The Good Wolf of the North

Oh, the woods, how I miss them. To help make myself more complacent, agreeable, pleasant, I have started studying foraging. Now I know exactly how to identify a fiddle head fern and when to harvest it. I also know that you can eat pertinear every part of the cattail at some point during the year. I also know how to make Sumac lemonade. Are you impressed? So now I'm getting ready to stroll through one of the many metro area parks and start identify the flora. Of course I wouldn't eat it. Lord knows what's in the dirt it's growing from, or in the case of aquatic plants, the water.  Flash back to age 23: I was a young whip snap just out of nursing school and starting my first job at a nursing home. I was asked to witness the destruction of some meds and found there was a whole station devoted to flushing expired and discontinued meds into the sewer. My reaction was "Really? We just dump the meds into the water? What is this, 1895?" I know things are changing and...

This is it. My first novel. I guess that's not true, I wrote three others when I was just a youngster. The first, written at the age of 10 or so, was about a big shot who crashed his private jet, resulting in the loss of his legs. Soon after, said big shot meets the woman of his dreams at McDonalds where she's ordering from the value menu. They marry and live happily ever after. A classic tale of unexpected fortune lost among the coloring books. The second novel I wrote when I was 17, it was titled Eighteen. It was about a bunch of teenagers traveling out to California. Once they get there they lived in a ramshackle shed on the beach. Before long that desperate teenage drama ensues and they go their separate ways, but not before one of them gets run over by a bus. The third, written when I was 19, is about a girl who moves to the big city and falls in love with a drug dealer who looks like Eminem, or at least he did in my mind. Between the age of 19 and 28 is an abyss in which...

Well, it's been two years. I like to take my time in doing things, or so it would seem, but so much has changed since the beginning of the beginning, and why was the beginning marked by my graduation from college with an English degree? I mean, really, it wasn't. There is no beginning, there is only the idea that we get another chance to do things better. First of all, I changed the name of my blog from The Archer's Mark to The Good Wolf for the following reasons: 1) I have been a vegetarian for fifteen years and the connotations of an Archer contradict my morals in more ways than they compliment it. 2) Wolves are amazing and I love them. 3) I have always liked the legend (Cherokee?) about the two wolves. It goes like this:   A grandfather was explaining to his grandson that there are two wolves fighting inside of him, as there is in everyone. One is greed, sorrow, pity, envy, anger and hate. The other is kindness, patience, humility, trust, generosity and love. When th...

Brand new, that's what this is. I'm not one hundred percent on why I'm doing this, starting a blog that is. I have been slowly vowing to go off the grid and this is kind of the opposite of that. However, I have also been slowly vowing to be adaptable. Mountains of journals, essays and poetry are taking over my house and the rate of production is rapidly exceeding the rate of publication. That's mostly because there is no rate of publication. So in an effort to take myself a little less seriously and to ensure at least one person reads one thing that I've written, I'm starting this blog. I have no real designs or specific intentions for it. We'll see where it goes.  Anyways, about today: Today I got four bills in the mail for my school loans. Since I'm no mathematician,  I called the loan center and had them add the four bills together for me. I was astounded to find that fresh out of a Minnesota State University with a spankin' new degree in creative...