Oil World

I am really interested in alternative fuel sources, especially lately as gasoline prices go through the roof. I have three oil refineries surrounding my city and yet I still pay $3.15 a gallon for gas, and my cars only get 17-24 miles to the gallon. I hate math, so I'll leave the doing of it to you, but needless to say I, like most other Americans, pay a lot of money for gas every month. So I started looking into alternative fuel vehicles before I bought my most recent vehicle, and it seems the progress we have made in this area is surprisingly limited. On a lot of models it seems like the car manufacturers just slapped the word "Hybrid" on their vehicles to make people feel better. In all models that I looked at except the Toyota Prius, gas mileage was no better than 25 mpg! My Toyota RAV4 gets that on a regular gas engine. So why should I pay the extra $10,000 to get the same mileage? Fuel cell vehicles look promising, but they are also at least a year or two off and promise to be even more expensive than hybrids. So what if, for $7,000 to $10,000 , you could retrofit you current vehicle to run on a fuel that is plentiful, environmentally friendly, and that you can manufacture yourself? Well guess what? If it wasn't for your government looking out for your safety, you could!

There is a company in New Mexico, United Nuclear, that has designed and successfully tested a retrofit hydrogen fuel system that will work on modern gasoline engines. Check out their site and read the information. http://www.switch2hydrogen.com/ And even better, part of the package is a hydrogen generator that will create all the fuel you will ever need out of nothing more than air, water, and electricity. Too good to be true, you say? There must be a catch? Well, you're right. There is a catch. The Consumer Product Safety Commission shut down United Nuclear's program because some of the main components in their system could also be used for illegal fireworks manufacturing. Now, call me crazy, but do we really have an epidemic of illegal firewoks in our country right now? I know we have toys imported from China that are poisoning our children, and yet they still flow over the borders. I know that some of the commissioners were busy taking luxurious trips paid for by lobbyists and manufacturers, so they probably didn't have time to make sure that imported toys didn't have significant levels of lead paint, but they did take time out of their crowded travel schedule to take notice of the fact that some of the key components of United Nuclear's hydrogen fuel system could possibly be used to manufacture illegal fireworks. Here's a link to the CPSC's injunction against United Nuclear, if you are interested in reading the actual document. http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PREREL/prhtml07/07249.pdf

Who, I wonder, would have anything to gain by shutting this cutting edge technology down? Who would have the most to lose if this technology became prevalent? I think you already know the answer too. Big oil. And who is a major influence for big oil? Why, it's the President of the United States, George W. Bush, who continues to push Congress to give billions of your tax dollars to oil companies like Exxon, even when they are reporting record profits! Can you imagine what would happen to those companies if we could suddenly make our fuel with solar panels and water? I can think of many scenarios, among them a huge shift in our economy and a major change for a lot of people. People would lose jobs, and oil moguls like the Bush family would have to look for new ways to exploit Americans so they can maintain their standard of living. But at least our children might be able to look forward to having a planet that they could still live on. That would be nice.

Now, I know people love a good conspiracy, and many of us have heard stories about the guy who posted the design for an engine that gets 100+ mpg on the internet, and the next day the plans were gone and no one ever heard from the guy again. And Bob Lazar, the gentleman who runs United Nuclear catches some flack because he claimed to have worked at S-4, a super secret military base near Area 51 where he claimed to have studied and worked on the reverse-engineering of the propulsion systems of extraterrestrial space vehicles. Regardless of what you think of this, the fact remains that Lazar is a physist who has worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, so it would be an understatement to say he knows his science. The facts still remain that the US government, with whom Lazar has tangled before, took notice of this small science supply company. Why? Because they had a revolutionary idea that threatened interests at the highest levels of our government. With something like this hydrogen system powering our vehicles, we would no longer be beholden to the middle east for our oil and the costs for shipping products would drop dramatically. There would be difficulty, without a doubt, but this country has faced and overcome adversity far worse. That's part of what makes America great.

Feedback

Okay, this is going to be a blatant case of down-on-the-knees begging. I'm gonna do it, and I'm not ashamed. Ready? TALK TO ME, PEOPLE!! :-) I know there are a few of you who read this, and I appreciate it. I love it that there are people reading my words because I am an egomaniac and I need to be validated by having others tell me how much they think of me. No, what I really would like to see is just your comments or your thoughts on the subjects that I put out there. Boring? Fine, tell me. Lame? I know. What do you think is interesting? Let me know. Though I indulge my own little fantasy that people like to hear what I have to say, I know that I would like to hear what YOU have to say. Let 'er rip!

