Author's Note: I wrote this on July 22 and am only posting it today - August 6. I had to think about it for a while to decide whether or not I even wanted to publish it. Finally decided to.

I don’t normally bitch about the service in fast food restaurants. They’re all understaffed, usually by people who are there out of necessity, not desire. There’s enough nastiness in the world without me adding to it, so when things take longer than I’d like, or something goes awry, I try to be patient, understanding and accommodating. But after today my patience with the Wendy’s in Wasilla is spent.

Rewind to a few months back. My wife and I stopped to get dinner around 5:30 on a weeknight. The drive thru was packed, so we went inside. The dining room was also packed. After standing in line for a full twenty-seven minutes, without being told anything by any of the employees, including the managers who were wandering around aimlessly behind the counter, my patience was, like today gone. I finally walked up and asked the kid at the register, who was clearly overwhelmed and panicked by whatever was happening, if we could expect to place an order within the next ten minutes. He told me no. So we walked out and went somewhere else. Like I said at the beginning, I try not to be that guy who complains about everything like some entitled prick, a male Karen. We all have bad days, problems, stress. Being rude and nasty because I didn’t get my way is juvenile and helps nothing. So that brings us to today.

My wife and I were out and about on a Saturday and stopped at that same Wendy’s around two in the afternoon. Again, we went into the dining room. There was a line, not big, but it was obvious we were going to be waiting a few minutes to place our order. We were ok with that. Even fast food takes a few minutes to prepare. While we were waiting we struck up a conversation with a nice lady in line behind us, and at one point we overheard the young lady working at the register speaking to a customer. Her tone was utterly rude and dismissive, as if the customer was inconveniencing her by being there instead of paying her wages by making a purchase. The three of us even commented on it briefly, expressing our disbelief that an employee would speak to a customer that way. It took a few minutes, but we finally got our turn to order. The same young lady who’d just been so unwelcoming to that other patron took our order. My wife ordered first, and when she was done, the first words the girl asked were something like, “Is that it?” in that same snotty, irritated voice. It creased my brow a bit, but we soldiered on with placing our order. Each time we stopped speaking for even a brief moment, the same type of phrase with the same tone came out. “Is that it?” The question was accompanied by a frown of borderline disgust on the girl’s face, and by the time we were done telling her what we wanted and were ready to pay, I was good and irritated. My wife and I really make an effort to treat others the way we’d like to be treated, and this girl was about as rude as I’ve ever seen anyone act toward a customer anywhere. You don’t act that way in business. Ever. When it was time to pay, I put my debit card in the machine and entered the pin number. She got our drink cups while the machine was doing its thing. I couldn’t tell when it was done; the screen didn’t display a message telling me to remove the card, nor did the girl say anything, she just stood there staring at me. I was waiting to be handed my receipt, or told that the transaction was complete, and while I waited for some kind of acknowledgement, I picked up the drink cups. I looked up at the girl and was about to ask if I could take the card out when, in an even more aggrieved and haughty tone she looked at me with utter disgust and said, “Those are your drink cups!” That was it. I barked back. I don’t remember what I said, but it was something like, “Yeah, I know those are my drink cups!” I’m sure I had a bit of an angry look on my face, and my tone left no doubt that I was displeased with the service I’d just received. What surprised me was the girl’s reaction. She immediately backed away from me, raised her hands to her face, and started to cry. I’d been expecting another snide comment. It was immediately obvious to myself, my wife, and the nice lady behind us that this girl was most likely on the spectrum, as people sometimes say. Autistic. This is not something I know for sure, but my wife and I, and our conversation companion, all suspected that was the case. I felt horrible. She probably had no idea how she was coming across. The nice lady we’d been chatting with did a great job of calming her down so the girl could take her order while my wife and I found a table to wait for our food.

We rarely eat fast food, but when we do, Wendy’s in one of our favorites. I don’t know the owners of that restaurant or any of the employees, but I would like to ask how in the hell they could put that poor kid in that situation. They could easily have had her doing something else. At the very least they should have had someone helping her take orders. And look, I get it. It’s very hard to get people to work, especially at fast food places, and when you have someone, you use them wherever they’re needed. It’s that way everywhere. This situation, and the extreme delay I described earlier, are symptoms of a different problem. Management. I’ve seen poorly managed businesses in a variety of industries. That restaurant has provided me with the two most ludicrous experiences I’ve ever had when trying to make a purchase of any kind, at any point in my life.

