I walked down Walnut Street yesterday thinking I'd drop into a local watering hole for a little refreshment.

Just about 2 blocks from where I live is Cahootenanny's. Since they opened a few years ago, I've sort of avoided the place. No reason, the domed building was once a dive called the Dome, then a great italian restaurant, and then another italian restaurant/bar. The place was always small, crowded, and I spent too much of my misspent college years there.

Immediately, I ran in to a couple of friends and sat down to chat. At that point, who walks out from the kitchen? Jeff, owner of Mid City Grill. Suddenly, I notice the fliers all over the place!

Jeff has temporarily set up shop at Cahootenannys! They have a limited menu - just 5 items, but they're first class! Da Big Daddy, Tofu Burger, fries, and a couple other items all served with his incrdible garlic sauce!!

I ordered a tofu burger! I love the tofu burger. That's a significant statement because I generally can't stand tofu in anything but frozen desserts. He complained that he didn't have the right type of bun or avacado, but I asked him to please make me one! It was great, Smothered in garlic apricot sauce, I closed my eyes and missed the Mid City Grill.

According to him, he will be opening up the new shop in about a month on Market Street across the railroad tracks from the usual block of downtown. I think this is going to be great! I've always wanted a reason to hang out on the wrong side of the tracks!

Mid City Grill, disembodied, but STILL one of the very best restaurants in town!

It was a great night! I had started out at Poor Richards writing a scenario for the Marvel Universe RPG that I'm dying to play (no dice!) I asked the bartender what her personal best drink was. She wanted to make me a Grateful Dead, but they had no pineapple juice. She ended up making a drink with vodka, long island iced tea mix, and some sweet and sour mix. She said that it was supposed to have Grand Marinier on top. I tasted it and it was very sour, so I asked if she could drizzle in a shot of blue curaco. She did and for a moment, the blue and the red colors looked like the superman logo. It was a new drink, so, in my head, I called it superman. I must have missed something, though, I don't know what she put in to make it red. Just before I left, a good samaritan bought me a jager-bomb. Jagermeister and red bull...it was suprisingly VERY good.

After a while I moved on to The Casbah which was actually OPEN! They had the TURNTABLE PIMPZ, DJs that actually had a good mix and a decent flow. Nothing fancy, but they played nothing but good stuff. My buddy Marion was working the door, so I spent a while catching up with him. I just don't get out like I used to, I'm usually too broke. Shirak made me a drink with Grey Goose vodka and cranberry juice. It was very tasty! I don't usually care for either.

Moving down the street I go to Cahootenannys! I've avoided the place since it opened under it's current name. No rational reason, really. Hippie and the lovely Cathy were there. I hung out with them and their hilarious friends for the rest of the night. A tofu burger and a bit of beer later, I was on my way home.

I had left my dog Verbal alone in the apartment. I've been working with him for months a little at a time so I can leave him without worrying that he will start tearing stuff up. Well, last night the trust ended. He tore up my books, my electronics from work, my comic books were scattered everywhere. He chewed on my PDA, I still haven't found the leather case. He scattered an entire ream of paper and knocked dirty dishes into the floor. I'm still not brave enough to venture into the living room to start cleaning the damage up.

I was furious and he knew why. He ended up sleeping in his cage all night to avoid my wrath. Luckily, the electronics he scattered seem to have been merely scattered not chewed on or damaged. Likewise most of the books seem to have had the same rough treatment, but little chewing. I think my Politically Correct Bedtime Stories is a total loss. It could have been worse, he could have chewed on cables or really rippeed things apart rather than scattering them. I'm still pissed off at the dog, though.

Naturally, to add insult to injury, I had a cramp in my leg this morning. Walking is currently agony, so here I sit on my Linux laptop writing blog entries.

I hope your day goes well...anyhow, I had a great night last night!

"My Hero," is our new video project. It's a short, about 10 minutes long and is going to be alot of fun.

The script is ready for production. Five of the seven speaking parts are cast and confirmed. I've got to get started on securing the two locations and nailing down the two remaining roles. One was written with a particular local business owner in mind. I need to talk to him since he also owns one of said locations.

