STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On March 18, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler. I’m a writer and an editor. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon. Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here’s the important ones:

You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
Sign up for my mailing list here.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

Well, that was easy

On March 15, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

090819164319_1_540x360 — Pictured: not my tooth

The tooth extraction has basically turned out to be nothing worth talking about, honestly, which isn’t going to stop me from devoting an entire blog post to it. The most complicated part was convincing the … nurse? not-the-dentist-but-not-clearly-a-hygienist? Dental assistant? I dunno, the lady who wasn’t the dentist– that while I appreciated the offer of sunglasses and would happily wear them during the procedure, the idea that the television in the room should be tuned to my needs (“Christ, no, not the news, anything but that”) or that the in-room bluetooth should be playing my own personal pullin’-teeth playlist was utterly unnecessary. The TV doesn’t even have to be on, and if it’s going to be on my only condition is that it be either not turned to a channel that’s going to provoke rage or muted. I really don’t need music.

She really had trouble with this idea. Apparently it’s rare that patients for extractions don’t have media demands while going through the procedure. Personally, I don’t get it.

Anyway, the nurse smeared my tongue and the area of the tooth with some sort of numbing gel and left me alone for a few minutes and then the dentist came in. We talked about Hamilton for a few minutes and then he did … something inside my mouth for maybe a minute and said “Okay, all done!” and left.

I was surprised to learn that a tooth extraction takes less than a minute; I hadn’t felt a damned thing. I expressed my surprise (“Holy shit, that’s it?”) and then discovered that, no, he hadn’t even touched the tooth, I’d just received three numbing shots to complement the numbing gel; the various non-dentists in the room were vastly entertained by my theory that the dentist declaring “all done” meant that “all” was “done” and that I could go home.

It was not, and I could not.

That said, the actual extraction took maybe five minutes. He warned me beforehand that he suspected he might have to break the tooth to get it all out; as it was maybe 97% of it came right out and then he had to do a touch more fiddling around to get a tiny piece of root that stayed behind. There was no pain whatsoever. There wasn’t even any real sense of pressure or discomfort or even tugging. If he hadn’t shown me the tooth I don’t know that I’d have believed he removed it, since I couldn’t feel anything inside my mouth– it was hours before I could actually feel the hole the tooth left behind with my tongue. My appointment was at 10:00 and I was texting my wife that I was finished at 10:30.

Several hours of lazing about the house and occasionally switching out my gauze ensued; as of this moment the extraction was ten and a half hours ago and while it’s been a bit obnoxious I still can’t say that I’ve felt any actual pain at any point. I ate ice cream and applesauce and had macaroni and cheese for dinner. I’m going to take some painkillers before bed strictly as prophylaxis but I’m not sure I really need them.

So, yeah. Kinda feel like an idiot that that had me more nervous than my gallbladder surgery did ten years ago. I mean, shit still has time to go south if I lose the blood clot or something, but so far this has been cake.

RIP, my original head

On March 14, 2018March 14, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Gonna go get a tooth torn out of my head tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to any part of it, for obvious reasons, to the point where I’m actually kind of embarrassed at how much it’s weighing on me. It’s a wisdom tooth. Those shits get pulled all the time. It’ll be fine, and I’ve got an excuse to spend the rest of the day in bed. How often do I get to do that nowadays? This is a good thing.

Stupidest thought of the last several days: that since I mostly chew on the right (which may not even be true) I’ll have to relearn how to eat. I don’t think so. I’m pretty certain that people who have single molars taken out aren’t generally in need of physical therapy afterwards. I’m just being ridiculous. I am also certain that once the swelling goes down, if indeed there’s enough swelling to be worth worrying about, that my face will neither be a different shape nor noticeably lopsided-looking. They’re not removing my jaw.

Anyway.

Keeping with the “it annoys me that this annoys me” theme…

I dropped below 10,000 Twitter followers this week, for the first time in probably two years. In itself, this isn’t a huge deal; followings ebb and flow and I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 10,300 or so, so it’s not a big drop at all. It’s mildly annoying, because I like that five-figure following, but ultimately it’s a nothingburger.

Now, that said: I worked at getting that 10K following, and I had several strategies that I used that worked. It took under a year to go from a few hundred followers to 10K. And once I hit 10K every single one of those strategies stopped working, and nothing I’ve been able to do since then has been able to push me above that 10.3K number I referenced earlier. Anybody reading this big into Twitter, and have any suggestions that don’t involve actually buying followers (never) or premium access to one of the various Twitter helper programs like Crowdfire? I don’t want to spend any money on this, but time I have.

Anybody out there know more than me and want to share?

Had a woman come into the store today looking for occasional tables, and in talking to her about what she was looking for she volunteered that she recently bought a 1600 square foot house, filled it with new furniture, then sold it “on a whim” six months later to buy a 4400 square foot house.