We never got an explanation for the long wait. I even filled out a comment form on the Wendy’s corporate website. Never heard a word from them in response. That too is poor service which is likely also a symptom of poor management. I don’t expect a free Baconator or anything for writing this, not looking for refunds or make-it-right giveaways. But I would like whoever owns that store to be aware of the kinds of experiences their customers are having. A member of our family worked doing Door Dash for a while, and told us that he completely ignored orders from that restaurant. Other people have mentioned another Wendy’s location in our area, and exclaimed about how much better the service is at that one. I believe it, and even though it’s a twenty-minute drive farther from our house than the other store, we may just start going to that one when we want Wendy’s.

Good news to report! I found an artist who is currently working on the cover for Blackfire 3. Look on Twitter or Minds for @neutronboar if you want to see some examples. He does all the cover art for my buddy, the sci-fi author Black Knight, which is where I found him. Speaking of Black Knight, his Starshatter series is great fun! Look him up on Amazon if you like your sci-fi action packed. One other note on BF 3: I submitted my copyright application to the US Copyright office a month ago, and as of April 29 it’s still ‘Active’. Which means they haven’t approved it yet. I know they will eventually. My other five books have taken between three and six weeks each to be approved. Still no release date yet for the next book, but it should be fairly soon. I’m hoping within a month or two. 
 
Blackfire 4: Worked on this a bit today, although it’s been slow going the last few weeks. Summer is coming in Alaska, which means much of my free time will be spent outside in our enormous yard. In summer I write on rainy days or when I’m really inspired by something. If I get 30k words written between May and September, I’m happy. So how many words is BF4 at right now? 12,358. And I just got an idea while typing this, so I’m finishing up, posting, and getting back to work. Cheers!
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Short Stories: I finished one a week ago called Patchouli Puke. It is by far the weirdest story I've ever written. This one really stumped me for an ending, which is unusual. Generally as I'm going along I'll have an idea for how I want the story to end, and it just takes itself there. Not this time. It got to about 12k words and completely stalled. I pondered it for a month, wrote a couple shit paragraphs which I threw away almost as soon as they were done, and I was starting to wonder if I'd ever finish it when finally inspiration struck. What a relief to have it done. I'm a little OCD about unfinished tasks. It bothers the hell out of me if I start something and don't finish it, which I guess serves me well in writing. One other note about PP - it features hallucinogens, the International Space Station, and MC Escher. Had another idea for a short story that I was able to crank out over 2k words on today. This one is about a tycoon who has cancer and has his body cryonically frozen until the disease can be cured. I currently have 11 short stories  (10 finished) with a word count of 100,583. Damn near ready for another book of them!

What’s the point? What is it all supposed to be leading us to? By ‘it’ I mean the notions about how the world should be that the disparate viewpoints among us constantly scream about. If we approach my questions in terms of the political spectrum, both left and right have their visions of the future world. Both sides believe, quite strongly, that their way is best, right, moral, equal, and least destructive to the environment, social groups, the economy, or whatever their favored group/demographic/issue is. In the world at large Islamic fundamentalists want to bring Sharia law to the globe, impose their will on us all. Klaus Schwab fervently predicts that we will all own nothing and be happy. Opposing and conflicting views are everywhere. We are bombarded with opinions, inundated with rhetoric begging, cajoling, bargaining with and threating us for our support. But for what? What does the end look like? Who is the one who will say, “Alright folks, we’ve made it to Utopia, go live your lives in peace forever and ever”? And perhaps more importantly, when will those words be said and what will that Utopia look like?

You might now be asking yourself, what’s the point of this essay? That’s the easy part – happiness. That’s it. That’s what I’m writing about. We are all looking for it in our own ways. Some of us are lucky enough to have found it. Good for them. I wish them the best in life wherever they are in the world. What interests me more than the happy people, however, are the unhappy people and why there are so many of them. I read a piece of news today about an individual who was arrested for “Terroristic Threatening”. This person made a phone call and indicated that a public facility was going to be shot up. It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that this individual was unhappy about something. How many stories like this, and far worse, do we hear about every day? 