What's it about? Loss. Love. Superheroes.

It's going to be a fan film, yea, but it's not going to be onoe of the mastebatory "I wish I was a superhero" fan films. My Hero is about telling an interesting story first and showing off cool superheroics second. (Don't doubt for a second though...the heroes will be in full effect with all their signature moves and powers!) We're bringing some Marvel heroes to life for better reasons than just to bring evildoers to justice.

I can't wait to get things rolling!

There are probably five things in life that I have a consuming passion for.

One of those things is creating original works of entertainment that people can enjoy. When I was four years old, I would take my parents cassette recorder and record radio shows doing several different voices to populate the show with different people. At ten I invited everyone on my block to watch me, my sister, my cousin, and the neighbor kids put on an improved "show" in the basement.

I wrote my first scifi story in 1982 after watching Roger Corman's "Battle Beyond the Stars." My first play was "An Almost Classic Late Halloween Story" when I was in 7th grade and my first film (written and cast) was on super 8 starring my Middle School teachers and administrators. I sold my first short story for publication when I was 17 (the magazine folded and they never paid me.) My senior year was fun. My dad bought a VHS camcorder and me and my buddy Chad made several improved shorts.

When I graduated high school I wanted to go to a collge with a great creative writing program, but my parents couldn't afford it so I went to ETSU in my home town of Johnson City, TN. Since I didn't want to do anything but write, I took theater classes to maybe pursue a local writing gig for my own troop of actors. I was in the theater program for one semester. Warren Robertson's Intro to Theater managed to kill any interest I had in working with the local theater scene. Where else could I go? I didn't really care about anything but writing or performing. In desperation,

I went to the one institution that had never let me down (because it catered to lowered expectations anyhow.) In 1990 I began to study broadcast television. I recieved some formal training to augment my natural ability. I did an episodic TV show in college, then a couple more over the next few years. I was one of the people who wouldn't wait for a class to teach me. I volunteered for anything that would give me hands on experience. For a while I ran the campus radio station. I shot news video for a couple local stations, I pulled cable in the dome, I did all the shit work that you're expected to do as you learn the ropes.

One day, Tom, my mentor in the TV program, encouraged me to apply for a job in the ITFS service on campus. ITFS was distance education, an evil merging of teaching and live TV. I got the job after a single short phone conversation with Lynn, the Operations Manager.

One day, Lynn told me that she needed someone who could build XLR audio connectors. The individual that could would get lots of extra hours. I immediately volunteered. The next thing I did was go to a buddy of mine in the engineer's office and learned how to make XLR connectors. As time went on, I had to learn more and more skills to make more money. One day ten years had gone by and I'd been a temporary employee the whole time. I was the only technician in the program, I'd worked on circuit boards, troubleshot countless problems, and earned quite a reputation as a problem solver. I got hired full time.

Then I realized that I hadn't done much more than scribble ideas in a notebook the whole time. I'd wasted years working when I should have been creating. (Well, Chad and I had done an ashcan type comic, but that was it apart from school work.) My buddy Jim started back to school and then wanted to get his master's degree. We shot a few videos for his projects and it awoke the creativity in me again! I had to do more! We did some videos for DragonCon TV and they were hugely popular at the Con.

I had created a website originally for friends who had moved away to keep in touch, then they stopped. When our videos went to DragonCon, I relaunched the site to promote my friends and I who had created the videos. Suddenly, I had all this web space and only so much we could physically produce. I opened a photo gallery to all of my artist friends, then I invited them to my apartment in an attempt to get these artists familiar with each other's work and working together to create a new style, a new movement.

Now, I've changed the website again. Now I include original videos, music, poetry, art, and sarcasm. I have to create and surround myself with these things because it's who I am and who I have always been.

Sometimes I think that I'm instant creativity, just add belief. If people believe in me and support my crazy ideas and schemes, then they will usually succeed, my problem is that I can't do anything alone. I NEED people prodding me, cheering me on to create these things.

