Writing Stories

For the past ten years or so I have taken up the hobby of writing novels. It’s not unlike any other conventional hobby in that it is fun, done in your spare time, and serves as a distraction from the demands of your day to day responsibilities. But writing long and complicated stories takes a long time to complete, especially if its a hobby. But no matter how long it takes, you never get tired of the story or the characters you’ve created. In fact, you find yourself quite attached to them as the weeks become months, and for my latest…the months become years. I started writing this current story in August of 2020 and I’m still probably only halfway done. When/If I ever retire from my real job, I plan on trying to see if I can get one or all of them published. But for now, its just a cool outlet for my devilish imagination doing something I’ve always loved to do…write. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

A Life of Dreams

This is a story about a gambling savant whose gift destroys his life and eventually leads to a suicide attempt, after which he begins seeing visions of his still living ex-wife, which leads to a pseudo-reconciliation as the two of them go on a search for her long absent father. They find him, a successful but tortured attorney who himself commits suicide after meeting his daughter after 30 years of abandonment. When her dying mother shows up on her doorstep months later, all kinds of weird semi-supernatural stuff begins to happen, some of which involve a stray dog.

Saving Jack

Jack’s wife gets murdered in the parking lot of a convenience store by a deranged drug addict. This random act of violence leads Jack to abandon his life and business and flee to his cabin in Maine to attempt a recovery. While there, a stranger from his past shows up with the news that his wife’s murder may not have been so random after all. Both of Jack’s grown children become concerned and suspicious of this stranger and her motives and race up to Maine to intervene. What is ultimately revealed has the power to destroy the family. 

Reardon’s Walk

This is a strange tale about a traumatic event of betrayal that leads to a bizarre time travel episode that takes the protagonist back in time to the year of his birth. In the year 1962 Charlie meets his mother who is pregnant with…him. Back in real time, Charlie is dealing with the fallout from the witnessed betrayal and the disturbing information he has learned from his trip back in time. More strange semi-supernatural things begin to happen with the appearance of a kind but weird old lady with a connection to Charlie’s mother. Every detail of the story seems to center around the ornate beach house on Hatteras Island named Reardon’s Walk, built by Charlie’s estranged father not long after he was born. 

Each of these stories were super fun to write and all three of them were completed in roughly 8 months. The one I’m writing now has no working title and as I said earlier is only half done. But by far, it has been the most difficult and disturbing to write. It concerns a man who is living a perfectly fine life with lots of success and happiness when he suffers a nasty face-plant fall while out for a run. The blow to the head causes at first subtle changes to his personality then everything goes off the rails as he loses almost all impulse control which causes him to disappear without a trace one afternoon after a business lunch. His elderly and oppressive mother hires a private detective to find him and bring him home after coming into possession of evidence that her son has written a six figure check to some random woman in Mississippi. Conflict is everywhere, between Danny and his angry and abandoned wife, between Danny’s wife and her overbearing mother-in-law, between Danny’s feuding  business partners, and between Danny and this new, post-fall version of himself. There’s an encounter at a bowling alley, a hitchhiker with a gun, and a female private investigator with tons of issues. I am totally invested, all in on this group of characters, but at this point I can’t even figure out who the hero is and who the villain will end up being. All of them have each impulse within their personality.

At my current rate of progress, I’ll wrap this story up sometime next year.

Where are the Workers?

I keep seeing a lot of stories in business publications with headlines like this:

Jobs are back, but where are the workers?

Well, from all of my reading on the subject my answer is..its complicated.

There is no single reason why jobs aren’t being filled. One of the laziest answers suggests that people aren’t going back to work because the combination of enhanced unemployment along with stimulus checks make returning to work equivalent to taking a pay cut. I’m very sure that this is true in some cases, but this assumes that the average worker is a lazy freeloader with no self respect who takes pleasure in shafting the American taxpayer. This describes almost nobody I have ever known and is an insult. I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to my objections to the American safety net turning into a hammock, but I don’t think that is what is happening here. What, then? Here are some suggestions:

People have discovered that they really enjoy working from home and don’t want to go back to the hassle and expense of commuting.

