The musings of a madman...

     I knew this damned day was coming...  I knew as soon as I was "done" with it in September that I had not heard the last of this situation, and I said as much at the time.  I guess my only real source of "surprise" is how little time it took to come back to me. To be totally honest, I shouldn't be all that surprised about that either. I say all that to say -- and y'all know it -- my phone rang. Me: "Hello?" Her: "I'm bugging out right now!" Me: "I'm fantastic, thanks for asking!" Her: "Huh?" Me: "You know you haven't spoken to me since the end of May, right?" Her: "Oh, oh yeah right... And I had the problem with my brakes and my landlord." I know where this is going, but she don't know that so I'mma play dumb or at least treat this conversation like it is all news to me.  Remember, she came to PHILLIP for advice because she has known me before Moe Phillips existed.  Her l...

  (yes, this is the permanent WaW image from now on)      After some discussion with a couple of people, I've decided that I will be doing this once a month for the foreseeable future...      The narration project was--... A challenge. In the challenge, I found that I have had to slightly alter how I approach the writing of a story. Today, we will discuss the necessity of embracing change, and welcoming challenges when it comes to growing creatively. Let's talk first about what had to change...      First was story length. As a general habit, I've approached this with a "my website, my rules" kinda thing and if I give y'all a 3500 or 5000-word story then that's what y'all getting. What I've learned setting up some stories as long as the lower side of that for narration is that my preferred narration tools are limited at or over 10:55 in length. For that reason, I'm limited to what I've noticed is about 1900 words now. This has, how...

       Sometimes when I get bored, I go to Craigslist... Not because I need or intend to buy anything, just to kill a little time. Don't knock me for this, I've found two of my cars and Yeti doing JUST this.      Anyway, I'm on Craigslist last week and I happened upon a "personal services" ad that REALLY piqued my curiosity, and no I was not in the "pussy for sale" section of the website, I assure you. [ Phlip note : the "pussy for sale" section is more often the "pænis surprise" section, if what I read on Reddit is to be believed ] In the ad--... fuggit, copy/paste time. "Gentlemen, had a rough breakup? Wanna get back at her? Well we're here to help! Contact us at [information hidden] to discuss services we can offer"      Well shiiiid... I'm fully comfortable in a room with my ex for hours on end without addressing her directly, so I don't NEED this service, but I'm always doing on-the-ground research...

       Not to let y'all in on anything more than you want to, need to -- or particularly ASKED -- about me, but I sleep naked no matter the season. The only difference is I close my bedroom door when Ava is at my house and not with my ex wife a woman I had a wedding with once... Why am I telling y'all all of this? Because we had to deal with a home invasion last night!      We came up to our bedroom and stripped buttnekkid. Wife Person™ turns on the television in the bedroom and puts it on The Blacklist... or Lucifer... or Burn Notice...  whatever...  She turned on the TV and puts it on a show that will serve as background noise until we fall asleep when there's a noise in the living room, it is the Amazon home screen... No biggie. We got these Fire TVs in my house, turning on the TV in our room sometimes catches the sensor across the hall in the guest room or even the living room TV sometimes.      As I head downstairs ...

  I'm obsessive...      After my decision first to add narration to True Story© and then actually STARTING the project to get it done, I realized I would not be able to rest until I had them all up on YouTube. This means I would be multitasking with the AI to read, then listen back to each and every one. If you have been paying attention to me on BookFace or following the YouTube channel, you'll know that I converted every story from 2023 clear through this year, plus the whole of the Santa Saga (that one was by request). It took me from August 10 to September 5 to get all the narration done and QC'd. It was not perfect... sometimes words were changed or omitted by the AI, one time it added a whole disclaimer (you can hear that here ). I kept what I found acceptable and scheduled them out at a rate of three a day until last week.      I was worried, though... I just fed a large language model dozens of hours of the absolute WILDEST concepts in my writi...

