6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 4

 [I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 3 sch 8/14/2026]  

JH and I were involved sexually before I went off to law school, before TJ broke up with me, during my time in law school, and after her divorce. No details are needed by you. She even proposed to me. I sometimes wonder what have happened if I had taken her proposal seriously. Nowadays, she and another friend of mine have been deeply attached for over a decade. When she took up with him, we started talking; a a bit of pique and shard words. Neither speak to me any longer.

Cindy F. and Connie W. came into my life about the same time. I cannot remember who came first. I like to think it was Connie, who nicely sent me on my way as she went back to her ex-boyfriend. Both were blondes; Connie was kind with a broad smile as she orgasmed. Cindy was none of that.

Filled with divrocee's resentment, Cindy came riding hard and furious and left quickly, too. JH warned me against her; Cindy being a first cousin. She was the first anti-TJ. 

I lost track of Connie until her murder. She came home from work to have her soon to be ex-husband shoot her as she walked to her house. There had been a protective order - so much for them. Then he killed himself. The deaths of many people might improve the world. Hers did not.

The friend now so attached to JH introduced me to KA. It was a wild time with threesomes and oral sex in cars being turn ons for her. On our first date, she told me she had had a husband and did not need another, nor did her children need another husband. I took this seriously, even if she quietly changed her mind about the husband bit. She is one of two women toward whom I have some resentment. Because I relied on her statement of what she wanted. She changed her mind by the end of our relationship. By then, she was telling friends of mine of her intent to marry me within the next six months. Too bad she had played the tight-mouthed, too jealous, humorless girlfriend for too long by this time. If she had come and made an outright offer, things could have been different for her. KA made another mistake by not involving her children in the marriage question. My mother did not marry again until all three of us children approved. I would not marry a woman who with children unless they approved of me. So, we did not marry. Not liking the feeling of chains, at one point I was dating three other women at the same time. Our ending was not pretty. She began acting more irrational than usual. She informed me that the wild sex was just to please me. If so, she had been a great actress, the enthusiasm in her eyes did not seem easily faked. This angered me as I had never asked anyone to do anything they did not want to do. We broke up.

Several years ago, KA turned up and asked me to get her divorced from her second husband. I did. She never finished paying her bill. Go figure that out. KA was the second anti-TJ in many ways. She has been one of three who might have actually helped my career.  

sch

[Since writing this KA is one of two of my ex-girlfriends I would like to speak with. As time went by, questions grew and I would liek answers, but not enough to hunt her down. 

JH died in 2015. I omitted one conversation with had in 2008 or 2009 and the one time I saw her about the same time. I failed to follow up with the phone conversation just as I failed to speak with her when I saw her.  She died from cirrhosis of the liver. Her boyfriend did not tell me she was ill. I wish he had it would have motivated me to change the course of my life. Since her death, I have given up any thoughts of new romantic attachments. I am not convinced that anyone's attachment to me did them any good. More importantly, that I am not that good of a friend. JH was a far better friend to me than I was to her. The boyfriend has become a former friend of mine. I suppose he wants to avoid any possible taking up with my ex-wife. He once turned down T1's advances because she was an ex-girlfriend of mine. When he told me this, I emphasized ex-girlfriend, so perhaps ex-wives do not count or he is too ashamed to speak with me. What he does not understand is that his letting JH drink herself to death angers me.

Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 5. sch 8/14.]

Group Session Notes: July 2026

Another sign that procrastion remains; it is my oldest vice.

7/3:

Self-assurance or inner peace.

Steps to:

1. Think of yourself less often
2. Live according to values. Integrity plays a big role.
3. Get good at what matters to you.

[Ah, values. Nietzsche trashed Western values over a century ago. Nihilism rises out of their lack. Integrity dissipates when values are shown to be worthless. When society values hypocrisy, when society values the grifter and the performance over the substance, then integrity must be able to subsist in the desert. Nihilism leaves only destruction of one's self, of the world, as the only thing that matters. The only way I found to get out from under my nihilism was to have a complete breakdown, a return to the consolations of philosophy (starting with Aristotle and David Hume), reforging a will to live my life on my own terms, and ended with me entering the Eastern Orthodox Church. sch 8/15/26]

Live with integrity makes life better, not being ashamed.

[See Albert Camus's The Rebel. See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. sch 8/15/26]

How to get out of your head -

1. grounding
1. form of attentiuon mindfulness - goal is to be present in the moment.
2. mindful eating (been here before) 
2. Actuall practicing gratitude 

6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 3

[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 2 sch 8/14/2026]  

I spent most of 1988 licking my wounds over T1. There was an encounter with Cindy—a wonderfully erotic and tender pair of encounters - but she would not go out with me again. There was a bit of shared history from college that she could not get over. She never knew that she had just to snap her fingers. Delicate, sweet Cindy married in 2008 or 2009. I wish her well.

And there was an encounter with Shelly about then. Questions raised since high school got an answer of sorts. Having dated what seemed like all my friends. I was curious about her charms. She proved TJ's theory that great sex requires love, passion. I would go so far as to say that good sex requires affection for one another. Never go to bed with a woman who does not laugh.

 Then I spent a considerable time mooning over LAH again. She would invate and then push away when I got too close.

