Lesson 3

Ask a family member to explain a little bit about where your family is from.  This could be a state, country, or a city or town.  Then write about what you learned and how it made you feel about your family history.  Where you surprised?  Excited? Sad? What emotions did you have when you heard about your family?

Lesson 2

Pick two inventors from the list below and write at least three paragraphs on your blog for each person you picked and tell me  what you like about them.

Wright brothers (flight), George Washington Carver (science), Alexander Graham Bell (communication), and Thomas Edison (electricity)

Then read one of your fellow students’ blog and post a comment on why you liked what they wrote and something they could improve.

Lesson 1

Use informational writing and use RACE to answer the question on your blog.  Give it the title of Native Americans.

What were some of the problems Native Americans had when the Transcontinental Railroad was being built?

I can’t say what I can’t say

I am in a relationship with someone that I don’t to be with, but she also doesn’t want to be with me.  The catch is that to get what we want we have to be friends in a way because each of us holds the card that the other needs.

It isn’t a very good relationship because she holds more of the cards that I want.  The more I think about it, she has the power over me in the short term.  I hold the trump card, though.  I have power that people don’t realize I have.  She knows.  I mentioned it once during a tense conversation and she closed her mouth and did whatever I wanted in that moment.  She was willing to give me almost everything that I wanted, but I wanted something else.  Until that moment, we have passed each other in the hall knowing that the secrets are always there.

I have powers.  Not super powers, but the ability to get information that you don’t even know people have access to is my power.  I can find out where celebrities live and how much they paid for their home. I have the power to find out how much money you make and how much your business makes.  I know how to get things that you have no idea about.  That may be a super power.  I can bring people down with information.

Mortified and no way out

I’ve paid the piper.  Gave him money and then some.  I have seen things that nobody should see and done things that nobody should, but they were pretty fun.

I have written stories about some of the most amazing people that exist in every town, but have seen things that you can’t unsee.  I was a man that I didn’t want to be, but it had its benefits.  I got to interview very powerful people in the world of politics.  I even interviewed a man who worked for the Queen of England.  I met sports stars, and I have been called a liar to my face when I had their words on tape.  (That was the best part.)

The best part was the great people who do spectacular things without anybody knowing.  I saw people cry when they left their job after decades of service, a man a little older than me face death in the face and struggle with it, and watch someone relive their life through a gesture someone gave them.

I was more than happy to take on the opportunity that I had chosen.  I met all of those great people, but I had some of my best times defying the rules, which were encouraged by my bosses.  I have slipped passed the cops so many times it should be looked at.  A firefighter let me get on top of truck to take pictures, but I climbed up the ladder to get a better shot, which made the photographers proud.  I went ducked under lines to be close to the murder scene, but not close enough to where I would cause trouble.  I can say that I have seen many things that other people want, but it comes with a cost.

Then came the part that I couldn’t live with anymore.  The calls at midnight to see what major car crashes or accidents happened.  Wondering on the scene of a dead man who walked off the highway and fell dead when he reached the grass.  The worst part is when I walked up on the scene and the officer took off his latex gloves to shake my hand.  One of the weirdest and most horrifying things was putting together the sexual offender list.  I had to stare at those images of people who did horrid things to people and put their offense with their name so we could print it for the county.  I actually spent some time with the officer who’s job it is to watch over those people and the stories were so vile that I did not sleep for a couple of days.  All of the stories haunt me.  They still come into my mind every so often, but that was the life I chose.  The most evil of evils was trying to get a quote from a family member after their child was murdered or the murderer.

Be careful what you wish for.

The Weird concept of what is News

I am a news junkie.  I consume every article, editorial, and feature story that interests me.  Mostly it is politics, but there are times when I venture off into the Science realm because there is some really cool shit going on out there.  This all stems from my days as a reporter and my natural curiosity.  When I was journalist I covered all kind of government agencies and people.  You have to be prepared before you interview a politician, even if it the local city council that makes decisions for a couple thousand people.

As I venture around the Internet to visit various news sites, The Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc., I will go to The Onion from time-to-time, which is a very funny satirical site if you didn’t know.  They have all kind of categories like every newspaper, but they are completely absurd.  They have profile pieces with titles like Aging Mother Knows any Wrong Move Could be Taken for Telltale Sign of Dementia or Bobby Jindal Lies to Parents About Winning GOP Nomination.