Age

I am 38 years old this month. That is getting dangerously close to 40. There is a lot of pressure to "succeed" before the age of 40, and though I don't usually think a lot about those sort of landmarks, this one is weighing on me. My 20th class reunion will be this summer and I don't think I will be attending. I tell myself that I there is really no one that I need to reconnect with, but I hereby admit that part of me is embarrassed that I am twenty years out of high school and still just plugging along. I never became an actor or a musician or made a million dollars. I still live in the same town, just a few blocks from the high school from which I graduated. I have a wife and three great kids, and I am proud of them, but I have no need to parade them in front of these people hoping that they will pat me on the back and tell me how wonderful my family is. Their opinion of me never mattered all that much then, why should it matter now?

I'll let you in on a little bit of geek truth. Yes, I was a geek in high school. Not a full-blown nerd, though I don't think I was very far from that, but still, I didn't play football or basketball or wrestle. I was in choir and drama, and I did pretty well. I was in the most prestigious choir in school, and my partner and I won the state championship for serious duo in competitive drama. Thanks for holding me together on that one, Traci. I still remember having to cut a couple of minutes out of a scene that we had been performing all season when one particularly competitive coach (TED!!!) timed us and found that we were over the allowed time limit. He threatened to file a complaint if we didn't get under the time limit, and I freaked. Traci held it together, though, and we did it and won state. That was a good year. However, the fact that I lettered in choir and drama was, and still is in some cases, a joke to a lot of people. So the bit of geek truth is, no matter how much we hated and resented those people who ostracized us because we didn't fit their ideal, we still want them to be impressed with us now that we are adults. We want to come to the reunion with better jobs and hotter wives and smarter kids than those jocks that laughed at us back in school. But WHY, for God's sake? Why should I care what they think? My wife loves me for who I am now, and my kids love me because I am their dad, why should I give a rat's ass what a complete stranger that I barely knew twenty years ago thinks about me? It upsets me to even acknowledge it.


But to return to the focus of this entry, when I think about my 20th class reunion, I begin to feel old. Not ancient, but at that point where a majority of people no longer consider me a young man. I have mentioned before that I have always had a youthful perspective on life, and think that I have a pretty young attitude, but if I ponder how old I am, I begin to feel older. So that got me thinking: how much of aging is dependent on how old you feel? I know that I am wiser in some areas of my life than I was when I was sixteen, and I know there are some things that I used to do when I was sixteen that I can't now that I am thirty-eight, but I still feel sixteen in my mind. So at what point to I begin to feel thirty-eight? Is sixteen the age at which I finally became fully aware of myself as a person and therefore am permanently fixed there, rooted in time? I just don't know, but when I'm sixty-four and my mind thinks I'm sixteen, I foresee problems.

Failure and Determination

I recently participated in Nathan Bransford's Surprisingly Essential First Page contest, found here: http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2008/01/surprisingly-essential-first-page.html That was a difficult thing for me to do, but I had a current work in progress that I thought I would put out there and see what kind of reaction it got. It didn't get shredded by the few people that took on the task of trying to critique all the entries (there were nearly 700) but it didn't get any "wows" either. And I didn't win. Or even make the finalists list. I don't think I was even considered to be honest, and I can see why. The finalists really did have awesome first pages, especially the winner. Duh, right? Well, often I can find a way of saying, "Pshaw, my stuff is as good as that." Ha! Not this time. There were some good pages. The winner, who went by Heather!Ann! wrote a great first page that I definitely want to read more of. Nicely done Heather, if that's your real name. I was impressed.

There's nothing quite like a contest to make you feel inadequate. Well, not if you win the contest, but if you don't even place in a contest like this you begin to question yourself. If my first page wasn't good enough to be in the top ten of 675, then how is it going to be good enough to stand out in the thousands of stories that agents see every day? One person commented on the blog after the contest and stated that he wished he had never entered, because now his confidence was shaken. I can understand that. But does that mean I'm going to quit. Nope. I don't think I'm going to get any worse at this whole writing thing, at least I hope not, so what do I have to lose? I keep writing, I keep getting better, and maybe one day, that awesome first page will be mine. I still have plenty of stories to tell, and who knows which one of those might be the one that makes everyone stop and think, "Hmm. This might be the next big thing."

