Tag: Monday Morning Dispatch

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (6/30/25)

1)  An old creative writing teacher once  told me he read a short story that took place in an old house. As a writing exercise, he tried to write down everything he remembered from the description of the house from the story. He wrote about the wood floors and the way they creaked when you walked on them, the chipped and peeling paint of the walls, the doors of the rooms that stuck, the mold in the basement, the dust in the attic…

When he finished, he had nearly ten pages of description.

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (6/23/25)

1)  There’s an early episode of MOONLIGHTING (mid-1980’s TV show starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis) where David Addison (Willis) remarks to Maddie Hayes (Shepherd), “This is the chase.” The character says it just as the two of them start chasing after that episode’s bad guy.

There are other instances during that show when the characters “wink at the camera,” i.e. they acknowledge they’re on a TV show, without completing breaking the 4th wall.

THE SIMPSONS does it. Episodes of 30 ROCK have done it. RICK & MORTY walks a very fine line at doing it.

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (6/16/25)

1)  I wish people talked about books the way they talk about sports. Like, instead of,

“Yo, man, you see the way Manning threw that pass?” or “That 3-pointer just as the buzzer sounded was crazy, dude!”

They’d say stuff like:

“Yo, you see the way the author used that turn of phrase? Crazy, right?”

“That plot twist in the last chapter? It had me screaming at the page!”

“Not gonna lie… The first half of the book, I didn’t think the author was going to be able to pull it off. But that second half? It was insane! Complete turnaround! Never seen character development like that before!”

Stuff like that.

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (6/9/25)

1)  Still fighting with myself to not get political in the stuff I write about on here. But…

I’m seeing reports that over 140,000 people have been deported since the start of the current administration, and over 50,000 are currently being detained. For the folks who voted for this, I was wondering:

Has your life improved dramatically over the past five months? You feel safer when you go out at night? Is it easier for you to find work now that you’re not competing with as many illegal immigrants? Economy is doing better and your grocery bills have dropped significantly? Find medical care is easier to get, and cheaper?

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (6/2/25)

1)  Finally deleted my Substack account.

I could deal with the occasional political talk. It’s not as bad on there as it is on other social media sites. I could deal with the occasional trolls, too. They’re not in the vast majority like they are on Xitter (or whatever the heck Musk’s personal trolling site is called these days).

I even was able to ignore the COVID deniers, the people who started popping up and saying COVID was never a real threat, it’s just a bad cold, etc. You know the type:

“I got COVID, and it was no big deal.”

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (5/26/25)

1)  I’ve never watched a full episode of THE SOPRANOS, but I’ve seen tons of clips of the show on YouTube.

This isn’t an attempt at that kind of weird bragging you see sometimes, where there’s a discussion of a popular show and someone snidely says, “I’m happy to report I’ve never watched a single episode of this overhyped show.”

No, nothing like that. I have nothing against the show. Just personally, I’ve never seen a reason to give it a watch.

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (5/5/25)

1)  I hate driving.

Besides how boring it is, the main reason I hate driving is other drivers. I realized the other day that my typical driving routine is broken up thusly:

50% yelling at other drivers who changed lanes or made a turn without using their blinker.

10% yelling at drivers who obliviously have their blinker on all the time.

40% yelling at other drivers who slow down for green lights.

The first two groups, I understand. They’re idiots.

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MONDAY MORNING DISPATCH (4/28/25)

1)  A while back, my son asked me to write a story about him. I said, “Sure!” Then time went by.

I worked on something. Scrapped it. Worked on something else. Scrapped that.

I finally worked on what I thought it would be. Got almost finished, and realized it was not the story he would want, or what I originally envisioned. Also, he had matured quite a bit during that time, and he was reading things at an older level. My originally story was aimed at an elementary school-age kid, and he was reading YA books.

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