A speculative mind

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Dungeon Crawler Carl

I have a guilty pleasure. I have been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and I am hooked. I read the first book a while back, and now I am up to book five. Okay, the premise may sound a little wild, but here goes. One night (or day, as this event happens all over the Earth at the same time, no matter what time of day or night) all roofs collapse. Any person who is under a roof of any kind gets smashed flatter than a pancake. Instantly. Anyone who is in a car, or a house, or a building, is dead. This leaves only a fraction of the human race left alive. Why has this happened? Aliens did it. Why did they do it? For entertainment. Carl, it seems, had gone outside in the middle of the night to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s cat (named Princess Donut). So now Carl and the cat found themselves in a subterranean labyrinth forced to participate in a game for the amusement of aliens. This game comes with nonplayer characters like orcs and goblins and dragons, but th...

That Road Trip to Pocatello

After two plus years of junior college, I had to decide where to go to continue my education. I was at a gray point in my life. I no longer considered myself a boy, but I didn’t really consider myself a man yet either. Some college done, but not complete. And what was my actual goal in life? What was I becoming? I needed to take the next step, but what was I going to step into? Track was very important to me. I had been accepted to the University of Oregon, but if I went there, I would be a small fish in a very big pond, as U of O had a nationally renowned track and field program. The coaching staff had not really gone out of their way to entice me to go there (no scholarship offer). A friend of mine had a connection with the new track coach at Idaho State University in Pocatello. The coach there (Jerry Quiller) was visiting my friend in Eugene and asked me if I would be willing to come to Pocatello and see the program. I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I said yes. We made arrange...

Eternal Empire

Consider the Roman Empire, so vast and “eternal.” At least it would have seemed eternal to a Roman citizen living in it. At its height it stretched from Scotland to North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to Iraq. Imagine yourself as a Roman citizen living in the year 200 A.D. You would have considered the Roman Empire (your empire) to be something that would last forever. It had already lasted 600 years, and in fact it would continue on in one form or another for another 1200 years. It was all you had ever known. You would not be able to conceive of a day when the empire no longer existed. It was the world’s first superpower. It was militarily dominant. It exported its art, culture, and values to most of the known world. No one could remember the last time they ever lost a war. They even survived some incredibly bad emperors. I am talking: Nero, Domitian, Caligula, etc. These guys should not even have been allowed to run a tavern, let alone an empire. Yet even with these incompe...

One of Those Moments

When I was a kid, my father was appointed as a justice to the state Court of Appeals. Two years later, he had to run for reelection. My father had earlier been elected a state legislator a few times, but this was the first time he would be running for state-wide office. To make matters more difficult, the former state Attorney General decided to run against my dad. Not only that but the former Attorney General had previously run for governor. Everybody in the state had heard of this guy’s name. No one (outside of our former county) had ever heard of my dad. This was going to be a difficult election for him to win. One of the strategies he decided on was to get out and meet people. This included visiting some African American churches in the Portland area. On one of those visits, I went with him. I was twelve years old. I was about as milk-white as a white boy can be, and my family was the epitome of middle-class milk-white. The places I had grown up had very few persons of colo...

That Play I Didn’t Want To Do

A number of years ago, our theater company had a proposal to do The Diary of Anne Frank. I was not wild about the idea myself. I felt it was depressing and everyone knows how it will end. What can I say, I like comedies. But the other board members felt it was a good idea, and I was not going to stand in the way. We had two casting calls, one for the adults and one for the two girls in the play (Anne and her sister Margot). I got cast as Otto Frank (Anne’s father). I went to the casting call for the girls just to observe. I walked in the room to a plethora of little girls. I had no idea that so many girls in our community wanted to play Anne Frank. I don’t even know how many girls there were, 40? 50? I thought it would be difficult to choose one. But when one girl named Madeline read for the part, I thought to myself, that’s her, that’s Anne. I was not involved in selecting the cast, but I was not alone in my opinion about Madeline. Everybody thought she was perfect. And I hav...

Hamnet : Some Thoughts

I recently watched the film Hamnet and I had some thoughts. First, we should recognize that this is a work of fiction. The film was based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Though the big life events are correctly placed (births, deaths, marriage) everything in between those events is speculative. There is very little we know about Shakespeare’s personal life. For example, it has been theorized that Shakespeare did some private tutoring to make ends meet. This is depicted in the film. But we have no direct evidence that he did so. So little is known about his life that people have speculated that the man from Stratford (Shakespeare) did not write the plays and sonnets at all. A variety of other authors have been proposed. Personally, I believe that the man from Stratford was the playwright. None of his contemporaries ever doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. There was no theory running around at the time that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else. Those theories...