Month: October 2021

What Do You Consume?

“These are people. That’s right. They are people and we throw them away. And you wanna know why? Because they have committed the greatest sin of all in this country. These people have stopped consuming. And so we throw them away.” “They’re broken consumers.”

That comes from Tori – Pacific Northwest (Tori PNW?) and it is part of the series. “The Series” not the book or the movie, the series. It comes from Apple TV(a plus symbol, not available on my typewriter) Apple TV-+ (hand drawn) Just $4.99/month That quote came from https://youtu.be/d0TShy9fT30 (a O or a 0? those can be different depending on the typewriter) Tori used this as a closure to her great discussion of ® “Use it up. Wear it out…” a quotation from 1940’s slogan. She does not think it will be an effective approach for today’s people. (and they are very different on a computer, a cap o in this case)

Tori – I am with you on this issue.

Will we listen to storytellers? Storytellers instead of reading books, watching TV, watching videos? With enough consumption will we have a choice?

This paper comes to you from a company (why| name names?) sending me Get Our Card’ mailings. There are two big problems with these emails. First: I have one, those mailings are a waste. Seconds I have| signed up for paperless delivery of everything. Their marketing department needs to catch up with the rest of the company.

Actually, I do not like to use paper like this one. Plain white paper is good for me. Yes, it is kind of cute(?), or whatever to type on paper bags. It just does Sot do it for me. We do not seem to be doing much for the environment to use paper bags that we should not have used in the first place.

And what the? what then? There is a store here that does not stack or stock paper or plastic bags. They will offer you) a box, if they have one. Or you can buy one of those questionable bags. Or you can bring one of the questionable ones, provided you remembered to bring one inside the store with you.

My, aren’t we a grumpy old man today?
Yes, I started with driving at the speed limit all the time and everywhere.
Now I am going on about reusing stuff, like paper bags, for a One Typed Page.
Get ready to hear me shouting at people on my lawn.

Yeah well this is enough for me today. You do not need to read my stuff here. Arrghh.

I will return with ideas for…

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Things Found in Unusual Places

Right up there with advice for writing in “write it down when you get an idea. You can thank God later.” Yes, the other advice is to not, no, never read comments. There is nothing to be found there. Unless you are reading the comments here at One Typed Page. Those comments are filled with people who understand what they are commenting on and keep it all civil. Dare I say nice? It certainly seems like it there.

I read One Typed Page as one of the early morning activities. So there is not much in the way of comments then. I need to change that habit. I need to return later in the day and check on what people have added to the conversation.

That was a great idea, going by the One Typed Page later in the day and read them. And this idea is now written down, right here, right now. Hopefully, I will be able to remember it. I cannot blame that, forgetting to read the comments, on not having written it down.

For a pad, a typewriter pad, what you see around my paper today was sold as a shelf liner. For less than a buck, I have these things and they keep it, any of them, from sliding around.

—~ MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Thoughts

What was I thinking? I am not talking about my silly thing done at work that time. I am not talking about when I was drunk. I am not talking about that time that lead to a long winding political discussion. I am not talking about any time, of which there were so many of them, where I said something or did something that was … ill advised.

No, I am asking about that time this morning or this afternoon when I was just thinking. What was I thinking about?

Sometimes when you think about something that upsets you, well maybe you, or I, remember that thought for a few hours. But mostly I have no real idea of what I was thinking just a few hours later.

They do not seem to be that important. Yet, well, whenever you are thinking something it seems to be pretty important at the time. So important at a moment and totally forgotten before you sleep that night.

I remember a time when I thought. I had done something and my brain shut up. I loved that activity. It got my brain to quiet down. At least for a little while. It still, for the most part, keeps my brain from talking non-stop.

Now it seems like my brain and its talking is quieter. Like background music. Perhaps I know what it is saying. So, so what?

