CarlHoliday

Geoff’s POV I sat in my office looking at the computer. It was the late spring after Jerry had been nearly murdered by the man who had attacked Billy. I assumed he was upstairs in his room reading something I’d given him on the French language, but I never knew exactly where he was due to the psychosis caused by the brain damage he suffered from being shot in New York City. His lawyer said that Jerry couldn’t get his wish to become my adoptive son until he was examined by a panel of psyc

I’ve been suffering with writer’s block for a few months now, but slowly the creative juices are beginning to unclog and flow once again. Most of this block can be attributed to my recent bout with increased arthritic inflammation in my left knee. My PC sent me to x-ray and the radiologists diagnosed pseudo-gout. My PC who isn’t an MD, but an ARNP, did not accept this diagnosis because she had no knowledge of this affliction. She decided I was suffering from regular ol’ gout because my uric acid level was nearly one full point over the threshold. At what point do you question the medical knowledge of a nurse practitioner over a medical doctor? The telling symptoms of my knee WERE NOT swelling, warmth, or redness, which would be consistent with gout, but was just pain, often excruciating, wake me up in the night pain. Having had knee pain in varying degrees since childhood, I knew what to do to help lessen the impact of this latest bout. Unfortunately, I’m allergic to all the standard NSAIDs. The only one my body can tolerate is aspirin, which, interestingly, can compound the effects of gout. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Well, I got an appointment with an orthopedic resident who—with the affirmation of her attending—said arthritis is spreading throughout my knee. I suppose this was inevitable. Bad knees can go only so long until they attract the attention of the arthritic god of old age. An orthopedic surgeon I saw in 1971 said I had ninety-year-old knees; I was twenty-two at the time. So, I guess it’s back to self-treatment as I know it and when the knees and fingers (new symptoms) get too back I’ll try to get back to orthopedics. The good side of all this is I slowly getting back to writing. 319 Winesap Lane, Chapter 18, is coming along, slowly, ever so slowly. Two new boys have come to the home and Billy has encountered a problem with an upper classman. My new project, which will not be published until it is complete or at least complete through Section One, has the working title of The Faggot. It is a sci-fi story of a homosexual man who is transported to a planet that is lacking a male prostitute to service the needs of the men who desire the sexual services that only another man can provide. Interestingly, the faggot is also available to women of the village who desire sex with a man other than their spouse. There is, also, a harlot to service the heterosexual needs of men and homosexual needs of women. The interpersonal possibilities of the characters are endless.

Let’s get this straight right from the beginning. I am suffering from a writer’s block. I’ve had these before and they’ve passed in time, but somehow I feel that this time it’s terminal. In fact, I don’t know the process of moving from Signature Author to Classic Author, but this very well maybe the time for such a transition. I’ve tried to work on 319 and The GMOs, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything there. So, I’ve done the only thing that a failed writer can do. I’ve turned to reading and, in my case, I’m reading short stories by Ernest Hemingway. I never read much of Hemingway other than The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, but I recently purchased a collection of Hemingway’s first 49 short stories and they seem to be hitting a nerve. Tonight, I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (I always thought it was a novel, but its just a long short story) and in between the lines there was another story that kept trying to come out. It concerns a transsexual by the name of Sara Jean and her friend Billy. Sara Jean is raised by liberal parents who accept their son Steven James is genetically programmed to be a girl and do everything they can to support her decision to go through the process of becoming fully female. Billy, her lifelong friend, is seen at the hospital where Sara Jean is having her penis surgically modified into a clitoris and a urinary outlet; and, after her testicles are removed a process of vaginoplasty opens a pseudo vagina between her testicles and anus. He, along with her parents, know what is occurring down the hall and through the doors clearly signed “No Admittance – Hospital Personnel Only.” I don’t know if or when a story will come from this idea, but it’s there and that’s all I can hope for at the present time.

Thank you for your comments. I really appreciate it when readers give me their honest impressions of my stories Hopefully you will continue on to subsequent chapters and get to the full impact of this story.

Thank you for your comments and interest in my story.

