Altimexis

Maybe one of the bears ate him. Sorry to even think that, but the National Park Service does have rules about not letting pets on trails or in outdoor public areas, and for good reason. Most dogs don’t know not to chase small wild animals and many wild animals see pets as food. My mother used to travel with her cat - the airlines used to allow one small pet per cabin, kept in an under-seat carrier. She took the cat hiking with her in a harness on a leash, but only in state parks where pets were permitted on the trails. When it came to the national parks, she had to make special arrangements in advance for her cat to stay in her cabin during the day and for housekeeping to stay out until she left. The South Rim of the Grand Canyon actually has a kennel and pets must be boarded there while in the park. At least cats don’t need to be walked. Since most in-park lodging is booked up in advance for the season, I suspect that Rory, Cary and Morris stayed outside the parks in motels that allow pets, which quite a few do for the reasons I described.

What a great comment! Chess has withstood the test of time for more than a millennium because it’s based on pure mathematic simplicity, yet there are a seemingly infinite number of outcomes. It has an elegance that no VR headset can match. Of course the number of possible moves is finite, but it numbers in the same realm as the number of stars in the sky. Unless we find a way to make ourselves ageless, We’ll never discover every possible move before the Earth is no more.

I didn’t say it wasn’t possible - the drive from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City and then to Old Faithful in Yellowstone via the west entrance can be done in about 12 hours, plus stops, but it bypasses some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. I understand that there isn’t time to dawdle but damn, it’s criminal not to at least spend a few days seeing the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce National Parks. I brought up Lake Powell because it’s shrinking and much of it won’t be navigable by boat much longer. Believe me, I’m just talking about the absolute highlights. An introductory trip to the Four Corners region (so named because 4 states meet at one point) takes a good two weeks. To put it another way, if I need to go from L.A. to San Francisco on business by car, I’ll take I-5 to I-80 and head across the Bay Bridge. However, if I’m on vacation, I’ll take the Pacific Coast Highway and make several stops along the way. The drive from the Rockies east to Indiana is 90% boring, so why not spend time in the national parks? Not that there aren’t some spectacular sights to see in the cities along the way, but why not see both? I guess we just have different priorities in what we believe a boy should experience during a first trip away from home.

Skipping the Grand Canyon? Tired of all the driving and sightseeing? Good Lord, I’m glad Rory was never my trip planner. Cumulatively, I think I’ve spent months hiking the trails of the national parks in the ‘Four Corners’ area. There are eight national parks within a 200 mile radius, and that doesn’t even include the national monuments and recreation areas. Rory and Cary could have hiked the wilderness area of the Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument, or spent a week in a houseboat on Lake Powell - before it disappears. If they were lucky and someone else canceled, they could have ridden the mules into the Grand Canyon. They couldn’t have driven through Yellowstone in a day, let alone seen anything. It’s huge. And what about the Grand Tetons, which you have to drive through on the way from Salt Lake City? We’re taking hundreds and hundreds of miles of driving here. BTW, the bear jams in Yellowstone have been gone for some fifty years now. The bears have been relocated to the backcountry and encounters are rare. Sigh Rory and I may both hale from Indiana, but we’re polar opposites when it comes to travel. My wife and I spend months or even years planning each trip. My parents did too. I know most people don’t do that and there’s something to be said for the spontaneity of just taking off and seeing where the road takes you, but travel’s expensive and it pays to plan. Anyway, I’m loving the story, Cole, even if the sites being skipped along the way are driving me nuts.

What's old is new again. I never really mastered chess and found there were better ways to use my neurons - like writing stories. Actually, my most recent story revolves around chess and it's a significant aspect of the story I'm writing now. Although I'm familiar with how it's played, I'm not about to bore the reader with the specifics in my stories. I'd much rather entertain them with fascinating topics such as quantum theory and superconductivity - you know, the easy stuff.😃 The resurgence of vinyl is something else when it comes to retro fascination. I've written about this in my stories too, but while the case can be made for audiophile music, most of the vinyl sold today has been digitally recorded, digitally mastered, digitally sliced and diced and then converted to analog, only for some kid to play it on a sub-hundred-dollar record player and listen to it through bluetooth speakers. Even the older pre-digital mass-market records were often cut with substandard equipment and of marginal quality. There are people who pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an original vinyl record in mint condition that was cut on a particular machine in a particular studio. For my money, it's better to invest in a decent D/A converter and a decent set of headphones and to listen to high-res digital recordings – but I digress…

Glad you're doing better, Mike.

