Category: No Bears in the news today –

Snowstorms and Possible Progress in my ‘Literary Career’

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Friday, February 2nd, 2018 —> -8˚C / +17˚F with light snow and some wind creating interesting swirls out there @ 2:52 pm in Atlantic Canada —> It’s Lisa’s and her son, Ricky’s, Birthday today 🙂 and also Cousin Lynn’s ( not really sure how to spell his name )’s birthday too 🙂 —

winter scene February 1st, 2018.

– Yesterday – I think I was able to capture the feeling I got when I looked between trees up close and saw a nice winter wonderland about fifty yards farther away through a frame of evergreens and birches –

— I submitted a manuscript that that was accepted for a “Kindle Scout Campaign” – The manuscript will be available for Kindle Scout Members to read for the next thirty days. And if enough readers are impressed enough to ‘Nominate’ that manuscript for publication, they might help the editors at Kindle and Amazon decide to publish it. I’d get an advance and maybe even royalties if I’m not too far off into the fringes of ‘weirdo writers’ or vastly over-estimated my writing ability and/or style?

llyn Ellyn Cover.

– “Llyn Ellyn ( Healing Waters Run Deep )” – Cover art by Catherine M. Harris. –

— “Llyn” is the Welsh spelling for the Welsh word that may refer to ‘a pool of water beneath a waterfall’ or may include ‘River’ and/or other bodies of water.

— This was my NaNoWriMo { National Novel Writing Month } project for November – NaNoWriMo is a yearly opportunity for writers to set the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days.  & If you reach or exceed that goal you get to download a badge for your website or facebook page – but more importantly – prove to yourself that you can do it. You need to upload your project and have it verified. You can’t get away with repeating the same word 50,000 times.

— This year, among the goodies we ‘winners’ get links to, was the ‘Kindle Scout Campaign’ & we had until January 31st to edit our NaNoWriMo story, get it as professional as possible, and submit it along with a short bio, book description your photo and a ‘thank you’ message to anybody who reads your story. I did manage to edit my story, changed the title a bit – Catherine M. Harris liked the first couple chapters she read and volunteered to create Cover art –

— That’s the cover to the left – and what you see there is a male humanoid with primitive bandages around his eyes – and  he might even have wings. He can’t remember much, but he’s been told he flew down and rescued a young woman from monsters from another dimension who were going to kill her, or worse. The woman he rescued has been placed in charge of watching him while he heals from severe burns he suffered during the rescue. She tells him they are in a huge cavern where a Medieval society includes Healers with near miraculous abilities. There is a river running through the cavern and that river flows over waterfalls. The community has named their underground city “Llyn Ellyn”.

— Ancient cave dwellers discovered crystal deposits in the ceiling of the cavern that can capture and amplify sunlight during the day and subsequent engineers have been able to fashion reflective panels of silver to reflect that light around some of the larger chambers of the cavern. The healers can reportedly use more crystals embedded in the walls of a “Healing Chamber” to aid in healing processes.

— He’s told he’s been given an “Elvish” name in lieu of being called something like, ‘John Doe’ – & that name means “Stranger” – or possibly “Magical Stranger” or even “Holy Stranger” – Some of the locals saw him fall out of thin air and into the pool near their central waterfall- they saw him with wings and thought he might be an angel. Some think he might be an evil fallen angel. He doesn’t know what to believe and he embarks on an odyssey through dreams and reality, ‘Dream Walking’ – and trying to piece together clues to who he might be and maybe what he might be.

— He can’t remember ever having wings and there do not appear to be any strange bones or odd muscles that might indicate his healing body ever had wings. He doesn’t know what to believe –

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— The ‘Campaign’ begins tomorrow, February 3rd, 2018 – and will go until March 5th.

