't it be nice to be an author?" As you can probably summise, with a fulfilling writing background such as I have described, this was not quite the perfect stage in ones career to sit down to write his first best selling novel. It is often said that a person’s first novel can never be expected to be a best-seller, but I would like to see the one who sits down at the typewriter with the intentions or dreams of doing anything less. It started off easy, even though afterward no one seemed to understand that the first chapter really wasn't part of the main story. It was just sort of a symbolic recapping of life up until the beginning. At least I knew the format I wanted the book to follow. After all, doesn't everyone attempt to write their first novel in the style as their favorite book? At least I could see the similarities between "A Mixture of Men and Martians" and Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles. "It was set off in the same type of short, distantly related chapters. A Mixture of Men and Martians isn't so clearly defined in years as Mr. Bradbury's work of art, but it does contain progressively timed stories about different, unrelated people and places as the Earth nears destruction with Mars left as the only sanctuary.

The length of the book grew as I fought to fill empty pages. But I soon found it exasperating to try to bring in new situations and characters into each new chapter while making the whole thing evolve and show some sort of time lapse from chapter one to chapter three hundred and ninety-five. Each chapter became fragments of unrelated stories. By the middle of the book I found I could not go on unless I were to ruin the format and start tying things together by using the same characters throughout the rest of the book. I couldn't give up my first attempted work of art without suffering severe mental quirks. So I poured out my cup of sentimentality and ruined the format. One thing I never knew until years after writing A Mixture of Men and Martians" was the Ray Bradbury wrote much of "The Martian Chronicles" as separate short stories, only later to be collected and tied together to form a book.

Every one of the stories from "Martian Chronicles" flowed much more smooth than any part of A Mixture of "Men and Martians" did. Even using the same characters throughout the rest of the way it dragged on to a point where I had no idea what my next word would be, let alone the next chapter. My characters acted at random and dice and lots were common solutions that either led them right or left. I didn't know where I should end it or how. But I just knew that I didn't want it to end too fast and have the world think that I coped out on my first best selling novel, so I did the gallant thing and on and on I forced it.

Then at the point I determined to finally end it, it ran fairly smooth again as I had led from the present state of chaos to the final conclusion. I almost hated to end it ...

The worst of "A Mixture" hadn't yet begun. You see, since I had written all the material out in long hand (and mostly still do) my two fingered "peck typing" is a holocaust after a work of any length. I typed night after night growing bored and irritable, reaching a point near insanity, I had to wrap it up for a while or run the risk of being wrapped up myself for good (I do admit I look lovely in white). I typed it on and off for over a year, keeping any new project as short as possible, making some revisions on "A Mixture" along they way, until I had it done.

Once it was done I put it down without rereading it. Later I would make a feeble attempt at selling it, but basically it stayed in my drawer most of its days. The only thing I learned from it is the kind of thing one learns from a first attempt at something such as this; Mostly, never to write another!

So it was fun for a while with short stories. But after all my "off the top of the head" plots were down I found it hard to dig up new story-lines. So the, at one time, barrage turned to a trickle. I started stories, finished stories; but rarely put the two together and completed one. I had fragments of stories scattered all about. And don't believe when they say these parts of stories and ideas will save for a future time when ideas don't come so readily. "You can sit down with a part of a story you had written long ago and forgot about, and magically the story, which in the past wouldn't work itself out, writes itself."

BULL. Write down ideas to be used at a later time and it might work, but the minute you start the story, either finish it or forget about it, unless you're in the likes of Mark Twain. I find that when I attempt a Mark Twain job I end up with the beginning of one story and the end of another. Mark Twain set stories down for years and came back to write them so that none were aware of the break. Some scholars say they can tell where he took his breaks, but I think these may be mere guesses. I have trouble setting a project down long enough to get a nights rest and not have it suffer for the gap. Many times it turns into a whole new story, leaving me to wonder where it would have ended up had I finished it on that first night.

I hope that someday my beginning fragments will equal my ending fragments. I have already planned on that glorious day I shall put them all in two bins, separating beginnings from endings, and draw one of each out at random and mail the resulting stories to my favorite editor. No SASE will be included.

At one point in history it dawned on me that what I needed was a way to air my fragments of thought, thus came the article writing. Maybe it would be possible to restrain my fragments to articles and finally get them out of my system, so I would be able to complete a few stories.

This article writing was something new, fun, allowing me to be my usual cynical self. It also led to my taking a first shot at serious science writing. Actually, I can't say for sure if I started "Born With a Bang" before or after my articulate writing, but they are closely related and one was bound to lead to the other. "Born With a Bang" was a pleasure to write. It was probably the most unique writing experience I have ever had. Even though most of it was common knowledge to anything even close to a scientist and could be found more clearly explained in any of a hundred other sources, I was quite proud of it, in my own insignificant way. It seemed to me, at least at the time, that I tied everything up a bit better than anything I had read up until it. I can honestly say that I wrote it before I had heard anyone else mention the possibility of the Universe becoming one big black hole in the end. I found afterward that it was just common speculative knowledge, and I did see the possibility mentioned quite a few times after. In that article I tended to boast of it as if it were new knowledge, almost a new discovery.

So "Born with a Bang" has a place in my drawer close to "A Mixture of Men and Martians." It is my drawer that is full of papers, while my wallet is only full of cobwebs.

I have written more articles than anything else (except maybe poems) mostly because they’re so easy to write. It’s not often you get a chance to shoot your mouth off about nothing (see "Thinking of Nothing"). In my articulate writing I can get serious for a moment or two, I can let loose with all my insanities waiting to bust free, I can ramble on, I can change topics in the middle, I go at my own pace, but most of all, I can grow tired of it. It seemed inevitable that I would grow bored with my articulate writing, which I hinted at almost at the start. That’s the magic of them though, I can set them down at any time, but somehow I have the feeling that I will never be able to put them down for good.

But where do I go next? Is it time to set my pen down? Close the drawer on my articles? Is this the last page in my tablet? I can see the headlines now, "Wishy-washy Writer Retires at age 21."

Yep, I’m the first to admit that I’m over the hill. I just wonder if I’ll be able to swim it, cause like the song says; "Over the hill and through the river, to grandmothers house we flow!" …No, that can’t be right…

Ah, we don’t get wet after-all. "Over the river and through the hill, to…" …er, what a dumb song!

Do people actually get paid for writing things like that?

                                                               Sincerely,

èim  Uhr

P.S.   The only question left is WHAT IS NEXT?

Well, after quite a few years I published a novel titled "Touched" so I guess I did continue to write...

Remember youth, though beautiful...

Isn't always well spoken.