Good day, readers,
So I see you have opened my very first blog. Good on you. I thank you for reading and hope that you are entertained by my writing, and not for all the wrong reasons…
At this point, you’re probably wondering what to expect from my blog, and so I’ll tell you: Rather random chatter. I mean, really, what else would you expect? Quite spontaneous snippets? Really? You don’t say, because that was actually my first blog creation! However, after posting a tiny bit of information (snippet) about Abraham Lincoln’s cousin John Hanks (spontaneous), I felt I was slightly straying away from subject matter that would in any way be interesting to the average reader. I mean, I had made note of the disappointment I felt to discover he was no relation to Tom Hanks, and had also shared my elation upon the notice that he had grown up near Beardstown and had had a very full beard–go figure! (Quite spontaneous.)
QuiteSpontaneousSnippets had had one reader–a bearded Beardstownonian who applauded it. Sadly, one hairy reader was not enough, and so that blog was brought down and this new one was put up in its place, just like this barn John Hanks built in…whoops, there I go again. Moving on!
But first, check out that beard!
So shall I write a bit about myself so that you are somewhat aware of what to expect in future blogs? I feel as though I can sense you shaking your head no, but I am moving forward all the same!
You have to start somewhere.
My name is Rick (and please don’t say, ‘Hey, Rick!’ because this is not an AA meeting) and I’m married to my best friend. We got hitched four months ago on June 8th. She’s a gorgeous little thing, funny and lovely and incredibly ambitious, and I would not be whole without her. (Yeah, yeah, I hear you saying, go ahead and score some bonus points with the wife. But I speak only the truth.) She’s a vet tech as of now, always busy, looking to get into pharmaceutical research in the not so distant future. Clever girl.
I’m an aspiring writer who has penned an entire Science-Fiction novel of around one-thousand pages. I’m currently going over these pages one by one, rereading again and again, in an editing process to perfect my work. Flip, edit. Flip, edit. Flip, edit. Nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven to go! While I think the length of my book is ballpark for its genre, my wife believes it is rather too long for her and informs me that she’ll simply wait until the movie comes out. She’s more of a visual person, I guess you could say. Although, come to think of it, she did complete the Harry Potter series and is a massive fan of J.K. Rowling’s works, some of which actually surpassed one-thousand pages. Curse you, Rowling, how do you grip my wife’s focus so?! Ten points from Slytherin, you cunning whimsical writer you… (*shakes fists at sky*)
I’m a Dj and a karaoke host on the side, which is how I’m staying afloat financially during my writing endeavors. This job is very good inspiration for science fiction, let me tell you, because late night karaoke brings out all sorts of characters, and once we reach eleven pm and beyond, people are speaking with all types of foreign alien tongues, slurring the languages of Planet Jack Daniels and Starbase Grey Goose. Don’t even get me started on the early am hours–that’s when we are transported entirely to a whole other world. The things I see and hear then, at work and even on the way home (heaven help me when I must stop for gas), it is like I’ve entered a mash-up of Star Trek and the Walking Dead. Lots of grumbling and bumbling folk who might as well be seeking brains as they try to make their way to the local 24-7 diner for greasy food, as well as hooded facial pierced creatures with wide eyes and speech problems that certainly cannot be from Earth. Why, one of these creatures even declared openly to me and everyone around me one night that he had the best weed in town, apparently not realizing that it was only nine pm and he was on busy Mainstreet with shiny police SUVs on his either side.
After reading that little story, you’re probably visualizing me standing in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia, but I actually work in and around the beaches of lower Delaware (please, do not narrow your eyes and say ‘Dela…where?‘). It’s a lively region of the small first state that draws millions of tourists from all over the country in the warm spring and humid summer, a region that then sends these temporary beachgoers hurriedly away during the abruptly nippy yet remarkably beautiful fall and winter months. I live twenty minutes away, and oftentimes drive down simply to admire the beauty of our shorelines. I’m a runner, a biker, a hiker, and a thinker, so the beaches are and have always been my favorite places in the world. There’s Cape Henlopen with its historic lighthouses and WW2 guard towers that rise high above the thickets of pines that sweetly scent the air, there’s Lewes with its fascinating historic buildings and lovely harbor and quiet peaceful shores where you can sit and watch the ferry head over to Jersey, and there’s Rehoboth Beach, the most popular, home to a quaint boardwalk, odd little shops and acclaimed restaurants aplenty, the locations in which I work, and a nightlife that does its best to rival that of neighboring beaches Dewey and Fenwick. I’m not much of a party guy or a shopper, and while I do enjoy great food, I’d still probably pick Cape as my top go-to beach of choice. Especially in the fall and winter. I can workout there during these cool and frigid months and feel as though I am alone in the world, as though the beaches and trails and massive empty parking lots belong solely to me and me alone. All of civilization has gifted them to me like an oversized jacket that will no longer fit them until summer comes back around. ‘We don’t want this anymore. You can have it. For now…’ It is tranquil, amazing, wonderful, romantic.