— I will be given links I can post to social media and I might be able to explain a few things about this campaign a little more clearly – unless today’s heavy wet snow messes up the electrical grid around here and then it might take me a few more days before I can post those links and try to explain things a little more clearly –

— Thanks,

~~~~~ Jim

Good Morning/Afternoon —> Some Archival Schtuff —

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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018 —> -4˚C / +24˚F & very grey and drab with almost invisibly falling snow @3:15 pm in Atlantic Canada — Imported to “Mirror Blog” much later —

Deserted Manor Houses

– Faer Kingdoms – Deserted Manor Houses at Dawn –

— One of our first glimpses of a parallel world within a parallel world – In this case it’s an anomaly-created ‘pocket dimension’ called, “The Faer Kingdoms”. This is an area where mythical creatures and “The People Of The Glenn” live side by side with humans and elves and upright bi-pedal Cat-People – among others.

Cavern Details

– Cavern Details – A guide named Daerenn led us part of the way to safety through a cavern that had been formed by rushing water from melting glaciers eons ago. –

— This cavern is mostly stable with wild portals opening in random spots from time to time. In a lot of areas it’s dark and scary, in others, engineers have been able to chip away excess stone near deposits of fairly clear white or perfectly clear colourless crystals in the ceiling and set up mirrors and lenses to amplify and focus daylight into the interior of the cavern so sights such as this one are spectacular –

Wild Portals

– Examples of Wild Portals springing up – Not inside the cavern –

— Guards rush to stand near wild portals on a dark and stormy night in a section of the Faer Kingdoms. This was just before a really intense lightning storm and the kind of downpour that produced flash flooding everywhere.

Cavern Guard - "Don't Look Down"

– Doug hinted that there were several areas where various guides warned us, “Don’t Look Down!” This was one of those areas. –

— Luckily, most of the guides and guards in this cavern are hyper-vigilant and not afraid to body slam somebody who looks slightly woozy against a wall when they might just pass our and teeter over the edge. There was a deep pool of water at the bottom of this drop. We were warned that some pools can be extremely toxic.

Moonlight through channeled crystals

– Moonlight channeled through crystals –

— On a night with a brilliant full moon outside the cavern, the engineers were able to filter that moonlight through crystals and flood areas of the cavern with bright, nearly magical light.

Woman guard guarding Crysal deposits

– Crystal deposits – Colourful glowing crystals light up some dark spots. –

— Her name is Eslyn, she’s a guard – and she told us, “When we dress like this, a lot of guys can’t think straight – Sometimes we need all the unfair advantage we can get.” She smiled. Other guards glared at us like, “You’re not supposed to look!”

Crystal Cavern Guide.

– Vollffe was another guide/guard. He told us that many guides and guards adopt flashy dress to suggest to potential looters and vandals that they’re already rich enough so bribery would be out of the question. –

— Rods and shards of mined crystals litter the floor while scars from miners’ picks and other implements of destruction are plainly visible in the walls of this section of the cavern.

Cave Entrance as seen from the Faer Kingdoms

– When we glanced back at the cavern’s entrance/exit once we could see again in daylight. This is what we saw –

— The Faer Kingdoms landscapes, and many other features there – exhibited much richer colours than we were used to in our ‘normal world’.

Dhoreena beyond the cavern.

– Dhoreena is an artist and a gentle soul from our world who became fascinated with this dimension and stayed on to capture as much of it as she could in paintings and occasional contraband camera photographs. –

— When our eyes became adjusted to daylight again, an artist named Dhoreena greeted us and led us to a safe hostel where the food wasn’t bad and the beds were a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the cold hard stone in the cavern had been. She admitted that she came from our world, said something about a designation “Earth – North America-Canada-Mexico Number Minus Five” – And mentioned that the only difference between minus three and minus five was the borders of Maine and New Brunswick. Presque Isle is part of New Brunswick in her world. She also told us that she’d heard rumours of a dimension in which Robert Kennedy avoided assassination, where the Psychiatrist who hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan confessed to trying to set up the hapless immigrant as a diversion for the man dressed as a security guard – who suffered a broken neck when a football player near Bobby Kennedy saw the gun in his hand – and Bobby went on to become a three term President of the USA and jailed the manipulators of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Economy, in her words, “Went Gang-Busters!” She also told us that she didn’t mind that the locals had her change the spelling of her name to reflect their customs.

— I probably need to come back and say a lot more, but I can do that later –