After spending 30 minutes on The Onion, I will go back to reading real news and I will read it as a comedy that is not real.  There are stories in the media that don’t seem real, like Donald Trump leading for the GOP nomination, but there are others that are just straight news, and just for the record I only go to reputable news sources.  I don’t dabble in conspiracy theories or speculation about a candidate for office unless it is corroborated by another source.  I do have friends who get in discussion with me about current events and try to point to these sites as proof that someone is guilty of something.  I have a degree in Political Science, so I generally wipe the floor with them.  Now back to the premise of this post.  After reading the satirical news and venturing back to real news or vice versa, I find myself reading one genre as if it is the other.

I find it funny that the brain can trick me into switching from one to the other without me recognizing it. One of the more plausible things is that the real news has become such a farce that you don’t know who to believe.  I knew I left the profession for a reason.

I Don’t Want You to be Here

You won’t like me.  You really don’t like me.  Then you might love me.  Then you might loathe me.  You will tolerate me.  You will like me.  You will love me.

That is the emotions of someone who goes through my writing phase in a few days to a five-day period when I sit down to seriously write.  I have tried to explain this to many people that it isn’t fun to be me, and that it is horribly wrong to be me when I am in writing mode.  To be honest, this is not writing for me.  I get words on a page, but that doesn’t mean that I am writing.  It is the equivalent of some of my writing days when I was a journalist.  I came back to the newsroom, which was mainly at night, and the editor told me how many inches of copy I needed to fill.  I wrote to fill space.  I had to.  I did have fun and did things that most people never get to do, and saw things that many people don’t even get close to.  Some of the things I didn’t want to see or do.

Writing for myself is different.  I go into a world that isn’t meant for human consumption.  It is weird.  The world gets a little blurry, the walls seem to bend a little bit, and I am the most incorrigible person you have ever met.  I sit in the dark.  I eat very little.  I lack communication skills.  I hate the world, but I go through the daily duties of being a human being.  As one of my friends put it after reading some of stories, “You are pretty funny, but it is very dark.”  At least I keep my sense of humor.  My compassion is heightened, my sensitivity is off the charts, and my love for people waxes and wanes with the tides.  The rest of me falls away into the abyss of my mind and my life.  It isn’t pretty, and nobody should be around me, but the weird thing is that if I don’t do it then I wouldn’t be myself.  It isn’t much, but it’s a living.

I Can’t Tell You the Math, but I Can Explain the Theory

I have a love/hate relationship with physics.  I have taken classes in the subject and we always start with the basics laws and math: gravity, thermodynamics, some chemistry, and atoms.  I could not, and will not be able to compute the equations that go with it.  One of my professors even allowed an open-book test for these laws and equations where I only had to plug in numbers.  I still couldn’t figure it out.  I struggled with what number went where even when they were in front of me.  My mind moves in the abstract better than the literal.  When I probed further into the world of physics I didn’t have the mathematics to understand some of the readings that my professor suggested, so I did poorly on the first half of the class.  But I had a hidden talent.

The one thing that I had in spades was to learn in a way that most do not.  I could understand things that others could not for some odd reason.  It came to me pretty early in life.  Going into high school, I already knew how to read Shakespeare.  It is lyrical.  You hear the words and put them in order when you read it, but also listening to the iambic pentameter that makes the writing so beautiful.  I got sick of raising my hand in English class that I eventually was called on because nobody else knew the answer.  I basically taught the class.  That was the way that I felt with theoretical physics.

I call it theoretical physics because that is the person with the doctorate degree called it.  I had a professor refer to it as something else, but I am taking the guy with Doctor in front of his name before I take the other person’s fake name for it.  Back to the point.  The class sparked a light in me and I love everything that science can give me.  I love quantum physics and the various theories.  I still can’t understand the math involved, but I know what the event horizon is, singularity theory, how we are all made of stars, and how the explosion of a star causes a black hole and then regenerates itself into a whole new galaxy or solar system.  Spoiler alert:  There is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy that we spin around. (We are actually falling into it.)  We spin around the galaxy, the sun, and the universe.  It fascinates me.  The moon is in geosynchronous orbit with Earth so that we only see one side.  Other planets go into retrograde where they seem to go backwards, but it is an optical allusion.  Millions or billions of years from now Earth will fall into a black hole and we will reach singularity.  (Not us.  We’ll be dead by then and wiped from history.)  Enjoy the ride.

