Loco en La Cabeza

 

Loco en La Cabeza

(Crazy in The Head)

 

The night became a whispering madness, a maelstrom that just might take me down its tube to hell and damnation while giving me pre-glimpses of the fire and brimstone awaiting my arrival…

 

I begin this post with a sparse attention-getter!

Well, my fevered-mind lives for these little de-facto moments, but, then, that’s what I do: I embellish. I’m an author of fictional crimes that are given birth from real true-life episodes from the underbelly of human existence. Are the books of Grade-A quality? Likely not, when one looks at the sales figures. Nonetheless, that is what I do and so enjoy doing, writing, putting my embellishing style on the words and phrases, hoping to create an appropriate atmosphere for the scenes I’m writing.

It is difficult to detach oneself from his writing and his wiring. My wiring has so many complicated turns and twist I’ve spent a wary and cautionary lifetime trying to figure me out…still, trying, for that matter. If I have learned anything in this lifetime it is this: if one has no heavy baggage, like, criminal and evil activities, it is quite okay to be who the hell you reckon yourself to be, that is, only if who you are not wreaking havoc on others…

Are you sufficiently pissed at me by now? Am I not making any sense to you, or, certainly, not enough to hold your interest?

Good!

Good, if you’re sticking around to see where I’m going with this post. Hopefully, you’re in for a treat, he writes with some degree of uncertainty himself of where the hell he’s going with this post.

I can at least promise you this, we will, all two of us, be joyful at the conclusion.

Okay, where was I?

Oh, my writing and my wiring, or, in better order, my wiring and my writing!

It is my theory that anyone who presumes to be a writer, should be able to take any phrase uttered by anyone (CAUTION! duplicate word in the same sentence!) and write a comprehensive and intelligent post from that phrase.

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned the aforementioned tip as good practice for would-be writers, giving practice to narrative stretching. It works for me – but, then, if no one likes it, maybe it does not work. But, someone (me) does like it, so that’s enough.

Writing is one of the most popular hobbies and occupations in which one can become interested…you can kill a lot of your ‘live-in demons’ with writing. Published or not published, writing is a rewarding and self-satisfying habit to get into – imagine all the diaries being kept across the world, how titillating some of those entries just might be.

About my wiring, I’ve come to accept my vagabond ways, my need to cross more mountains, my emotional edginess and wariness, those conflicting, wonderful moments of happiness and joy, my wonderful kids, my wife (okay, wives!), and the enduring heap of words I’ve piled up in my lifetime… You folks out there reading this wholesome post should be reading my books. I’ve tried to follow Ernest Hemingway’s and Andrew Joyce’s advice, write drunk, edit, sober! (Truth be known, some of my better stuff was written while a bit tipsy! That is, until my own writing began to serve as the ‘high’!)

Don’t be surprised to see the first paragraph of this post in a book I might publish in the future. I shall certainly be surprised if you are surprised and remember that opening paragraph and this rather ‘run-on’ post. But, come on now, folks, it is writing, and I am showing and telling my blog audience important tidbits.

Come on, you can give me that!

Always, my best wishes.

 

Billy Ray Chitwood – July 24, 2019

 

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Soul’s Surrender

The damp air assumed the color of periwinkle on my sweaty arms as the moon came from the cumulus like an angry despot, a wisp of cloud appearing like a mustache on its solemn surface. The gently rising hill upon which my steps carried me was covered with freshly mown grass that gave off a delicious smell of watermelon. I stopped at the top of the hill and breathed deeply the olfactory delight, the big house now in view, some three hundred yards down this hill and up another, big centuries-old maple trees dotting its perimeter.

For a moment, the lights in the big house seemed to twinkle for me, perchance a welcome home endearment, but, then, my errand of mercy had only taken me three hours although it seemed much longer. The car would not start. The cell phone would not work. I didn’t want to walk along the highway at night, so, to the rolling hills. We were alarmed and nervous about our cat, Joey. We were afraid we might be losing him as he seemed unable to move about without falling and regurgitating.

The vet was one mile away, and I decided to carry Joey to the vet’s office. Someone was at their small hospital facility at all times. Joey was of petite build and not heavy in his carrier. Laura, the nice lady vet, gave Joey a quick check and decided it was best to leave him there for a day or two to allow for thorough testing and treatment. She indicated his ‘vitals’ were showing satisfactory readings, but she wanted to be certain it was nothing more than a bad morsel Joey decided to ingest.

If the light from the moon was not deceiving me and my old failing eyes could be trusted, Heather was there on the porch waving me on. Waving back, I smiled, and tears slowly passed through the whiskery wrinkles on my cheeks and dropped to mix with the ground dew. It was rather common these days to shed tears in my desperate moments when harsh realities hit and confounded the order and sequences of living. I slowed my pace to give the tears their time to flow before I reached Heather, conjuring up thoughts that were mundane and easy to indulge and toss away.

There was something unrevealed to Heather which, as fate would have it, coincided with Joey’s sudden ailment. Perhaps the lovable cat sensed the secret. My days of doubting ‘cat lore’ and labeling mysteries of the world’s tomfoolery were long gone. Our family doctor gave me his diagnosis of my frequent headaches after EEG test-runs and consultation with a neurologist specialist. It was an inoperable tumor, now the size of a large marble but growing in size steadily. Was there a chance the tumor might just dissolve, just miraculously melt into nothing and its residue get lost in the nerve messages sent via neuronal activities? Doctor Spaulding’s only response to my queries was: “Miracles happen in the Medical field all the time, Jimmy, but take the medication I’ve prescribed to slow the tumor’s growth and we’ll keep a watchful eye. Other scans and tests were subsequently performed and diagnosed. The rendering was the same. The doctor said Heather should know, but I swore him to secrecy. This was my fight alone, and she was not to be part.