~~~~~ Jim

A Poem to Tom Rush

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(A Tribute To Tom Rush And Crazier, more Hope Filled Days / Daze)

 

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( This Is To Tom Rush /
But That’s Not A Title )

 

I’ve seen you reaching
to understand the feelings
of everyone around you,
like you thoughts yours didn’t matter,
you remind me
of the things I like best in people

 

People; we’ve known our share
(pass the wine friend)
we know that our heaviest burden
is that we care
too much for things
that never give us a second thought,
we’re soldiers in a war
to bring love to our friends
who fear it the most

 

have to admit it though,
we sure know how to live,
if livin is losin,
if livin is losin your soul
twenty times a day
(tied off with a crumpled bow
and tossed) at the feet of the living
whose dreams are bound to die
before their time

 

they’ll be back, Tom, the people
when their losing
brings them to the questions
we gave them answers for
when they were too young to ask,
when their breasts were new
and full of energy,
full of idealism
that told them
the world was theirs

 

they’ll drag their heals
and feel their tears
and wonder about dying,
the way we did,
before we saw them ready to fall
before we were ready
to fight all manner of gods
for their happieness,
to strain every muscle
in our hearts
to keep them from crying

 

pass the wine, Tom,
the waiting is on us,
empty as a corpse.

 

Jim Wellington (1971)

 

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(( I came home from work one morning, to an empty house. All my “hippy friends” and house mates had gotten up early to zoom off to New Haven to the farmers’ market.

 

I’d had a rough couple days, with a new friend named Richie, whose parents had kicked him out of their house- he’d scored some really bad acid and spent a couple hours puking his brains out in our reassuring bathroom.

 

-And a fifteen year old girl had wondered into the house, wide eyed and helpless, looking like somebody’s perfect daughter, flawless skin, beautiful eyes, thin young body wearing bell bottoms and soft suede shoes, a tight tee shirt of brown textured material with a wide cut between her hinted at breasts- the tee shirt held closed by criss crossed shoe laced leather. Long straight dark hair, innocent brown eyes. She was just barely hanging on to her sanity after some idiot had given her a first taste of Lysergic Acid Diethalimide .25 and she was calmly trying not to explode into millions of fragments that might never come back together right. I managed to let he know we believed she mattered, she was a wonderful human being with better than infinite potential. She wanted to hold my hands and look into my eyes and absorb that truth and feel really good about herself and the universe that was coming together to save her from her parents’ particular form of insanity. But that inrush of truth and beauty and hope and love threatened to explode her again. I think, somehow, I said something that had her laughing with joy and launched her bad trip into a much better field of exploration.

 

And I had to go to work in the midst of all this, leave Annie surrounded by friends I trusted to stand back and stand guard to make sure she was safe and happy and learning as much positive information as possible without exploding all over the place… (a poster of Jimi Hendrix turned and looked at her and said, “What are you doing? … What did I do?…” ) And Richie from Long Island finished puking his brains out and sat around for a while staring at a very frightening panorama of monstrous faces forming the air around him and later asked for a ride to the emergency room, and he survived- ((( a couple days later he was playing his guitar and teaching me licks from Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane… )))

 

-But I was freakin drained, dealing with long haul truck drivers who told me my beard looked like their girl friend’s private parts, and the clerk work at the trucking company office kept coming and never gave me a chance to sit down and catch my breath.

 

-So I came home to our hippy beach house and put on my newish copy of Tom Rush- the album that starts with Driving Wheel. And I cranked it a little louder than I would if anybody was sleeping upstairs or on the couch or passed out half hugging the washing machine… life was that kind of an adventure….