Today, I had to tell the DCTV folks that because of my rotten job, we didn't get any of the videos I'd promised them finished. I feel like such an ass. The failure is mine, I've let my job totally overshadow my life's work. That has got to change. I've been a dreamer too long to let the real world drag me down now.

I'm sorry we don't have any new videos. Believe in me, though. If you do, we'll create something beautiful.

S.

I'm currently reading The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar by Steven Sora. The book's pretty much a bunch of speculation and guesswork, but it's written in such a scattershot order I've learned all kinds of historical fact that I never knew. Most impressively,it had a bunch of word origins!

"The Jewish religion came to fruition at a time when goddess cults were prevalent everywhere. The moon goddes was called Sin. Her mane exists today in the Sinai Peninsula, which separates Israel from Egypt. The Hebrew faith first made Sin a male lunar god and then dropped all such multiple gods. "Sin" came to signify something evil."

"The Achaean peoples of early Greece had a female-dominated culture that survived in the Olympic Games. The old king [kings were rotated yearly, was]often called Hercules (from his devotion to Hera, the Mother Goddess) was put to death. The new king, "Green Zeus," mated with the winner of the [women's]footrace."

"The Ressurection of Jesus, possibly the most imortant date in the Church year, was fixed by the spring solstice - and then named for a Celtic pagan feast day that the Church wished to eradicte. Easter was named for Eostre, goddess of the east, the spring and of course, fertility. She was depicted with a rabbit."

"In Celtic Europe and early cultures of the Levant, the oak tree represented knowledge. This throwback to nature religion never truly died away. The first letter of the alphabet in Celtic Europe were extablished for corresponding objects in nature. "D" in the Ogam alphabet was the seventh letter, "duir." From "D," we get our word for the product of the sturdy oak, the "door.""

"The Druids also took their name from duir the name of the sturdy tree. Druids were literally "Oak Knowers," practitioners of an ancient art of worship."

Words associated with the sciences of the druids still remain in our language. "Chronology derives from the name of the goddess who determined time. From India to Ireland, this dark goddess was "Kali," who measured both time and the lives of humans. We take our modern word calendar from her books of time, the Kalends. From the mother goddess herself came the word calibrate, meaning "to measure," and caliber which is the diameter(of a projectile.) The circle named for the goddess Circe, was divided by the diameter (Dia-Meter[the god-mother.]) In its center was the core, named for the goddess Kore. Radius takes its name from the course of the sun (Ra) crossing the circle to its center, or core."

"In Ireland, Kali's preiestesses responsible for watching the skies wore green (kelly green.) Our word for month is from moon, which in time of the goddess measured divisions of time."

"The word hour derives from the temple prostitutes of Babylon, each assigned one period of time to stand watch and make herself available to passerby and strangers. The "ladies of the night," those assigned temple duty in the evening, became the "whores.""

"Our word horoscope comes from horos, meaning "time," and scope meaning "watch." The horoscope is a product of the "time watchers.""

Night itself was named for the goddess Neith, who was known by that name from the Atlantic to Egypt.

There are several more that I might post later. Consider yourself educated!

Welcome to the demo of my new and improved blog, Ten Million Years to Earth!

So far, I am very pleased with the B2 Evolution blog software!

Ten Million Years to Earth is a variation on the alternate title of the brilliant Hammer Film "Quartermass and the Pit." For some reason, it was alternately titled "Five Million Years to Earth," a fscinating non sequitur. It wasn't "light years" to earth, but an incomprehensible measure of travel time.

The title stuck with me, independently of the movie, the collection of words was an odd one. "Five million years to earth" struck me as one of the lonliest, yet cosmic phrases I'd ever heard. It spoke to me of a single-mindedness, a determination that was beyond human comprehension. It is an impossible journey for any living creature to make. However, if there WAS such a creature, it would be so far beyond human that we might not even comprehend it's presence.

My blog is called "Ten Million Years to Earth" because it evokes the image of a long journey and a cosmicness that is tinged with the absurdity of the phrase. It also expresses a subtle understanding of the phrase and how it is percieved by the reader. I believe that the phrase's uniqueness and cryptology epitomize my way of thinking. Odd.