I made a resolution (sort of) to write in my blog every day in the new year. Here it is the second day of 2012 and I’ve already failed.

I didn’t miss by much, but this is my first official blog post of the new year so my batting average has already dropped to .500. There’s absolutely no way now to bring it to 1.000.

Looking at a brand new year stretched out in front of you this way certainly makes it seem daunting.

Does that mean I’m abandoning the effort? Of course not. I can still shoot for a respectable finish. Like most other large projects, it often takes breaking it into pieces to make it seem less intimidating.

Even the most organized-seeming among us have moments when they try to see too far ahead. Moments the most well-educated guess of what’s-to-come misses the target entirely. What do you do when that happens?

If you’re good at what you do, you pick things up, toss the stone again and shoot for the next square down the line. Simple as that.

The goal may not move, but the path to it often does. In the world of business, or just the game of life, you need to learn that and play the game accordingly.

I’m getting ready to e-publish some of my creative work. I have been for months. Yet, I’ve hesitated for weeks as I waged a war in my head over publishing it in that way instead of following some of the more “normal” publishing avenues.

Then it occurred to me. What’s normal any more?

I remember, not that long ago, when many people (myself included) declared digital photography would never replace film…but it did.

Even more recently, another ill-informed prognostication – electronic readers will never replace books – was on the tongue of many well-meaning mystics. I myself couldn’t see giving up any of my beloved hardcover tomes for an ebook.

But I did. Oh sure, I was reluctant at first. I was going to be away from home for six weeks and knew I could not carry enough reading material to keep me occupied, so I bought my first Kindle. To get me through this inconvenience, I told myself.

Then I discovered this new way of reading was every bit as satisfying, much more efficient and a damned sight more convenient. The signs are all there.

Libraries are hurting for funding (I do find that distressing). A major bookstore chain has folded. The largest bookseller on the planet is Amazon, and a significant percentage of the content they sell is digital. Who am I to say it ain’t ever gonna happen.

Particularly since it already has.

I need to quit procrastinating and get my stories and books online before the next wave of change, whatever it may be, rolls over us all and I have to start thinking about it all over again.

I’ve probably used this image before. It looks familiar, but so do my New Year resolutions. When I looked at last year’s list to gather hints for this year, I realized most of my 2011 resolutions are not yet done.

Sigh. Did I really think they would be?

Well…yeah, I did. That’s why I made them.

Looks like I’ll have to make them again. I’m not sure why I keep doing this to myself. Is it because other people expect it, or because I do?

My lovely bride is after me again to shed some pounds. She’s even solicited help from my white-haired mother. Oh, she’ll deny it, but the two of them have a similar mantra. Coincidence? I think not.

I have to admit, it’s a resolution I would enjoy keeping – except for the work and exercise part. And the forgoing of fried food. Or cookies and cake. And the occasional beer or other alcoholic beverage.

Then there’s my writing. I did do a lot more of that in 2011. Not here, of course. But I did it. One of my poems “Woodland Avenue” was actually published in a respected online journal, Slow Trains.

I have almost 67,000 words written on my novel. Another 5-10 thousand or so and I’ll be ready to edit. I also have a collection of short stories that is now up to 36,000 words. Nothing published yet, so that’s still a to do.

I’ve submitted poetry and short stories to about a dozen venues this year. Nothing accepted yet, so I have to re-submit elsewhere in 2012. Plus, I participate in an online writer’s forum every day.

Seems like a lot. So why doesn’t it feel satisfying?

Oh, I attended the Rochester Writer’s Forum again this year, so I can check that one off. Why are you smiling?

Almost forgot, I traced my family lineage back to 1617 in Ireland (I always thought before I was German). My first paternal ancestor landed here, in Virginia, in 1635. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

I meant to do some traveling, and I have. We spent about 11-12 weeks of this year in Florida, with the grandkids. Maybe next year we’ll go somewhere just for the two of us.

There was also something I know I said about avoiding political commentary. It’s hard in such an overtly political climate. I’ve managed to keep most of my friends, so I must be doing all right on that score.

Then again, maybe not. There’s a group of us who said we’d meet for lunch once every quarter, and we’ve only met twice. I don’t see us getting in the other two meetings tomorrow.

So, for 2012, I guess I’ll just polish off last year’s list (changing all the 2011 headings to 2012, of course), and try it all again.

Maybe next year I’ll find a publisher, or at least gather enough cohonies to e-publish something myself. Maybe next year I’ll avoid political disagreements altogether (I can already see this one failing).

Perhaps I’ll even do a little traveling and get together with all my old friends. Next year. Why does that sound so damn familiar?

Maybe I’ll finally get around to my original “Blog365″ idea, with a short piece of writing every day.

Whoa…wait a minute. Next year is a leap year. There’s 366 days in it. Damn. There goes that idea, too.

Take care, my friends. Happy New Year.

