CarlHoliday

haven't thought about a sequel, but maybe I should.

I'm sorry you have to go to the horrors of morphine just to get a lot of hours of pain free sleep. Wicked stuff with lots of adverse side effects; which are adverse enough not to be mentioned here. Was the psychotic bitch being psychotic offering you a job knowing you'd turn it down because you already know she's a psychotic bitch or was she simply trying to be nice? You look at the simpletons going through their easy lives full of nothing compared to the complications in your life, a life so full of living you don't have to have that empty, blank look. Hope you make the right choice, if only to have lots of things to bitch about.

be careful of the over-the-counter drugs, too. aspirin will cause stomach and intestinal bleeding for men over a certain age. over use of tylenol causes liver problems, especially when used at the same time someone is seeking that beautiful calm only a tumbler of whisky will give you. There is danger in all forms of joint relief. I'm currently taking an analgesic that will burn a hole in my stomach or intestine if not taken with food and a stomach acid reducer, but my pain has crossed the line from aging pain to deterioration pain. best of luck to you on your search for the miracle cure. you might consider something to help you sleep in conjunction with the pain medication if you've been missing out on those 8 essential hours for too many days.

Thank you for your review.

thank you for your review and, yes, I purposely left the ending so that my readers could figure out an ending that suited their personal needs.

Thank you for your review.

Thank you for the review.

Ouch! Hopefully, they found all the gallstones. My fingers are crossed, too.

What, no beans, carrots, and other edible vegetables? It's been said, though I have yet to try them, daylily blossoms are quite delicious in salads. Do you subscribe to that premise? Are you clipping your fresh flowers after shooting them with your camera and sneaking back inside for a healthy repast of fresh daylily blossoms and other salad greens?

Thanks for the review.

Such a nice short story. Will Rachel go back? It's nice you left that unsaid; gives you an opening for a sequel, which I hope will have the same degree of brevity.

I liked the brevity of the story. No overly long descriptions of all the other models led to the anticipation of the final two, who were fully described. I really liked the end with director giving into Raven's dominance of the situation. Nice story.

I see the inside of the door having a bar of some sort for some unstated purpose (the locking mechanism, maybe). The tiger reaches out and using its claws pulls the door closed. Or, maybe one of the monkeys did it. I'll leave it to you to decide how you want the residents to respond to their door being opened.

Thanks, I need all the +'s I can get.

Well, it certainly wasn't the monkeys.

How did the animals know? Well, there were quite a lot of screws holding that door in place. I suppose taking them all out would've been noticed by the residents. Did the tigers become sentient? I don't think so. I believe their evolution did make them friends with the monkeys. Need more to the story? Unfortunately a lot of my short stories leave a lot of interpretation to the reader to fill in whatever blanks they perceive as they see fit. I guess that makes me in some sense a minimalist.

Well, another week at the shelter is in the basket. Got a new roommate yesterday. Seems nice. He used to be a trucker until his employer gave him a breathalyzer test one morning and his reading was over 0.04, which is way above the zero tolerance trucking companies usually expect. Needless to say, his world has gone from okie-dokie to oh-f**k-this-isn’t-good. The only negative aspect of our new relationship is his radio or rather the station his radio is tuned to. I guess it’s rock of some sort or maybe it’s alternative of some sort. Either way, a lot of it is noise I can do without. Interminable repetition is not one of my favorite forms of music. If there is going to words along with the music, I prefer lyrics that at least tell some sort of story (even if it’s only minimally recognizable as a story) rather than have one phrase that is repeated over and over, ad infinitum. Other than that we get along okay. Went to see the shrink today. He told me I should’ve come into the clinic when I was feeling low last month, or gone to the emergency room to see a mental health specialist, or called the crisis line. I guess just talking to someone about how shitty my life was going would’ve done a great deal toward a quicker, tidier recovery. I'll definitely do that next time because I know there will be a next time. Bipolar works like that, up down, the blahs, down up, the blahs, over and over. It's a life. Up until late 2005 I dealt with it by using alcohol as a damper, which wasn't good. Now, I use the meds. One chemical or the other, it seems. He did change my sleeping med from Ambien to Trazedone, which I hope will help me getting to sleep. Also, we had a fairly good session, the interpersonal chemistry is finally working and I hope future sessions will be as productive as today’s. I’m slowly working on Chapter 14 of Remembering Tim. The stuff Sharon sent me from 2008 occurs about six chapters in the future from where Geoff is right now, considering a lot of what Geoff has been going through this time around is original stuff. So I have a lot of new stuff to write to do to get from here to there, though when I do get to that point the journey definitely will not be as it was back in 2008 when I originally wrote Tim and the Corsair. I can’t give a time when Chapter 14 will be ready to post, but I hope it will be before next month. It all depends on my mood, which is good today, but tomorrow may be in the crapper.