# # # #

This morning I did another piece of NaNoWriMo writing. It was my fifth in a row. This leads me to thinking (??) that I can do it for a month. I just need to work out an outline. This does not, yet, seem like a big deal. Yes, this guy who typed many One Typed Pages with “I have no idea of what I will type today” openings. The whole point is to get the 50,000 words down. There can be plot holes. There can be “what? how did you get from A to B” there. Those problems come from a first draft. Especially a first first draft. Though it would be nice to have some bits of consistency there. Well, I will find out then. Or so I hope,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

PS – Kind of like this One Typed Page. A first draft.

Gift or Loan

Thank you to W.G. on the subject of contractions. I have never wondered about people in foreign countries thinking of me as a non-native person. Pass along my sentiments about them sounding native is a very sticky slope. Do they want to sound like a US person, an Irish person? a Welshman? a pick your part of the British area? an Australian? They would like to speak without an accent? Which one? They can always say they are from New Mexico and let the person listening figure it out. Provided they even know where New Mexico is.

If you loan someone money, I am talking about a personal loan not a loan with paperwork attached, if you loan someone money you should give it as a gift, and any return of it to be a nice gift in return. Meaning do not expect getting it back. Gifts are something of the same. When you give something to someone you need to give up all attachments to whatever you have given them. In either case, give the item up and wave goodbye to it.

How about letters? Are they a gift? Something you have freely given and have no expectation of a return? Are they like loans, something you have given to someone and you should not expect a return, or if you get one in return Yay! you can feel good about it. Which is a letter like, or more like, a gift or a loan?

I recently got caught in this dilemma. I sent a letter. OK, it was an email but it was a long one with many questions. Then I sent another. Still no response. And again and again. No responses.

Haiya! Wait, are you aware of Uncle Roger and his videos on YouTube? If not, well you have a lot of laughing ahead of you. Especially with people cooking (or not) the simple Chinese dish of fried rice. Especially the professional cooks. Haiya!

So back to my expectations and letters. I got caught in my expectation of receiving a reply. There is, however, a silver lining to this bit. I suggested to my nephew that we trade emails like we were preparing for NaNoWriMo, Writing at least 1,667 words. I did that. And again and again and so far all of my letters to him have contained more than 1,667 words. One of them over 2,000 words. Yes, I have the stamina (?) of writing that much. I can do it. Well, as much as I can prepare for it now. There is no preparation for the mid-month slump. I am working on an outline so I have something to write about. That helps.

NaNoWriMo coming. Any of you doing it? Or perhaps a mini-NaNolWiriMo of 25,000 or just making sure you write something every day.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

PS as you may recall I do not announce my Monthly Challenges. This is a divergence.

Writing for Yourself

A lot, a whole big bunch, of it, of writing, is talking to yourself. Well, saying “talking to yourself” does not carry the meaning I have so hang on while I explain. You have a journal. That is talking to yourself, but decide that there is something special. You would like to give it attention so you start a second journal. This second one is more focused than what your general interest, your journal to hold all about anything. I have a few of these. Here are a few examples.

Remember Robert Rodriguez? Director of “El Mariachi”, “From Dusk to Dawn”, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For”, the “Spy Kids” trilogy (or four?) all of them great movies. But he also did some YouTube things. 10 Minutes of <fill in the blank>, like how to direct a movie, and of great importance, Cooking. Breakfast burritos, Texas-style BBQed meat, and more. He suggested that you make a menu of what you have made and like a lot. Then serve up to your friends. I do this with a book of Cooked. Food I have cooked and can cook for others. Nothing goes into the book unless I have cooked it. It is growing fat enough for me to organize it, print it out, and bind a book.

No surprise, my Morning Pages, now in Number 25. Look up Julia Cameron for inspiration on it. In a similar vein is my Sketch Journals, all inspired by Lynda Barry. There is a lot more to a sketch journal than drawings. It is an everything journal.

A few days ago I mentioned, well I spent an entire day on, a Commonplace Book. Mine is growing with a table of contents taken from the Bullet Journal work.

Keeping chords and strum patterns and all other things that can be written is a Uke book for all things Ukulele. It is a pretty thin book for now. But all of my books were thin at one point.

When we travel again travel journals will come into play.

