A Day of Epiphanies

Well, one or two anyway. No real miracles though. :D

Why is it that as soon as my son is at grandma's, I can manage to get settled in and cram chocolate covered coffee beans down my muse's throat? Does he really make an anti-creativity field around me? Perhaps the smell of children makes my muse sleepy. What a horrible idea. Oh well, one more reason not to teach.

I used that big word, so I damn well better make it count, yeah? So there was a question that spawned both of these sudden insights. What do I like to do more than anything? Books - reading - writing- collecting books. Right. I should have noticed it before!

I have a lot of books that I may have spent money for. Reading doesn't make me any money. I'm trying to make money writing, but it's coming along too slowly. But I'm really quite sucessful at collecting books. Too sucessful, because I'm rapidly running out of shelf space. Some of them need to be gotten rid of.

This thought process led eventually to plans of owning a mango farm in Costa Rica, and only a few bookshelves of works I just couldn't live without having on hand in case I want to read or refrence something specific. And then I took a breath.

So I know where to get a lot of books in good condition. And when they run out, I know where to get some more. In my comparisons, Amazon seems to have the better deals han eBay. I also have to say that I've bought more books from Amazon than I've ever bidded on anything on eBay. But I may be biased.

I must do more research. And try not to get distracted by 1955 Playboys with Bettie Page centerfolds, or back issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, or FRUIT FARMS IN PUERTO RICO!!! *gasp* Hunter, preserve me.

And so passed the first epiphany.

Work was typical for a campground in February. I helped out with organizing the gift shop's inventory, added up and made a new postage chart since it went up two pennies, and answered the phone. It was, honest to crackers, boring.

So I'm sitting there slackjawed over my inventory list and thinking that we need to order more of those tree identification books, and hope that they sold as well in the spring and summer as they did in the autumn. My muse sits bolt upright as says to go look at the catalogues. So I drag them out and start flipping through them, looking again for books specifically on my area. Out of six little catalogues, only seventeen of the books in all of their pages were set within a hundred-mile radius of my back yard.

And that's what Arkansas is - my back yard. Along with some places right across our borders - Table Rock, Bull Shoals, Memphis, Greenville, Monroe, Shreveport, Texarkana, and FayetteSmith. I know the rocks. I know the places where there aren't any rocks outside of gravel pits unless a man brought them there. And sometimes, if those rocks are novaculite, they were traded from quarries less than fifteen miles from here. Folks still use the quarries. A few privately owned ones produce some of the finest whetstones in the world. Then there's the crystal mines, and the diamond mines. There's no gold in Arkansas, ask Rush. And then ask the graveyard and the lake that marks Galena about lead poisoning. Every wonder why people that live on the Saline River are sometimes kinda weird? Ever wonder why they seem like they might be crazy? Because they eat the fish every day, and drink the water every day, and they've got more mercury in their systems than a nineteeth-century hatter!

So yeah. I could go on for days. But I need to get it all organized. I must calm down.

Photo of Hunter S. Thompson by Allen G. Arpadi, yoinked from Wikipedia. Aarrrg!

Things to Love about Christianity

Chick Tracts


Just go read any one of them on this page. I think the last place I got one of these was at Memphis in May. I try to keep them, but they dissappear. I've only got a couple. "Bewitched!" is my favorite I think. Just because my name is Ashley.