I am Mycol Hritz.
I am the son of the late Regina Arlene Gould Hritz. Known to some as Lady Mia, to many more as Gina, and many, many more as simply Mom. She was the stand in mom for hundreds for her 78 years of life, even for my wife Bonnie Hritz.

I am a Bard.
Not just at the game table, or even just around the campfire.  I carry every impact on my life and the lives of my ancestors and family.  I tell stories to share humor, might, honor and lessens learned.  I remember them that I might share them. I share them so that we never forget.

I am a Asatruar.
I follow the reclaimed faith of the Northern European traditions.  We venerate the Nine Noble Virtues; Truth, Courage, Honor, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-reliance, Industriousness, and Perseverance. We honor our Gods, our Ancestors, and our Heroes.

I am a Red Road Shaman.
I learned that keeping memory, stories, and legends are the only way we grow.  I learned that by telling the stories, we never lose anyone. Mitakuye Oyasin.  We are all related.

I am enraged,
For I have learned that there are those who have chosen to erase the memory of my mother, my Ancestor, Regina.  I have learned that those who should be carrying the story with me, have chosen to destroy it.  They find their guilt less bitter if they can deny she existed.  Gone is her name, gone are her pictures, believing that they can erase her.

I am smiling.
For I have, for years, shared and told those stories, to all that would hear.  I have amassed a following of love and adoration for the mother they never met.  Her stories have been shared with men, women, and children of all circles.  Five seek to forget her.  Countless others seek to know her.  Countless more love her.

I am victorious.

And they are already defeated.

Hail, Mother Gina.

Aho.

Sample chapter of "The Dimsdale Diaries"

The professor sat behind a ludicrously large desk, made of an odd amalgam of teak wood, oak, mahogany, and brass.  It was the brass work that would give most people pause, not being relegated to burnished drawer pulls at the like, but also a noodle-like patchwork of pipes, valves, and gears.  The whole office smelled of cardamom, tobacco, tallow and oil.   He was hunched forward over a large upturned leather top hat, a screwdriver in one hand, a tiny but vicious looking torch in the other.  His long hair, the color of wormwood shot with ash, had largely worked its way free from the half-hearted attempts to restrain it, hanging perilously close to the flame of the torch, which escaped Professor Dimsdale’s attention completely.   Without looking up he called out for his assistant.

“John!  Another mug of your rye here, my good man!”

John stumbled in promptly, a fresh mug already in hand, deftly maneuvering past crates, stacks of books, piles of tools and various nearly unidentifiable devices with practiced ease.  He was a young man, not quite a score old, but his face bore wrinkles of a man twice his years.  A deep rough scar circumnavigated his neck.  He set the mug gently down on the professor’s left side, decidedly away from the torch in his right.  Only then did Dimsdale look up from his work, as if startled by John’s arrival.

“I thought you didn’t care for my homemade spirits, Professor.  This is your third this eve.”

“Nonsense, my lad.  Tis a wonderful concoction.  Not fit to drink, but makes for excellent flux.”  Dimsdale punctuated his statement by promptly dunking a thin copper tube into the mug, waiting a moment, and then removing it to show how nicely it was cleaned.  John scowled, which perplexed and puzzled Dimsdale, who failed to see how this could be anything other than a compliment to John’s skills as a vintner. 

Such was the lot in the professor’s life.  He was a man who understood sciences both modern and arcane, who had seen things that most people not only believed strictly mythical, but sometimes hadn’t even written myths for yet.  He worked with metal, steam, alchemy, even time the way a baker works with dough.  And still, he never mastered the intricacies of the human ego.  This, along with his tendency to get mentally (and oft physically) lost in his work to a staggering degree, was why his social calendar and his love life stayed perpetually blank.

John took a deep breath, let the unintended barb slide off his back, and eyed Dimsdale’s project at hand.

“What seems to be the matter with your hat, Professor?”

“Boiler is not performing as I would like.  Not nearly hot enough for tea,” he replied, now using the strange torch to heat and bend the freshly fluxed copper tubing.   The blue flame licked around the metal, tingeing green where it made contact.  His fingers, calloused from years of wear, were heedless of the creeping warmth along the surface.  The going was slow, but seemingly effortless as he affected a perfect ninety-degree bend without a hint of crimping.  He eyed the tube, then the inside of the hat, and smiled to himself.  He reached in with both hands, up to his elbows.  The distance was quite impossible, the hat only a little over three hand spans from brim to crest, yet by the time he reached where the pipe was to fit, he was nearly to his shoulders.  A loud round of clinking, clattering, and cursing ensued as he set it into place.

“Torch please, John,” he said, withdrawing his right arm.  John deftly obliged, always happy to assist the professor and ever curious about his hat in particular.  He thanked him and reached back in, very nearly setting the opposite sleeve alight as it passed.  John winced audibly, suspecting that as long as Dimsdale had been working that night, he was certain to have splashed himself with the rye at least half a dozen times.  The professor proceeded unscathed, however, and set about the business of mounting the newly fashioned pipe into place.

“There, solid as micro-crystalline igneous monoliths, that.”  John just nodded, as usual, feigning comprehension of the old man’s euphemisms.  “And now for the tea test.”

The professor reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a funnel which he then set into a small port on the top right side of the hat.  “Now water… water… Ah! Here we are!” as he picked up the mug John had fetched. 

“Begging your pardon, Professor,” John interjected.

“Not now, John, nearly done here.”

“But Professor…”

“It can wait, John, far past teatime as it is,” refused Dimsdale as he lined up the mug to pour.

John looked quickly about, grabbed a discarded mug near the end of the desk, and promptly poured the last splash therein onto the still-burning torch, evoking a brilliant blue flash and ear-ringing pop.  The old man jolted, and only just managed to avoid spilling his mug all over himself.