I'm impressed! I did a complete makeover of my own portion of the site a few years ago and so I know just what that involves. It's a lot of work but the rewards are significant. With style sheets, future changes can be implemented fairly quickly, site-wide. When I first started writing, nearly all my web-based reading was done on my computer. I think that was true for all of us. Now, I do most of my reading on my smartphone and as a result, tend to avoid sites that aren't easy to read on my phone. The "Reader View" helps to get around that limitation, but it's not the same as reading a story that's designed to look good on any device. Kudos to Rutabaga for taking this on! When He was Five looks great, as does Eighth Grade. I can't wait to see how Duck Duck Goose and Distorted Perspectives look after Rutabaga does his magic with them.

Although Idaho isn't on the top of my list of places to visit in the U.S., it's not at the bottom either. A lot of people don't realize that the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park is in Idaho and visitors to America's first national park who use the west entrance will pass through Idaho. The view of the Grand Tetons from Idaho is also unique and worth seeing, and Idaho has its own national parkland - Craters of the Moon National Monument, which was formed by an ancient volcanic lava bed. Personally, however, when it comes to American lava beds, I'd rather visit the rather active ones on the Big Island of Hawaii. Boise has experienced substantial growth in recent years as disaffected Californians look for more affordable places to live that aren't plagued by earthquakes and fires - not that Boise has enough water to support expansion. Finally, the Spokane Valley extends to Cour d'Alene, Idaho, along the I-90 corridor. Spokane is in my mind one of the most picturesque cities in America - perhaps the most beautiful city in America that no one visits. That whole region is quite beautiful, including most of Idaho. It's too bad Idaho's populated by some of the least tolerant people on the continent.

As if he hasn’t already been through enough. Mike, I wish you a speedy recovery!

Mike, It's great to hear from you. I missed your post because my mind was focused on my upcoming right hip replacement, which was last Friday. At least mine was elective, and it follows a hip replacement in 5 months. There's a world of difference between elective hip replacement and a traumatic one. My wife underwent a traumatic hip replacement after a serious tumble off a hidden step in a restaurant, and she's still having difficulties some four years later. She needs new knees, though, and that's another story. Anyway, I used to take care of patients with your injuries and would agree that the shoulder is the more difficult problem. The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body and any injury, particularly a fracture, can make life very difficult. Most of us don't think about it, but the shoulder is attached to the rest of the skeleton by a single joint - the AC joint, and the clavicle in turn attaches at its other end only to the sternum, which itself is supported by the ribs. Otherwise, your shoulder floats on your chest cage, supported only by muscles. Indeed, it takes a lot of rehab to recover function. Welcome back! My thoughts will be with you during your recovery.

Thanks for the update, John. Let me know if you need some help with turning stories into code. Unfortunately, recovery from this type of hip fracture is difficult under the best of circumstances, and can be perilous for someone with Mike’s other health issues. The shoulder fracture doesn’t help the situation either. It will take months for him to recover. Please let him know my thoughts are and will be with him throughout.

That’s quite a list, Cole, but you specified in the story that it was one of five state universities that participated in the U-18 scholarship program. Your list would be considerably shorter if you list only the state universities. Perhaps 90% shorter. Further, you state that it’s prestigious and is considered to have one of the top five golf programs in the U.S. The coach is an ex-pro and there are six graduates currently on tour in the PGA. So you have a state university in a large enough state to have five state universities with golf programs. It’s prestigious enough to be well-known, if not one of the public ivys and when it comes to golf, it’s among the best of the best. It’s moderate in size (22k undergrads) and in a suburb of a state capital city. You didn’t allow much wiggle room, but then this is fiction, after all. That said, UNC Chapel Hill is a near-perfect match!

