Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

The invasion of Newnan, GA, August 2025

Posted on by Dale

You may imagine our astonishment when we awoke this morning, August 15, to find this announcement on Facebook:

WTF, as the majority of the comments ran. We were being told that we were to be the hosts for a military training operation tomorrow.

Reaction was swift and mostly negative. There were some MAGAts who apparently are thrilled that our military might be training to invade American cities to protect us from the usual suspects — immigrants, trans people, and drag queens — despite fact that our military is forbidden to do shit like this.

Beyond that, the actual language of the press release is worrisome, especially in these days of rampant Nazification. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. Surprise! That’s tomorrow! That’s not going to raise eyebrows or panic people, not in the least HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK THAT EVEN?

2. We all know exactly what a “United States Army Special Operations Command” is, right? Special Ops… that’s like the people who raided bin Laden? And they’re going to train here because… Hold that thought.

3. Yep, that’s what it says: “in and around” Newnan. Hold that thought.

4. “Rotary wing” operations. Could they possibly mean “helicopters”?

5. And what exactly are “operations”? I have to presume weapons will be fired. Tough, manly “warfighters” running through our neighborhood? Swarming the Court House? Getting lunch at Redneck Gourmet? Also, “ground–based, close–quarter” needs those hyphens and that comma. Your English teacher is ashamed of you.

6. “Battle training.” Ah. In and around Newnan. I’m beginning to feel as if I should be concerned, especially if it’s going to be “close-quarter.” [See: 5.]

7. “Simulates environments troops may encounter while deployed” — to small American towns, you mean?

8. “for more information”…

Let’s start there. I clicked through to the city website, where I found exactly this DOD press release along with a bit more information. But nothing that explains one bit of this.

Okay, this whole thing, taken merely as a PR announcement is a disaster. Let’s do a deep dive.

First some caveats: I am assuming that the City of Newnan was told that they were in no way to alter the wording of this release. I can assume this because a concerned citizen — whose name I am not going to publish, but THANK YOU! — made it her business to call the mayor and get some actual facts, the first of which was that “operations” weren’t going to be in Newnan, but on a piece of property that the land owner offered to the DOD for “operations.” (Hold that thought.)

Also, all of you who worship our military, please note that I don’t. Like the founding fathers, I have a deep distrust of the military. They were right, and so am I. So bugger right off with your weepy-ass SUPPORT THE TROOPS KENNETH bull.

So. What a pile of ill-begotten propaganda! The whole thing is designed to obfuscate, confuse, conceal, and intimidate. Note the jargon like “rotary wing” — why not say “helicopters” and/or “drones”? Why not indeed? Because, citizen, it is not necessary for you to understand what they are up to. In fact, they’d rather you not. One of the additional bit of info on the city website was more DOD propaganda, including the phrase “Robust safety precautions are currently in place to protect both the participants and the City residents, along with significant planning considerations to minimize the impact to the community.” Protect the participants? Bubba, you signed up to go to war — shouldn’t you be prepared to sustain injuries?

And what makes our fearless “warfighters” so concerned about their safety? Is there something in the air that makes them think that their presence in these “operations” might not be welcomed by the community and that they might need “robust” protections?

The additional information goes on to say “No public viewing opportunities will be available throughout the exercise, as the participants will maintain the highest level of security.” Translated into English, they’re telling us that you will not be protesting this event and that if you do… well, you’ve seen the ICE/DHS/National Guard videos, right? Pure intimidation.

I get it. You don’t really want civilians in the way when you’re training your teenagers to go kill people, you really don’t. They have a tendency to be a bit on edge, don’t they? And you can’t vouch for what an edgy teen with a gun might do if any part of real life intrudes into that bubble you’ve created around him. What if it suddenly dawns on him that he’s being trained to obey unlawful orders? NOT THAT THAT WILL EVER HAPPEN IN THE AMERICA KENNETH.

But this announcement? It’s practically a provocation to panic for the citizens of Newnan, for all the reasons I’ve limned above. I mean, how do we know this isn’t a “operation” to arrest enemies of the state for thoughtcrimes against Dear Leader? This communication does nothing to dispel thoughts of conspiracy.

Oh, and the property? Our intrepid citizen activist kept calling until she got the location: the old hospital building and grounds on Hospital Road. And the “land owner”? Piedmont Healthcare. Draft your emails and letters accordingly.

Onward to the Glorious Reich!