You type one page daily, you should consider keeping one of those or a journal that fits your interest. Whatever you write down will be far greater memories than your brain. And, of course, there are these that your write for here. Punch holes in them put them in a three-ring binder. Or soon enough, two or more binders. It is a great way to keep them. You will be happy you did in the future.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

PS Where do you get ribbons? I need some new ones. Prefer to have the two-color like I have on this one.

Talking To Myself

Do you use contractions? Don’t, I’m, can’t or whatever is used to slim down the language. I have found them to be … well just not nice. I prefer Do Not, I am, Cannot, and so forth. Now I expect that I am making some changes to my spoken language. But it is something to do with being more formal. I do not know. Thoughts?

But look, you can ignore the prior paragraph. It is part of my long-held habit of talking to myself. Which I do on paper and all sorts of other forms in other places.

When I was driving back and forth to visit my parents, this was a four hour drive through rural Idaho (perhaps describing Idaho as rural is a bit redundant) (travel more than 30 minutes in Idaho you were in rural country, at least in the 70s) and out of range of radio for a car radio and 8 Track placers were, well I had listened to what I had too much, I would talk to myself.

Subjects would include life in college and maybe alternate ways were to be considered. Spend your money on getting a pilot’s license or getting out of the country, or working in the woods as a cook, did that actually happen to people outside of Tangled Up In Blue words?

Another subject was having Hodgkin’s Disease because they did not want to use the word cancer even though people with it would hear that word soon enough. There was a lot to say, but only myself to listen. At that time that was a good enough thing. Since the time in which I would believe doctors and consider myself cured was still nine or ten years off into the future.

And now here I am, using paper and Daniel’s reposting of whatever I have typed as a place to give me some voice. Every day I can come up with something to type and get it to him.

Thank you, Daniel.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Friends and Words

It has been a good day. I set out on a pair of things to get done and accomplished both of them. One was meeting with friends at a pub. Do you know how long it has been? GAH! We met, we ate, we enjoyed beer. It was great of us to meet there and we met at a place with phenomenal beers. But more important we met. We had time together. Damn it was great.

Earlier I typed 1801 words. This is important because 1667 is the threshold for NaNoWriMo word counts. I set up an email to my nephew who will be participating in the event. I chose a group of things to talk about and sat down to type them. I did not even need to use all of them. Spares for tomorrow!

Since it is late (I had an appointment for this afternoon) I am going to cut this off. Yes, I understand in part of the day I push out 1801 words, and this evening I am not coming up with a whole bunch of words for all of you. So it goes.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Keep Going

People do things to see if they can do it. Like marathoners, who run 26 and a bit of miles. Or bicyclists who ride 100 miles, a century. That seems like a lot to some people. To others it is a nice warm-up for their 400, 600, or 1200 kilometers There is an event where they run four miles (or something like that. it is not a tough distance the first time) at the top of the hour. And then another run of the same course. And it continues with a new start at the top of the hour until there is only one finisher. There is no stopping for eating or sleeping. You get to do that if you finisher your four (or whatever it is) miles and have time left in the hour. This is not restricted to physical things (Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the Ironman triathlete, my apology to any of you who have done one of them) anyway, it is not a physical event. I once joined a 365 Photo event. A photo every day for a year. How did I miss taking a photo on a day? I did in the midst of it all. But, like many, I did stay with it until my 365 photos were taken. You may recall my 1,000 consecutive days of Duolingo language learning. (I am still at that one) and there are lots of 30, or 31, or 28-day challenges based on months. Like Inktober right now. 30 days of cycling in April or September or both. I am not aware of the challenge of typewriting in days or words or pages. Are you?

Last weekend the subject of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) came up. Could you do that on a typewriter? How many words would you get credit for per page? It turns out that they do permit it, typing your novel. I am digging into getting the details of how it is counted and how much credit you get per page. If you would rather, of course, you can convert it to text and submit that. Though it seems like a pain. This is something like my nephew who is participating in NaNoWriMo by handwriting his novel. Writing out 1,667 words a day — transferring that to another format. Ow.