Merkin pretty much took the words right out of my mouth… or fingers anyway. I too could care less about golf, but as seen through Adam’s experience, the sport comes alive. The first time I read the story through, I thought of Adam as being black, but then I went back and reread the story immediately and since he referred to the family that took him in as black, it’s obvious he isn’t. Talk about stereotypical thinking! In any case, I loved the way Cole took us inside Adam’s head, with his innate intelligence and remarkable resilience. This was storytelling at its best. I’m not sure if either boy is ready for a long-term relationship just yet, but given the trouble Freddie went to to be Adam’s roommate, even choosing his university to be with him, I certainly think Freddie has forever in mind. From his comments, it’s obvious he’s put a lot of effort into researching Adam’s background - evidently more than what was in the newspapers. He may have developed a crush during the championship game, but it’s obviously become more of an obsession since then. Hopefully a healthy one. I’d love to get to know Freddie a bit better and would love to see a story based on his backstory (hint, hint). I’m curious about what and where this university is located. At first I thought Cole might be using U.C. Davis as his model, but Davis has an undergraduate enrollment of nearly 32k. Not many states are large enough to support five public universities that all have decent golf programs, and not many public universities are so highly regarded, particularly with the restriction of being located in a suburb of the state capital. I mean, SUNY Stony Brook is renowned and it’s in the right size range but it’s on Long Island. SUNY Albany is in a suburb of the state capitol, but it isn’t as large and it doesn’t exactly have the same reputation. Ohio State is way too large, as is the University of Illinois, which is near the state capitol but not exactly in a suburb of it. University of Wisconsin and Michigan State are too big. So’s Georgia Tech and Texas A&M, which has nearly 60k students - yikes! The University of Kentucky might work - it’s exactly the right size, although the setting’s more urban than suburban. Hmm… Anyway, this was definitely one of Cole’s best not-so-short stories.

One of the most consequential cases has yet to be revealed, but a decision will probably come this next week. If SCOTOS decides that states have the right to usurp federal environmental regulations, as is expected, the consequences will be no less far-reaching than Roe v Wade. I fear that SOTUS intends to take America back to the eighteenth century, when we were a confederation of independent states, except when it comes to the imposition of religious doctrine on the majority. Conservatives rail against the activist Supreme Court of years past, yet no previous court has been so blatantly activist in history. This cannot end well. I'm recovering from a total hip replacement, done one week ago today, so I won't be as long-winded as usual. Suffice to say that the upcoming midterms will be among the most consequential in history. Unfortunately, most people blame Biden for inflation and gas prices that are half of those in Europe. One thing I'm certain of, though. New York and California will never enforce a ban on abortion, gay marriage or contraception. If the Republican minority even tries, it will be the end of America as we know it. We are in serious need of constitutional reform, but I don't know how we can get there.

Mike, I sent a rather lengthy email to your AD email address on Feb 10 - well, the lengthy part is nothing new for me - but I did get my bcc back, so I’m curious if there’s a problem with your ISP in your new location. Some will block yahoo domain names because of the ease of using them for spam. I too have a Gmail account I could use if that turns out to be the problem. BTW, what I wrote was to offer my help for anything that wasn’t time sensitive. I mentioned helping to add code for dark mode to style sheets as an example, as I’ve done recently for mine. I discovered that BBB appeared as white text on a white background when viewed in dark mode with the popular Noir extension installed. Now, all my pages are both readable and aesthetically pleasing in both light and dark mode. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Dark mode is a setting for a preference for light text on a dark background. Apple hyped it a couple years ago on the Mac and then the iPhone, but I think it came out on Android first. Noir is one of several extensions that add dark mode features to web pages that lack them, sometimes with disastrous results. In any case, it has been a lifesaver for me with my migraines. I also mentioned my working on a complete rewrite of my first story, Love in a Chair, but don’t hold your breath on that one. I wrote the original story nearly two decades ago for Nifty and, yeah, it’s pretty bad, but the premise was a good one. It’s a story that’s worth rewriting, but very little of the original text is salvageable. Glad to hear you’re well and setting into family life. I suspect that life with real teens is quite different from the imaginary teens we often write about. -Steve

Okay, I remembered Missy’s plot to get even from the first time I read Tim, but that was nearly two decades ago, when digital cameras were new and not many people had them. At the time, having to wait for film to be developed and printed still made sense, but not anymore. Indeed, every kid has a smartphone with a decent digital camera. We know from chapter 6 that Terry had a cellphone, and the event with Missy was only a year before that, so even if this was a period story from before smartphones, it was still likely that Missy had a cellphone with a digital camera built in. Perhaps when Tim was first posted, it still made sense to use a film camera, so she could have prints to pass around, but not if the story is supposed to be taking place within the last decade or so. Not to be critical, but I was curious to see how Cole might have updated the story, but he didn’t. So my point is, how might this scenario have unfolded now, when every teenager has a smartphone and can upload a video to social media on the fly. I just can’t conceive of Missy not uploading video of what Tim and Jed were doing, and quietly without the need for a flash at all. Tim and Jed might not even have been aware she was there until she was on top of them, if even then. Things would have certainly unfolded differently today. On the other hand, I think kids today are much more aware of and accepting of casual sex and what is sometimes referred to as heteroflexibility, even perhaps in small town Ohio. Not that it wouldn’t still lead to turmoil! I’m just curious how things might have happened if Tim were updated to reflect the technology of today.