Writers often hear stories of how many times they were rejected before they finally got a book deal, just as entrepreneurs and inventors hear about how many time businesses and inventions failed before they finally succeeded. That's what I like to keep in the back of my mind. Every failure is another step toward success. There are those who succeed with their first novels and I congratulate them wholeheartedly. Jessica Verday, one of the members of the Querytracker.net community just signed with Rachel Vater, and she had the enviable displeasure of having to choose between four well-known agents that offered to represent her book. Wow! Is that better than paying your dues and getting rejected hundreds of times? I would say so! I also think Jessica paid her dues through her work, perfecting and polishing it until it was ready to go out. Alas, such fortune did not occur for me. I have learned much, and I do believe I am improving, so I will continue to tap away. I will wear keyboards out. I will watch laptops go obsolete, and maybe one day, it will happen to me, too. I just hope I'm still young enough to enjoy it.

Ninja and the Geek

Yes, ninjas. I have had a fascination with the whole idea of the ninja ever since I saw Berry Gordy's "The Last Dragon" back in the '80s. Sho 'nuff! Great movie, for as campy as it seems now. Taimak was really fantastic in it and at one point he dressed up in shinobi shozoku, or ninja uniform, and went to rescue his girlfriend from a group of thugs that were holding her captive. One guy armed only with some throwing spikes (shaken) and his fists taking on gangsters with guns! Man that would be awesome! Completely insane, as I learned from years of martial arts training, but, hey, it was a movie. And it was a lot of fun. Anyway, that inspired me and several buddies to spend the summer of 1985 skulking around our neighborhood in really cool black uniforms that we ordered from some martial arts catalog, throwing cheap shuriken at poor, innocent trees. Yeah, we were living the dream. Never once were we spotted taking out those trees either. You better believe it.

In the next few years I did a lot of research into the martial arts that the ninja studied and their methods, and as is usually the case with these sort of fantastical characters, once you start to learn about them, you find your illusions being shattered. The real ninjas were mercenaries, spies, and assassins. They handled the jobs that were too dirty or dishonorable for the nobles or elite samurai. There is a very famous story of a ninja who hid in an toilet for three days until the nobleman he was hired to assassinate came in to use it. I mean down inside the outhouse hole. You know there wasn't going to be a samurai doing that. Certainly not the glamorous image of a black-clad warrior throwing deadly blades and then disappearing into a puff of smoke. Though they were used, they were always looked down on by the upper class. They were thugs and gangsters, and though they had their place, they were not respected in the culture of the time. And worst of all, ninjas almost never wore the black uniforms that we all associate so clearly with ninjas! Their objective was to blend in and get close to their target, so they would most often dress as samurai or monks or peasants, whatever allowed them to assimilate with their surroundings. A peasant ninja? How boring, right? But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Even when ninjas performed night raids, they often wore dark green or blue, even purple to blend with the natural colors of the night and the surroundings. A purple ninja?? I could hardly even stand the thought! So many of my preconceptions about what made the ninja so cool were disproved, and I found myself disenchanted with them. I studied the samurai for some time and found that though their code (bushido) was appealing, it turned out that many of them were just as bad as the ninja. So now what? Well, sadly, I gave up on them.

Then, after a long hiatus from the ninja obsession, broken only by the revival of GI Joe and Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, I played a game on PS2 called Ninja Gaiden, and you know what I decided? Who cares if the fantasy ninja never really existed? The fantasy is still fun and interesting. Yes, I know I'm probably too old to want to be a ninja, but I refuse to let it go. I probably won't be attending Ninja Academy this year, but I will always be a ninja in my mind. Who knows, I might even write a book. The world needs more ninjas.

