Category Posts

In search of a believable sequel to 2024

JT Twissel 30 Comments

I didn’t get much done this year and so I’m not sorry to see it end. According to my first blog (“The Celestial Smooth”) I began the year watching “The Full Monty,” a dark comedy about a group of unemployed steel workers who become strippers. The movie ends with the men exposing themselves to an audience filled with cheering women as a line of policemen prepare to arrest them.

For just one moment they are triumphant. But you know … there could never be a believable sequel. These are ordinary men, not Chippendale models.

In all, I managed to post 65 times this year. I’d say half of the posts are rather short on words and long on photos. My most “liked” post was about the raccoon who had her babies in a drain under the deck. That’s the second time raccoons and their shenanigans have taken over my blog.

February and March were lost months blog-wise. Family came to visit and their stay was stressful. My most viewed post during those months was about obituaries. I see a lot of dead people these days.

In April I shattered a filling on a Jordan Almond requiring an emergency visit to the dentist. His first question was: “How are you other than falling apart?”

In August I decided to post snippets from the sequel to Flipka, my first novel. Eleven posts which only a few of you were kind enough to comment on. I was sad but perhaps, like “The Full Monty,” that book could have no believable sequel.

September rolled along and with it the long lost contractor we’d hired back in March to fix the retaining wall and drainage in the front of our house. A job projected to take a week took over a month and, despite repeated assurances, his men managed to find and break both the water and gas lines. Imagine that? They could handle the water line but the gas line breakage required visits from the fire department, sirens blaring, and the gas company. A new gas line, a new gas meter. Road blocked for gigantic gas truck. Neighbors upset. And what did the sheepish contractor say: yadiyadi, yadiyadi, whine, whine, I have to pay a fine, whine whine.

In October I took a break and flew to Hawaii. Oahu seems to be getting more and more crowded which is sad but there’s something eternal about the South Pacific, isn’t there?

Let’s not talk about November and here we are in December, trying to be merry and bright. Me, mostly failing. So, I’ve decided on New Year’s Day I’m going to watch a movie with a believable sequel. Any suggestions? The only one I can think of is “The Return of the King” (part three of “The Lord of the Rings”). Good prevails and the evil ring of power is thrown into the fires of Mordor.

Ah, if we could be so lucky!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

the flowers pine

JT Twissel 9 Comments

As I promised, a couple of pieces from Malverde Days by Duke Miller.

the flowers pine

The Double Deers by Tres Miller (on the original back cover)

I sat with juan, my gardener
We were talking about how flowers could love a person, how to gently prune them like you were removing a woman’s clothes
He was as old as Cervantes, rode a burro to my house every Thursday
He had no family, lived on the highway connecting the capital, where cars passed at one hundred miles per hour of complete indifference
Juan had shrapnel in his knees
He was shopping for rat poison when a bomb went off in front of a business being extorted by the gangs
As he got older the knee joints stiffened, he could hardly get up from the ground, the earth waiting for him, not a problem, but plants were another matter, almost no patience when it came to the growing, the nurturing
As we talked he told me he felt exhausted, his heart beating wild like birds overhead
He said there was nothing wrong with him, no fever, no stomach pain, no trouble breathing, nothing except he felt tired
We sat together for about an hour, discussing this and that, and then his eyes got heavy and he rolled over, passed out
I called a taxi, we went to the hospital
When we were trying to get him out of the car he came around and walked into the admitting room and promptly threw up a bucket of blood, but he didn’t die, that came later, when he climbed a cliff and jumped
Poor Juan had been depressed about his knees and how the government cheated him out of his measly pension
Juan lay at the bottom of the cliff for a year before they found him
Most of his body had leaked into the wet cracks along the stream bed and filtered down into the aquifer beneath Malverde
When I think of the water I wash my face with, I think of Juan, his knees and flowers in my garden who miss their lover

Under Malverde Time

time is tricky here
January seems like Monday to me
February is Tuesday and so on
I went to Dr. Pablo for some answers
I was thinking it might be the weather or the food
He made a meta-diagnosis and wrote a prescription for 100 kg of nails and a carpenters hammer
He told me that I should start nailing down the days just after midnight
Hammer them squarely into the darkest part of the night as it spreads across your bedroom floor
The nails will slow things down considerably 
I said that sounded like a lot of work to me and couldn’t he write a prescription for a nail gun
He said sure, but he very much doubted if my insurance would cover it

A rejected idea for the cover, also artwork by Tres Miller.