“Blazes, you addled billy goat! Why you nearly…”

The professor paused, as his eyes went from torch, to mug, to funnel, and his mind extrapolated the probable outcome of pouring ethyl alcohol into an elemental-fueled boiler.  He decided that as interesting an experiment that would make, it was unlikely to yield tea.

“Good show, John.  Bring us a beaker of water then, will you?”

The Jagged Looking Glass

I should offer a small warning or three up front.  This post is not in line with the previous two, nor is it nerdly, nor scholarly, nor geek-centric.  I can also say, though it is still early in the composition, that it is quite unlikely to be funny.  But, for me, in this moment and many like it, it is important.

Allow me to lay a foundation here.  I will for the sake of others involved gloss over many details regarding the suffering of friends and loved ones in my story here. Some things I will tell, some I will not. This is not as a tool of ego; not a literary Fresnel lens intended to focus the spotlight of attention on my portion of the events at hand.  It is because not all of the connected stories are mine to tell.  Their trials and triumphs belong to them and are theirs alone to choose to share or not at their discretion.  I ask you, the reader, to accept and embrace their right to that choice.  I am not seeking pity either, but instead endeavoring to understand the mechanics of my experiences in the framework of the larger picture.

Can we accept these guidelines as given? Good. Thank you.  I begin:

The last year was (and continues to be, it seems) a very hard year for friends and family.  There have been many losses; of home, of love, of friendships... even of life.  My father and his family lost their home as many did in the Bastrop wildfires.  Much of that region has simply ceased to exist in a very real way.  Many of my friends and families have lost people, pets, and the like, while others have suffered (and continue to suffer) the loss of relationships that meant the world to them.  My wife lost the matriarch of her family.  And even now, my "family by choice" is dealing with the impossible questions and unyielding burden of terminal illness, again.

Note: please understand that this is not a call for aid or prayer.  The micro-communities involved in all of these events have done a simply remarkable job of locking shields together and opening arms, alternately as needed.  Everyone is admirably well seen to, and thank you to all who have been a part of that.

My query is as follows.  What right have I, who is arguably the least injured party in any of these dynamics, to be depressed?

I have a home.  I have a wife who, though I cannot fathom why, loves me unabashedly, unconditionally, and beyond any hope to quantify.  I have the most devoted, accepting friends of anyone I have ever met in life or in fiction.  I even have the beginnings of a career, for the first time in my life.  Not one of these Blessings escapes my notice nor my appreciation, and I share my gratitude with the Allfather daily.

But in the midst of all of these Blessings, and in the midst of the heroic bravery of my family's travails, I find myself in the proverbial "dark place".  I ache at my core.  Every failure, loss, heartache, every sting of lost love pricks at the periphery of my perception.  I do not seek sympathy, or truly even solace.

I seek to understand.

I am aware of the fact that, by virtue of caring for my friends and family who are so suffering, one can expect to suffer along with them.  As Spider Robinson said, "Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased. Thus do we refute entropy."  I agree with the emotional mathematics of the statement (though I reserve judgment on ambitious presumption of the defeat of entropy.  Fodder for thought another day).  However, I find myself inexplicably lonely and self-pitying of late, with no valid, tangible reason.  I find I seek involuntarily to find someone to confide it, only in the last moments before I speak realizing that I neither have right to add to burdens nor do I even have the means to qualify or quantify what it is I seek to vent.  How can this be?

What manner of fool would turn to a friend to express a phantom melancholy, when the world around him is beset on all sides with valid, sincere hurt?  What greed! What hubris!  What arrogance and entitlement!

Thus, I put the challenge to you, my dear readers.  What say you all?  What are the mechanics at work here? Is this a function of selfish attention seeking?  Of misguided martyrdom?  Is this a sort of emotional noise-pollution or bleed-over? Or perhaps just a function of exhaustion born of too many shocks to the family for too long?

Sincere insight is welcomed, either as comments below or email me at wmdimsdale@gmail.com

Thank you, good night, and may your Path be Light.

Sincerely,
     Prof. W.M. Dimsdale

My Professorial Opinion on Matters Steampunk

1)  Gears should always actuate something.  It doesn't have to be important, but they are an engineering marvel and should be treated with enough respect to be allowed to serve a purpose.  Chant with me: "Actuate, not accentuate."

2)  Brassy is beautiful, but there are other metals at your local craft market.  Most of them are even shiny. Embrace them.

3)  Even in the 1880's, not all leather was brown, and not all garments were wool.  If we're accepting phlogiston ray guns, we are allowed cotton and leather dye choices.

4)  Airships.  Seriously, doesn't this make anyone else's brain twitch to see these giant hulls with envelopes of equal or lesser size?  Relative mass, people.  If it is a dirigible, and you feel the need to to have a mock up made, think about the mass you're lifting for a minute, for me. Please?

I know ultimately none of this matters a tinker's tuppence, my opinion included, but thank you for taking a moment to let me vent.

"Doctor, the Professor will see you now. Again."

I know, I'm late to the party described herein, but as delineated in the text, time is obviously more wibbly-wobbly than even The Doctor might have surmised.  Here is a news story from the BBC detailing the bounce-back of television signals being received Earthside on radio telescopes.

Of particular interest; the lost episodes of Doctor Who... ones for which there were no surviving recordings... Even more timey-wimey is the fact that the news story was posted in 2009 and references television signals as 47 years old at the time of the report... meaning that the reconstructed episodes they are currently restoring are becoming viable, "regenerating" if you will, just in time for the Doctor's 50th anniversary.

Now pardon me while I leave you to read the link for yourselves.
~toddles off singing to the tune of Frosty the Snowman... "There must have been some chronotons in that old blue box they found..."~

http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm