I dunno, how about you?

I used to have lots of opinions, some of them even reasonable.

Now, however, the plethora of opinions on the Web and in all the media simply render my opinions null.

I don't care what the "experts" think. All my reading has convinced me that experts know their opinions and find enough "facts" to bolster them, as compared to those of us who have opinions without facts.

Screw em.

What can we do about this situation? The world is not becoming a better place for all these battling opinions. Do you see a solution?

The Monks' Secret

A man is driving down the road and his car breaks down near a monastery. He goes to

the monastery, knocks on the door and says, "My car broke down. Do you think

I could stay the night?"

The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, even fix his car. As the

man tries to fall asleep he hears a strange sound. The next morning he asks the

monks what the sound was; but they say, "We can't tell you. You're not a

monk."

The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way.

Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery.

The monks accept him, feed him, even fix his car. That night, he hears the same

strange noise that he had heard years earlier.

The next morning, he asks what it is; but the monks reply, "We can't tell

you. You're not a monk."

The man says, "All right, all right. I'm *dying* to know. If the only way I

can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?"

The monks reply, "You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of

grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these

numbers, you will become a monk."

The man sets about his task. Forty-five years later, he returns and knocks

on the door of the monastery. He says, "I have traveled the earth and have

found what you have asked for. There are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and

231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth."

The monks reply, "Congratulations. You are now a monk. We shall now show you

the way to the sound."

The monks lead the man to a wooden door where the head monk says, "The sound

is right behind that door."

The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He says, "Real funny.

May I have the key?" The monks give him the key, and he opens the door. Behind

the wooden door is another door made of stone. The man demands the key to the

stone door. The monks give him the key, and he opens it only to find a door made

of ruby. He demands another key from the monks, who provide it. Behind that

door is *another* door, this one made of sapphire. So it went until the man had

gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, amethyst...

Finally, the monks say, "This is the last key to the last door."

The man is relieved to no end. He unlocks the door, turns the knob and

behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound.

But I can't tell you what it is because you're not a monk.

Hemingway's Computer

HEMINGWAY'S COMPUTER

That was the winter they put in the computer at Harry's Bar.

It was not a big computer for the crunching of numbers. It was a little computer for the crunching of words. It had a big disk, that little computer. Most of the words we put in were little and some were big. But the computer crunched all of them very clean and black on the yellow backs of the racing forms we did our printing on in those days when we had not much except words.

They did not put it so near the door that when little Scott F. Itzgerald hurried in the door it would bang its brass knob against the printer's backside. Nor did they put it on the rug of the color of whipped grass under the back tables where little Normal Maler scuffed his feet as he plotted campaigns against lady generals.

Normal heated to a fine sweat when he planned his seductions. Sometimes he would jab a finger at the aged telephone which he used to breathe obscenities into his opponent's ear. At such times, if it was winter and if he was standing on the green rug, sharp sparks liked to jump out of Normal's fingers.

"I'm hot today, boys," he would giggle.

If they had let Normal's fingers touch the keys of that lovely little computer there is no telling what kind of words may have come out. Unprintable, perhaps.

So Harry who owned and ran the bar, when they put in the computer told Normal to take off his shoes. Just in case.

We said how very nice it was of Harry to have the computer installed. First we would stand at the bar and rip off a few drinks and then sit at the computer and rip off a few pages.

The keys felt soft against our fingertips like little pony hooves running truly and with gentle accuracy on the fine green turf.

"It's a nice way to work," John O'Hair said.

He was a big man but the thing about not having the college education was sad for him and Scott F. never let him forget it.

O'Hair typed his college correspondence lessons on the computer. The thing we didn't like about O'Hair was when he ripped off too many pops and tried to sing the correspondence college's song.

But the arm wrestling was good with O'Hair and of course it was good to see little Scott go to his knees and beg the computer not to lose his words.

Scott thought he had more good words than the rest of us. We shrugged and grinned. We knew about the software and of course Scott did not know that. There were many things we knew that Scott did not know.

We knew that Scott liked to write when he had a load on.

What we would do with the software was while Scott was leaning on the bar and talking with his pretty mouth and gesturing with his little white hands about how the very drunk are different from the rest of us, we performed some delicate sabotage on the software.

And when Scott would write something very beautiful and very tender, the software would consider his words for awhile and then disappear the words, and the screen would tell Scott, "GARBAGE IN/ GARBAGE OUT."

After that, in what came later, in the time of the big troubles that obscured all our little ones, the little computer got shot in its big disk.

We looked at Scott F. standing there with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a smoking pistol in the other

We watched our words leak into the fine sawdust that covered Harry's floor.