 

And I fried myself a couple brown eggs and got the toaster to work and found enough coffee left in the pot to bring it all together into one of the better breakfasts I’d tried to cook myself…

 

And I sat down in the living room (in the mix-matched furniture that only looked right in a rented beach house)

 

And the music filled the universe with magic- every note relaxed and soothed another part of me that I hadn’t realized was on fire. And Tom’s voice was the soul of compassion and I could see the old man with white hair sitting on a park bench, looking through fading eyes at a world worth loving, and I wanted to get up and dance to stuff my momma would have warned me I better not dance to, all night long. and I wanted to drop my guard and feel the pain of crazy people who had a lot more to offer than I’d ever realized.

 

Star Children from the other side of the universe were coming to earth and infiltrating our wild and crazy hippy get togethers and donating secret bits of love and wisdom and compassion and hope. And they were using unassuming genius folk singers to help them spread their message.

 

I had to sit down and write the above poem, straining to feel and find the words that fit together just right.

 

I typed up two copies and gave one to Annie (the fifteen year old hope of my lost tribe’s wildest uncontrollable generation)  She kept a crumpled up copy with her and read it read many times after being used and abused by flower children and people who hated flower children. She went to a Tom Rush concert because of that poem and loved every second of it.

 

And I thought I lost my last copy of that typewritten poem but found it yesterday in a stinkin mildew and mold ridden mess in a storage unit a family member had filled with stuff that my brother in law had not burned when he set his house and fire and blew his brains out, never getting over the loss of my sister to cancer….

 

And the original is inside a plastic page protector and this copy will be saved on five or six hard drives and on the web in at least three sites.

 

Yeah, life is still worth living. Even if the only wine I want is the spiritual kind that warms you to the core of our universal soul and spirit.

—–Jim, July 12, 2014 (Full moon tonight) ))

Was Today Saturday?

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{ Imported as a “.png” image on Thursday, February 1st, 2018, then pre-dated – & posted as an archive here – }

Screenshot from 2009.

– I really liked this WordPress theme – with Tolkein scripts – You may be able to download this –

— Archives from July 26th, 2009 – The 29th of July was my cousin Jaimie’s birthday and a friend, Kaylie’s, birthday, too – 🙂 – I was experimenting with formatting when I posted the above, and I think this might even be readable as an image here – Yay!

Mother's Day, 2009 post

– Mothers’ Day Post, from 2009 – Shows the theme’s author. I went looking for her in a StartPage search and was able to download a copy of this theme from her site after it disappeared from WordPress’ offerings. – 🙂 – If you go to http://www.aerendel.ca/wp/ “Karen Blundell aka arwen54)” is a link that might even still work – 🙂 –

— & at the bottom of the page at http://www.aerendel.ca/wp/ you can click on the author’s name and go to her site and maybe even still download a copy of this theme if you really like it.

~~~~~ Jim

Poetry from 2009 –

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Sunday, February 4th, 2018  —> -7˚C / +19˚F & snowing lightly outside at 1:11 pm Atlantic Time —

Boof with bone.

– Jassper – May 17th, 2008 –

 

 

jassper onda couch.

-“Boof!”-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— This is from the old “Aerendel News & Review” WordPress Blog:

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Saturday, June 6, 2009

Posted by Jim – June 6th, 2009

 

The dog just “booof” ed on the back porch.

I’m staring at a world that keeps demanding stuff from me

And dismissing every effort I offer

to try to make it a  better place for everyone involved

I just wrote in a venting page

“If nothing I could ever imagine

could possibly be good enough for you

Why would I ever bother trying?”

And the dog is still boofing on the porch

And I can’t see anything I can propose to make anything any more liveable

That could meet with anybody’s approval.

And laying down and dying just isn’t an option.

So I’ll write this down and let the dog in.

And see if it’s at all possible

to go back to sleep. (10:19 AM)

 

—–“Truth Seeker Indigo” —