Memorial Day Weekend. Here Are Our Orders.

HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868

1. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

   We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

   If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

   Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

    

2. It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.

    

3. Department commanders will use efforts to make this order effective.

   By order of

   JOHN A. LOGAN,
   Commander-in-Chief

   N.P. CHIPMAN,
   Adjutant General

   Official:
   WM. T. COLLINS, A.A.G.

Adam Sessler, and the End of an Era

Now that's a face you can trust.

This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but I am a nerd. A big one. I don’t confine myself to just one or two branches of the Geek Tree either. I am a multidimensional dork. Tabletop gaming? Yep. Live action role playing? Uh-huh. I’ve even added boffer fighting to my repertoire. Comic book fan? Oh yes. I even find myself in the nerdiest of all possible corporate professions. That’s right. I’m an accountant. I am an all-around geek.

But of all of my nerdy pursuits, my favorite is video games. I was a PC and console gamer back when Combat! and Adventure were awe-inspiring. I was jaded before Super Mario Bros. came out (I owned E.T. for the Atari 2600, after all). Video games have been a life-long love of mine, and that hasn’t changed. Luckily, my wife shares this passion with me, and our side-by-side TVs and separate XBox 360s mean that we can both stay up until 5 am playing Skyrim or ME3 and not feel guilty about it. In fact, we’ve been known to apologize for going to bed and leaving the other to game by themselves. It’s our main hobby.

We don’t watch a lot of TV, because that gets in the way of all the multiplayer Mass Effect playing we can do, but there are a few we always catch. Top Shot. Archer. The most obscure one, however, would be one found on the G4 network. You probably have never watched it, because it mostly shows Cops and its teenaged counterpart Campus P.D. No one should ever watch those shows. My wife and I used to watch two of their shows religiously – Attack of the Show, which was about pop culture with a heavy emphasis on technology and other nerdy things and went to shit when Olivia Munn left, and our favorite of them all, X-Play.

And Now, A Rant About Cupcakes

This is a cupcake.

I love me some cake. I mean, I love it like a fat kid loves redundancy. My whole life is littered with the cakes I’ve seen and tasted, from my grandmother’s Red Velvet cake (with vanilla frosting. Seriously, people, cream cheese frosting? Are we in Communist Russia? Am I to begin standing in line for beets next? Cream cheese frosting is ONLY acceptable on carrot cake. Nothing else. UPDATED: I let my rage get the best of me. Cream cheese frosting is delicious on pumpkin or other spiced-cake product. I stand corrected.) to the cherry cake pops my wonderful wife made a couple months ago. I fucking love cake, just to be clear. Love it.

This includes cupcakes. Ahhh, the sweet, glorious cupcake. It’s a mini-cake all its own, a piece of heaven made for one hand, allowing a cake lover like me to eat a cake without having to use a fork and plate. From EZ-Bake ovens to school bake sales to after-game treats to something to make a bunch of goddamn kids shut the fuck up for 5 minutes, the cupcake has a well-deserved legacy as a beloved American treasure. Like so much of our precious heritage, however, this glorious symbol of utter deliciousness is being denigrated and desecrated before our very eyes. If we don’t act soon, the cupcake as we know it will be gone, tossed carelessly in the compost heap of forgotten culinary treasures like so many crumb-lined paper wrappers.

For fuck sake, people, LIVES ARE AT STAKE. Possibly.

Love You, Carl

Cheers to you, buddy.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to write this. I already know it won’t be as good as I want it to be, or as good as he deserves, or really convey how I felt about my friend and the role he played in my life or how important he was to me or how much I’m going to miss him or any of those things. But I have to try, because my brain won’t stop trying to write this, and so I’ll try to put it here. My shitty little nothing blog is no place to try to immortalize one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, but it’s all I have, so I’m going to try.

Carl Spicer was one of my friends. The word “friend” does a bad job conveying the role the people who are important to me play in my life. My friends are my family, the ones I have chosen to surround myself with. I love them all, quietly but fiercely. I don’t show much in the way of emotion, generally, so it isn’t something that I usually convey overtly. But those people that are part of my life, that I am lucky to know and be close to, are as important to me as any blood relation.

Carl was a very special person, to me and to everyone he knew. He was kind, gracious, warm, genuine, funny – really and truly, he was one of the best people I’ve ever known. I never heard him say a cross word about anyone – he’d bust balls with the best of them, but I never once heard him demean or complain about anyone. I am sure he lost his temper from time to time – he was Italian, after all – but I never saw it. He was calm and generous in words and deeds. I compare myself to him and I am humbled. He’ll always be a better man than I can be.

He dealt with cancer for a long time, but this past Friday night his fight was over. He was 51 years old. Too young. Just too fucking young. He deserved more and better. I get angry when I think about it and I want to rant and rave and it’s taking everything I have right now to not let myself do that. I’m pissed off that the sun comes up and the fucking world spins and everything looks like it just doesn’t matter that he’s gone and I’m doing a terrible job right now keeping it together and not getting furious again.