If I were a god …

JT Twissel 12 Comments

Many years ago I read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a long book with a seemingly endless cast of characters. Generations are born, procreate and die and everything they’ve created is eventually devoured by fast-growing vines, mosses and fungi. Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? It would have been if Marquez had focused only on the world we can see and the realities we can comprehend but he didn’t. He combined the mundane with the mythical which is one of the many definitions of magical realism.

I was curious to see what Netflix would do with Marquez’ masterpiece, primarily because magical realism is one of the least understood of the literary genres. So far, it’s fairly dark and heavy on the realism. But it’s put me in mind of a book published by my friend Duke in 2019.

Duke’s book is far shorter but just as memorable as One Hundred Years of Solitude and the ebook is only $2.99.

Below are some reviews:

In Malverde Days Dylan Thomas exits Milkwood through a vortex and crash lands in the tropical, surreal town of Malverde on the opposite side of the planet. Here too, like their Welsh counterparts, the locals are restless, haunted by dreams that they would nail down if only they possessed a nail gun. In this surreal montage of life in a town cursed by violence death is never far. The pretty young woman in the ice cream shop is shot through the head while making a strawberry sundae. “Citizens of Malverde, do not worry”‘ announces the newspaper the next day. “They are only killing themselves.” Then there is Alice “the only woman who ever tried to kill me with a can opener, so I mourn her in my own way.” This is Duke Miller at his most incomparably irreverent self. His view of humanity is as bleak as the future, but we may as well go out laughing, or at least smiling, and Malverde Days delivers these moments in hallucinogenic spades.

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2019

Malverde Days will stop you in your tracks. “Wait! You need to re-read that part.” It’s heavy and yet translucent, letting in the light, illuminating those shadowy corners you feared as a child. And yet proposes that there are closets, dirt roads, alleys that end with your hand to your own throat.
Duke’s words must be savored. Take it easy. Take it slow. But take it.

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2019

Duke pulls no punches in this rich dense poetry. One piece made me cry. Another made me laugh out loud, something that words on a page rarely are able to do. Always his writing is worth returning to see how the words wash through your mind this time.

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2019

Malverde Days is part prose, part poetry and follows a group of disparate souls as they live, love, work and die beside each other in a sometimes magical, sometimes deadly town which feels south of the border although the exact location seems unimportant. I read many of the chapters on the author’s blog as they were randomly posted. But when I saw the cover I just had to buy the paperback. It’s a good thing I did because in the final product Miller has pulled together a group of blog posts (or cuttings as he calls them) into a plot stream that flows well. He also added a few pieces not posted on the blog that help readers get to know the characters and their motivations. It’s not a long book but you will want to read it again and again just to delight in Mr. Miller’s musical use of words and gentle depictions of even the most retched of souls.

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2019

I have both Malverde Days and Neil Gaimin’s bestseller American Gods on my Kindle, and was switching between them. Just realized I haven’t even opened American Gods in a week, because Malverde is so much more interesting, engaging, and enjoyable.

Tomorrow I’ll post some excerpts.

Thanks for the lift Uncle Bob

JT Twissel 27 Comments

Legend has it that my mother’s water broke while she was shooting the bull with her two younger brothers in my grandmother’s kitchen. Charley, the elder of the two boys, frantically called The Enforcer (aka Grandma), who was the head nurse at the hospital in the next town over and she ordered him to drive Mother to the hospital PDQ. But Charley couldn’t do it. Perhaps it was the sight of all that embryonic fluid on his mother’s kitchen floor or perhaps Charley had begun to celebrate the weekend a little early. And so fourteen year old Bobby took charge and drove my mother to the hospital.

Uncle Bob age fifteen. That’s Charley’s wife next to him – my Crazy Auntie Dottie.

I guess you could say, without my Uncle Bob’s calm in the time of crisis, I would have been born on the kitchen floor. And how did I thank him? I wrote a book about the time I spent with him in Germany in 1970.

Click here for a synopsis of the book.

My mother had a predilection for stretching the truth. Thus I landed in Europe believing my long lost uncle was some sort of a spy.

Uncle Bob in his late thirties discussing top secret spy stuff over a beer with his friend Bruce, also a top secret spy.

He quickly disabused me of that notion. Below is an excerpt from The Graduation Present.

“Gilberto, did you get a look at the knockers on Lou’s new secretary?” Uncle Bob asked the driver as we drove along.

“Molly, you mean Molly, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s her name. You know, the big ones are fun to cuddle but there is something to be said for frisky little titties. The French have a saying that the perfect size tit fits into a champagne glass. What do you think of that Gilberto? You like the little bitty titties?”

“Ah, Uncle Bob. I’m in the backseat,” I reminded him.

“So? You got a thing against tits?”

“I can’t believe I actually thought you were a spy.”