Working from home has also solved the financial burden of childcare for many young families, who are not eager to go back to shelling out thousands again.

Then there’s this. This morning I ran across this line in an article, “Retailers are reluctant to raise wages and erode their thin margins—and are losing workers to employers who pay more.” Who would have thought? You mean the labor market is working exactly how it is supposed to???

Listen, I know that a lot of people out there don’t like competition and think it’s destructive to the human spirit or some such thing, but if I own a business that cannot make a profit unless it can pay its workers X, and the guy down the street has figured out a way to make a profit paying his workers XX, guess what? My workers will figure it out pretty quickly and jump ship. If that happens I have a couple of choices. I can either figure out a way to increase productivity, raise my prices, or go out of business. Nobody has a God given right to stay in business if they can’t make a profit. That’s what bankruptcy laws are for. I know that sounds harsh and unfeeling but this is business we’re talking about here. You might say, but Doug what about inflation? What about it? The race to the bottom of pricing brought about by the Walmart’s and the Amazon’s of the world has been a boon to consumers in this country. That’s great. I’m personally thrilled to death that I’m not held hostage and forced to pay exorbitant prices for consumer goods down at Mom and Pop’s Five and Dime because they’re the only choice I have. But everything, even every good thing comes with a cost. Its one thing for the American consumer to demand low low prices out of one side of their mouths but then demand higher and higher pay for retail work out of the other. If we want employers to pay more competitive wages at some point we…all of us…are going to have to be willing to pay higher prices. Yes, that’s called inflation. 

Of course, there are other thumbs on the scales in our economy that muck everything up too, like government subsidizing some businesses at the expense of others, government red tape making it so much harder to start a business than it should ever be, stupid and counter productive labor union work rules, insane CEO pay, etc..etc. But for me, the bottom line on all of this is if you want something good, whether it be a good job, a good product or a good business, you’re going to have to be willing to pay for it. A good job is going to require a marketable skill so train yourself to do something well. A good product will require imagination and ingenuity and excellent marketing, and a good business will have to be one that can offer a product people actually want at a price they can pay, while paying their employees a competitive and attractive wage.

If you can’t do any of these things, go get a job with the government.

The Gates Divorce

Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. I don’t care. You shouldn’t either.

Practically every day for the past month a story has popped up on one of my news feeds offering the latest salacious details. I have steadfastly refused to click on a single one. When news first broke that the famous couple had filed for divorce, of course I read about it. It’s not every day when one of the most obnoxiously sanctimonious billionaires on the planet files for a divorce so sure, I was curious. But that first news article was all I needed to know about the two of them. They are nothing more than a long-married couple who now hate each other and are parting company, joining the roughly 2.4 million other couples who file for divorce every year in the United States. Why do we need to know all the gory details? Imagine what it would be like if you and your spouse were going through a messy split and you woke up one day and every single failure of your marriage was plastered all over the front page of the Times-Dispatch?

So why are Gates Divorce stories all the rage? Because we want to read about our blessed celebrities at each and every milestone of their ridiculous lives. If nobody cared, they wouldn’t print it, people. In other words…we are pathetic!

Now for something more uplifting:

Why does YouTube constantly recommend videos of dancing former Vice Presidents to me??

Must be a bad Al Gore Rhythm ….

The Post-it Note Wall

A few weeks ago at my church there was a pen and post-it notes under every chair in the auditorium. It was the first Sunday after the Covid social distancing and mask requirements had been lifted. Towards the end of the service our pastor asked us to write down something that had happened to us during the COVID pandemic that was memorable, either good or bad. It could be something happy or sad, or maybe just something that the COVID experience had taught us. Then he asked us to stick pour notes on the wall in the foyer. It was up to us whether or not we wanted to put our name on our note. They are still up there three Sundays later, hundreds of them, and every week I stand there reading as many as I can. It has been an amazing experience.

I lost my job.

I found this church.

My father and both of my in-laws died. Deep dark depression.

We lost our dog.

I’ve learned that I love working from home.

It has been the loneliest time of my life.