Look at any protest, over any issue, anywhere in the world and what will you find? Unhappy people. Iran has been roiled by protests for a number of years over that country’s strict theocratic and repressive government. Lots of Iranian people are angry. In America we’ve seen the group known as Antifa riot in numerous cities and destroy millions of dollars of property because they’re angry. Even the Chinese have been protesting over their communist government’s draconian covid lockdowns. Those people were also angry. There are protests all over the world almost every day if one cares to look for them. Because people all over the world are angry. The issues and reasons change with the time zones, but there is still that singular emotion fomenting and propelling them all – anger.
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I’d like to think that humanity is moving toward some form of… I don’t want to say enlightenment; we’ve already had that age, and the word is overused, nearly archaic at this point in time. I don’t want to say awakening either because that word is really overused. So, I’ll say nexus, locus, a point where all these unrelated events and their corresponding timelines intersect and what has been promised, predicted, and envisioned for decades becomes reality. What happens then? What’s the outcome? The New World Order? Klaus Schwab owns everything? Christ comes back? The Hidden Imam comes out of hiding? Ragnarok? The apocalypse? Peace on earth and goodwill toward men? The answer depends on who is speaking. There are countless visions of how the world should be and countless people working to make them reality. I just hope that when all the anger and protests are done that they don’t leave behind only sadness.

​Humans just have to have answers. We’re obsessed with the unknown, with mysteries, with solving puzzles. It was recently reported that a decades-old case from Philadelphia known as the Boy in the Box was partially solved. He’d been unidentified since being found in 1957, and authorities were able to determine who he was based on DNA. Many old cases have been solved using DNA. There’s even one from my hometown of Tacoma, Washington that was solved in this manner, one that I had a personal connection to. A young girl named Jennifer Bastian disappeared in 1986. She was found murdered a couple weeks later. Her killer was ultimately caught many years after the fact, in 2016 to be precise, largely because of DNA evidence. How, might you ask, could I be connected to this horrific crime? Her parents bought their house from the parents of a childhood friend of mine; they lived two blocks from me. Her sister and I went to the same school; she was a year or two ahead of me, Jennifer was a bit younger. I was passingly acquainted with them both. The story was all over the news for weeks and months, as one would expect, but for years it was a cold case, a mystery, until DNA caught the psycho who did it. 
Why do I mention these two sad and depressing cases? Because they are indicative of how the need to solve a mystery can lead to… I hate the word closure. Nothing is ever closed, neatly sewn up and put away, for the families of murder victims, as that word implies. I’ll say finalized instead. Maybe that’s not exactly the right word, but I like it better than the over-used, and in my opinion inaccurate, closure. Pardon the digression; back to our topic. The examples I cited display outcomes that most people would probably consider favorable, if not exactly happy. But there are others that are more innocuous, more mundane but in their own ways maybe equally as sensational.
How about the Titanic? Does anyone remember the time before it was found resting on the bottom of the Atlantic? I do. It was a famous shipwreck, sometimes seen on old tv shows like 'In Search Of', but not much more than that, and it certainly wasn't the global phenomenon it became after its discovery and the subsequent eponymous movie. All that aside it was a mystery that people felt needed to be solved, and a group of explorers finally did. 
Ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript? It’s a famous illustrated codex purportedly from the early fifteenth century. It’s written in an unknown language that baffled code breakers and academics for decades, even centuries. Many have claimed to have deciphered all or parts of it, with varying degrees of academic acceptance. Whether or not it has been decoded accurately is for others to decide. What I find interesting is that so many have tried over the years. It’s another mystery that humans cannot stop themselves from trying to solve. 
There are mysteries everywhere. From the Challenger Deep to the edge of the known universe, we are searching for answers to questions. How were the pyramids built? Is there life on other planets? Does God exist? Who really killed Kennedy? When the hell is that guy going to publish Blackfire 3? 
There’s an old adage: Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought it back. I hope there never comes a time where every puzzle has been solved, every question answered. The world is much more fun with a bit of mystery in it.