LEft Behind, a really moral tale for your betterment.

“LEFT BEHIND”

copyright 2010 by Donald Henry Hinkle

812 words

Pepi had a family: mommy, daddy, and Fritz and Hans and Little Bethie. Pepi was a good dog with all of them, but especially he loved and took care of Little Bethie because she never pulled his tail or poked his eyes like the boys did. He slept in her bed.

One day, Pepi was walking Bethie to the school bus. He had stopped to sniff at a butterfly. Suddenly he felt a tug on his leash and he heard Bethie cry: “O no, Pepi!”

He looked up. Bethie was floating up in the sky, being carried by a big angel.

The angel looked at Pepi with gentle eyes as he disengaged Bethie’s hand from the leash.

“I want Pepi to go with me!” Bethie cried.

“I’m sorry, Bethie,” the big angel said. “No dogs allowed where you’re going.”

Her tears dropped down on Pepi’s nose. Pepi barked and barked to be taken along, but the angel carried Bethie up and up until she disappeared in a fluffy cloud.

Then Pepi saw that other people too were being carried up by angels.

He galloped back home and saw that Daddy was being carried up, while Mommy and Hans and Fritz were stood on the ground shouting at him.

“I’m sorry!” Daddy shouted back. “I’ll miss you all in heaven. But I warned you that if you didn’t do good this might happen!”

“I know!” wailed Mommy. “But I thought the Rapture wouldn’t happen until the next generation!”

“Goodbye, kids,” Daddy shouted from higher up. “Try to be good even though it’s too late now before the Apocalypse!”

The boys cried and wept and beat their breasts, but no angel would pick them up.

Hans said to Fritz: “OK, he was good, but not that good!”

Fritz said: “I wonder how he got the fix in?”

All over town, indeed, all over the world, similar scenes happened, as some people were carried up to heaven and many others were left behind. Including all the dogs and cats and elephants and lions. And horses.

Pepi saw a neighbor being carried up. He was a fat man and the angel was very small. The fat man’s mother wouldn’t let go of his hand.

Pepi barked sharply at the angel.

The angel, of course, understood what Pepi was saying.

“I’m sorry,” the angel said to Pepi, “but those are my orders from the Angel In Charge.”

“Who is he?” barked Pepi. “Please let me talk to him?”

The little angel stopped struggling with the fat man for a minute and pulled out a heavenly cellphone, which was pink and blue. He, or maybe it was a she, spoke into the phone.

“Okay,” the angel said to Pepi. “He’ll be down, but I don’t think he’ll change his mind. He’s very strict.”

Soon, a large ugly angel descended and stood facing Pepi.

Pepi barked out a long story about how he had always been a good dog and a loving dog and had never done anything more wrong than mere puppyish mischief, and how Little Bethie loved him and wouldn’t be consoled without him.

The big angel snarled, “No dogs in heaven!” and flew away.

The little angel had finally loosed the mother’s hands from the fat man and had him ten or twelve feet in the air. The angel sighed loudly and said to Pepi: “I’ll talk to the Big Guy and see if anything can be done.”

Then quickly he or she and the fat man soared out of sight.

Pepi sat patiently and waited, his tongue lolling. He watched all the other people being separated from each other. “Like sorting out bad treats from good treats,” Pepi thought, being a dog who liked analogies.

Suddenly the sky darkened dramatically and a heavenly bright light descended.

From its midst, a quiet voice spoke to Pepi. “I see what has gone wrong. The wrong angel was put in charge. He is Quentin Tarantino, a director of savage moving pictures. My people were misled by idolaters who called him, ‘a god among men.’ He doesn’t belong in this Exodus at all. He selected many of the wrong people, so we have a lot of returns.”

As Pepi listened, he noticed a loud wailing and saw a body falling from an unimaginable height, at the end of a trail of feathers, until it disappeared into a boggy swamp.

The bright light spoke once more and said, “Come, good dog!” to Pepi. Pepi felt himself rising.

He rose higher and higher until Earth was far below, and he saw Bethie waiting for him, with a big bone!

The End.

How I learned to eat

Dinner time. My mother had “slaved” in the kitchen and was hot and not pleased. Vegetables were steamed soft, meat overcooked in the pan or oven. She did not have the touch. However, we ate it. My father’s cooking wasn’t much better. I was about 30 years old before I learned that cooked liver could be deliciously tender and juicy.

Mom’s best dish was a tuna casserole that included a can or so of tuna, and mushroom soup out of a Campbell’s can, poured over alternating layers of Fritos; she gave me the recipe and I made it for myself when I was a working bachelor. Fritos were one of my favorite food groups. I could buy some new comics or science fiction magazines, get a cold Pepsi and a bag of Fritos and sit on the porch in an afternoon and have a grand time.

