JamesSavik

Chapters 1-7 are re-worked, and an appropriate song has been embedded in each chapter.

I have. 😉 Never have I had casual sex. I'm always quite serious about it.

Broken is back. This is an autobiographical piece I started almost twenty years ago. I didn't have the guts to face it or the writing chops to do a decent job with it. Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty. This is a little scary to face. I'm opening up some old wound, but F* it. I'm not getting any younger, and it needs to be told. Expect chills, not warm fuzzies. You might want to wear a helmet, and have your emotional support squirrel on call. I will make a run through it, do some editing, add a badass soundtrack, and rock on with new chapters.

Lodestone was the old name for magnetite ore, a magnetic mineral found near iron deposits. Discovered in antiquity, pieces of loadstone suspended so it could turn, became the very first compasses, and were thus crucial to the fledgling art of navigation.

Generations of Drill Instructors have been yelling at recruits to see if they are malleable enough and packing the gear to be a Marine. If they can't take getting yelled at, getting shot it is out of the question. DI's have to be hard and want you to quit because they don't want to take quitters into combat. They have to be special people. They can't be sadists, although to watch the process, you might think so. Neither can they be pushovers. Many recruits hate their DI in boot camp. Once they pass and go from recruit to Marine, when their DI tells the recruit that he is proud of him, it is one of the finest moments of their life.

; 😉

@sandrewn The horror of a Mimefield! ☠️

Oh, joy. Here's a fun one.🙄 Grief is a tricky thing, as it is both an emotion and a process. The emotion is easy. You know it when you feel it. It's natural when bad things happen, like when people you are close to die, relationships end, and so forth. It's the process of grief that's oh so tricky. Grief isn't a fun thing, and many people would rather stuff it, and get busy with life/work/play rather than dwell on it. This can lead to something the shrinks call unprocessed grief. This is never a good thing. It doesn't go away. It stays with you and can come out in inappropriate ways like flashes of anger (road rage), depression, and self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse. This is something I struggle with. It's easy to see it from a bird's-eye view, but until you understand it, it's a mystery why you feel that way. It's a very common thing for men, regardless of their sexuality. There are expectations for how men are supposed to act, and the stoicism expected of men does us no favors in this regard. It can lead to anxiety disorders and complicate other issues. Signs of Unprocessed Grief

Italian accent: Big Joey, Little Joey, Fat Joey and Tony all want to talk to you.

When you experience great art, music or literature, there is always a passion for creation behind it. The artist, musician or author could no more ignore the inspiration and drive to create than they could just decide not to breathe or eat.

I have. It was a blast... I think. That water was so cold! Never have I ever enjoyed cold. I'd go further south, but there's a frikkin ocean in the way.

They snuck up on me! Hyacinths are one of my favorite flowers. According to myth, they are the tears of Apollo over the loss of his beloved Spartan Prince Hyacinthus. If you're unfamiliar with the myth, check it out here, Apollo and Hyacinthus. I would have probably gotten along with the Greeks.