I read a news article the other day about some new discovery astronomers made. If you pay attention to the news like I do, you'll see these stories relatively frequently. The recently deployed Kepler telescope has been finding all sorts of new things, as are the various probes and rovers that are currently transiting the solar system or traversing the Martian terrain. That stuff is fascinating to me. I'm old enough to remember the very first Space Shuttle launch, the Hubble launch and subsequent retrofit/upgrade, and many other milestone events in the history of space exploration. But one thing that has always both intrigued and baffled me is the Big Bang. I'm not smart enough in science terms to debate or challenge it, so until some other theory comes along, I'll take it at face value. But one thing I don't understand is how the earth, our terrible, beautiful home, can be so far away from the point in space where the event actually happened. I wrote the piece below while pondering that seemingly incongruous fact. If someone out there reads this and can explain it in layman's terms, I'd be tremendously grateful.

How is this possible? Telescopes can see billions of years into the past, nearly to the time of the Big Bang. I don’t dispute that. We know how far light can travel in a year and even have a galactic unit of measurement for that - the cleverly monikered light year. What I don’t get is this. When the big bang happened, presumably all of the material in the known universe was gathered in one place, one single chunk of mass that exploded and created the universe as we know it. If that’s true, and our science instruments can see billions of light years into the past, then how did the material the earth is made from get so far away from the point in space where the big bang happened? That would mean this matter has been moving away from that point in space and time like a car driving down a highway, and presumably at the speed of light. If a telescope can peer ten billion years into the past, based on the speed of light and all that, then what we now consider our planet, the molecules that comprise it, must have been moving at the speed of light too (or faster), in order to end up so far away from the origin, right? I've read that the universe is expanding, but at what speed? Is our galaxy flying away from the Big Bang at the speed of light or faster? Here’s another way to think about it. Let’s say a ball is hit by a batter in a baseball game, the impact of the two represents the big bang. The ball is a home run; it leaves the park and lands in the seats where it stops moving. The ball represents earth at this point in time, right now as I type this. Now let’s say that the spot where the bat connected with the ball, that actual point in midair above home plate, emits light and that a fan out there in the stands next to the ball looks down on the field with a telescope or something to that spot where bat met ball. The fan can tell how far away in distance and time home plate is from where the ball is by measuring that light. So if light is the fastest moving thing known to man, and from what I know that's a true statement, then in order for the ball to be that distance from home plate, shouldn’t the ball have had to travel just as fast, or faster, than light in order to get that far away from the point of origin, from the Big Bang? Or do I just not know what the hell I’m talking about? That last one is entirely possible when it comes to this kind of stuff.

November 11, 2022

Some time ago I decided I wanted to read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, so I bought the unabridged three volume set on eBay. It's an incredible piece of literature and commentary; I strongly encourage everyone to read it. One story he relates really struck me, and in fact inspired me to write the short story you'll find below. He talks about a woman who was a true believer in Communism. She was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, and wrongly imprisoned, like so many innocent Soviet citizens were. Even after seeing the deprivation, brutality and horror of the Soviet penal system, she never renounced her Communism, and in fact claimed her imprisonment was her own fault! That anecdote got me thinking about modern times and how many of us, despite overwhelming evidence, are so staunchly entrenched in our own ideologies that we ignore, or just don't see, the truth of events happening around us. 

This story is about that, about the refusal (or psychological and emotional inability) to change one's mind about ideology. But it's about a few other things too. Once I got started writing it, ideas just started coming out that I'd never planned on. It happens that way with me and my stories. Ordinarily I'd keep this one tucked away until I was ready to publish it in a collection, but after the midterm elections, I felt it was time to let it out of its virtual cage, also known as my hard drive. It will be included in the next short story collection I publish, whenever that might be, but for now I hope anyone who's made it this far reads and enjoys it. 