When I woke up the next morning I wasn’t in the ward with Sam, Johnny, and Peter. I was in a private room. There was a small window on the door and every now and then I saw part of a face looking in on me. Suicide watch, I was still a threat to myself. Only, I wasn’t. I got out of the bed and went over to the toilet where, after pushing my pajama bottoms down, I sat down and began to think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was kind of tired of trying to kill myself and fa

My roommate of the last four months left for home yesterday, deciding after being away for 15 years the snowy winters of Upstate New York are better than the ice storms in Dallas. I will and won’t miss him. It’s kind of hard living with someone who has to be right, all the time. Yet the sandwiches he smuggled into the shelter every now and then were very much appreciated. He is the kind of guy who having earphones for his television will listen to the same appliance without the earphones at a volume that is sufficient to ensure sleep won’t come easily, but not so loud as to bother those in the room next door. Yet he was more than willing to give me a ride over to the cellphone store so I could sign up and to Walmart for needed supplies when I started receiving my disability payments; plus, give me a ride up to Micro Center when I was ready to buy this laptop. Good guy, bad guy. Nice guy, homophobic bastard. Yes, there is that problem, too. If anyone asks me if I know the definition of disparage, I can say I lived with the definition. On the home front, I’m having a problem with obliviousness. I don’t know if it’s the all the meds I’m taking, but I been having a real problem lately of not being aware of people and things around me. I suspect it might have something to do with the hypomanic state I seem to be in. Yes, I bounced out of the gloom into happyland once again. Also on the medical front, I have been told not to take aspirin to treat arthritis as it could, may, might, or quite possibly burn a hole in my stomach, leading to all sorts of bleeding problems. So, my good PC prescribed Etodolac, which WILL burn a hole in my stomach if not taken with Omeprozole (to reduce stomach acid) and food. What’s worse could, may, might, or quite possibly or WILL? Aspirin has been working for me for the past 40 years so why stop now? Oh, almost forgot to tell you, but my ex-roommate let me have his old mattress. It's a real twin bed mattress, which is far better than the thin foam mattresses they give out here at the shelter. Don't get me wrong, he didn't give it to me, but he did let me buy it in lieu of selling it to someone else. Like I said, he is the kind of guy who'll give a friend the shirt off his back, as long as you have the cash.

I remember Jeff mostly from the sitcom Taxi, which kind of places me in the older crowd, though he and I were nearly the same age. It's a shame he wasn't able to overcome his problems with substance abuse.

I was trying to come up with some kind of blog entry today as tomorrow is my four month anniversary here at the Salvation Army shelter, but my mind is in a flurry of needless activity and I can't hold a straight thought for any decent period of time. I did apply for Social Security today. Big step in the life of every American. I'm going in early because, well, with the bipolar messing up my life for probably a lot longer than originally thought, my chances of having any job more than part-time is slim at best. With my VA disability payment, I should make out okay. If I get a Social Security disability, also, life will be almost rosy. I can only hope the Tea Party Republicans don't dismantle Social Security in their suicidal attempt to create a government that can run without any taxes. The last thing I want in my waning years is to be a wandering street person begging for sustenance as the US of A slowly implodes. Posted Chapter 12 of Remembering Tim, leaving only one more chapter until I'm out of previously written stuff and will have to totally create the story from that point forward. I've kind of thought about where the story will go, but am not quite certain how it will get there. As I said, my brain is fluttering madly as I rapidly rise out of a recent bout of severe depression, so you'll have to excuse the bleakness of this entry.

Tim came for breakfast Monday morning before school. He looked like someone who knew a secret and was busting a gut to keep from telling everyone he met. Mother was still subdued and standoffish to me. I must have scared the shit out of her. I wasn’t in the mood for school, but went through the motions, anyway. At least I didn’t have to go out to Doctor Randall’s happy farm for my stunt on Jerry’s balcony. Tim didn’t talk all the way to school. Not a word. I hadn’t seen him since Saturday morni

You are an inspiration. I'm only 61 and am just now putting together my early retirement package. I'd love to go another 21 years and be able to look back on a journey well spent. Have to remember to keep the master controller fed with sufficient new data to keep it interested in keeping on instead of shriveling to a atrophied mass between our ears. Yes, it's best to keep going.

As someone who has fallen by the wayside on too many occasions, I do not expect to participate in the Rapture tomorrow. It’s been kind of nice in this life and I suspect the next few months (years) are going to be very interesting until God actually gets to actively destroying his Creation. I suppose if you’re the Almighty and you get bored total destruction is a whole lot better than making a few adjustments to the whole Damned mess. Anyway, I have my Rapture suit ready just in case I am taken up to Heaven where I’ll sing Praises for the rest of What? Certainly not eternity since Time is a product of Creation. When the End comes, that will be the bid End of everything. God, in a sense, will die with his/her Creation if he/she destroys it, which causes me to think this time is just like all the other predetermined Apocalypses. Somebody has been reading between the lines, again. For myself depression is down, while anxiety is up, up a lot more than it’s been in years. The good news is the VA doubled the disability amount for my decrepit knees, which would be very, very good news if Social Security had approved my claim of disability for being Bipolar, which they didn’t. It seems, according to Social Security, I’m not totally disabled. According to them, I can go back to a previous occupation, which is, well, true, if you don’t think about it too hard. I am, in the moral sense, between a rock and a hard place. I could appeal the decision, but basically I agree with them. I’m left with the disability pension from the VA, which is okay (it is a quite a lot of money). I’d rather have more money going into my fading years (short though they may be due to the upcoming Rapture) and dread the day when I have to go down the pet food isle in search of affordable sustenance. So, you see, even though the end of the World, as we know it, will occur sometime tomorrow (or, today, if you live in that part of the world), I’m quite anxious that I won’t be taken up and will have to live with worsening knees and a flipping mental state into the Apocalyptic Hell which we can all expect post-Rapture.

I don’t know why I was on the bus heading toward Uncle Jerry’s apartment on Beacon Hill. Tim was at a North Park College football game with his dad. Their annual nemesis, Springfield Polytech, was in town to beat the local losers and Tim said he had to go, something about a business deal his dad was working on. I don’t know what role Tim was playing, but he couldn’t get out of it and I couldn’t get out to see Sam, so I didn’t have anything to do. I’d called Uncle Jerry earlier in the week about