The college fraternity cooks were okay. I was usually hungry. Plus there were all the hamburgers and French fries and fried chickens and chicken-fried steaks in between. And late night in the dorm, the hamburger and milkshake guy would come through. He sold hamburgers made of some kind of ground meat, greasy in the bun, and frozen milkshakes.

The military cooks had the license to keep us fueled. It was fuel, you couldn’t care too much how it tasted. Could a car complain about Cities’ Service gasoline instead of Phillips? Was Gulf too rich, did (Conoco betray its dirty origins?

So--later in life--when I was assigned to a fancy series of books about food... I required extensive and rapid education.

The Adventurer

There are, it seems, so many things I haven't done and places I haven't visited. Things, perhaps, I should have done; places I should have visited.

"You've never been to Paris? Oh, you must --"

"Downhill skiing in Colorado with the wide slopes and the deep fresh spring snow--."

"The Louvre--"

"The catacombs--"

"We got tickets for --"

"..this hidden hotel in--"

"Cancun--"

"..sailed our schooner into the port at --"

"..the chute opened at 1200 feet--"

Not that I blame friends and acquaintances for telling me of places they've been, things they've done. Half the fun of adventure is sharing the stories afterward.

It's just that it seems that I've never done anything worth talking about. Nothing unusual. "Just an ordinary life"--that could be my epitaph.

I did go to Iceland, once. My only trip beyond the confines of the United States. Went to Hawaii. But not Alaska.

Not just travel but other places I haven't been as well. I never took an acid trip. This didn't bother me until, years after the Sixties when I might have tripped, I learned that the CEO of a hip company customarily inquired of new hires when they'd tripped. So I never applied.

Climbing a ladder to the roofline of our second floor to clean out the gutters makes me week-kneed. So I haven't scrambled up mountains, dived from planes, jumped with bungee cords tied to my ankles.

I learned to live a vicarious life. I wrote a theme in freshman English about riding a bucking horse that threw me off. It never happened but I got an "A" and the instructor read it aloud to other classes. I learned to live a vicarious life and write about the adventures in my thoughts. This kept me at home with my dog and family while my imagination roamed into weird places on Earth and in far galaxies.

I'm a quiet-looking guy. You can look at me and see nothing unusual. Indeed, you could sit next to me at dinner and not hear of anything I've done. But I could show you things I've written and pictures I've drawn, of extraordinary things and places and people--I've been there; I've done that.

Blessing the Skunk

BLESSING THE SKUNK

by donald hinkle

On my daily walk, a week ago, I passed a large house on a bluff overlooking the Vineyard Sound, and saw a feline shape moving erratically under the two vehicles in the driveway. I paused and watched. It was a small skunk, possibly not mature because the white patch on the back of its neck did not extend down the back to its tail. It was daylight, time for skunks to be in their holes.

Then I saw: Its head was stuck in a yogurt cup, on the small end rather than the large. I watched it bump into tires and the garage door and, like one of those vacuuming robots, turn and go in an opposite direction until it bumped into something else.

I was the only person around. I was scared of getting zapped by skunk stuff, but realized that it was my duty to free him. After I thought that, and briefly asked God for help, the skunk left being under the vehicles and headed for the end of the driveway and the street. I wondered if I would have to chase it back onto the grass, but it turned around and moved in my direction.

Moving around me erratically, it got close but not quite close enough. I was certain that if I did remove the cup, I'd get sprayed (quick vision of my wife having to bathe me in tomato juice). I stiffened my resolve, and made a hesitant grab; my fingers hit the end of the cup and the skunk startled, ran away.

I looked around, hoping someone else would appear to help, perhaps by limiting the skunk’s running space. A jogger went by, watching me and the skunk, without offering aid.

Of the 350 odd degrees that surrounded me, the skunk seemed to try each for a few steps, then turn back and try another. I thought again, God, help that skunk come close so I can get the cup. The skunk moved randomly for a few more minutes, almost retreated into some shrubbery, but turned and came back again toward my feet. Closer. Closer.

I grabbed faster than I realized I could move, got the cup and lifted...and both cup and skunk left the ground. Then the skunk popped out of the cup five feet in the air and I was staring into his small face. He dropped to the grass and faced me. Shook his head, squared off at me.

I said, “I'm a friend, I took that cup off.” He turned and his tail went up and

it seemed I was due for a squirt, but, tail high, he bustled off into a cluster of bushes on the other side of the road.