And then I met Paula of Bloomington while working for a bill collector. Her wit led me to ask her for a date. She possessed all the energy and loveliness of TJ. Sandy-haired and buxom. Wonderfully energetic in bed with a habit of scratching one's back. Her two children were her life. If I had the nerve then to become a stepfather; it would have been an interesting marriage. I lost track of Paula after 1998. She shared another quality with TJ: the world was with her in it. Perhaps my affection for Bloomington has a lot to do with Paula.

I think time has come Regina. Another on/off relationship with her for a few years.  I lost track of her between 1993 and 2008. I saw her at the Madison County Government Center. She was even livelier than when we dated. Like T1, she was about 5'10”. Of women I should have married, she was number 3. Regina had the temper to keep me in line, the brains to keep me from getting bored, and a sex drive to keep us both busy. Unlike any other, the end of our relationship was not primarily because of my emotional disabilities. No, Regina felt her being African-American would cause me problems. Not that she ever asked me how I felt. She would tell my friend JH that I was the only white guy she would go out with. Regina never knew how much I loved her.

sch

[When I returned from prison, I found out Paula died in 2010. She had health problems when I knew her. Regina was the onlyex-girlfriend to write me in prison. Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 4 sch 8/14/2026]   

6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 2

[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 1 sch 8/14/2026] 

KH threw a New Year's party in Anderson to which he invited me and T1. Not as a couple, not as a matchmaking venture. I have not mentioned T1 was 5'10”, had light-brown hair; that night she wore slacks, an Oxford shirt, a pink sweater, and a thin black leather tie. We drank, chatted, and flirted. I could not resist reminding her about her seeing me on her back porch and ruining her fun at a party in the summer. She blushed as pink as her seater. We were both intoxicated when midnight passed and she suggested I follow her back to her Muncie aprtment.

She was 21, and I learned a lot from her. T1's favorite movie was 9 1/2 Weeks.  She had the novel as well. I got a hint of what was to come that first night when she told me to tie her up. Clueless, I wrapped the tie around her thigh. She taught me different in the following months.

The relationship stopped at the end of the school year with a couple of eruptions after that. I have not heard much from her since I married. Although T1 married a fellow who did not like me and has been married the second-longest of my friends, there were vibes given off that she disapproved of my marriage. I think like most of my ex-girlfriends, she did better without me than with me. I find solace in that.

However, she has a more current reason for being angry at me. T1 is the mother of my only son. He contacted me through Facebook; I expected a phone call and never contacted him before my arrest. She had opted for an open adoption, so he knew who I was. His birth ended my sexual relationship with T1 and the start of our friendship.

What followed was a bit more muddled. 

 sch

[I looked up T1 this year. It was a bit surreal. Yes, it had been over, or about, 20 years since I saw her. She did not recognize me. She had no interest in speaking with me, but was not outright rude. About our son, she made it clear that they had not spoken in years. Our son knows how to reach me; he has not. I do not think it would be good for him to be associated with me, so I stay silent. Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 3. sch 8/14/2026]

On Writing: Interiority

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

Lincoln Michel's Counter Craft on Substack has been a source for ideas and instruction. Do check out his The View from Inside: On Adding Interiority to Your Fiction.

In fiction, interiority is relating the internal world of a character to the reader. Their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, memories, motivations, and so on. This is a simple yet consequential thing. Every one of us lives simultaneously in the external shared world and our own private worlds. These two realities are constantly colliding, separating, and distorting each other, whether that’s something as small as snapping at a friend because you are “hangry” or having a life-altering epiphany at the image of, I dunno, a dove flying over a lake that symbolically completes your character arc because you are a protagonist in a literary fiction short story published in a university literary magazine.

I kid, a bit. Still, it is true that our interior worlds are as vast as anything outside of them. If your fiction is missing interiority, it is leaving quite a lot out. This is true in a grander, philosophical sense yet also in a very practical craft sense. Readers tend to connect to stories through the emotions and desires of the POV character(s), and interiority provides that connection. The simplest story structure might be a character wants something but obstacles get in the way. This is a classic and powerful story, but only when the reader understands the character’s wants.

Interiority provides far more than just desires and goals. An interesting character will typically have a gap between how they act or speak and how they think or feel. Here’s an old CW class chestnut: In every scene, you should know what a character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want. This can be applied to anything from prize-winning literary novels to pulpy superhero films. In this scene, the villain, Dr. Evilguy, says to the security guard that he wants to just use the bathroom but what he thinks he wants is to steal the blasto-ray 4000 omegagun prototype and conquer the city yet what he really wants, deep down, is to please the daddy that never loved them.

sch 6/3 

 

 

Indiana Thieves - Old and New

We have a history of criminality in Indiana that we hide in a closest.

But reading The problem with going solar in Indiana (Indiana Capital Chronicle) makes me think we still have plenty of theives hanging about:

In most states, if you deposit 20 kWh of power during the afternoon (as is usual on a typical sunny day), you get a full 1-to-1 credit to withdraw those same 20 kWh later that night. While states like Florida, Ohio, and Iowa protect 1-to-1 net metering as a matter of property rights and energy freedom, Indiana’s Senate Enrolled Act 309 created an artificial government price control that penalizes Hoosier families for investing in their own homes.

