This, for example.

Read it.

Stubbornness Averted

Well, I was trying to delay posting until I managed to find the aforementioned Capitol Collection in a store near me. Luckily for my readers, something happened in the meantime, and I received a new survival kit in the mail, which I'll tell you about in this post.

Many months ago, my parents went to test drive a car to get a gift card. They actually wanted to test drive the car, but the dealership was busy, so they got the gift card and were sent along their merry way. The gift card was for an outfitter that happens to sell a Deluxe Survival Kit unlike any I have ever seen before. Now it is in my collection of survival kits, and all it cost was like an hour of my parents' time, and $3.50 in RT fuel cost according to mapquest.com.

I will tell you what it includes. It includes a signaling mirror. A map compass (I have other compasses, but this one has a base that you can set down on your map for more accurate orienteering), and a magnesium firestarter because a girl can't have too many of those. But that's not all! It also includes 12 fire sticks. Well, I already have the best fire-starters ever, which I made myself with Miss Gokey, but I'm very glad I looked up the contents of the kit, because I very seriously believed the fire sticks were some kind of high-energy protein bar-type snack. I was mistaken. I'm glad I didn't bite into one.

Further, the kit includes one poncho, two towels that are shrunk to the size of quarters (once unleashed, those towels are NEVER going back into the bag), and one tiny roll of duct tape, presumably enough to tape you up if a branch rips a 1/2" gash all the way up your forearm.

The best parts of the kit are two things that I don't have in my previous kits: glow sticks (! YAY! I let glow bracelets from the dot spot suffice for my homemade kits) and...

drum roll please...

a bug net. Which my dad immediately put on his head. I didn't get a photo of him, but here's a photo of ME wearing it.

It's cammo! Perhaps you'll see me wearing it in the woods of Michigan some summer soon. Just for the bug net, the packet was totally worth the absolutely $0 and 0 effort that I personally put into it. Thanks, mom and dad! 

In other news, I have FINALLY finished reading 1491. You can find my rather abrupt review on goodreads here. I think. Now, since it's October (my favorite month), I'm reading Libba Bray's The Diviners. 

Don Quixote says, "alea iacta est."

Just now, I peeled myself up from the awesome leather couch and began crossing toward the Marco's pizza box when Miss Gokey happened upon me and noticed that I was gasping and crying.

That's right, kids. I just finished re-reading Going Bovine. 

I have received quite a bit of submission fodder in e- and regular mail, but since I'm here enjoying a staycation in a gated neighborhood in North Las Vegas, and the submission fodder is on the east side where I live, it will have to wait, and I will have a built-in post for Tuesday. Until then, my five loyal readers have to deal with a series of text messages I received today along with my weird literary grief.

Although one text message in the series I read at lunchtime eloquently enumerated items that the sender hated at that moment in time, it was an "I hate everything" message. We all have our days. My previously mentioned "heterosexual life partner" says, "You can never go home again." Sometimes the die is cast, and we must trust when we look in the mirror that we are where we need to be to learn whatever lesson we need to learn. As I read the message, I came to the conclusion that it's not about the boss, and it's really not about the clients, either. It's about me. It's about each of us. What can *I* learn today?

I understand:
When it comes to reading materials, tastes are highly personal. I would hate to love Going Bovine as passionately as I do, and then suggest it to you only for you to hate it as much as I love it.
With so many brilliant minds out there composing new art for us to consume, why return to an old favorite?
A second reading of a favorite book always teaches a different lesson than reading #1. 
Although...I'm fairly sure I've liberally quoted these exact same words from Libba Bray at some previous point in time. Read it now with an "apocalypse" flavor.

"Maybe there's a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we've ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on the big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find our human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we're an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we're still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we're all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again - each of us playing our parts in the others' plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together..."

November is National Novel Writing Month. May it produce for someone, somewhere, another Cameron Smith on whose journey we can ride along. It may be the last National Novel Writing Month ever. So...if you've ever wanted to write a novel, tonight is a good time to get started by typing your first 2,000 words. 2,000 words a day will earn you a "finished" badge, which is something that I've never gotten. November is, after all, smack in the middle of the confusion of quarter 2 on the front lines of public education in America.

Now, after all of this re-visiting, it's time to kick it into gear. I have a kit to prepare for the girl who hates everything (at least for a moment in time). This is because, in the words of some nonfiction writer whose books I've never read (named Ian Frazier), "Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away."

FREE THE SNOW GLOBES.