I suppose I have not joined the Blog revolution.  I still write little notes in my notebook, start stories either on the computer or on paper, but I am still far from reaching blogspace.  Yet, the railroad tracks can be bad and I won’t be able to write by hand at times.  Maybe that means I should only read while riding the train.  Should I be like those power people who dictate?  Talk to a machine, then pass it on to a secreatry? It was nearly midnight Saturday night when I returned to Kepler’s to retrieve my bike after seeing a movie.  Near the bike rack sat a man with big glasses and a walker loaded with travel bags.  He tried to get my attention by looking at me and vaguely gesturing while saying words I could not understand.  It was as if he could not pronounce the words very clearly, in the way people with degenerative disorders end up.  I approached him, expecting the usual request for money.  But it was not so: he could still not make himself understood by me.  I remained silent …

I must say that while I was in school the impending deadlines kept me going. Now it feels like whether I write or not will not change anything in my life. But perhaps it will. There’s my project of publishing “Guy’s Peninsula Rides” or “Rides from the Peninsula” which I think will be a web site. I have also written a short story that I sent to a Glimmer Train contest. One never knows. The drawback is that the story is kept prisoner until the verdict (winner? loser?) comes out. The story is that of a man who finds out that his lover died in the war, uncovering issues of acceptance of gay men (to others and themselves), and the absurdity of war. Look back at the writers of the Modern period in England and similar themes come up. It seems that history repeats itself. I think that the process of looking at our world doesn’t change. We have bigger and faster machines, but the people around us still behave and adapt in the same …

Can you tell I’m done with school? Yes, I graduated a couple of weeks ago with an M.A. in English, having completed a collection of short stories “Heating Up the Fog” as a thesis. You, my reader, can see some of it on my web site http://www.tiphane.org/guy/portfoliobut only my friends (or a publisher) can get a complete copy. Actually serious requests will be served gracefully with a paper version. I still think I could publish the collection as a book, but since I have submitted a few here and there, I will wait for the rejection letters before I do so. I liked the process of writing each story separately, then putting them all together as a collection. The final revisions were the most difficult, as when one is close to having completed several levels of a house of cards and someone slams the door behind. Fortunately we have computers to preserve our work. At the beginning it felt like submitting essays to a teacher, when the student makes sure to put his copy underneath …