Rummaging randomly, I opened a journal and found a completely-out-of-context note from five years ago, when I was reading a book called Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, a book about golf that somehow transcends the game while providing sound advice about playing the game, as I recall.
There, in all capital letters, I wrote this quote from the book:
“IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT ADVICE IN THIS BOOK … TAKE DEAD AIM.”
What is “taking dead aim” as opposed to simply “taking aim”?
I imagine this is a concise way of saying what they say about “SMART” goals — Don’t just have some vague thing you want to accomplish; rather, write down a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.
Taking dead aim is important because you want to have a clear sight of your target before you pull the trigger.
After you take dead aim, then go for it. Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
But first, take the most important advice in Mr. Penick’s book.
They say it’s going to snow and snow and snow and snow and snow and snow and snow over the next two or three days in our neck of the woods. Some of the talking heads on TV are talking about the heaviest snow of holy-cow-maybe-ever, as if we didn’t have 30 inches of snow in mid-April half a decade ago — holy moley, was that five years already? But anyway nobody has said this one will be 30 inches.
Maybe these will be my famous last words and something horrible will happen to me as I negotiate the storm, but enough with the OMGs and the sky is falling, all right? It’s snow, it may even be a lot of snow, but there are worse things than a whole lot of snow.
Like Godzilla destroying your hometown. I mean, amirite?
Let it snow and snow and snow and snow and snow and snow and snow. I defy you, Snowman. I double dog dare defy you.
The spring equinox is less than four weeks away, on March 20. However much it snows and snows and snows and snows and snows and snows and snows, it’s going to melt. That, in the end, is what snow does.
Ah, don’t mind me. I’m feeling ornery today. Maybe I’ll go on social media and try to convince someone they’re wrong about something. Yeah, that’ll be a productive use of my time.
REMINDER: The new and improved second edition of Echoes of Freedom Past: Reclaiming and Restoring Liberty is now live and available via print-on-demand or ebook.
The second edition of Echoes of Freedom Past, my book about reclaiming our liberty after the assaults of the last few years, goes live Tuesday, and to mark the occasion I’m having a little sale on my “trilogy” of books about the subject.
Echoes is a collection drawn from this blog on the subject of freedom and the Bill of Rights, the increasing attacks on those rights culminating with the unprecedented forced (and now proven fruitless) lockdowns that authoritarians sold as necessary, and what we can do to reclaim and restore some semblance of a free society.
A few months later I released it’s going to be all right, which I conceived as a book of encouragements about living and thriving with hope in troubled times. For more than a decade now, people have grown angrier and meaner and more afraid, and I think those are words we desperately need to share at such times: It’s going to be all right.
These are themes I first collected a decade ago in a little book called Refuse to be Afraid, in which I talked about how scare tactics have become so much a part of our lives, from advertising to politics, and it’s important to keep calm and not to act out the fear that makes us do foolish things sometimes — like willingly surrender our freedom for a false promise of security.
The second edition of Echoes of Freedom Past is not a revision so much as a reshuffling to make it flow a little better. The print book is a more standard size with higher quality paper than the first edition. The short story “Letters from Camp” is placed in the back, rather than smack dab in the middle, to better highlight my dystopian fantasy about living in a re-education camp with other folks who saw the government as something other than a kindly charity during the virus scare.
For the first week that the second edition is on sale, the ebook will be on sale for a mere 99 cents at amazon.com, and I’ve also dropped the price of Refuse to be Afraid and it’s going to be all right for those seven days. If you’ve been thinking about picking up one or more of my books, now is as good a time as ever, as you can reap these three collections into your e-readers for a mere $2.97, less than the price of one ebook at the regular price.
My books are all also available in fine print-on-demand versions as well, of course, so you can have my breathless prose in your possession even after the interwebs collapse.
Take advantage of this rare opportunity, leave reviews to help others find the books as well, and thank you very much.