My church is like most others I suppose, we clean up well, lots of smiles everywhere, and that’s a good thing. But its never all smiles in life at church or any place else. Under the surface human beings are conflicted and complicated. Few of us let anyone else see the vulnerability, we work hard at managing our image as a well adjusted, put together person who is getting along just fine. Deception is much easier to pull off. When someone asks, How are you, we answer fine, not because it’s necessarily true but because it’s more expedient than telling the truth about yourself…actually, I’m a mess. But with these post-it notes, our pastor had given us permission to tell the truth without the social awkwardness. The results were stunning and in a small way, comforting. The most brutally honest notes admitting depression and worse were surprising but shouldn’t have been. I’ve been in church long enough to know that Christian people are just as screwed up as anyone else. Maybe I had been lulled into the notion that this particular group of them were somehow different. It’s hard to fight that impression sometimes when I see all the smiles, all the wealth and comfort there. But there is no amount of money, privilege or comfort that can wash away the human frailty we were all born with. The wall of post-it notes serve as a reminder of this truth. My church family is filled with all kinds of people and many of them are carrying around massive burdens. It makes me love them a little more, reminds me to pay closer attention to those to my right and left and the lonely looking man across the way.

I hope they leave them up. I hope they are a permanent fixture in the foyer. I think it would do every church some good to have a wall of post-it notes. Here. This is us. This is who we really are. We all need salvation. We are all starved for grace. If not, why are we even here?

So, to whoever came up with the post-it note idea, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Squirrel #12 in the Books

Saturday was a fun day. Had a great little 5K run in the morning, cut the grass and putzed around in the yard for a while, got a massage, then went out to dinner to celebrate my sister’s birthday. I mean, other than the fact that it was hot and humid (94), Saturday was nearly perfect. But the central event of the day was none of the things I just listed. No, no...not even close. That would be the fact that I bagged my 12th squirrel of the year in spectacular fashion.

As you all know, squirrels and I have a long running feud in that they love to chew on our deck furniture, eat the flowers we plant, be-spoil my tomatoes and occasionally invade my attic, and I love to kill them. In this I am assisted greatly by my much celebrated Daisy Powerline 35:

Well, there I was Saturday minding my own business, when I spy one of the tree rats sitting up on his haunches on the peak of the A-Frame of my roof! I mean, the unmitigated gall!! I immediately stopped what I was doing and tip-toed away to fetch old Daisy. When I returned, there he was, still on his haunches taunting me with his arrogance, as if to say, “no way your Daisy can touch me way up here...” Unfortunately for Mister Squirrel, it was his last thought. One shot found it’s mark, wiping the little squirrel smirk from his little squirrel face and sending him tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle down my roof. I let out a triumphant grunt. Everything was going splendidly right up to the moment when this happened:

Are you kidding me? What are the odds?? So now I have a dead and rapidly decomposing squirrel stuck in a gutter that stands at least 15 feet off the ground, but less than five feet from my front door, and beyond the reach of my longest ladder. I guess I’ll have to borrow one from my neighbor. On the other hand, maybe I should leave him in there as an example to other members of his pathetic tribe as a warning to what will befall them should they try their luck on the Dunnevant roof.

Indulge Me

Indulge me. What follows has been percolating in my head since Friday afternoon of last week when the Biden Administration announced its federal budget for 2022. The fact that the decision was made to announce this bit of news late on a Friday of a holiday weekend should tell you something about how much coverage they hoped it would get, but that’s a story for another day. Below I have constructed a thumbnail sketch of the pertinent numbers:

Projected spending...6 Trillion dollars, which when written in numbers looks like this...$6,000,000,000,000.00

Projected revenue.....4.2 Trillion dollars

Projected deficit for 2022...1.8 Trillion dollars

For anyone quaint enough to be concerned about debts and deficits, the Biden Administration assures us that if all goes according to plan, the budget will become balanced in 2037, long after Joe Biden has gone on to his eternal reward.

What all this budget talk got me to thinking about was the last time this country actually had a balanced budget. Actually we ran a surplus of nearly 250 billion dollars. For younger readers of this blog, a surplus is when the government takes in more money than it spends. The year was 2000. It was the last budget submitted to Congress by President Bill Clinton, who had famously declared that “The era of big government is over!” 

