The Misanthrope – Sunday’s Lighter Side

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), French theologian and philosopher

Oil Change. I brought the car to the dealer for an oil change because I simply trust them more than the local shops. I sat in the lobby reading my newspaper and everything was good. I finished reading, I started to watch the television, and rarely have I seen such insipid programming. I believe it is called the "Steve Edwards Show" and he has two or three female co-anchors. Luckily for those fortunate readers outside of the Los Angeles market, you don’t this rubbish. My description of their silly banter would not do justice to how truly bad this show is. It’s almost reaches the level of Wayne's World garage Cable Show on the old Saturday Night Live.

I called my friend Scribe and he informed me that such programming is exactly what the dealerships want because it numbs the customers’ brains so that when the bill is presented, one is like Jack Nicholson after the frontal lobotomy, and you pay the bill without question.

Angels. I am so glad that I adopted the Los Angeles Angels. They are an exciting team facing stiff competition in their division from the Oakland As, it has become an exciting pennant race. For the first time this year, I listened to game on the radio driving home. The Dodger station has weak reception for most of my drive home, but the Angel station was clear all the way home. Also, since the Dodgers fired Ross Porter after 20 plus years of service, I refused to listen to them on the radio. This afternoon the Angels face the 19-year-old pitching star for the Seattle Mariners. I expect a good game. Go Angeles.

Blogging. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the blogging community for the most part. I learned a few things from Bitch.Ph.d and Dr. Steven Taylor at Poliblog. I have even sent a couple of notes back and forth to them. Jack at Random Thoughts generally provides interesting comments on articles I’ve missed. Janet at The Art of Getting By is very clever and has great grasp on life for being so young. I know I am leaving out plenty of others such as, Vitriolic Monkey, Simply Put, Et, al, Diary of a Hope Fiend, Through a Looking Glass, The Dog’s Breakfast, Fighting Inertia, Daxohol, The Bulldog Manifesto, basically just look down the right side of our blogroll list and you will see the sites we visit regularly, even if two of those mentioned don’t link to us.

This a long way of telling you that I have enlisted the services of Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries as a writing coach. You can’t blame her for grammatical errors or typos here. She serves a bit like a personal trainer, she is my motivation for getting back into short story writing. It’s working for me. I have been devoting more time to my creative writing and thoroughly enjoying it. Maybe one day I will be published in a literary quarterly. Although, I mentioned that we probably get more readers at Toner Mishap than at a quarterly publication, but it’s the challenge and prestige of such publications that would make it such an honor for me.