“Spies don’t like tits?”

By the time the book came out (it only took me four decades), my uncle had retired to Florida with his church-going, Texas-loving second wife. She took great umbrage at my portrayal of her husband and threw the book away before anyone in her family could read such rubbish. I doubt she read much beyond the frisky little titties scene which is a shame because the book is really about a silly, clueless girl in a complicated world.

Robert Ross Jameson, April 1, 1936 – December 4, 2024.

Hope there’s lots of peanut butter up there in heaven! And, thanks for the lift.

Tradition be damned

JT Twissel 18 Comments

I just pulled the pumpkin pies out of the oven. One for us to share, the other for my husband to enjoy later this weekend. He likes to say that pumpkin is a vegetable and thus pumpkin pie is good for him. Ha!

They smell better than they look, you’ll have to trust on that one. The kids will dose their slices with vanilla ice cream.

Most traditional Thanksgiving fare is inexpensive to make. After all, we’re supposedly honoring a feast between Native Americans and Pilgrims that supposedly happened in Massachusetts during the dreariest of months. There wouldn’t have been a lot of fresh food items available at the local markets.

Growing up I used to hate the above dish (Campbell’s green bean casserole). Don’t tell Campbell’s but in my rendition of this traditional dish, I did not use their canned mushroom soup! I made my own creamy, cheesey white sauce with fresh sauteed mushrooms and garlic. I also omitted the generous dose of soy sauce my mother always added. It was way too salty! I don’t really know why I decided to give it a try after all these years … my way, of course. Nostalgia I suppose.

Anyway I’m off to share. But first I’d better dress in real clothes and brush my hair. Brush my teeth, maybe? Happy Spare a Turkey Day!

Fiber Stress

JT Twissel 21 Comments

In my opinion, the love of learning is an addiction you either have or you don’t. My father was a professor of mechanical engineering who was considered an expert in fiber stress: How the materials used to build a plane, a bridge, an automobile, etc. will hold up under extreme stress. But he also knew more about classical music and literature, Greek mythology and astronomy, and even history than many of his colleagues who taught those subjects. He was addicted to learning. He was also a staunch conservative whose mind was unyielding on many subjects.

“Brittle behavior occurs when the material shows no yielding; the stress-strain curve continues smoothly to fracture.”

Dad quote from the chapter “Prediction of Static Failure” in his book:

It’s ironic to me how anyone who taught fiber stress could be so unyielding in matters of law and order, morality, and politics as my father. I like to think, given his breath of knowledge, he would have cheered the election of Obama purely for the historical significance, even though he could never vote for a democrat. I like to think he would have recognized that the fiber of this country was being fatigued to the point of fracture by the GOP’s increasing acceptance of anti-intellectualism, immorality and greed. But you know, we all want to think the best of our parents.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Issac Asminov

I’ll never know what my father would have done. If he would have stuck with the GOP despite its embrace of all the things he hated or if, in the end, he would have been able to yield. I will never know.

Dad (in the hat) where he was the happiest – building

Join me on Blue Sky at: jwiz26@bsky.social. I have no idea what I’ll be doing there. Maybe teaching fiber stress? What’s your handle?

The chocolate is melting on my keyboard

JT Twissel 23 Comments

I should have known when the threat of Santa Ana winds entered the forecast it would not be a good week. Instead of blowing off the ocean, these winds barrel down from the inland mountains like out of control freight trains. They’re generally hot and dry and can blow the flames from a grass fire hundreds of miles in only seconds. Not to mention the damage they can do to a power line.

Despite the wind, these guys are hanging on until the end!

Listening to the pundits jabber on about what went wrong in the US Election is like raking leaves in a wind storm. Basically, we had two old guys running for president. One of them had the gig before and kept the world in knots and stitches for all the wrong reasons. The other had the more somber task of getting the country running again after a pandemic nearly upended the world’s economy. But it, and the vicious attacks on his only son, the war in Ukraine, the Gaza situation, etc., slowed him down and made him seem not as sharp. So, he had to go. Considering Biden’s long service to the country, pushing him out was a shitty thing to do. It made the Democratic party look disloyal to one of their most faithful. Perception is everything in the world of fake news, especially given the GOP’s lapdogish loyalty to their own.

But it’s done and we are once again the pariah/laughing stock of the world. I hope that those in the MAGA movement will tone down the rhetoric about hanging people, take off their garbage bags and their diapers and the bandages taped to their ears and get a life. But I doubt that will happen. They were having too much fun.

And that is my last word on the subject.

Guess who sprouted up from the ground? When it blooms this plant is gorgeous. But it’s so damn unpredictable.