::sigh::

Posted on by Dale

I’m reading back through this blog’s 20 years of posts, and just now I came across this post, written in 2008 while I was still trying to write the Symphony in G, back when I was still checking out books to kindergartners during the day and riding herd on Georgia’s gifted and talented teenagers during the summer.

You don’t need to read the post; essentially, I was whinging about Dvorak and never being able to match his inventiveness. Of course, I said, it was his day job. He had all the time he needed to be inventive.

And then I wrote this: I begin to wonder if I would be more productive if I had all day every day to thrash out ideas and discard the less worthy ones.

Oof.

I guess I’ve answered that question.

Not an Easy Question

Posted on by Dale

Well, not an easy question for him.
My email to my congresscritter, Brian Jack:

Whoever had control of the “AUTOPEN” is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment. It is a major part of the real crime, THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN! Millions and millions of people knew that, but the Radical Left Democrats waged a campaign on inoculation [sic] and innocence like none that had ever been waged before. THIS IS WHY THE UNSELECT COMMITTEE OF POLITICAL THUGS, WHO WERE GIVEN A FULL AND COMPLETE PARDON BY THE PERSON WHO WIELDED THE NOW ILLEGALLY USED AUTOPEN, DELETED AND DESTROYED ALL EVIDENCE AND INFORMATION FROM THEIR CORRUPT AND VICIOUS WITH HUNT AGAINT ME, AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE, WHOSE LIVES WERE COMPLETELY SHATTERED AND DESTROYED BY THIS HISTORICALLY CRIMINAL EVENT. Remember, it all began with DIRTY COP James Comey, Obama, a hapless and cognitively impaired Sleepy Joe Biden, and my now very famous ACCUSATION that, “THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!” Whoever had control of the…

This is who you support and — indeed — worked for. Why?

As usual, your reply will be posted on my blog and on Facebook. Thank you for your attention.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’d fake my own death to avoid answering this for my constituents.

Hey, MAGAts, I sympathize with you

Posted on by Dale

No, really, I get it. The fear and anger with which those of us on the other side are reacting to the rapid, overwhelming Nazification of our country should feel familiar to you — it’s exactly the way you reacted during the Obama years or the Biden years, with panic and anger over the RADICAL LIBERAL TAKEOVER OF OUR GOVERNMENT KENNETH.

I am not mocking you. I get it. Your world was rocked because the Democrats were giving you affordable healthcare, infrastructure funding, alternative energy support, family medical leave, etc, etc, etc. It must have felt as if the wheels were coming off your Cybertruck. No wonder you revolted and ran straight into the arms of the Big Daddy to protect you.

However.

You were afraid of affordable healthcare, etc, because you were told it was SOCIALAMIZM KENNETH. You scorned alternative energy support (even though most of it went to your states) because WINDMILL CANCER KENNETH or DRILL BABY DRILL or something. You screamed with irrational rage at the two Democratic presidents even as they fixed the broken economy left to them by their Republican predecessors, raging about actions which neither man was taking nor was even considering, and not just allowing yourselves to be lied to by Fox News and the Republican Party but lapping it up like mother’s milk without any skepticism at all. (Receipts upon request; I got links, I’m just venting.)

We are afraid of the Gestapo, the crashing of the world economy, the wrecking of the post-WWII alliances, the blatant bribery and corruption, the dismantling of our social safety net, the dismantling of the agencies that keep our food, our water, our cars, our airports safe, the targeting of minorities, and above all, the arrogant incompetence of the Republixanazi Administration.

We are not the same.

The Parable of the Mud

Posted on by Dale

Once a man had a vision as he was meditating. He told his friends:

As you know, my practice is to meditate on the four elements — Fire, Water, Earth, Air — and express my gratitude to the spirit of each for what it has granted me in my life.

Last night, as I meditated, I gave thanks to Air for my breath, my mind, for inspiration. In return, Air gave me inspiration and creative breakthroughs.

I thanked Fire for my will, my blood, my passions. Fire gifted me courage and transformation.

With Water I was grateful for my emotions, my unconscious, even my aging and death. Water gave me love, hope, compassion, and dreams.

To Earth I gave thanks for my body and for the earth’s great riches.

But the spirit of Earth in return mocked me: “You presume to thank us, but your pride in your spirit is misplaced. Soon enough you will die and will be nothing more than mud.”

Mud.

I sat quietly with this thought. I brought to mind the gifts of all four elements, Air, Fire, Water, even Earth — all part of me and the sum of me.