I’ve done quite a bit of traveling in the past month. I did a little more last weekend for an unfortunate event, the funeral of one of my favorite people: Lowell Dean Allison.

He was only ten years older than I am, an age I consider far too young to have passed away (the older I get, the younger such an age seems to be). Regardless of his age, by virtue of marrying my father’s baby sister, he will always be in my memory as “Uncle Dean.”

He lived 600 miles away and I wish I could say we saw each other frequently, but every ten or fifteen years hardly counts as frequent. Still, at least in recent years, we did converse via email a lot more often.

During his funeral I discovered, quite by accident, that he enjoyed reading this blog. He thought I had a way with words and he read each new post aloud to my Aunt, who has severely restricted eyesight. I find that to be one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received.

Most people knew Dean as polite and subdued. They also understood that, after a life as a salesman, he was also a talker, with a sly sense of humor. I think you get a sense of his impishness in the picture above. It’s one that I took of him in 1968.

Dean was as close to the model of a real gentleman as anyone I have ever known. Oh, he could be stubborn, all right, that is very true. But he was steadfast in his beliefs without being offensive. He might state his position and defend it with resolve, but he would listen politely to yours, without rancor.

He would have been a great politician in another era; back when elected officials still had enough civility to respect viewpoints that disagreed. I know, because I was not always on the same page, politically, with him. He was far more conservative than I will ever be. But our disagreements were as low-key as disagreements ever get, because I respected him as a person. I like to think he felt the same way about me.

His family meant everything to him. You could see it in his eyes when he spoke about them. He loved his wife, and the two of them have an enviable legacy. His daughters, my cousins, are delightful, loving people. His son-in-law seems cut out of a similar mold.

His grandchildren are pious, respectful and intelligent; the kind of kids any parent or grandparent would be delighted to acknowledge. They are all quite a testament to the man he was.

He was generous and helpful to his friends and neighbors, and they turned out en masse for his funeral. I overheard one of the many mourners say, “Dean was good people.” It seems he was a marvelous role model not only to his family, but to his community, as well.

His only failing, as far as I can tell, was to leave us all far too soon.

Rest in peace, Uncle Dean.

Recently, while visiting my grandchildren in Florida, I came across an interesting article in the local paper. Actually, interesting isn’t the right word. Disgusting is more like it.

The Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, pushed through an initiative in that state’s legislature to require drug testing for welfare applicants. It took effect in July.

It mandates that all new welfare applicants must go to a state-approved list of screening companies when they apply for assistance and pay money they can ill afford, up front, for a drug test. If the test comes back negative, they receive the assistance they applied for and the state reimburses them the testing cost.

I know a lot of you are saying, so what?

Well, given the condition of the economy, the mandate is churning out 2,000 urine tests for new applicants each month. The State of Florida maintains this won’t increase their budget, because they’re “absorbing those reimbursement costs in the block grant.”

In other words, they’re using Federal tax money, allocated to them to provide real assistance to the poor, to pay a testing company.

“The program was designed,” said Florida State Representative Jimmie Smith (also a Republican) who sponsored the bill in the Florida State House, “to keep public money from being wasted on people using it to buy drugs.” This is for a program that pays a maximum of $180 per month per family of four.

By the way, have you tried recently to feed, cloth and house a family, of any size, for $180 a month? I’m sure the meager assistance helps, but it doesn’t go far.

The interesting thing? They have discovered the “scourge” of poor people using drugs is far from a scourge.

In fact, the numbers show that people on government assistance don’t use drugs any more than anyone else. They may even be using them less. Almost 98% of all tests are negative.

So, the net effect of those transfer payments is a very large chunk of Federal money (nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, so far) which is supposed to provide much-needed assistance to the poor, has now been diverted to the coffers of private for-profit companies.

This is where “disgusting” comes in. When asked about this, Rep. Smith replied, “My goal is to make sure our tax dollars go where they’re supposed to go.”

I see. Let me make certain I have this straight:

• The Republican-led government of Florida believes poor people, simply because they are poor, are very likely to use drugs;
• Therefore, the Florida government takes Federal funds intended to help the poorest of the poor and gives those funds instead to for-profit businesses;
• Florida legislators have taken almost $750,000 – so far – that could, and rightfully should, provide assistance for a whole year to almost 350 families living far below the poverty level;
• They spend it instead to catch the two percent of welfare assistance applicants who might be using drugs;
• By their own statistics, they are thereby saving the taxpayers of Florida a whopping total of $14,000 annually.

Spend $750,000 to save $14,000? This is helping?

Gosh, Representative Smith and Governor Scott must be so proud. The sound bites on TV make them seem so concerned about the misuse and fraud perpetrated by the poor.