I di also look up how they validate the word count. There are hundreds of thousands of people participating. They have some metrics for determining the count. It is not like typing for speed where every five characters counts. It was supposed that they use something like the Unix utility “wc” to do their counting. That software breaks words by whitespace. Which means A J Person counts for three words, and Li Wu counts for two. While Suzanne Goodperson-HappyMarriage also counts for two words. Care with name selection sounds like it will be important.

Advice for beginners includes what to do if this seems like too much for you. Recommendations included writing a story a week, 25,000 words for the month (a half-NaNoWriMo), or just going for it and finding out how much you can write. Which sounds good to me. Just do not quit.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

T-Shirts of Memories

Today woke up with an idea about how to write and what to write about. So much for that. That needs to wait until at least tomorrow. Yes, at least tomorrow. So today has another thing to write about. Now if lL can just pull that out of my mind and get it on paper.

Linda in D.C. – Now those are watches! Ah, those are good things to look at and wonderful to see. Thank you for restoring, a bit, faith in humanity.
Robert in Davis – hang on and bunker down and someday FedEx will, like mine, eventually deliver. Mine eventually did last Sunday. It is like spring, sooner or later its promise must be kept. It is beautiful when it comes.

Poll: How many of you remember what GENIE was? Answer coming up later.

“Don’t eat at Emelio’s”, that was a saying we had for people who did like spaghetti and beer. Just do not get it at Emelio’s place. I bought a t-shirt from there. In 1990 +/— 2 years, probably – not +. I wore that t-shirt today. It still fits. Admission: there were years when I could not have worn that shirt. I was way too fat (obese really) for that. But I can now. Every Tuesday and Thursday I wear a t-shirt from a different part of my life. Some of them have come close enough to be the same event, but different years. But still, the shirts are from different events or years. The 2000 Oregon Star Party, an EFF fundraiser, a Pizzamas fundraising shirt, an Oregon Country Fair staff shirt, a mountain turtle shirt, a (what I thought was) SF-Oregon Raid shirt, (but what I think now was just a Blackbird bicycle delivery service thing), (just add twenty or so years and your grip on memories and facts get loose), Emelio’s shirt was the most recent one. It gives us something to talk about as I do the treadmill and whatever he comes up with for my strength exercises. It is Pulmonary Rehab, which is similar to Cardiac Rehab and it is a lot like going to a gym. The largest difference is medically trained staff and my blood pressure and pulse are monitored all the time. So to give us something to talk about I wear a different shirt all the time every session.

Remembered GENIE yet? General Electric Network Information Exchange. Or something like that. It was a pre-internet place for nerds to nerd out and Emelio’s was a hangout for writers. I met a guy named Goehner, first name forgotten, who lived in Portland and he was one of my initial friends here in town. Ah memories, so many that drift in and out of your mind.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

Whole Lot Of Writing Coming Up

I was never into it. Oops, you should not start a sentence or a paragraph with “I”, But I did. But there, or rather here, I was/am listening to something I do not want to spend my Sunday mornings, or really any chunk of time participating, well that isn’t right either. But tonight here I am listening to it, and usually watching it too. (Hi Eric, Hi Gregory) (Hi Joe) (Hi YYZ, ABQ, PDXers) (YYC?)

I was going to cook dinner for myself. and what to do? So I grabbed a thing that would last through the time to get dinner ready without needing to hunt down and start another thing. There I was listening and watching (once in a while) and they were talking about NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words in a month. Not to get something ready to publish.  Get something down in and on the paper 50,000 words. If you are typing it and do go with single spacing, no, no, make that double spacing. This is a first draft and you want those blank lines to write in some in the half-lines. But thing is that works out to about, seven or eight pages a day. Every day. Give yourself a few days off, maybe one day a week and a couple of pages a day get a couple of days “in the bank”. So, SO, Any of you going to take a stab at it?

Now there was something I had planned to write about tonight, today. What was it? Where would I take my typewriter? Ona porch, any porch with a view. Heated somehow. Then type the day away.

That was not my original idea, but since I cannot remember it. It seems like a good substitute.

—- MichaelRpdx :: rkmm