I think he was grateful, but evolution and skunk society don’t provide many ways for a skunk to say thanks.

SNOW DAY BREAKFAST, YAY!

SNOW DAY HOLIDAY BREAKFAST

by Don Hinkle

"Goodnight, Wheels," Mom said.

Wheels looked out the dark window. Big white spots dropped slowly past.

"Tomorrow will be a Snow Day. No school!" Wheels said.

"Maybe, but I don't think so." Mom said. She got his school clothes and put them on the chair for the morning.

"Bet you two billion dollars."

"Wheels," Mom said. "I don't bet. And neither do you."

"Well... it WILL be a Snow Day."

"So... pretend. If it is a Snow Day, what will you do?" Mom asked.

"First I'll eat breakfast, then I'll build a snowman, then..."

"Wait! Stop! Say again, please... IF it's a snow day you're going to eat breakfast?"

"A BIG breakfast. So I don't have to stop to eat lunch."

"That's good news, Wheels. Very good,"Mom said. "If it is a snow day, I'll fix you the biggest breakfast you ever saw."

She kissed him. She turned out the light. Wheels looked out the black window. With the light off, he couldn't see the snow. But, when he held his breath he could hear the snow falling.

In the morning, the air smelled clean and cold.

Snow piled on the panes of his window. He rubbed the window and looked through the clear spots his fingers made. Everything was white.

From the kitchen, Mom called to him: "Wheels? Get hungry for the biggest breakfast of your life."

"Awright!" Wheels said.

Wheels threw his school clothes back into the closet. He put on old jeans and a sweatshirt with a hood. He went to the warm kitchen and sat at the table. He smelled hot food and heard sizzling and bubbling sounds.

"I'm hungry," he said.

Mom gave him a mug of hot cocoa and a plate of scrambled eggs with two slices of bacon and a piece of toast. Wheels folded the bacon inside the toast and took a big bite.

After Wheels ate that, she brought a plate with two pancakes. Wheels poured on maple syrup and ate them both.

Mom looked worried: "Are you chewing everything?" she asked.

"What's next?" he asked.

Next he had a bowl of oatmeal with butter melted on it.

Then he had a piece of apple pie with cheddar cheese melted on it.

"What a great breakfast!" Wheels said.

"There's more," Mom said. "Can you eat it?"

He started to say, "You bet!" but he just said "Sure!"

She popped two pieces of toast out of the toaster. One was white, with a suntan. The other was dark like chocolate.

"What's this?" Wheels said, holding up the dark toast.

"Pumpernickel bread."

"I'll put strawberry jam on it," he decided. He put peach preserves on the white bread. First he took a bite of white, then he took a bite of the black. Then he drank some cocoa. He reached for the telephone.

"I'm gonna call Jason," Wheels said.

"Don't go yet," Mom said. "There's more."

"Hey Jason!"

"Wheels! Let's go sledding!"

"I'm eating breakfast." He put the last bite of black toast in his mouth so Jason could hear the crunch.

"You NEVER eat breakfast!"

"You want to come over and eat with me?"

"What're you having?"

"Everything."

Mom put a waffle in front of him.

He ate the waffle with a big scoop of honey. "Jason's coming," he told Mom. "He wants to eat breakfast too."

"He'll have a tough time catching up with you, but there's plenty to eat," Mom said. She set down a dish of strawberries with milk.

Jason came in, stomping snow. Mom gave him strawberries.

"I don't like strawberries," Jason whispered to Wheels.

"I'm eating everything," Wheels said.

Jason ate the strawberries.

Then Mom brought hamburgers and french fried potatoes. Jason said, "I didn't know you could eat hamburger for breakfast."

"What's next?" Wheels asked.

"You want more?" Mom said, wiping her face with a towel.

Jason said, "No thanks." Wheels winked at Jason and said "Sure."

She opened the oven and brought out a roast chicken.

Wheels and Jason ate the drumsticks.

Mom opened the oven again and brought out a pecan pie. She cut two slices and put vanilla ice cream on top.

"Let's go sledding," Jason said.

Mom said, "What about the pudding? And the ham? And the souffle? And the chilidogs?"

"Dad can have the rest," Wheels said. Jason laughed and jumped up from his seat. "Thanks for breakfast, Mrs. Wheeler."

Wheels slowly got off his chair. He waddled over to Mom and shook her hand. "Thanks very much, Mrs. Mom."

"You're welcome, Mister Jason and Mister Wheels," Mom said. "It was hot work to cook but lots of fun watching you eat."

Wheels and Jason took the sled to the top of the hill.

Wheels went down the hill much faster than Jason.

the end