There have been a couple instances over the last few days of climate activists committing acts of vandalism and destruction as a form of protest. It’s happened before. Remember the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) committing arson against car dealerships? In the UK two anti-oil activists poured tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting. A short time later another group visited a grocery store, also in the UK, and proceeded to remove milk from the cooler and pour it on the floor. I guess I can (sort of) intellectually understand the Van Gogh event, even though I completely disagree with the tactic. He’s a world-famous painter and defacing one of his works was certain to draw attention, even if it didn’t create much sympathy for their cause. The pouring out of the milk I don’t understand at all, nor do I really want to do any research to find out if the perpetrators voiced a rationale for their actions. They’re idiots and I don’t have any interest in what they have to say. Pouring out milk that some mother might want to buy so she can feed her kids is not protesting. It’s utterly petty and self-centered. The goal of these activists is, ostensibly, to stop “climate change”, which would, presumably, ensure that everyone on earth lives some sort of climate-utopian better life. What that would actually look like I don’t know, and I’m not sure they do either. The bottom line is if you want to protest something, vandalism and the destruction of property are not the way to convince people your cause is just. 

I’m not going to get into the whole ‘is climate change real’ debate here, other than to say I believe it is changing because it always has changed. The simple fact that it’s possible to find fossils of aquatic life on ten-thousand-foot-tall mountains, or the remnants of tropical flora buried under the arctic tundra should be enough to prove that fact. What I do not believe is that driving my car is going to destroy the planet. 

So, what were these activists actually protesting? Oil. Among other things. One of the most terribly bad, horrifically evil supervillains, according to climate change activists, is the oil industry. They’ll tell us things like, if we don’t stop drilling, the entire world will look like Mars or the moon in three years. Or something. And exactly how bad are oil companies and the products they produce? Well, I have a bit of experience there, because for six and a half years I actually worked in an oilfield – Kuparuk on Alaska’s North Slope. I can’t speak about other fields and the companies that operate them, but Kuparuk was the most environmentally conscious place I’ve ever been. 

Here are just a few examples:

Wildlife has the right of way at all times. Herds of caribou, thousands of them, move through the field each summer. If there is a caribou, or three hundred, on a road blocking traffic, everyone stops. They don’t harass them or blare their horns. Everyone waits until they move. That’s true regardless of what animal might be in the road. I once sat in a pickup truck for fifteen minutes waiting for a red fox to decide it wanted to trot off into the tundra. Interfering with the animals or walking on tundra in summer without permission is punishable by termination. 

There are pipelines there that carry all sorts of products other than oil from one facility to another. They’re built on pilings or columns above the ground, and not just a few inches either; many of them are six or eight feet up. I once watched a training video where a biologist explained one of the reasons why they’d been built so far off the ground. It’s so the caribou can walk under them when the snow melts in summer. They actually studied the caribou herds and determined an ideal height for the pipelines. 

There is also a full-time spill response team that will respond to a spill like a fire department would to a fire. (Oh, they have one of those too – with huge fire trucks and everything.) Any liquid spill consisting of more than a cup, I mean a measuring cup like you’d find in a drawer in your kitchen, requires notification of the spill response team. I remember one incident in winter when a piece of equipment blew a hydraulic hose. There was a trail of hydraulic fluid droplets that covered an area maybe twenty feet by twenty. A coworker and I spent a half hour out in the sub-zero cold digging those tiny little droplets out of the snow and dumping it in hazmat bags so that it could be taken to a hazardous waste facility for disposal. There was so little hydraulic fluid on the ground that if that had happened on the gravel driveway at my house, I would have ignored it. But not up there. If that spill hadn’t been reported, the management at that facility could have faced serious repercussions, including termination, for not reporting it. 
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What’s the point of all this? The point is that there are oil companies out there who do it right. Who actually do care about the environment and about the health of their employees. Maybe the anti-oil activists should do a little research about oil companies before they go throwing their lunch on a masterpiece painting. 
 
 
Mark Sowers
Wasilla AK
October 16, 2022

I don’t care what continent your ancestors came from. The level of pigmentation in your skin doesn’t mean shit to me. Your brown eyes, blue eyes or green eyes; your straight hair, curly hair or no hair; your accent, language or guttural grunts: none of them matter to me. At all. I don’t care. Wail, scream and gnash your teeth at how “oppressed” one group is compared to another. Perform all the logical and linguistical contortions you want in order to make everything about race. Just don’t tell me I’m bigoted simply because I don’t agree with you.

