The camper priorities are the brake and tail lights. If those become operational, which they should be this weekend, none of the extras matter to this journey. I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon or Reno and I have no way of knowing which trip will be my last. After practice, I stopped at Jimbos to visit Jackie the Troll, Charlie with the teeth, and to help figure out the TV remote control. The TV I donated is minus the matching unit so some guy walking in and able to program robots can find usually find a non-sports channel, thereby gaining instant popularity.
I’ve planned an overhead latch to the camper. A combination of an upward swinging lid and downward opening platform. Between the two, I can “sit” myself into the camper opening and unstretch into the sarcophagus rather than trying to slide in there. I didn’t even try sliding; I could see that the bedclothes and anything else in the way would get pushed inward. Stay by for photos of the electrical, which should prove very educational as I proceed. Why not? The only thing to save me from disaster is proper thinking in advance and I accept the challenge.
When I was a kid, the neighbor was an old German carpenter. Weird as hell, his name was Konrad Wauer. That’s the guy who was an atheist but won the award every year for the best Xmas decorations. His sons, Udo and Klaus, naturally learned the trade and I was not surprised that the younger (Klaus) built his own camper. Yeah, yeah, I thought, until I heard about it. I never saw it, but those who did said it was a masterpiece. He would have been around 14 years of age at the time, that is, too young to drive it.
Strange, is it not, that I should envy someone with such skills? Not strange at all, if you were deprived of any opportunity to even learn a trade—but that is probably something most of you cannot imagine—parents who cut off their own kid at the knees the moment he tries to get ahead. Good old Klaus, with a turnip-like personality and too gawdawful stupid, except for the completely equipped wood shop his daddy handed him, to earn a Boy Scout merit badge still provoked my jealousy. If nothing else, experiences like this demonstrate how narrow the margins were in this life that prevented me from taking over.
Back to Deborah Harry. I cannot identify with this lady, simply because she made a bundle easy money while she was young. Enough to spoil herself and learn life’s bad lessons and still have plenty left over to follow through. She was a Playboy bunny at roughly age 21 and you’ll never make easier money than being a blonde female and taking your clothes off.
I’ll namedrop because this is interesting. Around that time, our guitarist knew a club owner in the Bahamas who drove a vintage Morris, which are tiny cars. He picked up Harris is a club and took her for a ride, reporting that she is, in real life, a very big (but not fat) woman. This statistic is purged from her bios. Anyway, he shoehorned young Debs into the Morris and the rest is speculation.
ADDENDUM
Readership, that’s what a blog boils down to. I keep the stats to a minimum but I think we understand that every blog likes a large following. Mentioning it too often is a form of advertising, which I generally eschew—but nobody has offered me a wad of cash either. Was it Mark Twain who said you should write for free and if you are any good, somebody will pay you? Then he added, if nobody pays you after three years, give it up.
The reason I bring up the topic is a comparison which is also today’s trivia. The bestseller list. How to get on the list is a secret, but it is known the book has to already be selling well at an unspecified set of locations. The list lost a lot of its meaning when the Harry Potter series came out, as it dominated the fiction category so completely, the Times created a new list, “Children’s Books”.
So how would the bestseller list deal with this blo?. It can’t because at best, this blog is semi-fiction, not non-fiction. The facts and most of the opinions here are quite real, but with a built-in error margin. For example, my camper did not really cost the full $600 I often quote. Should anyone quote that figure, we’ll know where they got it. But the camper does exist. At least in the pictures.
Next, the bestseller list is focused on a fixed time period. Books that sell well over long stretches don’t make the list. The popular rumor out there is that you make the list if your book sells over 10,000 copies in a month. But I can’t verify that number though it explains how potboilers by Koontz and Steele make the list.
Consider the other facts. Books are not updated daily, like this blog. People also don’t buy or read the same book more than once, as a rule. The blog counters don’t say how many visitors are unique. But I will tell you that readership here is expanding steadily. I’m going to estimate that an unspecified percentage of the hits are new readers, so when I hit 10,000 in a month (that’s unique estimated hits, not total hits) I’ll say something.
I’ve also detected an upsurge in hits from other blogs that have a similar format, meaning a recap of the day’s people and events, though that’s usually where the likeness disappears. Let me randomly pick one and direct you to it to see what I mean. Here is Confessions of a Recalcitrant Goddess, who seems to have been blogging around the same amount of time as the famous “Tales From The Trailer Court”.
It is a blog I find typical of what is out there. From the early days to now, you’ll see no significant changes in the author’s style. Most posts are one long paragraph with no division of topics. I call these the “my-cat-had-kittens” brand of blog, a rather dry description of ordinary household events meaningful mainly to the author. Should you read ten of her posts, you won’t come away with a sense of having learned anything new, rather an impression of year-in, year-out sameness.
How would I rate my own blog differently? Folks, get out and do different and new things so you have something interesting to write about. People who watched television all last evening probably don’t want to hear what you watched. Don’t just give an opinion, qualify it—and that’s only after making sure your opinions are not the same standardized drivel we hear at the office. Tell us why you feel that way so we can decide if you have a case.
And make a plan so there is some direction to your life. Quit assuming we are all so family-oriented that what you did today thrills us. We need to gauge how well you move toward a goal; that will tell us all we need to know to judge you as a person and an author. Tell us when you fail. Don’t post random pictures and then make up editorials, take pictures in real time so we can follow along. And learn a little HTML so you blog is easy to read. The inclusion of one ounce of thoughtfulness, the indented paragraph, which we all learned in grade two, became the largest single draw for this blog. As far as we know, it is the only blog considerate enough to do it.
