Friday, August 29, 2014

8/29/14 - Zombies Galore

Find my whimsical zombie story, "Cinnamon Road," in Zombies Galore, a fresh new anthology from KnightWatch Press!

Thursday, August 28, 2014

8-28-14 - The Literary Hatchet

Find my dark short story, "The Hillside," in Issue #9 of The Literary Hatchet, available for free online!

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The Anti-Soapbox: Collected Essays

Free eBook from Aaron Garrison: The Anti-Soapbox: Collected Essays


Blurb:
The typical soapbox comes with strings attached: an agenda to be pushed, an ego to be stroked, a donation box to be filled. This book, on the other hand, attempts to fulfill the soapbox’s original ideal, as a fount of goodwill and ideas. 
Aaron Garrison, author of Learn Yourself: A Manual for the Mind and Synchronicity: One Man’s Experience, has taken the soapbox, and the speech has begun. In these collected essays, Garrison explores the ideological, the sociological, and the philosophical, with a healthy spoonful of psychology for good measure. Written from the laymen’s no-nonsense perspective, The Anti-Soapbox takes a practical, real-world approach to some big issues, yet does so with a gentle touch, refraining from the bruising tone characteristic of soapbox oratory. 
So step right up, folks! On the anti-soapbox, there’s no shouting, accusation, or ecstatic gestures, just a good old-fashioned reality check.

Available as a free eBook from the following vendors:


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Available in Print-on-Demand here:

Thursday, August 7, 2014

8/7/14 - An Emailed Link

Food intolerance is not pleasant. To be sure, even the most mundane foods contain dozens of substances, any number of which can have bizarre, sometimes hellish, effects on the body. Over time, I've learned which substances I'm intolerant to, and, unfortunately, the quantity of my intolerances is rather high, heavily restricting my diet. So it's only natural that I sometimes lose track of how much of which substance I'm eating or not eating -- or that I get so distracted with the predominant intolerances, I lose track of the lesser ones.

One of my lesser ones involves "oxalates," a substance found variably in vegetables. And, after a long time without an oxalate-related upset, it was only natural I forget about the prickly-sounding stuff.

You see where I'm going with this, of course, so I'll just cut to the chase: over the last few days, I overloaded on oxalates. As it were, chance saw my diet altering in just such a way that I ended up eating several high-oxalate foods in rotation. Additionally, I was taking a high-oxalate supplement at the same time. And there you have it: oxalate overload, introducing a wide range of really nasty symptoms. But, thankfully, I was keen to it all. After going over my food journal, and some self-analysis, I tracked down the culprit and then made the necessary corrections to my diet. Thus began The Wait, for my overburdened body to rid itself of the flood of oxalates, and for the agony to lift -- but that's a whole other story.

In any case, it was just yesterday that I got to the bottom of the whole mess and stopped eating the high-oxalate foodstuffs.

Then, this morning, not even a day later, I received an email from a friend. The email, bearing the subject line "Quick email," was indeed very short, just a couple sentences, but I found it rather interesting. As it were, the email's purpose was to send me a link to a health seminar my friend had learned of, entitled "The Oxalate Reduction Diet: Triumph Over Brain-Fog, Fatigue & Chronic Pain."

My friend did not know of my oxalate intolerance. In fact, no one did (not very good conversation fodder, food intolerance). Yet, from out of the blue, she emailed me that link, indicating the precise food intolerance I'd been battling, within a day of my making the connection. And is it surprising that the primary symptoms I was experiencing were crippling brain fog, fatigue, and pain?

And, the clincher (if this incident really needs a clincher): the seminar in question was not local for me, and I have neither the time nor the desire nor the spare gas money nor the energy to drive out-of-state to view it. My friend knew these things ... yet she still took the time to email me a link to something I would in all likelihood never attend. Had she acted logically and not sent me the link, there would've been no synchronicity for me to be blogging about.

How ironic.