Meanderings and Musings of a Cluttered Mind

Writing from the Atlanta airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to Milwaukee ... Is Heaven for real? I capitalized it, so I must believe it is. But it's a good question. This isn't what I was going to write. After hearing someone too-young-to-be-drinking say on the airplane she was, "hungover as fuck," I thought it would be good for some meandering observations of life in an airport. But then perusing the rack of alluring paperbacks at one of the gift shops, I spied the novel, "90 Minutes in Heaven" (Now a major motion picture!). I'm never sure if the proclamation of a book turning into a movie spurs more book sales or less. On one hand, you may say, "It's so good, they made it a movie! I must buy it and read it first!" Or you could say, "Reading words is so tiresome. I'd rather go to a place and pay way too much for popcorn and a soda and have someone spoon feed me the information with dramatic music." ...

Ted Master learned photography the old-fashioned way -- with an all-manual camera. He used a manual camera and then PhotoShop to create "Inside Out," which took first place in the photography category and Best of Show. BY GARY  J. KUNICH It’s a door to somewhere that appears out of nowhere. It is a staircase that goes up into something, but no place in particular. It’s there, but it’s really not. It is a hole ripped in the gauze of temporal reality, creating a universe imagined by Ted Master for his Gold Medal-winning photograph, “Inside Out.” The image, created and photographed on a farm field in the middle of Goochland, Virginia, then brought to life with PhotoShop and Master’s imagination, also took “Best of Show” at this year’s competition. And it almost never would have happened had Master not taken that route home from school that day and saw an advertisement for the Art Institute of Atlanta. “I’ve had all kinds of jobs,” the 69-year-old Mas...

In all my fantasies of multi-million-dollar Lotto wins, in all my dreams of all the homes I'll buy -- one in a secluded lakeside cabin, another in a snowy Italian ski chalet and yet one more that kisses the white, foamy ocean in Key West, Florida, there remains a constant in the ever-changing scenery inside my mind. It still looks cooler than an iPad. Each place comes with a special room all to my own, with a large window to gaze at the lake, the mountains, the ocean or maybe nothing and everything. And in each room there will be a typewriter in the corner -- the black, manual Royal machine my wife bought me as a gift a few year's back. And just below the window, a desk with a computer and keyboard where I can sit and write. Even with all the millions in the bank, all the property owned, and no need to get up to an alarm or count down to retirement, there is one thing I can't give up -- the option to stare at a screen, and tap a keyboard that strings letters into ...

Jessica Herrera works on a pastel portrait of her father, who passed away six years ago. She said he was her biggest supporter and stood by her as she recovered from an illness that cut her military career short. BY GARY J. KUNICH She found her voice in her paintings and pastels, and silenced the other voices that filled her head with despair. Air Force Veteran Jessica Herrera, is the first place winner in the special recognition category at this year's National Veterans Creative Arts Festival for her portrait, “Trading in My Heels for Combat Boots." She said her artwork gave her life purpose after her military career was cut short because of schizophrenia. Herrera was 23 and stationed at Misawa Air Base, Japan, when it started back in 2004. At first, she couldn’t understand what was happening because it all seemed so real. “My whole family was proud of me for joining the Air Force, and they were excited for me,” she said. “I had a good time, made a lot of friend...

At 91, George is our oldest veteran in this year's National Veterans Creative Arts Festival. BY GARY J. KUNICH “We were so young when we went off to war … none of us were heroes, we just did what we were told …” -        From the poem, “Veterans.” The young man who wrote those words has hair that long ago turned gray. A stroke a few months back slowed and slurred his speech, but come Sunday in Durham, North Carolina, he'll take his place on a stage he knows all too well. George Farr, 91, can be considered Veteran Performer Emeritus -- it’s his 12th year at the festival and he holds the distinction of being the oldest in the show. He’s been working hard at his speech therapy and other exercises to hold his own with the young whippersnappers in their 80s and younger. “I’m not walking as vigorously as I was. If I could run a marathon, I would. I know my speech is a little peculiar. The secret is to speak slow. But I’m ready. I’v...

Here's everything you need to know about the debate, start to finish, whether you watched it or not ... - Lincoln Chaffee should have come out dressed like Abe Lincoln. Bernie should have had crazy hair. - Who the hell are they waving at? Ain't nobody waving at them in the audience. They are doing that to make people watching THINK there are people waving at them. As in, "Oh, I wasn't going to vote for Hillary, but she's waving to people! She sure is friendly. I'm gonna vote for her ... " - The six presidential candidates: Martin O'Malley, Lincoln Chaffee, Hillary, Bernie, someone else and Sheryl Crow's hot leather pants. - Did you see Lincoln's eye twitch and almost explode when Sheryl hit that high note that wasn't quite right? Wait a second, was there a National Anthem before the Republican debate? - CNN's graphics have really gone downhill since their "War in the Gulf" stuff from Desert Storm. - Jim Webb is ...

Happy Ass-Hat Day! Or, as we like to call it in America, the great country he didn't discover, Columbus Day. This would be well and good if Chris did, indeed, sail the seas so blue in fourten-hundred-and-ninety-two to discover a new land. But if history is any indication, the guy we name parks and federal holidays after more or less stumbled upon some land he thought was something different ... and he was a supremo ass-hat. He wrote about enslaving, raping and killing hundreds, if not thousands, of people and even dismembering his own crew for insubordination. I don't remember any poems about that in elementary school, but in defense of white-washed history, it really is hard to find something that rhymes with "dismemberment." This is all very true. You can believe me, because I read it on Facebook today. As the story goes (and if you can't believe everything on Facebook, what can you believe?), Queen Isabella -- the real queen, not the future name of on...

VA's suicide solution Each year, veterans come from all over the U.S. (including Hawaii) to showcase their talents at the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival. For some, it's just about the love of performing. For others, it offers hope and healing. His name was Connie, and he came to town to kill himself. "I was an over-the-road truck driver, so I knew what rest stop I was going to do it at and had my gun," he told me. "I had the place picked out and everything." But first he was making a stop at the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival, where he was asked to attend, based on a poem he wrote before the brain injury. "And I thought it was just going to be a rinky-dink, fly-by-night VA thing where they threw it together for the veterans and didn't really care. And I walked through those doors, and was embraced. I was treated like a human being. I went up to the VIP lounge and sat and talked for hours. They literally saved my li...

Everybody has a novel inside themselves. Problem is most people are shitty writers. The End

 It’s bizarro world where everything is nothing like it’s supposed to be. The political party that generally supports abortions is creating Facebook memes in support of the pope who is against abortions, the pope is against gun manufacturers and owners but is protected by Swiss guards who protect him with guns, and the political party accused of never caring about minorities has the most diverse group of presidential candidates, with one woman, one of Indian descent, two Hispanics, another married to a Hispanic, an African-American, and a fully grown Oompah Loompah. I'll just be over here sipping tea with Kermit. My blog, my rules, so let’s skip the first two parts and rack and stack the remaining 15 presidential candidates and their chances, on a scale of 1 to Whatever, before anymore drop out, or get stabbed to death with extreme right angles. Carly Fiorina 1. Carly Fiorina. She’s not in first place, but is kind of hot and makes me tingly in a weird kind of way. Not ho...