I have changed jobs this month. I have always wanted to take my writing to a bigger level, but never had the time or energy after a long day of “9 to 5”. With the help of a long time friend, I have found a job that is independent and time flexible that pays the same as I have made all these years, BUT, can be done according to the schedule I lay out. Soooo, the frightening thing is, I now have no excuses about buckling my self down to a writing schedule. Starting point – two thousand words a day, which will inevitably be edited down to a page a day, but you have to start somewhere. I don’t even want to think about the rejection letters for submissions I have made to magazines. According to Steven King, in his “bible” on writing, aptly named “On Writing”, the thousands of rejections he received at the beginning were motivation to try just a bit harder. Let me just say that I have thinner skin that needs quite a bit of toughening up. I have faith that these editors that offer suggestions will help me to hone my writing “skills”.
So, long story short, I was out in the small town of Bel Aire last weekend, working on inspections. It dawned on me, after realizing that I have noticed a difference in the volume and action of small groups of people this whole weekend that each small town must have a church or town run scavenger hunt going on. Young adults and teens are walking down the streets, faces glued to their I phones. At first I found this oddly sad. When I was young (my children like to refer to as the stone age), we played dodge ball or roller skated or played roller skating dodge ball, and lived free of this tiny bit of technology that seemed to keep the people I was watching from visiting with and interacting with each other.
Mid afternoon, I was trying to take a photo of a street sign, but the sun was not working with me. I said “hi” to a small group of kids that passed me on the other side of the street, internally wanting to pull there eyes up off the screen, causing them to exchange a few words with a human being. They were very polite and all said hello as they watched me directing my phone up and down to avoid the glare. They got about five feet ahead of me when the biggest kid in the group ran back towards me – very excited. He called out to me that I was on the wrong side of the street. He told me that I needed to go west 1 block to “find the Weedle”. Now, I was a little lost in the fact that there was a “weasel” in Bel Aire, America, and stiffly thanked him for the warning. As he was running to catch up to his friends he hesitated, looked back at me and said “you aren’t playing Pokémon Go are you.” Strange. Then, within the hour someone on the radio told a story about this reincarnation of the old video game of Pokémon – now a type of virtual reality.
Guess I shouldn’t have judged all the “plugged in” kids and young adults. They were playing their versions of roller skating dodgeball!