I don’t care what gender you are attracted to. Your preferred pronouns, your self-designated abbreviation(s) LGBTQ+-!?&*$# are utterly without meaning for me. Marry whoever the hell you want to. Marry a damn doorknob. I don’t care. Just don’t try to indoctrinate my kids into your world. They’re from mine, and they’re going to stay there.

I don’t care how vegan you are. If you want to wait until the apple falls off the tree and lands on the ground before you eat it because the tree might feel pain if you picked that same apple while it was still attached to that tree, then starve. If you are completely comfortable eating engineered foods that mimic something real, like those fake eggs they advertise on tv, then knock yourself out. Just don’t tell me I have to eat them too. I like real eggs and I’m not going to give them up. If you don’t want cheese on your portabella “burger”, then don’t have it. I don’t care. But don’t tell me I can’t have a triple Baconator from Wendy’s. With cheese.

I don’t care if you want to protest because your side lost some court case, or some event happened that hurt your delicate little feelings. Protest away. It’s your right as a citizen of the United States. But you do not have the right to riot, throw Molotov Cocktails, try to intimidate others, and generally act like a spoiled four-year-old whose tyrannical parent just took away their favorite toy because things didn’t go the way you wanted them to. Grow up and learn to deal with disappointment and losing. It’s going to happen to you again soon, in one form or another. Get used to it. If you want to carry a sign proclaiming your position on some issue, go right ahead. I don’t care. Just don’t tell me I have to accept you burning down a city because you lost or you’re mad about something.
 
I don’t care if you want to drive an electric car because you think the world will end if you don’t. I don’t care if you cover your house in solar panels and erect so many windmills you can’t walk out your door without getting smacked in the head by a rotating blade. Those things kill birds in the thousands, but by all means, save the world from the dreaded greenhouse gases. Just don’t tell me I can’t drive my truck or heat my house. Nature was here long before us, will be here long after we’re gone, and she always seeks to find balance. By the way, North America and most of Europe used to be covered by glaciers. Where did they all go? Did all the car and factory exhausts from twenty thousand years ago melt them? So go right ahead with your “green” efforts. Compost your own shit if you want to. I don’t care. Just leave me and my John Deere riding lawn mower alone. It’s got a cupholder (!) and I like driving it.

I don’t care about the latest celebrity scandal. It makes not one iota of difference to any of the problems in the world what some slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, drooling moron wore to some awards show no one watched. And that goes double, maybe quadruple, for politicians at the Met Gala. The pronouncements of Hollywood’s denizens mean nothing to me. The hypocrisy and idiocy emanating from that gaping, frothing, suppurating pustule of a self-righteous enclave smells worse than the world of The Walking Dead would if it were real. So read your tabloids, follow all the hottest celebrities on the social platform du jour, and accept their uneducated, incoherent and infantile mumblings as equal to a proclamation from Socrates. I don’t care. Just don’t tell me I have to pay attention to that offal too.
 
I don’t care how you live your life. Drink to excess or be a teetotaler. Smoke all the weed you want to. Or don’t. Live under a freeway overpass and shoot poison into your veins with a needle if that’s what you want to do. I don’t care. But don’t show up on my land looking to rob my house or harm my family to get your drugs. I have lots of guns and a big dog who doesn’t like strangers. So, if you want to get tanked every night, or obliterated on the dope of your choice, go right ahead, I don’t care. Just don’t drive when you’re wasted. That’s a total dick move.
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I don’t care what you think of my politics and opinions. You won’t find me out marching in the streets. I much prefer writing to chanting. Slogans get old. Then they start to sound weird. Don’t believe me? Try it. Pick any word or phrase and say it over and over again for a minimum of three minutes straight. It begins to sound and feel like gibberish, like it’s not even real words anymore. That’s what your slogans are to me. You won’t convince me to change my mind, and I’m probably not going to convince you to change yours, although I admit I would be happy if I did. So go on and chant away, and I’ll keep my opinions, thank you very much, and you keep yours. I don’t care. 
 
…
 
You know what? I changed my mind. I do care. A lot. And I’m paying attention. Are you?
 
 
Mark Sowers
May 11, 2022
Wasilla Alaska