I spoke to Earth. “It is true that I will become mud. But I am not mud now, nor will I become mud until I am Earth again, when I am no longer One of Us.”

Earth was silent.

“And even then, O Earth, I shall be Earth and Air and Water and Fire — I shall be All of Us once again.”

Earth listened.

“And why do you scoff at my mortality, Earth, when you know that soon enough we will all combine again to become a new spirit, a new being, and we will once again be One of Us. You will be One with Us.”

Earth was still silent, but I knew the Earth had blessed me.

“Thank you for this blessing, Earth, for without your harsh truth I might not have found this comfort.”

And his friends marveled.

More Adventures in Hoarding

Posted on by Dale

Having emptied out our storage unit, we are now faced with dealing with the boxes of personal papers that we stuck out-of-sight-out-of-mind for twenty years. (There’s also a bunch of furniture as well, but that is not my concern at the moment.)

You will recall that I came across a box of materials from our 2007 William Blake’s Inn workshops, and I actually took that to a meeting on Friday with potential collaborators to show exactly what I mean by workshopping the world premiere.

There were also two boxes/tubs of empty three-ring binders, and given that we now live in the space science future I’m having a hard time re-homing them. But look at these:

These held the scripts for some of the very first shows I directed in Newnan. (Time’s Wingéd Chariot alert: The first show I directed was Georges Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso, in the summer of 1975. I will spare you the mental math — that was 50 years ago.) Of the actors involved in these shows, several are still doing theatre, and one ended up on Broadway.

Then there was this:

It was attached to the script for the “Epilogue” of William Blake’s Inn, and I know it had nothing to do with my magnum opus. But I have absolutely no clue what I was working on that I would need this quodlibet of songs — and what’s with the ? on p. 12?

In the storage tub of music that I was surprised to discover in the back of the storage unit, there were all these notebooks:

BACK IN MY DAY, WE HAD TO SCRIBBLE OUR MUSIC ON ACTUAL PAPER AND JUST HOPE IT SOUNDED RIGHT. I actually had a music pen, a fountain pen with a broad nib that allowed me to write noteheads and staves and flags and rests that looked almost like real music.

Eventually, though, I used pencil and paper to scribble ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS before transcribing them into Finale and beating them into shape. Here’s the sketch for “Wise Cow Makes Way, Room, and Believe,” from William Blake’s Inn:

What else was in those notebooks?

IYKYK.

The real treasure trove?

My manuscript copies of William Blake’s Inn. I’ve put them in a portfolio binder, and I seem to be missing “A Rabbit Reveals My Room,” “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives,” “Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room,” and the above-mentioned “Make Way.” I don’t know whether I ever created an actual manuscript for those pieces; they may be in that tub or in the study somewhere.

Just look at what is still in the tub:

I see at least three never-finished projects there, and there are scraps of ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS littered throughout. My current plan is to take this tub with me on the Lichtenbergian Retreat in a couple of weeks and go through all of them, transcribing bits that are still only on paper and cataloging them all. And then?

I don’t know. Put them back in the tub. Store it in the basement or something. Wait for the biographers to show up.

So far behind…

Posted on by Dale

The past couple of months have been a drag, which you may have suspected after my account of our trip to Germany in December broke off mid-trip. For that I can only say that the wifi in the Motel One chain is weird and unreliable, and it was cold.

Then the holidays, and more cold, and so much crap being sprayed about by whatever fan we as a society have been cursed with that I couldn’t see sinking myself even further into nonaction (and not the good kind) by ranting about it here, plus all kinds of paralysis over on my Lichtenbergian blog due to the impending possibility of a world premiere for William Blake’s Inn, and soon you’re talking about real stagnation here.

So I am now going to raise myself out of my torpor by talking about an amusing kind of failure, a backlog of cocktails.

Some background: I subscribe to several emails from websites like liquor.com and diffordsguide.com which send me recipes nearly every day. I’ll go and look them over, and if I think one might appeal to me, I copy the recipe into a word processing document that is always open on my desktop. When the page is full, I print it out and start experimenting.

That’s the theory. The reality? See this photo?

On the right, my bar book. On the left, twenty-one pages of cocktails that have built up over the past year or so. Either I don’t get around to making them, or I’ve run out of a key ingredient or there’s some syrup or tincture you have to make first… You get the idea.

How bad is it?

On those twenty-one pages there are 189 cocktails.