When I Die I Want it to be a Spectacle

Being a clinically depressed person who takes medication everyday to stay alive, I have thought about death way more than the average human being.  I have sat on the steps going to the basement in my parents house and cried.  Not a weep, but a full-on cry.  I had no control over my life and still live there temporarily from time-to-time.  It is not fun.  I would wish this affliction on my worse enemy because the police would never be able to tie me to the eventual death.

As much as I would like to focus on my pending demise and away from my past life, I would like to focus on my actual death.  Really, I would like to focus on my funeral.  This is also something that I have thought a lot about, but it is the way I want to be remembered.

I would like some kind of viewing at my funeral so that people could pay their respects the way they want to.  I never really understood the point of a viewing, or a funeral for that matter.  It is all about making the living feel better.  Being an Agnostic, I have no idea what will happen when I die, but it won’t be taking in my own funeral.  This is either because there is no supreme being, or I am visiting different dimensions and discovering the wonders of the universe.  I can watch the funeral on tape delay later.

After the ceremony is when the show really starts.  I would tell only a few people what would actually happen because they would need to know.  I would rent a boat and pay off the captain to take everybody aboard on a long term because “that is what he wanted.”  I would invite friends and family to expect a celebration of life.  I would then take them on a small cruise into international waters so that everyone would be able to do anything they wanted.  Fireworks would be mounted on the sides of the boat to give the impression that something special was going to happen.  When night came, the spectacle would begin.  The fireworks would be set off, but I saved the best for last.

To make the evening work, I would have a cannon put on board and if anybody asked, it was just part of the festivities.  At the moment that the fireworks ended, I would have someone shoot off the cannon.  What the revelers would be expecting as a fantastic finale would be just that.  I would be the spectacle.  I would have someone load me into the cannon before people got on, and at the end of the fireworks I would be shot out of the cannon with weights attached to pull me to the bottom of the ocean.  It would be horrific and great at the same time.  What do I care?  I’m dead.  I would love to see it, but I might just watch it later.

Questions of faith?

I have some religious friends who feel no problem sending or posting things on social media about how much they love god or how he has helped them, but when I bring up the subject or post something questioning religion they are not very christ-like.

I am an Agnostic/Deist.  That means that I don’t know how the Earth, humans, and the rest of the universe became to be.  And here is a little wake-up call for you, YOU DON’T KNOW EITHER!  If you knew you would be a prophet, and probably wouldn’t be doing all the bad things that I know you do because you have told me.  The Deist part has a little more substance, and some of our Founding Fathers believed in it like Thomas Jefferson.  He even cut out all the miracles in the Bible to make it correct.  That is something that we believe.  There are no miracles, no prayer, and we certainly don’t believe that god intervenes in the day-to-day life of people.  We believe that some supernatural power set the universe in motion and that was it.  All things that were set in motion will happen and have happened.  It sounds bleak, but it frees you up to not really care about what happens.  There are no worries, and I don’t care if I got the wrong thing at the store or picked the right movie.  I get that you really like one book, but I don’t throw around “The Grapes of Wrath” or “Crime and Punishment” at you when you ask for advice or I don’t like what you do.

I wish that most Christians that I have met had as much tolerance for me as I have for them.  I never point out that what they believe is stupid, even though 14 percent of Americans are Atheists say they believe in a higher power, and the numbers are continuing to grow.  I don’t have the benefit of pointing to a book written thousands of years ago by people who were even stupider than they are now, and a new chapter that is supposed to be non-fiction written hundreds of years after the main character dies.

What I do have is common sense.  You don’t know.  I have read the Bible and studied the New Testament in college.  I wrote a paper on the book of John as being the only one in the New Testament where the word of god became man.  I also know that if you add together all the words that Jesus apparently said, it would amount to about 30 minutes of speech.  I’ve done longer speeches on the benefits of butter as opposed to butter-like substances.  I can’t believe that your prophet was such an introvert that he couldn’t give a speech at a wedding.  At least Mohammed was said to speak every word of what would become the Koran in one sitting.

And people ask me why I have doubts?  My friends know me well enough that I can poke holes in the facade, and that I have thoughts of my own on the subject that are just as valid as theirs.