All posts in June 2016

Sometimes all you need are uncooked burgers and a bird bath.

zzzummmdayzz awooeeurhhhh uhnnguhhggg urhhhurhh aha ihrrrbahh.

Readers:  What’s that perfect summer meal? Barbecue and corn on the cob? Salmon and gazpacho? Clam chowder on the beach? A simple turkey sandwich with potato salad and chips? Why not think about this for a minute, make a grocery list, and set out to create a few of your favorite summer classics?

Let’s carpe the hell out of these summer diems.  They don’t last.

 

English: “Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can’t see.”

Zombie: “zzzhummdie ennn ahhgoze mīayyhhhz ahgahnzeeee”

Question for readers: Should we close our eyes more often? An observation from the recent cross-country road trip. I never missed the news for one moment. I found a bar in Big Sur for the NBA finals. That was all the TV I watched during the entire drive.

Of course, driving itself requires open eyes. As my friend Alex would observe, the number of drivers staring down at their laps is reaching epidemic proportions. I like how the some states are now labeling rest areas as texting zones.

Having a zombie blog, a biography blog and an education blog just seemed silly. I merged the biography and the zombies to simplify life. This “new” blog will be a bit disconnected for awhile as I attempt to fit my biography into tips for the apocalypse.

I still hope to encourage others to tell their life stories, with or without zombies.  As I noted in the previous bio blog, as a society, we have become so busy multitasking and screensucking that we are not telling our stories. In place of a campfire, we sit around large, flat-screen TVs, alone or in groups, and the conversation dies. We discuss plot lines, characters and tomorrow’s itinerary, tossing in fragments of our day. Our backstories are sacrificed to work and leisure demands, and electronics, supplemented by the latest developments in the Game of Thrones.

We need to tell our stories before they become lost in time. Many of us know the old stories, our parents’ stories, because once we took time to listen. Sometimes we listened quietly while dad sucked down bourbon around a grill, visiting friends who sat in camp chairs, cup holders and laps laden with their own bourbon and burgers. Other times we sat at dinner tables while family members recalled the stories of their youth. I remember eating grandma’s beet soup while my mother described her own mother’s livid anger after my mom accepted a meal from a nearby family during the Depression. Grandma was going to have to sacrifice a chicken to repay the favor. That chicken threw my calm, analytical grandmother into an uncharacteristic rage, a memory of hard times in the 1930’s that stayed with my mother through decades to come.

Do our children know our stories? Do our friends know our stories? Do we know our own stories?

Whether we stumble into apocalyptic times or not, we are always charting our lives’ directions. Here’s a first question: Do you own your screen or does the screen own you?

Are you clicking on link after link, spending minutes of your life finding out what Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston have in common? Are you reading about abnormal eating behaviors in frontotemporal dementia? Or are you even keeping up with the Kardashians? If so, maybe it’s time to write, not read.

(I don’t want to seem overly judgmental here. Readers, if you feel like researching the adventures of Tom and Taylor, I’d say go for it. I am merely concerned about the amount of time that gets lost to that click-click-click, as link by link, we travel down the rabbit hole.)