I haven’t been working on the next chapter for 319 because I have been working on a possible short story for another site during the past week. I know I should be working on 319, but I’m focused on this other story. It involves a young teen who decides to run away from home, hoping to connect with his uncle in Fresno, California. The only problem is that he hasn’t quite figured out how he is going to get in contact with his uncle. And, then a favorite song comes up: That’s the problem with being a Type 1 Bipolar. You just never known when something will come up that does or doesn’t have anything to do with your narrative (or train of thought). As I think I said in an entry before this, I read a collection of John O’Hara’s New York stories. It was interesting because he doesn’t give character movements in his dialogues. In other words, it’s just straight dialogue that you might encounter in a play or movie script. In other words, you set the scene, add the characters, and go with the script (or dialogue). For many writers, they want to provide movement for the speakers, but in traditional fiction writers (as in literature) there is not movement added. You leave it up to the reader to imagine how the speakers are moving within the scene. Oh, yeah, I forgot, sometimes life goes awry and you never quite know where you're going to turn up: You see, I'm in a melancholy mood and I don't know where I'm going from here. Anyway, I’m almost finished with this other story, which may be published on this other site, or if there are problems, I’ll just throw it up on GA and got with what may come. You see, I’m at an age where new stories are few and far between. I have to admit that the creative juices are running low and soon there will become a time when I will no longer be able to come up with anything original. Sorry, with my age and mental illness, there isn’t much more than I can do. My son just served me two “special” brownies. And, so, I sit here with two fourteen-year-old gay boys who don’t quite know where to go when they’re alone for some close interpersonal time. So, I go forward and take two fourteen-year-old boys to the point where love blossoms. As you can see life in mental illness is sometimes not quite want you want.

Thanks for the review. His struggle will continue, but I see a brightness on his horizon. All he has to do is make the right moves to get there.

Thanks for the review. Having had hallucinations in my personal experience with mental disease made giving Jerry the right amount of insanity much easier.

Thanks for the review. I'm glad you saw Jerry's hallucinations as "bizarre". I tried very hard to get his attempt at sanity down just right. Wish I could tell you if Jerry will eventually get better.

Jerry’s POV Almost dying twice on the operating table as the surgeons worked to repair the damage from those two bullets definitely helped me realize that the insanity clouding my mind since being shot in the head wasn’t something I wanted to live with anymore. What was remarkable most was that I could think a thought such as that, whereas before, after receiving a bullet that damaged the lower frontal cortex of my brain, I lived in a foggy world where communicating with other people was very d

What can I say, your stories affected me so much. I can only pray that somehow there is a miracle waiting for you, only to be given when you accept the consequences of that choice. I lost my father and mother to stage 4 cancer, so I know the seriousness of your condition. I give you the hope that in that special time when you look upon the love you have here at GA will give you the knowledge that you are loved for giving us the beauty of your stories for all time.

Okay, let’s get this clear from the beginning, “I am inebriated.” I have had a double shot of Laphroiag single malt Scotch liquor (it’s one of Prince Charles’ favorite Scotch single malts), an Estrella Jalisco cervesca, two Harvey’s hot buttered rums, a Dos Equis draught, and two double shots of Cazadores Añejo tequila. In the process of becoming inebriated I had a chicken enchilada, a chicken tostada, and a third of a Chicken Milenesa (deep fried chicken breast). I have had, as usual on weekend visits to our favorite Mexican-American restaurant, the Ixtapa in Sultan, WA, a deep conversation with my son about our recently departed wife (on my part) and mother (on my son’s part). She was a very disturbed person who never admitted her insanity to others. It was never her fault that she was not quite the good mother or good wife. She, as most neurotics would admit, was a perfect person. She is gone now, at least from the letter I received from the VA that said a check they had sent to her had been returned indicating that the addressee was “deceased”. I sit here writing this entry to my blog on GA while my son supposedly has crashed onto his bed for the night after too much alcohol (he had two double Cazadores margaritas), two hot buttered rums, a Negra Modelo, and two double shots of Don Julio Añejo tequila). Nana, our nine-month-old German Shepherd is lying on the sofa looking at me as I write this. In the past two weeks since we have had our X-mas tree, she has been a very naughty puppy. So far, she has partially eaten one very special handmade ornament. (If you will excuse me, but I’ve been away for twenty minutes while Nana was outside supposedly to take care off a physiological need, but didn’t seem to need to do anything other than to run around and chase her tail.) Nana has a problem. She chases her tail and captures it on occasion. She has a definite curl in the end of it due to chewing on said object. I looked online and discovered that some German Shepherds have a predilection for chasing their tails. It seems that inbreeding has produced a fault in some genetic lines that causes some German Shepherds to chase their tails to the point where it is similar to the human condition known as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and, is some instances, can be treated with medications that treat human OCD patients. We have, as yet, not gone expense of treating Nana’s OCD. Hey, she’s an altered bitch, so why should we go to the expense. We’ve got a whirling Dervish German Shepherd; what more could one ask for? I’ve been reading a Penguin Classic collection of the New York stories of John O’Hara. Why is he important, you ask? Well, he is acknowledged as being one of the few writers of fiction to be able to write dialog as it is spoken by real people and, at the time of his death, was the most published author of short stories in The New Yorker magazine, which I consider to be quite an accomplishment. (Have you ever listened to Stephen Bishop singing, “On and On”? It’s playing right now; it’s one of my favorite songs and I thought you might enjoy it. If you want to listen to it, go to: ) While I was reading John O’Hara’s collections of short stories I couldn’t stop thinking of all the missed opportunities I had in my own life of writing the kind of stories that are published in The New Yorker. You see, I consider myself to be a failed fiction writer. I don’t know how many stories I have left to write for GA, but I don’t think there are very many. Creativity wains and there are not enough hormones to keep producing the kind of stories I want to create. Tonight at the Ixtapa, I saw a young boy, probably in his late teens, who I thought I’d seen somewhere online. He was across the restaurant so I couldn’t get a good look him, but from a distance I could tell his was slender, but not skinny. His brown hair hung over his forehead, but not into his eyes. His slender, boney fingers handled his smartphone with the expertise you would expect from a boy of his age. In many ways, I saw in him the beauty only a teenage boy can exude to those who look for that in a boy. To my regret, I couldn’t keep my eyes off him to the point where my son looked to where I was looking to see what was catching my eye. I don’t think he appreciated the beauty I saw. I suspect there won’t be an update to 319 until after Christmas because I can’t write while I’m watching Nana, who has her attention focused on the X-mas tree. (Did you know X-mas is a valid abbreviation for Christmas? Well, it is. It’s in the Greek.) In my playlist, which delves back many decades, “Fernando” by ABBA just came up. If you’re interested, try: .