Which she now needs to fill with more new furniture.

Is it wrong that I don’t know this woman at all and I still feel like her taxes probably ought to be doubled or tripled?

I was gonna blog tonight…

On March 12, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

…but instead I’ve spent the evening on the couch playing Super Mario Odyssey with my six-year-old.

‘Twas time well spent.

RIP, Mrs. Gates

On March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching1 Comment

image-29403_20180310.jpgx I got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92. Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.

I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years. My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right? As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time. I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.

The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it. Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean. She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.

I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away. And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone. Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation. I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class. And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates. Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances. I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story. I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates. I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.

Proof of art

On March 9, 2018March 9, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn art, Photography3 Comments

I didn’t do anything today other than draw and sleep, and … well, I can’t make a post out of what I did while I was sleeping. I’m still not any good at this, really, but I’m enjoying it.

This might be my favorite picture I’ve done so far. The boy’s gotten back into Phineas & Ferb recently and I love Dr. Doofenschmirtz.

A lot of what I’ve been doing lately, when I haven’t been drawing established characters, is just playing with putting different body parts together and seeing what happens. I kinda like this guy but then again when I started drawing him he was supposed to be a woman, so …

This is what happens when I stare at Phineas’ enormous triangle head for a while and wonder what a rectangle head looks like. Answer: terrifying.

Dude on the left is random. The girl on the right started off as just a nose, and her nose was supposed to be the shape of her whole head, and then I decided it was a nose so she ended up oversized.

This was fiddling around, too; keep the same basic head shape and hair and play with the other face parts and see what happens. I kinda like the one with the straight mouth and the frog nose.

On HAMILTON

On March 8, 2018March 8, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life, Music6 Comments

Ask me to name my heroes and two names will come to mind very quickly: Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln. I’m always interested to see how fast people catch the fundamental similarity between the two men: they’re both damn near entirely self-educated. I’ve had more than my share of formal education but in a lot of the things I find important I’m an autodidact, and it’s a quality I deeply respect in people.

Which explains my attraction to Alexander Hamilton, or at least the version of him that Lin-Manuel Miranda has created in HAMILTON. I mean, the fundamentals of the story are basically correct, and Hamilton is undoubtedly a supreme autodidact, but he’s not quite up there with my heroes mostly because, while I’ve read tons of speeches and writings by Malcolm X and Abraham Lincoln, I’ve mostly read stuff about Hamilton, and that represents an important difference to me. At least at the moment. I need to reread the Federalist papers sometime.

But, yeah. This guy? I wanna be this guy:

How do you write like you’re running out of time?
Write day and night like you’re running out of time?
How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write every second you’re alive?

I wish, y’all. I don’t write enough, and the feeling “I don’t write enough” has been a goddamn constant in my life basically since I left college despite the fact that I’ve had, at the very least, an active blog for for nearly that entire time. I don’t write enough, but I think about writing constantly. I am never happier than I am just after completing a written piece– distinctly happier than when I’m actually writing it, a sentiment I suspect most writers will recognize.

Writing is torture. Having written is the purest bliss. 🙂

Anyway. We went to see HAMILTON for our 10th anniversary a week ago and somehow I haven’t talked about it here yet. Walking in, I had large portions of the soundtrack memorized and my wife was at least reasonably familiar with the whole thing, and I think both of us were concerned that the cast being “wrong” might impair our enjoyment somewhat. I’m glad to report that that concern was basically nonsense; my wife actually walked out preferring the Chicago cast, or at least their voices. I wasn’t quite there, but I spent some time raving about the performance of Jonathan Kirkland, who plays George Washington. The guy’s physical presence is outstanding; he towers over the other actors in the show, and he does a tremendous job embodying someone who was so personally forbidding that Hamilton himself once actually made a bet with a fellow Constitutional Convention-goer about whether he was brave enough to slap him on the back. The “son” scene in Meet Me Inside was so much better than I’d thought it was going to be from the soundtrack. Washington just stares at Hamilton, and Hamilton folds like a cheap suit.

I mean, okay, not surprising that I liked seeing the most successful Broadway musical of my lifetime live, but still: I know the tickets are expensive, but if this show is near you? Go see it. It’s worth it.

My wife is actually prettier than she was the day we met. I am … still alive, mostly.

Briefly

On March 6, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

This is more a proof-of-life post than anything else; my wife is out of town for the next few days so I’m on solo Daddy duty, and today was a long and ridiculous day at work featuring virtually no sales of furniture in exchange for money but well more than a nine-hour allocation of nonsense.

And then I got home and had to clean up dog poop, which always improves one’s day, as you can no doubt well imagine.

The goal for tomorrow is to get through it without smacking anyone. We’ll see how I do.