Passed in 2017, the law allows electric companies to harvest those same 20 kWh of afternoon power from you and immediately sell them to your neighbors for $3.00 (the full $0.15/kWh retail price), while crediting you just $0.70 (the discounted $0.035/kWh wholesale rate). When you pull that same power back out of the grid that night, they charge you $3.00 once again. That leaves the homeowner getting back less than 25% of the energy value they deposited just hours earlier.

 I am surprised no one has litigated this. 

sch 8/18 

6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 1

[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 8/14/2026] 

Gunshy as I was from breaking up with TJ, I did not hurry into another romantic relationship with any woman. I blamed myself for all that had gone wrong.

I got attached to LAH during my second semester of law school. She was Bones back then. Like me she came from Central Indiana. Unlike any of our other classmates. Blonde hair, firm breasts, thin, who was always being hailed home on weekends by her mother. Scared and lonely as I was at law school. We had one date while in law school.  She transferred to the IU Indianapolis Law School for her second year. I took her out a few times during the summer of 1985. It was difficult to ignore her. I dropped by one time, she wore jeans with the seat ripped out and a white cotton T-shirt that only accentuated her breats. I came close to those breasts during that summer. I lay on the floor of her parents' basement looking at the first naked breasts I had seen since the previous year. Only I made the mistake of smiling. (What else could one do when confronted by such a beautiful, wondrous sight?) She stood up, got dressed, and had me leave soon after. She thought I was laughing at her.

That began a relationship that lasted on and off with me dealing with her mental health issue and getting repaid with scorn until 2005. It ended when I told her I was to marry. She said I would end up in the gutter. Why did it go on for so long? It was not sex. We made it to bed only twice, then it was platonic. It was me who suggested she take up women. No, LAH had no other friends, and I thought I could help her. I must admit that her prophecy came true. She played with my head like it was a revolver. My friends made it clear that if I ever let her back in my life they would drop me. I hope her mental health is now better than mine.

The one who saved me was E. She came after me. I can say it is a very pleasant surprise to find a naked woman in one's walk-in closet. We remained friends but drifted apart as I went south and she remained in northern Indiana. I wish I ha felt financially comfortable enough to have taken up an offer she made me in 2009. She wanted me  to take time off and stay on her farm. Sorry, I did not do so E. The failure belongs solely to me.

T1 came into my life almost accidentally. Friends thinking I needed a feminine distraction invited me to a party in Muncie to meet a sure thing. (Which brings to mind Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, and why is it seldom seen nowadays?) That was T1's roommate. Only she was too blonde, too thin, and too vacuous to interest me. Nor did I pay much attention to T1, she was attached to someone else and my mind was on TJ. This party was the longest time I spent in Muncie since breaking up with TJ. I stood on the back porch of T1's second floor apartment, looking over the neighborhood. I was only a few blocks from where I had disasterously impregnated TJ. I left soon after. I drove around the places in Muncie TJ and I had frequented in the old days (something I would do even after I finally married.)

 I did catch T1's eye. Seems she and her boyfriend were below me engaging in sex when she looked up and saw me standing there. I became a coitus interruptus without becoming aware of it. My mind, my eyes were on 1984. I did not know what I had done until months later, after a call from KH telling what had transpired below me. It gave me a  good laugh and a little guilt at spoiling T1's fun. The next time we met things went differently.

sch 

[Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 2. sch 8/14/2026]

The Inauspicous Beginnings of Another Week in Muncie

 I got out and about yesterday. I fixed the problems with Xfinity, had brunch at Jersey Mike's and shopped at Aldi's.

I had to schlep my groceries from University to Riverside, a walk about 4 short blocks, and that did me in for most of the day. 

It was a gloomy day and humid. It was one of those Indiana's days when it's like living in a warm, damp sponge.

I slept most of the afternoon and into the evening. Then I could not sleep. I watched a bit more of Penny Dreadful. I had seen most of it years ago and am finishing it up. I like its variations on the idea of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It also made an interesting comment on Frankenstein, that he could create but had no interest in nurture. There is something to think about in that; especially in light of Mary Shelley being Frankenstein's creator.

I went down to the convenience store when I finally felt the energy to move about. A blue, clear sky above, a coolness in the wind, and a pleasant deficit of humidity.

The time since has been spent on reading online articles and answering emails. I do not feel like I have the energy to work on a short story that I have in the works. Perhaps the article.  

CRAFT rejected “After Making Landfall”:

Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall" to CRAFT for consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your work. At this time, however, we must say no to this piece. Best of luck placing this one elsewhere soon.

Best,

The Editors 

I did not realize the connection between 9:45 p.m. update: In Madison County: 'Flood cleanup kits,' microbursts and a Fall Creek crest (heraldbulletin.com), One American dinner staple faces a historic shortage with no quick fix (Fox Business) and White River cresting around Martinsville | Monday A.M. River Update Across Indiana (wthr.com) until today. Climate change.

There was some debate during the group session last week about what was meant by a hundred year flood, and I learned with were all wrong. U.S. Geological Survey's The 100-Year Flood explains:

"100-year floods can happen 2 years in a row"

Statistical techniques, through a process called frequency analysis, are used to estimate the probability of the occurrence of a given precipitation event. The recurrence interval is based on the probability that the given event will be equaled or exceeded in any given year. For example, assume there is a 1 in 50 chance that 6.60 inches of rain will fall in a certain area in a 24-hour period during any given year. Thus, a rainfall total of 6.60 inches in a consecutive 24-hour period is said to have a 50-year recurrence interval. Likewise, using a frequency analysis (Interagency Advisory Committee on Water Data, 1982) there is a 1 in 100 chance that a streamflow of 15,000 cubic feet per second (ft³/s) will occur during any year at a certain streamflow-measurement site. Thus, a peak flow of 15,000 ft³/s at the site is said to have a 100-year recurrence interval. Rainfall recurrence intervals are based on both the magnitude and the duration of a rainfall event, whereas streamflow recurrence intervals are based solely on the magnitude of the annual peak flow.

Ten or more years of data are required to perform a frequency analysis for the determination of recurrence intervals. Of course, the more years of historical data the better—a hydrologist will have more confidence on an analysis of a river with 30 years of record than one based on 10 years of record.

Integrity has been so diminished of late but I was shocked by Capitalism, as Told by Its Enemies - Phillip W. Magness, Caleb Petitt (The Dispatch). No one is perfect, no human being sees all; therefore, intellectual integrity requires us to admit as much. Mr. Magness and Mr. Pettit provide what such integrity should look like:

A more balanced entry on capitalism for the SEP could have offered a constructive assessment of this subject, its history, and the contemporary state of scholarship around it. Such an entry could still have room for critics in the Marxist and many other socialist traditions, but they would not have the disproportionate dominance found in Cordelli’s piece. Instead, a better entry might include serious engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment precursors to the emergence of market capitalism in the late 18th century, with references to David Hume’s work on trade and currency, as well as something more than superficial references to Adam Smith. 

It might also discuss how the ideas we call “capitalism” came to supplant an older mercantilist economic order that used government policies to steer an economy for nationalistic objectives. It might also discuss the period of both political and philosophical contestation between the “capitalist” and “Marxian communist” worlds following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and culminating in the collapse of the latter in 1991. It could discuss in greater depth the theoretical contributions of institutionalist economists like Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North in the mid-20th century around the theory of a market economy. It might mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment as a positive argument for what we colloquially refer to as capitalism. And it might explore the tensions between these and other theorists of market capitalism. As it stands, this rich and complex academic literature receives nary a mention beyond a few passing citations.

Since capitalism is fundamentally an economic concept, one could reasonably expect to see mainstream economic voices discussed, and competently so, by someone versed in economic theory. There would be a clear description of how profits work both as signals of demand and incentives for entrepreneurship, how competition between firms disciplines market actors, how market prices make economic calculation possible by signaling the relative scarcity of goods in a common denominator, and how government policies contribute to the creation of monopolies. Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism from the far left would also be balanced with mainstream economic critiques of socialism. Early in the 20th century, there was famously a debate among economists over whether socialist central planners were capable of engaging in economic calculation. The economists who argued against the possibility of socialist calculation ultimately won the debate—though one would not know this from reading Cordelli’s entry.

Welfarist arguments for capitalism would not be confined to a single paragraph, and would describe in detail how free-market capitalism has been responsible for lifting the world out of poverty. The way that capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, and the role entrepreneurs play in arbitrage and the creation of new goods and services, would play a more important role than the entry’s single paragraph on Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to make entrepreneurship central to the understanding of economic development and change. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.

Humility requires we acknowledge our failings.

sch 

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Odyssey, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Irvine Welsh Walk Into A Bar

One thing lacking during prison was information.  I did not read Llosa, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, or Irvine Welsh until then and without much context. I keep my eye out for articles that will fill in the context for me.

 The Odyssey piece is here because it is so big this summer.

 I hope this helps your education, too.

Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin review – the Peruvian leftist who fell in love with Margaret Thatcher  (The Guardian)

Gabriel García Márquez is the book’s foil: the magician to Vargas Llosa’s realist, the man who stayed with the leftist tribe while his lesser rival abandoned it. Martin, now the biographer of both, is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa floored García Márquez with a punch after allegedly accusing him of overstepping the mark by comforting Patricia during the collapse of their marriage.

The punch marked more than a personal rupture. It sealed an ideological one. García Márquez later remarked that there were only “two soups on the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.

China understands The Odyssey better than we do | The Spectator

The party is afraid not of Plato but of Uighurs, whom it has smeared as terrorists and agitators. What the party actually wants from the ancient Greeks is a pedigree. In November 2024, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a letter to the first World Conference of Classics in Beijing, urging scholars to “embrace the responsibility of advancing classical studies.” A Chinese School of Classical Studies now operates in Athens. A Chinese translation series of western classics, which includes Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, has sold tens of millions of copies across a thousand titles over four decades.

The West is putting the same inheritance on trial. In December 2024 the British government moved to end the £4 million Latin Excellence Programme. The program had carried Latin into 40 non-selective state schools, where more than a third of pupils were eligible for free school meals. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had launched it to stop Latin being reserved for “the privileged few.”

