Well, hello there. This is a completely unplanned bit of business, but I will just say that here’s what I read in the paper today [Sunday, Oct. 1] that I thought was interesting. What do we have here? The Loneliness Files. [You better believe that’s on my TBR!] Laments the Isolation of life online. Yes. Yes, indeed. We are online, connected and yet so isolated. Go figure. And Tom Wolfe and the Birth of the Quant Revolution, or is the one for today, Tom Wolfe, apostle of New Journalism who captured, ah, that’s what it is. Tom Wolfe died. He’s the apostle of new journalism who captured the extravagance of his times. The extravagance. Yes. What was he writing about? Was he writing about the Sixties? I guess there was extravagance. I wouldn’t know much about it. Frankly, I wasn’t in an extravagant place during the Sixties. Wait, “‘I don’t have to dwell on the point that cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say 1750 to 1850,’ he wrote. ‘They are freedom style, sex, power, motion, color. Everything is right there.'”

Yes, we’re all about cars here. We love our cars. God, we love them so much. Yeah. So anyway, Tom Wolfe, I don’t know what got me thinking about Tom Wolfe because I thought, okay, this guy’s a groundbreaker, and now we have groundbreaking women out there doing stuff, and I feel like sometimes I can barely function, but I get the feeling a lot of people feel that way. So having said that, I think it’s nice when you find somebody like a Craig Gillespie who has just devoted his life to what he’s done. I mean, the difference between a Craig Gillespie and myself is monumental, and I was just taken by the story of the fact that he has a brother who’s more American, if you will, I suppose.

Yeah. He’s an Australian surfer, “an identical twin, born and raised in Sydney. Gillespie says he was more rambunctious and less focused than his academically astute brother. He lasted just a semester at the University of Sydney before dropping out, preferring to shred waves on the beach rather than tread water in the classroom.” See, here’s a person who knew what he wanted to do, and he did it. Now, here’s the thing about creativity and all of this stuff. Years ago, I could have been writing my novel, but it wouldn’t have been the same novel. Would it? It wouldn’t have been. I don’t know what, I didn’t know what I was doing when I was 21, 22. I was just trying to figure things out, and there are people who are amazing, who write amazing things at the age of 22, and I’m not one of them, but maybe what I wrote back then has value in itself in that it helped me become what I am today, whatever that is.

I’ve tried my best to do the best I can with what I have, and I just look at articles like this about Craig Gillespie, and I think this guy is making, it says here, “the Dumb Money director’s knack for portraying outsiders has roots in his own self-made path to Hollywood.” Think about those words, a self-made path to Hollywood. People have been doing this for years, actually. It’s just gotten a lot easier now. So there’s a lot more competition, and we need to be very careful that we’re not stepping all over each other trying to get ahead, so to speak. Do you hear what I’m saying? That’s all I’m saying, so, oh yeah. I love this. The new phone etiquette: text first and never leave a voicemail. Talk about confusing. Okay, so I’m supposed to text now before, what if I don’t have it? What if I don’t like texting?

What if I’m one of those old-fashioned people who just has a landline and doesn’t even have a text type phone? Okay. We have no room in our society for that anymore. That’s as weird as not being on Facebook, right? Or not having your books up on Amazon, so yeah, right. It’s like, okay, don’t leave a voicemail. Never leave a voicemail, God, but text before calling. You don’t need to answer the phone. Hell no. I mean, they can call as they want. You don’t have to answer. Emotions are for voice. Facts are for texts. Keep that in mind. Unless it’s an emergency, please hold. Use video voicemails judiciously, and they might use your voice as an AI trainer. Who knows? Stay still for video calls. No, I think I’m going to do this while I talk to people on the phone.

Don’t use speakerphone in public. Gee.

Start screening calls again. You can call all you want, but I’ll be screening them. Don’t stop talking on the phone. Don’t stop talking. Phone calls. Oh, I get it. You can actually make a phone call. That’s okay. It’ll make you less lonely. It says, go figure. Right. Oh, and I guess I’ll go ahead. I don’t know that I’m going to actually show this,

But maybe I’ll cut this out. Or maybe I won’t. Stephan Pastis. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of authors are rolling their eyes at your Sunday comic.

That’s it. And this may be a video, or it may just be a podcast. We’ll just have to see. Huh? Be seeing you. I forgot to mention the part about how I’m trying to put a movie together in less than two weeks, which is nutty, completely nutty, but I want to really, really try to do this. Yeah, and you’re right, Trevor.

Jammie Dodgers can get a little sticky. I got a bit of Jammy Dodger just won’t come out. It’s all kind of gluey there, but I still love them. Anyway, so I’m trying to get a team together to make this movie. Maybe. We’ll see. I hope I’m, I’m hoping No, I’m doing. Doing and hoping. Something like that. Anyway, that’s it. Talk to you later. Sorry, I’m rambling. Sorry. Be seeing you.

PS: Thank you, Paul, for this! 🙂