New Year, New Goals

The New Year is upon us, and though I am not much into the whole "New Year's Resolution" thing, I do believe it is a good time to set new goals. It's just a natural starting place, and it is easy to remember. So, upon noticing that I have not put up a new post since October, I have set a goal for myself to have at least one new post every month. I know now that the world hungers for my unique perspective and worldview, and my pithy, intelligent delivery of ideas. Ha! Actually, I had someone mention to me that I had not posted on my blog recently, and that surprised me. "You read my blog?" I said. Yes. Someone is reading my blog! I have sitemeter tracking my visitors, so I can see that a few people have been visiting, but for some reason it still surprised me. So, with that audience in mind I will discipline myself and keep my blog up to date. Thanks to all of you, or should I say both of you :-) that are reading.

My next goal will be about my writing. I have expressed before my desire to become a published author, and I have been working toward that goal, but this year, I have decided to "turn pro" as Steven Pressfield puts it. If you are a struggling writer, artist, whatever, and you haven't read Pressfield's "The War of Art," you are doing yourself a disservice. This is a highly motivational and logical approach to navigating the road toward artistic accomplishment. One of the pieces of advice he gives in the book is that if you want to do whatever it is that you love for a living, then you have to approach it as a profession, not a hobby. If you want to be a writer, then you need to believe that you are a writer, and you need to approach your work like a professional. You have to commit to writing every day. You wouldn't miss a day of work unless you had to, so you shouldn't miss a day of writing either. You get the idea. And though I feel I have done well, I haven't done as well as I could or as I should, so this year, I will not make excuses and I will not be lazy. I will finish the drafts of my second novel and complete at least the first draft of my third. I'll let you know how I do.

Finally, I hope to help my good friend Patrick by contributing more to his wonderful website Querytracker.net. He has created an invaluable resource for authors like me who dream about being published one day, and though I was there when the idea came to us, Patrick has done all the work. I say this openly and publicly. This site is the product of his vision and his hard work, and I applaud him for that. I will try to find a way to become more involved in the future, though, because I believe in what he has done, and I believe that the site has great value to all aspiring authors. Thanks to all those who have supported us over the last year, and we hope you are enjoying Querytracker 2.0! Happy New Year, and thanks for reading!

Rite of Passage

My twelve-year-old son kicked my butt the other day. Not literally. No, he’s not quite there yet. But we were playing one-on-one in a Halo 3 Slayer match and he beat me. And not just by a little bit. I even think he might have let me get in a couple of kills just to make me feel better. Now, I don’t know how I should feel about this, but I can tell you how I do feel. I am ticked. I really want to beat him, but he is too good. He has surpassed me in this area. My wife points out that it is my own fault because I have raised them with video games, and that if I am going to feel anything besides shame for addicting them to brain-rotting, time-wasting, ultra-violent crap, (her opinion, not mine) that I should be proud that he has gotten so good. And I am proud. When it’s not me he’s shooting in the face with a shotgun.

I remember a while back watching an episode of “Home Improvement” where Tim Taylor is having problems with his oldest son, and Wilson tells him that his son is reaching a point in his life where a lot of cultures begin treating boys like men. They begin their training for adulthood with a rite of passage. In this particular episode, Tim let his son use the cutting torch for the first time, proclaiming him a man because he had cut metal with fire. I have often wondered about that sort of rite of passage. I have heard stories that the Maasai would send boys out on their own to kill a lion, and if they came back alive with a lion, then they were men. The Spartans took their sons from their homes at seven years old and began training them to become soldiers. In America, we consider children to be adults at eighteen, and yet a lot of those eighteen-year-olds act nothing like adults. Is that because we have not taught them how? Is it because we don’t expect them to fend for themselves and provide for them up until that age? We send them out into the world after eighteen years of dependence and then expect them to know how to live on their own, and then we wonder why there are so many young adults returning home to live with their parents. It’s not that hard, we think. We did it, why can’t they? They have seen how we lived our lives and how we went to work every day, why can’t they follow our example?

So what defines adulthood, then? We can’t send them out to kill lions. That’s cruel, and there aren’t very many lions left in the world. So how do we know that our children have made the transition? Self-sufficiency is a good sign. Living on their own and holding down a job. Grocery shopping by themselves. Making positive choices in their lives. Having a good marriage and/or a rewarding career. But most of all, I think it’s that moment when a child returns to their parents and says, “I’m sorry for all the crap I put you through, and thank you for everything” that makes a parent realize that they have done well by their children and they have completed their rite of passage. And then you laugh at them when their kids shoot them in the face with a shotgun!