Thanks for the review. I've always tried to follow the rule that if you introduce a gun in a chapter, you must use that gun no later than the following chapter or your audience will forget it was there.

Thanks for the review. In some way, it was a good thing that Jerry was there. You might even say he was a hero.

Billy’s POV On the second day of the first week, Billy kept his window shades down in his bedroom and bathroom. Downstairs, he didn’t go into any room—other than the kitchen—that had its draperies open. He worked on his homeschooling classes in his room and read the book Geoff gave him to read at the evening gathering. He didn’t quite understand why he had to read the novel, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, but since Geoff and Jamie also read, he figured it wouldn’t hurt him. Jerry sat in his

Thanks for the review. When Jerry meets Bill Daniels and Junior at the door he says, "... Geoff took Erik away and didn't bring him back. ..." I guess I should've added something when they were discussing where Junior should sit in the study as to where Erik has gotten off to. Yes, Jamie has become a full-time resident. Sorry for not adding some sort of blurb to indicate that. If I said what's going to occur in Jerry's life, there wouldn't be any point in putting up Chapter 16 and 17.

Thank you for the review. I guess I failed in portraying how evil Lardner is. Maybe, I should've detailed the beatings both boys have had at the hands of this man. When Lardner threatened to shoot Anson the boy fully expected to die unless he did what his stepfather wanted. Initially, I considered combining Parts 1 and 2 into one chapter, but that would've come to around 9,000 words, which some readers at GA feel is a bit unwieldily, so this bit of 319 was split in half. Unfortunately, its seems that was the incorrect choice.

Junior’s (Billy) POV It was one of those cold winter days when the snow from the last storm calmly waits for the next layer of whiteness. Two boys, one fifteen and the other a year younger, walked along a lane in the country after getting off the school bus with their bodies close—hands not clasped, yet with knuckles and shoulders occasionally bumping and brushing—belied a friendship that has moved beyond casual familiarity to something one might call young love if they could admit to such a fe

Thanks for the review. I could've gone more deeply into the reasons behind Erik's unusual increasing blindness, but I didn't. 319 could be seen as a refuge in a teens stormy life. Geoff has his faults, but he trying to maintain a place where young boys can come and live fruitful lives. Unfortunately, there are clouds on the horizon.

Thank you for the review. Yes, it is strange about Jerry, but one never knows about damage to the brain on the mind's activity. I wouldn't say that Erik is a slut. I think it's more of a reaction to his hormone deficiency and increasing blindness.

Jamie’s POV It seemed like I’d been in the group home in Lyons for over three months before that dude from Warnton finally got off his ass and came down to pick me up for a visit. I was waiting in the lobby and when he came in the door I wasn’t impressed. For one thing, he was old; not decrepit old, but old enough to be my grandfather if I had such a person in my family. He went to the counter and filled out my release slip. When he came over to me I didn’t know what to expect. “Are you Jamie?

Thank you for the review.

I can't really say; it just seems to be affecting a couple characters in this story. We can only hope it won't spread.

Jerry’s POV My trip with Geoff down to New York City was an adventure I’d rather not experience ever again. I helped with the driving on the Thruway, but he took over at the rest area at Sloatsburg and drove into The City. The hotel we stayed at was up near Columbia University, but that wasn’t the interesting thing about the place. Although it was nearly midnight when we arrived, the valet took the car and put it in the adjacent garage. We took our luggage, such as it was, up to the front door

Thank you for the review