Okay, enough about Delaware’s beaches. I’m sure there’ll be much more mention of them in the future. Let’s take a twenty minute drive up the Lewes/Georgetown highway, shall we? Take a right on a small rural road and you will soon find yourself passing my home-sweet-home. Georgetown is where my wife and I live, on a massive plot of wooded farmland owned by my parents. A part of their two-story house is finished off like an apartment, and so this is where we stay, avoiding the outrageous costs of rent elsewhere and saving up money for a house of our own.
My parents are both disabled, unable to work, my father stubborn and still fairly mobile, my mother not so much. My wife and I help them with chores, do our own grocery shopping, cook dinners when we can, and help keep the property looking fairly tidy. We try to do our part and we both enjoy it here.
The land on which we live was passed down from my grandparents on dad’s side, after they both passed on in 2007. My grandparents were incredibly sweet people, always very close and dear to me, and their house still sits on the far corner of our property, collapsing now. While much land was given to us, the house was given to my father’s sister, who chose to leave it sit, never doing anything to it, rarely even making the trip over to look at it. It pains me to see it fall to time and abandonment, to see it slowly swallowed up and reclaimed by mother nature. A little white dirt road still leads over to that the moss-covered, vine-entangled farmhouse, passing a great stretch of young saplings, growing up where once there had been a massive well-tended garden in which my grandfather had worked frequently. I walk over every now and again, fall victim to the uncountable memories made there that wash over me like a cool ocean wave. Me, a little energetic kid, visiting Pop and Nanny. I always pause before the formerly grand garden. Pop, almost always in a straw hat that protected his face from the sun, had showed me many a thing about gardening there, and I had worked with him for many hours, hardly able to keep up. Tilling. Pulling weeds. Planting seeds. Harvesting. Once transplanting flowers that still bloom vibrantly amongst the weeds to this day. Pop was always so spry and lively, my idol growing up, the kindest man I’ve ever known, owner of a ceaselessly calm voice and more patience than I have ever known. My grandmother, who rarely exited her home in her later years, had always been just as sweet, continuously offering cookies or hugs. Pop never left her side. He’d basically only left her to go to the grocery store, having occasionally hauled me around with him when I’d asked to tag along. When I went with him, he’d sometimes make it a point to stop at McDonald’s or other points of interest I enjoyed as a youth. I remember him taking me once to the local airport to watch the planes coming in and going out during the yearly airshow. Though I cannot quite remember how it had all worked out, we’d actually been able to board a small plane. We’d sat in the back while our experienced pilot had flown over the farm we thought so large until high above it and over our small town that had looked like a model village from the small planes windows. We’d stayed up in the air for quite a while, until we’d approached a gigantic lonely raincloud that had looked so remarkably magnificent from its own level high above the ground. I can still picture that giant obscure hovering gray blob, releasing a mist on all below it, looking somewhat like a waterfall in the sky, so wholly amazing.
When my energetic grandfather, so young at heart, discovered an odd lump behind his ear, little had I realized how serious it would turn out to be. Months and months passed by and he had played the steadily reddening lump off with kindly smiles and changes of subject, skillfully avoiding telling eighteen-year-old me the truth of the matter. I never saw his demise coming. He had been the type of man you simply assumed would live forever, too quirky and too full of life to leave us anytime soon. However, the cancer proved otherwise. By the time I found out the truth of it all, it had already turned him into a frail thing I did not know, a withered old man who stared at the ceiling in a hospital bed given to us by Hospice, a skeletal man who could no longer take care of himself. The medicines he’d been forced to take sent him drifting into a realm of forgetfulness and confusion. He had always been ashamed when I had had to see him like that, I had been able to tell, even when he had lost all recognition of everything else. It was so surreal. He had practically become a complete stranger, not the Pop who had always been smiling and telling witty stories and jokes, not the Pop who had always been out and about working on something or another, not the Pop who I had hung around with so often as a kid. The night he passed he told us that he was, “Going to board the big airplane in the sky.” And so he did. I wonder if he got to see any magnificent rain clouds on the way up.