There's a reason I try to keep it real. It's not to shock anybody. I have a very low tolerance for lies. One of them cost me a normal life. Nobodies going to get in trouble. You can tell me the truth. I just want to help. Once you've heard that one, and after what it cost me, you're going to have issues. Trust issues, Authority issues. Rage issues. If I'd been a different person, I could have been a monster. In fact, I almost did. The last time I saw the person who told me that egregious lie, it was through a Leopold scope attached to a .308 Browning. I had his eye in my crosshairs, a shot I could have made. The only reason I didn't take the shot was I would have blown his brains all over his youngest son. There's another lie that we all tell: it gets better. I think it's a hopeful prayer and just as useless. Make it real: Maybe it gets better. Not every problem gets solved in thirty minutes or an hour with commercial breaks. Mr. Brady or Ward Clever don't sit down with you and dish out wisdom and fix it. Doesn't matter how good a person you are, you can roll snake eyes. There aren't any promises. Put on a f*c&ing helmet and have your emotional support squirrel handy for this one. I never got hit as hard on the football field as I did when I would pick up the newspaper, grit my teeth and see another friend or acquaintance in the obituaries during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid dereliquisti me? No one wants to go mad, but holy f*&%, how do you avoid it with that in your head? Back in 2018, I flew to Seattle to donate stem cells to help my older brother fight his cancer. I did all I could to save him, but he died anyway six months later. I was there for a week in a hostel for people at the cancer clinic. Across the street was a shelter for homeless people. At night there was a woman who would go out in the street and howl with outrage at God knows what. How do I avoid joining her in her howling? There. I let you have a peek inside my head. I know it's not pretty, but I've got to live with it. There's even a nice clinical term for it: Complex PTSD. It's like having broken glass in your soul. If it's undisturbed, it can just lay there and not hurt for years. Then, given it the right stress, it can come back with a roar. That's where I am now, and yes, I have an appointment with a psychiatrist as soon as I can get one. Much of my writing started out as therapy because I couldn't talk about it without weeping. I wasted so much time pretending, running and just overwhelmed by the epidemic and honestly, terrified. I'm tired. I just want the war inside my head to be over and know some peace. That's my truth. If my writings take you to scary, dangerous places, just remember, that's where I lived for a very long time. There's a fine line between coping and howling at night.

Me either. It must be kilt first, because that's not the kind of work you want to do at the table. Never have I ever had anything at all to do with gerbils.

Then they had better wear a helmet and get an emotional support squirrel if they read my stuff. I'm going to tag it mature and rock on.

Ecstacy, or MDMA, (a.k.a. E, or Molly) is a popular party drug that was created and used to facilitate psychotherapy. First synthesized by a German chemist in 1912, it became a popular street drug in the seventies. The US FDA made it a Schedule 1 narcotic. As of 2021, there were limited studies of its use to treat the anxiety and depression accompany PTSD. Users of MDMA get a happy, euphoric, friendly, and silly high. It is a complex drug to synthesize, and small errors in the process can create dangerous isomers of the basic compound. In the eighties, a bad batch was released nationwide, which caused the symptoms of early onset Parkinson's disease. Others have the opposite effect, and make the user angry and belligerent.

I used to go crabbing every summer with my cousins on the Gulf Coast. Never have I ever been on a luxury deep-sea fishing excursion. (we always went out on my Uncle's shrimp boat).

If writing were easy, anybody could do it. Given some of the ummm... stuff I've seen, it looks like almost everyone has tried it with varying degrees of success. Even the drunken, worthless in-laws of people in the publishing industry, apparently. Come to think of it, that might explain the writing in TV and movies lately. None of it is easy. Front, middle or end. They've all got to work together to create a cohesive whole, and that's like juggling cats. 1st chapters have to do so much. It has to hook the reader's attention, and that ain't easy with all the distractions of modern life. I suggest the first chapter deliver a short, sharp smack upside the reader's head to make him furious enough to want to chase down the plot and throttle it. Middles are also hard because you can't let the reader catch up with the plot too easily. You have to make him work for it. Give him some blind alleys and false trails to make him chase his tail, then yell, hey stupid, it's this way. Endings are hard, too. After chasing the plot this far, the reader demands satisfaction. This resolution is, in my opinion, the hardest part. I like for the hero to walk off into the sunset with a smoking hot redhead on his arm, but that's just me. This is what makes it fun and challenging. Oh, and the cats are fun too, if they'll forgive you for juggling them.

There are a few it might be fun to toss on the barbie, but nope. Never have I ever had a pet skunk.

True terror is one of those things that's difficult to credit unless you have felt it for yourself. If you have ridden out a hurricane or been jumped by thugs, you just might get it.

OK, this blew my mind. I described the wetlands around south Mississippi and Louisiana and got this: This is what the salt marshes look like in the spring. A view like this is rare and would usually take a long ride in an air boat to get to see it.

I once worked security for a punk band called innuendo. Their name struck me as particularly ironic because those guys couldn't even spell subtle.

Every year until I blew out my knee. Never have I ever seduced any straight guys by fixing their car (that you know of).

AI generated memory of a pasture party ~ 1977.