Projected spending...1.7 Trillion dollars

Projected revenue.....2 Trillion dollars

Projected surplus......230 billion

So, 22 years ago the entire budget for the federal government was 1.7 trillion. In 2022 that’s just the amount of red ink. Wow. Let’s see now:

2000 spending = 1.7 Trillion

2022 spending = 6 Trillion

Spending is up 352% 

2000 revenue = 2 Trillion

2022 revenue = 4.2 Trillion

Revenue is up 210%

This got me to thinking. It’s easy for all of us to criticize the profligacy of politicians. We have at this hour 28 trillion reasons to do so. But, what about me? How has MY spending and revenue compared with that of my government? Good question. It wasn’t easy, but I found my old tax returns and here are the numbers:

2000 spending = NOYB*

2022 spending = NOYB*

Spending is up 192%

2000 revenue = NOYB*

2022 revenue = NOYB*

Revenue is up 211%

That’s funny, my revenue over the past 22 years has grown at nearly the exact same pace as that of the federal government, and yet I have run a surplus in all but two of the past 22 years (the dreaded two years when both of my children were enrolled in private, out of state universities at the same time!!). 

Of course, you can’t compare anyone’s personal finances to the economic life of a nation state except for kicks and giggles, but it is interesting. Actually, I must admit it would have been great fun to run 22 deficits in the Dunnevant home. Imagine all the amazing trips we could have gone on and stuff we could have bought. But, I was restricted by the fact that although I possessed an excellent credit history, I would have been expected to eventually pay all of that money back, with interest. That expectation would have been rather unyielding and I would not have had the advantage that a sovereign nation has of simply printing money. 

So, Doug Dunnevant has racked up a healthy surplus over the past 22 years, while our government has added 23,000,000,000,000.00 (TRILLION) to the national debt since that heady day in February of 2000 when Bill Clinton sent the last balanced budget to Congress.

* None Of Your Business

Disturbing Photographs

So, a couple days ago I saw a news story about a small plane that had crashed killing seven passengers. Among the dead, I was told, were an actor and someone who was described as a Christian Diet Guru. Against my better judgment and giving in to my base curiosity, I clicked on the story. What I discovered was, er...it was, how shall I say...there are no words.

I must here confess that before this plane went down I had never heard of either of these two. The Christian Diet Guru is the one on the left, a Gwen Shambling Lara. The man on the right is an actor whose most famous role was that of Tarzan in the television series The Epic Advetures of Tarzan, which somehow I managed to miss back in the early 90’s.

I am fully aware that one should never speak ill of the dead, and I understand that what I’m about to say might be offensive to some but...what the actually hell?

Look...I am an unashamed and unapologetic follower of Jesus Christ, but why was my very first reaction to this photograph, “Well, of course she is a Christian Diet Guru!!!”

This poor woman looks like an anorexic Barbie Doll who is probably single-handedly responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer of our planet, there being enough hairspray on that head to withstand a stage 5 hurricane. And, if Tarzan there had anymore Botox in that face he might never blink again! (And I think that he is wearing the bow tie from my junior prom tuxedo). Unfortunately, this image right here is what far too many people have of modern Christianity, a bunch of tan-in-a-can, herbal supplement selling, self-help life coaching, Hollywood D-lister wannabes. Don’t believe me...?

I’m told that the woman in this photograph, Jan Crouch, co-founder of Trinity Broadcasting, recently went to her heavenly reward. Reports are that her hair arrived three days later.

I feel some obligation to say to the non-Christian world out there that...no, we don’t all look this superficially goofy. Most of us, I dare say, don’t even own a can of hairspray.

It occurs to me that some of you reading this might have benefitted from the weight loss powers of Mrs. Lara. Others may be in fact, Living Your Best Life Now, courtesy of the ministrations of Mr. Osteen. If so, I’m happy for you.

But sometimes I just wish that a prominent Christian voice would come along who doesn’t look like they could either be an alien life form or...possessed by the devil...