The pressure comes from more than one direction. In January 2026, Texas A&M University ordered a philosophy professor to remove readings from Plato’s Symposium from an introductory ethics course or be reassigned, under a new university policy against teaching “race and gender ideology.”
On the academic left, the pressure is harder to describe. The Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta has written that classics was “a cheat code for mastering whiteness.” In that reading, the ancient work must answer our quarrels before it is allowed to tell us anything of its own.

On August 14, The Odyssey opens across most of China’s nearly 800 IMAX screens. More than 250,000 people had registered to see it before tickets went on sale. They probably won’t ask whether Homer needs forgiving. That was always our question, not his.

You might want to think about this one. I am. All the cultural malarkey imposed on us by neurotic, insecure boys like Elon Musk and his online cohorts does not address the poem. All that interests them is their obsessions and terrors for which they want to make use of Homer and his descendants.

How ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ Skewers the Lit Bro Before He Even Existed (Literary Yard) helped me understand a novel that I thought had not aged well and whose protagonist irritated me to no end.

If you finish that novel thinking “Ignatius gets it”, well brother, you don’t get it. And that’s the most Ignatius thing about you.

The dunces were never in a confederacy against Ignatius. He was a confederacy of one, at war with reality. And you will never win that war, no matter how many times you quote Boethius.

Trust me on this one.

I am. Perhaps my understanding was affected by being in prison, reading the novel in isolation, without any knowledge of lit bros.

‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns (The Guardian) because I read The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins while in prison and had seen the movie Trainspotting.

Can Nothing Save Us? is published this month, but it has a long back story. Welsh originally thought he was collecting material for an HBO pilot on the superstar DJ – this was in 2014 – with his friend Calvin Harris. (Welsh also DJs and co-owns a record label.) From the DJ boxes of Vegas, he’d look out at “this ugly scene where middle-aged sleazy guys grind up against young women who’ve been comped for the clubs” – but the project stalled and Welsh realised he had the makings of something different: “A novel about modern America.”

He gave the draft to his editor and some writer friends. “And they all said the same thing. ‘This is shit!’”

Welsh re-read it. “Fuck, they’re right,” he thought.

Rejection must be unfamiliar to a multimillion-selling novelist. But Welsh did manage to sell the screen rights, and while he watched the writers’ room work through his pages, he became “a voyeur of my own material” and understood how to fix his novel.

 sch 8/8

Indiana Gathering of Writers On 09/19/2026

 I ran across this news earlier today and then by accident: 09/19/2026 Gathering of Writers - Indiana Writers Center

Join us at the Indiana State Library when Indiana’s best established and emerging writers will meet for a full day of classes on the writing craft for the  2026 Gathering of Writers Annual Writing Conference, presented by the Indiana Writers Center and the Indiana Center for the Book.

Featuring a keynote address and a breakout session from playwright, Andrew Black. Other breakout sessions include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and more presented by Andrew Black, Rachel Cochran, Kelcey Ervick, Chris Forhan, Shasta Grant, Ashley Mack-Jackson, Karen Kovacik, Natalie Lima, Barbara Shoup, Liz Whiteacre, and more. You’ll leave full of inspiration, armed with writing drafts ripe for experimentation—along with a hundred other writers who feel the same way.

swch 8/16 

 

 

6/5/2010: Law School

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 8/14/2026] 

 Those looking for prurient information should skip this section. I dated only two women while in law school.

I started Valparaiso University School of Law in August of 1984. 

My first semester was rocky. I had been out of school for two years. I was neither certain if I retained any academic abilities nor that I belonged there socially. 

Second semester became a disaster. I came back knowing my mother's lung cancer had returned to kill her and that TJ no longer wanted me. I teetered on the brink of flunking out. That I might not survive scholastically was a first for me.

 Dad offered to mortgage his house. I turned him down. I spent the summer working for him so I could be close to Mom. I got myself onto law review by way of the law review's case comment writing competition. (By the way, I consider my contest entry better written than my law review note which is stilted, pedantic, and boring.) I reverted to a pre-TJ mentality for survival: the professors, the school, became the enemy, my opponents.

I survived the summer of 1985 and watching the effects of chemo on Mom.  With my attitude towards school, I survived. Even with Mom dying in March 1986 and learning in April that my Great-Aunt Elsie had liver cancer, I made it through.

I stayed with and worked for my father the summer of 1986 so I could spend time with Aunt Elsie. She died a month after I started my Fall semester class. I made it to graduation.

 Survive may be a bit of an understatement, as I increased my grade point average and class ranking every semester. This occurred even though in my last year I was on law review, had a part-time job at the undergraduate library, delivered pizzas for about a month, and was a professor research assistant. I always knew how to work.

 I thought law school was a serious place for serious people. They were not the educated morons I met at college. To the disappointment of at least one professor, we were not interested in the abstract, scholarly aspects of the law but in careers that could put food on the table. Thankfully, I was at Valparaiso instead of Indiana University-Indianapolis. Valparaiso offered none of the distractions of people and places in Indianapolis. 

I think I would have done better for myself had offered the clinical class that it now offers. Anyone actually wanting to practice law needs to take clinicals. They will do themselves great harm by avoiding practical experience.

 I will also say that a law school education is one of the best educations anyone can have and more should be exposed to its rigors. However, not everyone should practice law and no one should feel any shame about graduating law school and then foregoing the practice of law. I could not imagine not practicing law. I think now that I was utterly unprepared for the business side of law.

(How to know if you should go into private practice? If you cannot schmooze, if you cannot network with those your business depends upon, then a solo practice is not for you. Also read Jay Foonberg's How To Start and Build A Law Practice.)

Since becoming a felon, I seriously doubt ever being asked back to my law school (or to any other), but for the last twenty years I have wanted to tell law students two words they need for success. Those two words are: cash flow.

I admit creating a serious problem for myself by financing my law school career with student loans. I lost all control over my student loan payments in 1999. I took this path on the advice of my Aunt Mary Ellen's youngest son. Tax policy then allowed deducting student loans. Tax law changed, but being committed to finishing what I started, I took out more loans. Never base any long-term plans on the federal tax law. Doing so truly is building one's foundation on sand.

(Another interruption: with the Great Recession, the firms shed lawyers and student loan debt requires a steady income for younger lawyers. I predict we will be seeing younger lawyers leaving the profession and fewer wanting to go into the profession; law schools will soon find the environment as competitive as we did in private practice. I worry about the smaller cities in Indiana. I have already seen fewer younger lawyers coming into Anderson as solo practitioners. Operating costs have increased. I expect the Anderson paradigm of solo attorneys sharing office space as being extinct by the time I finish my sentence. Which then raises the question of how many people will go without what variety of legal services.)

I left law school for private practice. I had had no plans for myself past graduation. All the reasons I had for law school and going into the legal profession had departed from my life by May of 1987. I was never good at doing things for myself, such selfishness never felt right to me. I had no idea what to do now that I was on my own. No real goals other than to make money. Inertia saved me a lot of thinking, and I was heading back to Anderson.

[It looks like I was not far off the mark in 2010 about new law school students: Law School Enrollment Trends, 1963-2025 (LawHub ). And I was not wrong about law schools, but did not expect it to get worse:

 As for what I saw for Indiana: ISBA Attorney Shortage Plan (Indiana State Bar Association)

They even have a map where there is a shortage of lawyers. sch 8/14/2026]

 

Orthodox Christian Articles I Thought Worth Sharing

Fr. John Chryssavgis cautions against confusing intelligence with spiritual understanding at Clergy-Laity Congress AI panel( Huffington Ecumenical Institute) has much that is ignored by AI critics and fans.

Part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s “AI Red Lines in Orthodox Theology” project, supported by a grant from the Future of Life Institute, the panel identified five Orthodox “red lines” for AI: that it must never replace human responsibility, never replace human presence, never be confused with the nous, never reduce the human person to data, and never allow capability to outpace wisdom.

Fr. John opened his remarks by tracing the anxieties surrounding AI to older stories about the limits of human freedom, pointing to the myth of Prometheus and the Book of Genesis. 

“The principal lesson gleaned from such texts is that we are not God,” Fr. John said. “Yet, most of us live as if we are God.”

He described a spiritual dimension to modern technology, calling algorithmic innovation a form of idolatry and cautioning that the companies developing AI are driven by profit rather than the wellbeing of those who use their products.

Fr. John connected this reality to a broader anthropocentrism.

“In contrast to the divine mandate in Genesis for us “to serve and preserve” creation,” he said, “we are developing AI with the assumption that its sole objective is to serve and preserve us.”
“We need to re-learn what it means to be a part—unique and indispensable, but one part—of creation. Otherwise, we will treat the world—both other human beings and the rest of creation—purely as raw material for consumption and exploitation,” Fr. John continued.

Fr. John also warned that AI may usher in newer, faster methods of injustice and discrimination.

“Algorithms—especially those that determine employment, housing, and healthcare—tend to replicate or reinforce already existing and deeply embedded societal biases,” he said. “AI is unlike previous technological revolutions—like the printing press or the television—because it can actually decide whom to help or heal, whom to overlook or hurt.”

Turning to the distinction between intelligence and nous, Fr. John invoked the patristic separation of “intelligence” (dianoia or mathematical thinking) from “intuition” (noesis or spiritual understanding). Artificial intelligence, he said, does not have a complex inner worlds, inner motivations, or an emotional landscape, and thus questions about meaning or hope will never be resolved through it.

Fr. John also offered a measured critique of the recent papal encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. He observed that its title refers to human greatness rather than the glory of God, and noted that the piece opens with the story of the Tower of Babel rather than with the story of God’s covenant with Noah to preserve creation.

On approaching our creation “in the image of God,” Fr. John argued for balance. Genesis states that humanity is formed in God’s image, he said, but the same text also describes humanity as fashioned “from the dust of the earth,” sharing its day of creation with every other living creature. 

Forgetting we are “inseparably interconnected with nature,” Fr. John said, leads to a distorted sense of human exceptionalism that is, at best, a “half-truth.” 

The Unity of God’s Church and the Orthodox Church (Orthodox Christian Laity)

The recognition of those churches and communities’ ecclesial nature outside of the Orthodox Church’s canonical boundaries compels the Church to be in an unceasing dialogue and collaboration with them, allowing the Holy Spirit to move all into complete unity with Christ. However, recognizing the ecclesial nature of other nonorthodox Christian churches and communions does not sanction, at least for the Orthodox Church, the practice of intercommunion. The Church’s reluctance to be in sacramental communion with other Christian churches—despite the affirmation that they are imperfectly and incompletely members of the One Church of God—should not be perceived as a sign of arrogance, and neither should it be a source of Orthodox triumphalism or self-sufficiency. It does not allow the churches to become complacent with present relative unity and collaboration. It is a painful reminder to all that the unity of God’s Church requires the fullness of the Apostolic faith, life, and witness. Toward this realization, the churches are called to intensify their prayers so “that all Christians may work together so that the day may soon come when the Lord will fulfill the hope of the Orthodox churches, and there will be ‘one flock and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16).

Statement on the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America (Orthodox Christian Laity)

It is in this spirit that we call the faithful of the Orthodox Church in America—and, through their witness, this nation—to repentance: repentance for injustices past and present; for the idols of wealth, comfort, and power that seduce every generation; for the divisions and enmities that tear at the fabric of common life; and for the ways in which we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. A true commemoration of a nation’s founding is not mere self-congratulation; it is a moment of sober examination, of honest confession, and of renewed dependence upon God.

The Church does not speak this word from a posture of superiority. We acknowledge our own failures—in charity, in unity, and in the fullness of our witness to the Gospel. We, too, stand in need of God’s mercy. But it is precisely because the Church has known the healing power of repentance that she cannot withhold this word from the world she is called to serve.

I think therein is an answer to those who can see only America's wrongs and those who pride themselves on being anti-woke. Acknowledging failures must be followed by the repair of damage done. Ignoring our failures is hubris.

Charmolýpē (“Joyful Sorrow”) as the Antidote to Triumphalism (Public Orthodoxy)

 

There is a Byzantine word that guards this mystery from being turned into propaganda: charmolýpē “joyful sorrow.” The word sounds paradoxical because it is a paradox, not of logic but of spiritual truth. It does not describe alternating moods, as if joy and sorrow take turns. Rather, it names a single, integrated experience: joy that has not forgotten the Cross, and sorrow that has not lost the rose scent of the Kingdom. Charmolýpē is not a decorative nuance of Orthodox piety; it is a discipline of the heart. It teaches us how to celebrate without arrogance, how to hope without cruelty, how to speak of victory without becoming triumphalist.

Triumphalism is a subtle temptation precisely because it borrows the vocabulary of faith. It speaks easily of “victory,” “chosen people,” “truth,” “enemies,” “purity,” “greatness.” It appears in religion, ethnicity, politics, even in the Church’s own self-understanding. Its danger lies in replacing the Gospel’s disarming power with a familiar one: the power to dominate, to humiliate, to rank human beings. It imagines that God’s truth must appear as our superiority, that blessing must look like strength. In such a climate, the Cross becomes embarrassing—a means to something more “successful.” Resurrection is reduced to a trophy, and Christ becomes to a tool.

Our time offers many examples of this drift, especially in heated political cultures where leaders are clothed in messianic language: savior, healer, anointed, the one who alone can fix what is broken. In the United States, this temptation has become particularly visible in the way the President has been portrayed by some supporters in quasi-messianic terms, and at times has spoken in ways that reinforce such a narrative. The point is not to score partisan arguments, but to name a theological distortion: the substitution of Christ with a political image of redemption, where salvation is reduced to the triumph of power and healing to the defeat of enemies. When Christian language is recruited to sanctify domination, the Church is no longer teaching the nations; she is being taught by them.

***

 Charmolýpē lives precisely here. Even in resurrection, Christ is humble. Even in glory, He remains the One who poured Himself out. The wounds do not disappear as if they were mistakes. They remain, not as raw pain, but as radiant memory, a witness that love has a cost, and that the cost was freely embraced. This is why Christian joy cannot become arrogant. If the Risen Christ carries wounds into eternity, then the Church has no permission to preach victory as the humiliation of others, or to present God’s Kingdom as a celebration of our strength. To proclaim Pascha truthfully is to proclaim a victory that looks, at first glance, like weakness: a candle flame flickering in the dark.

Relational Authority in the Orthodox Church: The Role of the Laity Within Official Ecclesial Structures (Orthodox Christian Laity)

sch 8/5 

  

  

Sunday With Floodwaters Receding

 Sunday has been spent submitting stories, going through the email, napping, cleaning, dinner, and setting up future posts.

Such a wild and dangerous life I live. 

The Hillbilly Hellcats persist:  

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold | The Independent

I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear – The Irish Times is it a curse of humanity to hate one another?

A giant replica of a kitchen cabinet is unveiled in Indiana | AP News

Hoosier Myths and Legends - Episode 7.2: Haunted Ripley County, Indiana

Thucydides’ account of war is as timely as it is misunderstood | Aeon Essays  

How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine 

 

Submissions:

“Agnes” went to trampset,  Copper Nickel. The Georgia Review and Chestnut Review

 Rat Bag Lit received “Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow”.