I’ll never be able to tell someone who didn’t know Carl what they missed by never meeting him. That makes me want to cry, that I just don’t own the words to impart the man that he was so that a thousand years from now in some way someone who read this could feel a pang inside themselves and feel just the vaguest sense of loss that gnaws at me right now. I envy the people that believe in an afterlife, sometimes. Right now is one of those times. They can convince themselves that it’s a just world and that one day when they pass they’ll be reunited with him. I believe there is no afterlife. I can’t convince myself otherwise. So I’m jealous.

But I will see Carl again, when I dream. Every time I stand on my deck he’ll be there, sitting down with a beer in front of him, smiling. I’ll see him in the eyes of my friends, and I’ll hear his voice echoing from the walls of my house and all the places he went. He made my life better by being in it. Now he’s gone, and my life will always be a little worse because of that fact. But I’m grateful to have known him. I’m lucky. I miss you, Carl, and I’ll always miss you.

The last words he ever said to me were the same words he said every time we parted. “All right, guys, I’ll see you later. Take care.” I wish I could see you again, Carl, but I’ll do my damnedest to take care and make sure that the people I care about know how I feel about them. I want you to do the same thing. Tell the people you love how important they are to you, and look at them and squeeze their hand because you never know if that’s the last memory you’ll have of them.

I love you, Carl. I love you all.

I Got Interviewed Like Real Authors

And you can read it here! Well, to be honest, it doesn’t read like one of those staid, normal interviews. And that’s what happens when Evelyn Lafont, aka Keyboard Hussy, and I sit down to chat (virtually. I was sitting, at least. I can neither confirm nor deny that Ms. Lafont was or was not sitting). There were some technical issues, but honestly, it just makes it funnier to me. It’s entertaining, and she’s awesome and funny in her own right – if you don’t believe me, check out her Keyboard Hussy site, the VampLure online magazine (an homage to the trashy women’s mags of yore, and hilarious – Suicide Jeans!), and her novel, The Vampire Relationship Guide Volume 1. I owe her a debt of gratitude, but she would probably prefer a debt of TRENTA and a million dollars in Starbucks gift cards.

Go read it.

A Brief Apology

I am so sorry, Blog Of Mine, that I’ve been away so long.  You know how corporate accounting is: year-end work becomes an all-consuming beast, and the few hours you get away from it you want to run away and do anything that involves no thought. 

Oh, you don’t know what it’s like in corporate accounting, since you are a website that just allows me to paste things into it and let other people read them?  Well then.

Well, I’ve been doing that whole brain-off thing as much as possible.  For me, that’s been Archer, Tosh.0, Top Shot, Two Fat Ladies, Nigella Express, Restaurant: Impossible, and old episodes of Firefly.  In other words, a lot of TV and very little writing.

I’ll try to do better.

Soon, I’ll have a new review of Bob Harper’s latest cardio DVD, just as soon as I actually take the time to do it.  Then I’ll be making a push to finish my sequel to The Curse of Troius (available for the Amazon Kindle at just $2.99!) in the next couple of months.  Honestly, it’s good to be back.

So, A Week Off Kind’ve Happened…

It certainly wasn’t intentional.  I took last Tuesday and Wednesday off from work, since I’d agreed to cater a 40-person dinner on Wednesday night, and figured that it would be a good idea to give myself actual time to do it.  The best part was that Lady Aravan volunteered to do the desserts and took those days off as well.  Tuesday, we got up, did Bob’s cardio exercise, felt great, and went clothes shopping.  Had a great time, got home, started prepping some food and throwing stuff into slow cookers.  So far so good, day off and still worked out!

Five Things for Monday, May 10th

1.  My novel is now on sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s website, even a couple of Indian websites and a couple of Asian ones.  Crazy.  Before I did it, I said I’d be pleased if I sold a dozen copies.  I’ve sold 15, so I am now officially happy.  I’ve set up a Facebook page for it and already have over 40 fans, a couple of whom I don’t know and never met.  It’s cool.  I was afraid to set one up, feeling like the world’s biggest narcissist, but Lady Aravan had a good point: I want to write for a living, and I need to promote the thing as best I can.  She’s right.  Now I just need to stop checking the page incessantly.

Holding Your Novel

I got the proofing copy of my novel in the mail yesterday.  Holding your own book in your hands for the first time is surreal.  So is flipping it open and looking at words that you vaguely remember writing, but still feel alien and strange.  Some of it seemed like it was written by someone else – I literally cannot remember writing those words, even though I know exactly the scene it represented.  Flipping it open to a random page, I would see phrases that chunked like a frozen brick on a sidewalk, while others that sounded almost literary.

So, Donovan McNabb is a Redskin

OK, now that I’ve had a day to try to picture McNabb in a Redskins uniform (and no, I still can’t see it), I think I’ve finally sorted out my feelings on it.  I’ve always liked McNabb and felt like he got a lot of completely unnecessary flak for the “failings” of the Eagles – as a Skins fan, I would be happy to define failure as 4 straight NFC Championship appearances.  The Eagles’ continuing lack of commitment to the run and constant stream of bad receiving corps that he was saddled with for most of his career meant that he was the only way the offense could operate, which it did with constant success.  I watched the Eagles beat my team too many times simply because their QB was a gifted athlete and player.