So, who's next?

Why this stone is curious depends on your origins. It's from the non-descript, really tiny hard to find and outlandish town called Kitchel, Indiana, about 3 miles north of Liberty just off U.S. 27 (eastern Indiana.) The school has been closed for years, yet the gym still stands, mocking time, glaring back at the future. The place was once the playground of the Kitchel Cowboys, a high school team from Harrison Township. This monument boasts that the Cowboys won the Connersville Sectional in 1942 and again in 1943. I have no idea about this team, why it was successful for those two years or how bad/good it was afterward. I recall the last years of Kitchel. They had maybe 80 students, played the game with enthusiasm, and like everyone else, got beat in the sectional. Except those two years. I can speculate why the gym still stands and probably none of it is connected to those '42-'43 teams. Then again, who knows? For a snapshot in time, the Cowboys ruled. Never thr...

I am a member of the print media and I am concerned for its future. I actually fear that it will survive. Frankly, what we do in the name of news is sinful. It's time to let the newspaper die. Why? Because it's about blogging now. Writers are writing for themselves, for each other. They're wordy, unclear and far far too opinionated. The problem is: their opinions are based on the fact that they listen to one side of a story and come away believing it. They write that, post it on a blog and ... off they go. What has endured as the staple of print journalism is connected to something so far out of date as to be rendered virtually useless. News journalism as we know it needs to die. Soon. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. The editors of these rags can go too. All of them.

I generally believe that everyone is lying. To be less cruel about it, everyone has a version of the truth. Part of that truth is based on fact and part of it is based on fact as was told by someone else, who could indeed be fabricating the truth. The nice thing about writing is that truth and lie can be easily identified. Delivery is, however, a manifest of semantics, vocabulary, punctuation and sentence structure. The coach who tells the interviewer that he intends to take his team to the championship game could very well be telling the truth. Even if it's to watch. So you need to know which questions to ask. Men are less inclined to be credible than women for a simple reason, a woman once told me: Men don't pay attention. I told her that women were more inclined be deceptive. Now one of us was lying.

I hope to get myself up to speed on this blogging thing soon and at that time, I hope to share myself with people who can do me the most good. That would be either a publisher or an agent. In the meantime, I have an idea or two about a story or two that could be interesting for a couple of reasons. One of those ideas is about health. I mean, my own. Where do I intend to be in the next 4 years, 14 years? Next month. My doctor is optimistic. Sadly, at the end, not much gain is noticed. What we leave behind needs to matter. I'm working on that. Once I find a publisher or an agent who knows a publisher. I think I have something worth reading.

A larger question, if questions come in sizes, is probably why do I write? Most of us write, in a form or other. Some of us put it on paper. Virtually speaking, it's paper, this electronic sheet I'm filling now. Writing is essentially the organization of thoughts that occur in random fashion over the course of the day, week, month, year. The longer the time period, the less connected the thoughts. In a short frame of time, our ideas can be edited for clarity, meaning and substance. When we think in a sensible way, we are "writing" it down, on that electronic sheet of paper inside our heads. Writing, as a hobby or as a form of self therapy, should be rather easy, alleging the scope of the effort connects to a useful vocabulary and functional grammar. Putting ideas on paper is useful, even if it becomes a wad of waste, tossed into the trash can. If it goes beyond that, writing takes on a new meaning. Real writing is hard work. But it's worth the work. I've been ...

Jay Hughes is my nom-de-plume, my pseudo, my writer's name. It generally means "JU's" and was/is essential because my name and that of the late more famous John Updike were problematic for at least one of us. Establishing my own identity was more fascinating than I originally imagined, but once the character became upright and slightly believable, he became somewhat charismatic. Jay is about being honest, slightly confused, a bit on the naughty side and inclined to be clueless to the point of having the onions to "figure it out" on his own. The character has matured, generally, in the past few years, and I suspect that's along the lines of my own sense of maturity. We all eventually see where we've been, what may or may not be a discernable future and the capability to expect that nothing we plan will always go as we planned it. The adventure is what Jay is about, recognizing that -- in the story -- nearly everyone gets what everyone deserves. There...

To win the championship, you don't have to beat everyone. You just have to beat who's next. Having established that, we come across the bizarre world of irony, absurdity and peculiarity. I love these three words. I love many words. I won't go much beyond that for the moment. It's pleasant outdoors and my flowers want to sprout. The flowers have made that perfectly clear. Later.