Thankfully, no more rain of any appreciable quantity.

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Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

***

Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

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Another Story Published!

 No church. My ride is sick, my stomach is uncomfortable in a way that I want to stay close to home, and it started raining again. Just what Indiana needs.

I had some good news this morning, another story published: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861-1984 (Seven Story Publishing).

 It is a consolidation of some of my Indiana factory town stories into one. The ones inspired by Anderson and Muncie; the smokestack is the old Andaconda smokestack repurposed (btw, Anderson knocked that down). KH dislikes the format. He calls it the Our Town version. I would like to hear your opinion, if you feel like reading it.

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Muincie: End of June and Beginning of July

 

sch 8/12

JCO Answers How She Writes a Book a Year

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Is it possible Harper's Bazaar asked the one important question of Joyce Carol Oates and no one had before? Check out This Is How Joyce Carol Oates Writes a Book a Year.

Stephen King in his On Writing (a book I recommend, albeit for an odd reason: King publishes how he revises a story) recommends having in mind an audience. Oates offered a similar and different idea:

Who do you write for and why?

I started writing really when I was in high school, and I think I’m sort of writing for an ideal audience. It’s more like telling stories and trying to express the experience of a story as if it was a little movie. I think our lives are one story after another and we’re trying to give voice to that experience. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a specific audience. I mean, if you had no audience at all, you might still want to take photographs, and you might commemorate something. I don’t have a specific audience, but I would hope to have a literary community.

Do you mean a community of readers or writers or both?

Just that we have a common vocabulary and respect for literature, because there are so many people who don’t. It’s like that community of people who care about good films: more of a community of people who care about our culture.

How she describes a novel may explain one of the many reasons the short story form is difficult for me.

What do you usually start with when you are starting a novel? Is it an image or a character, or is it a sentence or a word?

A novel is a river, with a number of tributaries flowing into it. I don’t think you could write a real novel, a substantial novel, on just one little idea. For me, it’s like a number of ideas that come together, and I kind of conjoin them like characters. You have to have a little family of people. For me, it can begin with a place. All of my writing is set in a real place in my recollection. In The Frenzy, for instance, the first story is very much in New Jersey, down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then it’s on the Garden State Parkway, and then it’s in Cape May with a view of the ocean at a certain time of year, off-season. Very New Jersey.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Thinking Bourgeois

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Somerset Maugham said that it was the middle class that created English literature. I think that was in The Summing Up. I was a teenager with ambitions to be a writer, so it has been in my head for a very long time. What was meant by middle class might have been a bit muddled by me. Or circumstances in my case and time left me too little time left to write after trying to keep a law practice afloat.

But I think, on the whole Maugham was right. The rich are too comfortable in their economic status to use their education to create art. The poor are too desperate to create art, that does not help pay the bills.

Reading Hidden in the Bourgeois by Morten Høi Jensen brought all of this to mind. He is writing about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

...And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

We have denigrated the middle class for not being cool. Is that not the heart of The Graduate? But it is the middle that has enough education to grasp the world around them. It is the middle class that has enough stability and enough uncertainty to see the wrinkles and twists of reality to have a reason to act. If memory serves, Lenin and Joe Strummer came from the middle class.

And so let us encourage the middle class to create. Preferably in the arts and not in politics.

SCH 3/26

 

 

Worshipping Artistic Greatness

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

Much has been lately about cancel culture and writers not being morally up to snuff. I wrote about this on my old blog several times. Until I read What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann? (The New Yorker), did it occur to me the problem may be more in the worshipper than the worshipped. I do not think I ever worshipped an artist. As much as I admire Kurt Vonnegut, I would not worship him. It is not so hard for me to like The Rolling Stones without worshipping them; if Altamont does explain why, then Dirty Work should. Why should I expect an artist to be a better person than me? No, the real question should be if the work is better than the person, better than what I could do myself?

This is the paragraph that crystallized the idea for this post:

It is not impossible to imagine what Mann might have said if the dilemma of Sontag’s shame had been presented to him. He had long been brooding over the problem of the charismatic artist, over the hidden dangers of aesthetic cults. The topic floats through Sontag’s then favorite novel, “The Magic Mountain,” and it engulfs “Doctor Faustus,” the tale of a genius and a nation gone mad. Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. The worship of greatness leads, at best, to disillusionment and, at worst, to the insanity unleashed by the Wagnerian Hitler. Every pilgrimage is suspect: Mann scorned the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth on those grounds. “Only for very young people,” he wrote, “are admiration and adoration the same thing.” 

As much as The Magic Mountain awes me, my feelings towards Thomas Mann are more mundane: how did you come to write such a novel?

sch 4/9 

 

 

Friday and The Aftermath

 I worked on blog posts this morning before heading over to the group thing.

This is what Muncie looked like a little before 11 AM.

 My stomach has not been so steady, so I got the vegetable dumplings at The Sumpling House. The waiter whose child died was not; what grief for a young couple.

Before starting the session, I had time to walk over to White River west of Tillotson. 

 I did my grocery shopping, missed the #14 at 2:30, and did not get home until after 3 pm. I was tired, napped for a bit over an hour.

This is what we have now:

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