Unfortunately, their rhetoric is a diversion from the real issue, their own gross mismanagement. It sounds like the typical mantra of prejudice and bigotry we hear all too often lately from our public officials on the conservative side of the aisle. Their words are meant to disguise their own ill-conceived, crude and sterotyped perceptions, as well as mask their inept handling of our tax dollars.

I can almost hear them: Take it from the poor, baby, they can’t fight back. Don’t worry about the “cattle” in the general populace, they’ll believe anything if you tell it to them long enough.

I’m almost sorry I read the paper.

I was updating this blog and my writing web site, Broken Glass, when I came across a blog written by another writer I admire and have met several times in a writing conference setting, Cindy LaFerle.

It was a peculiar piece of happenstance, because Cindy’s blog on August 23, 2011, happened to be about another writer we both knew, Margo LaGattuta. It seems Margo died on August 22nd. I did not even know she had been ill.

I wish I could say we were good friends. She was a lively, energetic person who loved the written word almost as much as she enjoyed teaching writing techniques to all the “wanna-be” authors who would flock to her writing conference sessions (myself included).

Her passing comes at a time when there are other, closer, tragedies that weigh heavily on our family, and remind me that we are all just temporary occupants of this time and place.

The events of the past few days served as my inspiration for this update, because they reminded me of the photograph I took, above, of the wonderfully peaceful Gothic cloister garden in the Dominican Monastery in Dubrovnik, Croatia, built in 1315. I cannot describe, not with any words that would do it justice, the overwhelming sense of peace that occupied that place.

It is a peace I wish I could share with my own family, and Margo’s, as we go through difficult times. Time can seem to slow to a crawl when adversity raises its ugly head, while seeming all too swift in retrospect.

The first stanza of a poem Margo wrote (and Cindy also featured) resounds loudly in my mind right now. We cannot know each other’s heart, or the duration of our time in history.

Therefore, we should always appreciate each event, in every day, as something that forces us to pay attention to our existence. We need to both honor and cherish our history and our heritage in order to understand the direction of our future. Poets have had it right all along, love is eternal.

I CAME BY A RIVER
and the journey flashed
through me like a light
year. Some electric sound
got me moving from
the original place over
mountains and dusty
windows outside of time.

For the past month it’s happened to me again; another case of writer’s block on my blog. What do you write about when you don’t feel like anything new has happened?

It isn’t as though I’ve not done any writing in the past two months…I most certainly have. I just started building a web site, called Broken Glass, for my writing efforts. I’m working on short-story number fourteen and have a great idea for turning some of them into a themed anthology. I have entered several writing contests with new material and just began working on a 300-word online Flash Fiction Challenge. I also have extensive notes written down for another story idea that occurred to me on a recent sleepless night.

The stories in my head are endless. All it takes to write them is the resolve to do it. Yet lately when I’ve sat down to write on this blog nothing comes to mind.

Then I came across this photo (above). It’s a picture of my grandson taken on one of his visits. He’s sitting on the beach at the lake, totally absorbed in his playing. Some of the toys in the picture his father used on the same beach. It seems like eons ago sometimes. At other times it feels like yesterday. I like the photo, for obvious reasons.

I also like it for reasons that have to do with the “why” of this blog. I created “Painting With Light” in the first place to explore the creation of good images with a camera. I think this shot illustrates the strength of a good composition.

The main action of the image, my grandson, is placed in the bottom and left third of the picture. The angled line of the water leads your eye to the tree and the branches of the tree lead your eye back through the picture to the tiny swimmer’s buoy in the lake, which directs your eye back to my grandson. Your eye is directed, probably without your conscious realization, through the whole image.

I purposely waited until there were no boats or beachgoers in the shot, to strengthen the image of a little boy concentrating on his play. I didn’t leave him undisturbed, because I did the typical grandparent thing … calling his name to get him to look at the camera. But those images, as cute as I think they are, are not as strong as this one.

And funny thing … my writing block is gone.

I’ve been guilty of being sidetracked by the incessant political-speak on our airwaves. It’s hard to remember a time in the past two years the cymbal-clashing has been silent.

It makes me ashamed to get caught up in the finger-pointing, ‘we said/they said’ rhetoric. I wish our politicians would all grow up and learn what they really need to do is demonstrate some cooperation in getting the problems of the country fixed.

I’m not naive enough to think it would really happen, given the almost childish attitudes of our elected officials and the vehement polarity evoked by their lust for power, but I can always hope that somewhere people really do behave with civility, respect and a sense of common purpose.

However, I know all too well that probably only happens in Narnia (Google “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” if that doesn’t ring a bell), where even the animals know good from evil.

So I’ll content myself with talking about painting with light, which is why this blog began in the first place.

Photography, like all art, takes advantage of the way light is perceived to produce its special results. Like the picture above, where the dark shadows purposely frame the flower basket in the distance and the lines of perspective lead your eye into the light at precisely that point. In any good image, light and shadow work together to create the whole.

Darn it! There I go talking politics again.