  "Hey buddy, you remember me?"      I'mma keep it all the way funky with y'all... When someone asks me some shit like that and I wasn't looking to have already determined whether or not I'd ever met them, I adopt a "lie first and then sort it out" approach. I've found that this helps keep my ass out of situations I might not desire to be in. I turned around... Me: "Um... I can't say that I d--..." Him: "I interviewed you for the job at [company] back at the beginning of the the summer." Me: "Wait... The ones who kicked me out when I told the story about getting fired over the softball game?" Him: "Okay, so you DO remember!" Me: "Yeah man, my friends thought that shit was WILD funny." Him: "To be frank, so did everyone else in the office when we told them about it." Me:  "'we?'...  'everyone else?'...  How many damn people did you speak of my misfortune to?...

  (New WaW image, y'all!)      Y'all know True Story© is a whole construction/production process and I am 90% of the crew? It starts with a spark. I see something out in the world as I do my daily "life" thing. Something will happen in my field of view/hearing and--... Wait... Y'all DO know that there is always some element of something that happened in every story, right?      Anyway, spark... I see something out in the world and I use that as an idea. I break out the ol' phone and start typing furiously in a Gmail draft that will auto-save as soon as I navigate to another app or out of that message: (okay, so maybe not a REAL story forming) I will continue to grind out that wall of words, really only concerned with the idea of the story, minding grammar and making sure to establish properly-formed sentences and paragraphs. I do this in my Gmail drafts because that automatically saves them right where it is until I get to the PC.    ...

       Fall officially began this week on Monday. For those of us here in west-central North Carolina, the piedmont and foothills region, that means people will trek an hour or two west up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for nature's annual light show in the changing of the leaves. As mundane and unworthy of the trip as this sounds, this is a thing that people drive into the region for every single year. [ Link ] [ Phlip note : I have never personally made this trip and likely won't, September is the latest I've ever been up there ]      Although the parkway sits right on the way to one of Wife Person™ and I's favorite weekend getaway spots, we haven't been since April of last year. Not that we wouldn't WANT to or haven't had the capital means, we just haven't had the time to get away with my spring/summer side hustle and our now one year-old grandlittle.      As y'all may or not remember, but should after this paragraph, our last trip up t...

       Frequently, I find myself waiting on the other shoe to fall. This is not, like, an ACTIVE thing in the very least but for someone with my kind of history it is just kind of understood that bullshit begets bullshit. I'd say "trust me," but I'm comfortable that most of you are not new here and even if you are there are hundreds of thousands of published words to make the case.      So it's late summer now. The rains of the early/mid summer started winding down a few weeks ago and were replaced with a welcome cooldown in temps. This series of elements saw to it that when I caught up with my lawns that I offered to move all my clients off of scheduled lawn work to "as needed" so as to not be a greedy person for their money. ... I say that to say I was bored...      To combat the malaise, I decided to open up the Moe Phillips email and see what I could make shake. I started back at the end of August. The first one I acknowledged, ...

"I'm worried that I cannot trust my wife..." Oh shit, this gon be good! Lemme keep reading... "We met in high school, and I actually lost my virginity to her..." SHIT!!! We all gas and no brakes here. Aight, aight, I'mma chill and just read now. "The circumstances of even that are kind of wild, though. While I lost my virginity to her, I was not her first. In fact, I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I was not even her first on that very night..." Fucking WHAT?!!? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm trying, y'all! "One of the homies from high school had convinced her into meeting at a house party and letting him and four homies run a train on her. I drew third go before we left for the party, so naturally I waited outside the room door for my turn. I went into the room when it was my go, put on a rubber and did the thing. Sometime during, I decided that she didn't need to be in this situation and that I could be the one to get he...

       For reasons all at the same time weird, ironic and obvious to anyone paying even a small amount of attention to recent goings-on around these parts, I've spent the last few weeks rehashing the minute details of everything I have done and chronicled around these parts.      Somewhere in the midst of the work of it, reading and listening back, I began to feel something like contrition over the shit I've done. I knew that contrition is one thing, but to seek absolution is a whole other thing. To seek absolution, one must redress the thing they seek absolution from. That means that declaring myself done with the supervillainy is only the first step. The next -- and more important -- one is to do the work of making it right.      One might think that a step in that direction might include seeking to be held legally responsible for the things one has done, but that is one hell of a rap sheet and I'm too beautiful for prison so that i...