My grandmother stopped eating after he was gone, the man who’d loved her since they’d both been in their twenties, lost all willpower to keep on living. She too became a withered thing I did not recognize. Many things I had to see them both go through stick with me to this day, but the great emptiness that had filled my grandmother’s eyes after she lost my grandfather will probably haunt me forever. They were soul-mates, and when a love is that strong and lasts for that long, I suppose I can see how empty she must have felt. I love my wife more than anything and we have been together for only three years. Love starts by seizing hold of the heart, wrapping around it like the trailing vines of a prickly rosebush, and its grip only tightens as time goes by. When the grip slips and fades away, I suppose the heart no longer knows how to properly beat.
Be thankful when love seizes your heart, recognize and hold it dear, and cherish your time with loved ones. We never know how long we might have with them.
Now, I suppose I’ve wandered into solemn territory. I did not truly mean to go there, so apologies if I have depressed you. It’s just funny how the mind works. I started this thing on a humorous note and spiraled downwards to the loss of my grandparents. Where did that even come from? (Rather random chatter, indeed, you’re probably saying about now, random and incredibly melancholy.) I could revert to the whole Lincoln’s bearded cousin thing, but I believe that’s worn out after one mention and might not have even been humorous the first time around, so I’ll instead move forward to a random review. I have decided I’ll be doing those every now and again. Whether it be a television show, a movie, a restaurant, whatever. People very much enjoy reviews, I’ve noticed. If I discover something I like or dislike, I figure I’ll toss it in a blog with a rating every now and again, just like so:
Gotham: My Review
Having been a lifelong Batman fan, I was skeptic about this pre-bat show and its star Ben McKenzie, who used to play in that rather awful show The O.C.. I was much surprised to discover the show quite good and McKenzie shockingly intriguing and likable as Detective Jim Gordon. This show has sucked me in. I am hooked. It’s got the dark theme that simply must go with anything Batman associated nailed. The acting is good (although Jada Pinkett Smith overacts on occasion, in my opinion), and I like the idea of seeing Bruce Wayne rise from frightened orphan child to brave and iconic DC superhero through Jim Gordon’s eyes. I also love all the easter eggs sprinkled throughout most every show. Penguin, Falcone, and the Riddler, oh my! So many Batman villains!
“Want to stand here and look all cool and broody in the shadows?”
“Okay!”
The actor Robin Lord Taylor, who plays Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin, does a knockout job. He is one of the highlights of the series so far, convincingly creepy, entertainingly smarmy and devious, and even a bit pitiful. He just wants to be top dog in the villain world so bad, poor guy, and he can’t help his Penguin-like features and walk! Give the evil guy a break! Sheesh…
I give Gotham four Whoohoos! out of five.
Okay, that was a very brief review of Gotham, which has probably told you something else about me: I am a fan of all things geeky. Excluding Daredevil with Ben Affleck. Watching poor Ben portray that blind tight-red-suited horned do-gooder nearly caused me to lose MY vision. But anyway, I definitely enjoy things that most might consider nerdy, and so there’s sure to be random Star Wars and Monty Python quotes occasionally sprinkled into my blogs. Offends you, this does? Well, a hamster your mother was, and smelt of elderberries your father did. On the dark side you must reside.
Okay, okay, enough about me. That went on for far too long and went in far too many directions. I have probably given you whiplash. You get it. I’m all over the place and my blogs will certainly be random, a place where I can vent and rant and ponder and hopefully improve my writing skills. I will try to be a bit less random next time, I promise.
If you decide to follow my blogs, kudos to you, you earn my respect and sympathy both! Ten points to Gryffindor!
The Rather Random Chatter,
Richard G
ratherrandomchatter 