The nearer to the porch I walked, Heather’s beautiful smile and the love that shone in her eyes made me quake inside and the tears came again. I managed a smile to go with the tears but she saw the distress behind my quivering lips and ran down the steps to meet me.

“Oh, we lost Joey, Jimmy?” She wrapped her arms around me and was sure Joey was gone.

“No, no, sweetheart, Doc Laura is just keeping him over for some tests. Joey’s tough! He’ll be up and around in no time.”

As I talked she pulled back and eyed me carefully.

“Why are you crying, Jimmy? Tell me, please!”

“Ah, come on, I just saw you there and the moment got to me.  That’s all, honey, really. I’ve been gone for three hours and I missed you. Can’t I miss my wife?”

“Of course, you can – and, better, for that matter!” She smiled again, grabbed my arm and led me up the porch steps and into the house.

I was suddenly and unaccountably happy and unafraid of dying. Heather was with me! That was all that truly mattered to me. After all, dying is part of our living, a moment in time each of us must face. So, I pushed aside those moments of anxiety and weakness. I regaled in thoughts of all those moments yet left to me with Heather.

Flash Fiction by Billy Ray Chitwood – July 30, 2018

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Advice – Advice – Advice

By BR Chitwood

Guess it has come to this…me, making a total ass of myself. But the time comes for everyone to do just that.

What am I talking about?

Guessing again, but I suspect the title above gives some clue in answering that question.

Okay – let the record show I’m swallowing ‘hard’ because this post just might make me some enemies… However, that’s never stopped me if I put my mind to thinking about it.

‘Advice’? Let me put this ‘feeler’ out there!

Don’t you get just a bit tired of all the advice offered to you as writers? (Usually, with some fees coming with that advice!) How to this… How to that… How, how, how!

Don’t get me wrong. There are some good ‘advice channels’ out there in certain areas where you can solicit answers to gnawing questions. And, I’ll be honest here, living in ‘Twilight’, my take on ‘things’ is a bit different from some folks. But, don’t you really get tired of being blasted on the internet with all the advice – from ‘query letters’ to ‘formatting’ to ‘marketing’ (yuck! That hit a nerve!) to just about anything to do with writing.

 Here’s my advice – oops! Here’s what I think! (‘Hmmm… Getting sick of people telling us what they think’ can be fodder for yet another post’!)

At some point in our writing lives, we need to determine if we really can write. That is, do we have some simple fundamentals of the English Language – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, the simple ability to form a sentence longer than, ‘See Rex run!’ Do we have a fertile mind to give us characters and plots? Have we read enough in our lives of the great authors to get a feel for style and substance? Do we have a burning desire to write? Has a teacher, college professor, someone we respect, suggested we might consider becoming a writer? After my play-periods in life and a career in sales and management, I reached back, pulled my college history professor’s suggestion out of the memory file, and started to write. Do we possess the tenacity to hone our skills, to do our critical self-due-diligence of our growth?

Perhaps the most important question to ask ourselves is, ‘Do we have the patience to be writers? That is, the book reviews of our first title are mixed – some good, some not so much! Can we get beyond that nasty review from some reader who got our book FREE? That first title is your initial foray into the world of book publishing, your first ‘baby’ – and, it got some abuse. We’re not happy! we’re second-guessing ourselves! Can we get over this hump? Those readers who panned our first title? Hey, they’re likely ‘bad’ readers – you know, they were given a ‘freebie’ and they’re all of a sudden experts and don’t have to worry because they’re also anonymous! Hey, again, if there are bad writers there are bad readers. It’s my belief, we can accept our writing mistakes and become good at our craft. ‘To err is human’! (Ouch, another platitude!)

Some of us fool ourselves into believing we are really the true ‘Hemingways’ and/or ‘Alcotts’ at this juncture of the long compendium of life, only eventually to accept our self-imposed dictum that, ‘Well, at least our kids might have some fun trying to decipher, ‘Wow! just who the dickens were Dad/Mom, anyhow’?

The most difficult reality to face in this self-publishing environment is the ‘humungus’ numbers of us out there in the world – millions upon millions, all competing for a spot on the ‘Best Seller’ lists. Along with that difficult reality is, yep, marketing, making sure as much as you can that you’ve provided the best routes for your writing to get noticed and bought.

Now, I’m fortunate in having people feed me enough BS that I think I’m the ‘cat’s meow’ (don’t you hate those bromides?), so I plod along. I’ve come to accept these most beautifully offered bits of praise as genuine and continue happily with my writing. You see, after a while, here in ‘Twilight’, I’m enjoying every one of my sunsets and telling anyone who’s interested that ‘writing is my therapy’, and, believe me, kids, at this age that word comes up a lot!

So, you’ve read these words. Consider them, NOT as advice but as one writer to another. If your answers to the above were pretty much in the positive light, stay on board with your writing and test as many waters as you can. Who truly knows?

‘The shadow knows’! (Shut-up, BR, no one but no one remembers ‘the shadow’!

Who to trust? NOT Dad and Mom! I suggest you Trust your siblings! They don’t like you anyhow!

Now, I had a lot of fun writing this post, and hope my stirring words did not cause anyone irritation. Just don’t label this post ‘advice’ because that would defeat its most beautiful purpose…

Can anyone advise me on a good ‘shrink’?

Write your blog posts and books with the jolly ‘God of Writing’ on your penning shoulder…and utilize the ‘God of Bacchus’ when necessary to keep a cool head. Just, don’t overdo it! like a guy in Texas I know!!!

 

Billy Ray Chitwood – July 24, 2018

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