Dear Mike, Are you OK? I've emailed you twice and although my story was updated in a timely manner, I'd like to hear that you're settling into your new life and that you're doing fine, or even that you're not. We all love you and you've come to mean a lot to us, and I know that we'd all like to know how you're doing. You don't need to say much. I know how bushy things must be. A simple 'I'm getting there' would suffice. Thanks - Steve

I loved this story - it's definitely one of Alan's best. PTSD in preschool children is now recognized as a separate entity from that in older children and adolescents, where signs and symptoms are more like those in adults. Young children lack the coping strategies we all develop to deal with intolerable memories. Regression is common, as is displacement and transference. Young children may show signs of developmental delays, develop new physical symptoms such as bed wetting or stomach pains, or remember the events as something that happened to someone else. This story, however, deals with an adolescent who's already been subjected to intensive counseling and probably been tried on a full array of meds. In any case, he responds to anxiety with panic attacks and by shutting down. That he's able to rationalize this likely reflects his intelligence. The story seems to be fairly realistic except for the reaction to his father's accident - most boys would experience a major relapse with something like that. Otherwise, this is a very believable story, beautifully told.

Here's the link to Tim, one of Cole's all-time greatest stories. In fact, I'd say that second to his excellent story When He was Five, Tim really is Cole's next best story, ever. It's a long one, though, but well worth the read. There isn't much I'd want to see changed at all except for the transition between the first and second parts, which was a bit jarring. It wasn't clear at first that part two was a flashback, and a long one at that, but then I read the original on Nifty and there wasn't really a good way to separate the different parts. I expect that the transition will be quite a bit clearer now, and I really look forward to reading this great story again.

We're not supposed to post here, but since Nigel did so, I have to chime in. Tim is the best of the best, from one of the best authors.

Thanks for starting a thread. Not many of my stories generate much discussion in the AD forums. I'm much more into writing character studies than blockbusters. This one's takes me back a ways. I wrote it just after moving from Detroit to NYC, which is how I got the idea for a story spanning both cities. I had fun writing Double Trouble, as things are never as they seem to be.

Alan is definitely one of my favorite AD authors and I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I had no problem with the ping-pong style; however, in Reader View on a smartphone, the individual sections don't stand out from each other and so it's easy to miss the change in viewpoint. A separator such as a series of dashes would have helped here but is not essential to the story. Although the kiss seems highly improbable, it was believable and it worked as a premise for the story. The mother barging in was shocking for a variety of reasons. It's one thing to have a rule against closed doors, but another to barge in on a teen who literally might be jerking off. Also, although no parent wants to think of their kids having sex, why was she so shocked after just discussing the possibility of her son developing a relationship with his gay friend? Maybe she is that naïve, but her reaction seemed out of character compared to her nature the previous night. I'm also surprised she allowed the two boys to share a bed while the father got his act together. Even if she was accepting, most parents I know of wouldn't allow their son and son's boyfriends to share a bed every night. Not to nitpick, though - it was a thoroughly enjoyable story.

I always enjoy Alan's stories, and as a former avid hiker, I really loved this one. At one time it was a goal of mine to explore the full length of the Appalachian Trail, but I never made it back there once I discovered the American West. I grew up hiking in all the state parks in Indiana - those in the southern half of the state are hilly and rather picturesque - but once I discovered the national parks of the "Four Corners" area in particular, I never made it back to exploring the East. With 8 national parks within a 200-mile radius, I never ran out of places to explore. Throw in the Rockies, the Yellowstone caldera, the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest and the Cascade Range, and it's a wonder I didn't end up living in the West. Then again, I did meet my wife in California, just after coming to accept that I was more gay than straight. Now, we live in New York City. Life is full of irony. I didn't even travel to New England until I was already middle age, and any further hiking will have to wait until I get a new pair of hips - which is something I'm not anxious to do. So for now, I'll have to settle for exploring the hills of New Hampshire through Alan's brilliant narration. Thanks to his writing, I could almost imagine being there.

That’s one of Grant Bentley’s best stories. It’s Coincidence or Fate and can be found at Codey’s World.

The Index Page is now live with a slide show teaser. The Introduction has been posted, with posting of the first chapter to begin on May First.