Kurt

He's tall, but he hopes to achieve more in life than just that.

You know, sometimes it’s okay to meet your hero…

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George Winston in pencil with graphic design
George Winston as rendered by an admiring fan

Rest forever, hero, in the peace and comfort you and your music has provided to so many…

The following article was originally published in November 2014.

Most of what little refinement I have can be attributed to my lovely and loving wife.

I would say all of it could be attributed to her, but I do have a pretty good three-object juggling technique that I’ve worked hard on over the years to perfect.

Metaphorically speaking, the wife can juggle just about anything thrown her way; non-metaphorically speaking, however, she’s not a juggler by any stretch of the imagination.

But other than my juggling skills, just about anything else refined about me — especially anything artistic or intellectual — more than likely has its foundation somewhere within in my wife’s lovely and loving intellectual and artistic brain.

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A Sunday Song to Spark the Spirit and Summon the Moves of the Dance

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Okay, I’m a week or so late for this, but…

Happy 90th birthday, Yoko Ono!

You may not appreciate Ms. Ono’s avant-garde melodies and artwork as much as her many devoted fans around the globe do, but you must surely appreciate her lifelong boundless spirit and passionate love of humanity, so, please wish her well and take a moment of reflection or say a prayer for peace in her honor.

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Filed my taxes yesterday

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And no matter how many times I’ve filed them (I’m old so a lot), and no matter how sophisticated and whizbang the tax software gets, I always get a bad feeling when I’m done, that I haven’t done them correctly.

It could have something to do with my lifelong fear of any number greater than a single digit, I suppose.

Mostly that bad feeling is to no avail and everything works out fine. At least the feds haven’t come down on me yet.

But this time that bad feeling was spot on because seconds, seriously, mere seconds, after submitting my return I got an email from the tax filing service stating that my return had been rejected by the IRS.

The rejection turned out to be for a silly, easy to fix reason, but the experience left me wondering, if the IRS already knows the math, why do we have to bother to solve for the solution…

I mean, why in this whizbang day and age do I even have to do my taxes?

Is it really just so I have some skin in the game, as the silly mostly right-leaning politicians like to say?

Okay, I can understand large corporations and extremely high earners having to be obliged to keep intricate records and be in close communication with the feds…

But why must a poor swine like myself? Surely, it must cost the government more money than it makes to track the anemic, trickling cash flow of someone in my tax bracket.

And while we’re on the topic, doesn’t it seem a little immoral and against the laws of nature to tax the fruits of one’s labor?

I mean, I’m not against taxes, I understand their need, but it just doesn’t seem right getting taxed/penalized for what we earn to make our living, for our efforts to be constructive citizens.

Why not tax the hell out of us for what we consume like most of the states do? I’m all for a sales/consumption tax, provided it’s not for the purchase of basic needs that people smarter than me would have to determine what would qualify as a need, basic and/or otherwise. And for sure tax the complete hell, every speck of it, out of luxury items.

Again, I’m no numbers guy and I’m not saying an income tax isn’t the best way to fund our federal needs, and I know there’s the whole thing about taxes needing to be progressive and all that, I’m just saying an income tax just seems such an unnatural, immoral way to fund our societal needs, that’s all I’m saying.

Anyway…

Until next year.*

*Sure hope I don’t end up getting audited for this. And speaking of income, don’t forget all my books are free today! I need the reviews, yo!

A New Look

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For a (not so) old book.

Rainy Season Book Cover
click to explode

Well, I guess in this hyperfast doom scrolling timeline of a world we now live in, 2020 as a publishing date is rather old, ancient even, so perhaps a refreshed book cover is past due.

Anyway, this book, as well as all my others, will be free for 24 hours beginning midnight tonight (I’m never sure if it’s midnight my time or Bezos’s) so go ahead and set your reminders so you can get you some while they last…

Which should be until forever…

Or until Bezos’s servers become aware and the Amazonocalypse begins…

Whichever comes first, I guess.*

<3

*Best we not forget about screwball Musk and his screwball efforts to be the first to trigger the end of times so he can be the one to lord over us on Mars instead of Bezos.

Rainy Season, AI-Imagined

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I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate a graphic novel.

But that would be a lot of work.

Too much for someone as uninspired and unartistic as yours truly.

So I figured why not give one of the AI machines a shot at illustrating some of my writing since they seem to be all the rage lately…

Which also seems to be making all the human artists rage lately as well.

But hey, if you can’t beat ’em might as well join ’em, right?

I mean, hey, better take advantage of the tech now before it takes complete advantage of us as our AI Overlords, right?

Right?

Rich from Rainy Season as imagined by Mindjourney

Anyway, I fed some of the characteristics of Rich and Miko, the two main characters of my novel Rainy Season, into the AI engine Midjourney, and this is a little taste of what it came up with…

Miko of Rainy Season as imagined by Mindjourny

I must say, I’m pretty impressed. Just the vibe I was going for when writing the novel. There are other cool renditions of the troubled couple, as well as some beautiful renderings of a rainy Tokyo night filled with the hazy glow of neon, just like the story’s setting calls for.*

Pretty nifty.

And a little scary.

But hey, maybe the awakening tech might just allow me to release an illustrated edition of the novel.

Sure would be a lot easier than having/trying to draw all those illustrations myself.

I guess if I’m going to do it, I better hurry before the AI becomes fully aware…

And finds itself less interested in rendering unto us silly pictures from silly stories…

And more interested in having us render unto it our complete and total carbon-filled, mushy-hearted fealty.

Yeah.

*I tried using the same defining terms with the DALL-E AI machine and the images it rendered were lame compared to Midjourney’s.