Of those 189 cocktails, I have approved 26 of them and eliminated 14, i.e., I have tried 40. That means that I have made only 21% of the cocktails that I claimed to be interested in.

I hereby commit to doing better.

The Parable of the Setting Sun

Posted on by Dale

A young person journeyed far, on a pilgrimage to gain wisdom from those who possessed it.

One night, as she walked along the road, marveling at the stars above and the earth around her, she saw many people seated in a meadow, all facing the same direction. All were weeping and beating their chests. Some threw themselves prostrate upon the ground in their grief. Their clamor was heartrending.

She approached one and asked, “Who are you? Why do you weep? What great tragedy has befallen you?”

The man replied, “We are the ones who have seen the day and mourn its passing. We sit facing west, mourning the setting of the sun, our grief overwhelming us.” He paused. “This is our wisdom. It brings us no joy.”

“But…” the young person began, but the man was no longer listening. With a loud cry he rejoined his fellows in their clamor.

She stood silently for a moment, observing their pain, and then walked away, toward the east, where the sun was already rising.

A suggestion for bar owners

Posted on by Dale

Hi there, owners of cocktail establishments! I have an idea for you.

If you have TV screens in the bar, and if you can stream from the intertubes, then set at least one of your screens to show BEARS, YOU GUYS, at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park (Alaska). It’s a livestream of the salmon run up the river, and all the brown bears that start arriving to eat fish and fatten up for the winter.

I promise you, patrons will be rapt. They will cheer the bears on. They will create narratives for the bears. They will rate the bears’ fishing strategies. They will squee at the baby bears. They will, like the rest of us, worry about Otis.

And then: FAT BEAR WEEK, YOU GUYS! Post the bracket! It’s just like March Madness, only WITH BEARS!

Feature salmon on the menu.

Encourage teams with t-shirts.

Print out the official National Park Service guide to identifying which bear is which.

I’m telling you, start featuring the bears on your slow night each week, and by the time Fat Bear Week arrives, your place will be packed with customers.

DA BEARS!

A Parable of Light

Posted on by Dale

On another plane than this one:

A man lay dying and called his friends to him.

He said to them, “I know that soon I must die, and I have seen that my life has produced no great works or deeds. I console myself with the thought that I have been as kind and generous as I know how, but I cannot help but ask — what good can one person’s kindness do in the vastness of this world?

His friends murmured sympathetically — what, indeed?

“But,” he said, “I have seen a vision. On another plane than this one…

“I saw myself suspended alone in an infinite darkness. I seemed to be made of glass, so that you could see through me.

I was surrounded by a vast, infinite darkness — the void of the universe, and I was alone.

That darkness was complete. I could see nothing but myself.

Every time I felt a kindness, though, of thought or of deed, it came from my breast in a burst of warm light, which flowed out from me and soon dissipated in the darkness.”

The man’s friends listened politely. He continued.

“But then, in the distance, the faint remains of my light of kindness met… another soul, perhaps? I could not see, but it was as if my light had encountered a node of some kind, which glowed briefly itself before fading.

It began to happen more often — more and more glowing nodes in the darkness, bursting into light and fading into the void.

And then I began to see, as more and more light suffused the void, that all these nodes — lit and unlit — were connected by fine filaments, and the more nodes were lit, the stronger those connections became until I was looking at a galactic mycelium powered by warmth and kindness.

Of course, not all nodes gave off the same amount of light. Some shone brightly — others barely glowed before fading. Very occasionally a node would explode with light, completely overwhelming and then freeing everything in its vicinity.

Slowly, the vast darkness was diffused with light, light that had come from me, light that ebbed and flowed, tenuous light, faint light, but light.

I began to understand that I had been receiving bursts of light myself from others before me, and that I always had been. I knew some of those lights were gone now, but what I received from them I passed on so that the light did not fail.”

“I saw all of this, on another plane, and I knew this was the answer to my question: What good can one person do?” The man smiled at his friends.

“There comes a time…

…he said…

…when your light is no longer enough.”

He paused.

“Nor is it necessary.

In my vision, I saw that my light was gone now, too, and I watched as the darkness spread before me like ripples in a pond.

But though I was no longer giving light, the light I had already given continued its journey through the network of nodes, of souls, each soul now giving its own light to the universe. I watched as the light, my light, traveled far ahead, leaving an expanding darkness behind, until there was nothing more.”

He spoke.

“The rest is peace.”

“But…” said his friends.

He spoke no more, not on that plane or any other.