YOU CAN'T PUSH A STRING UP A HILL

YOU CAN'T PUSH A STRING UP A HILL:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/667904

  STRUNG UP: Why helping your cousins can only lead to ruin – no good deed goes unpunished!

·  A STRING ALONG: The misadventures of a screenwriter in Hollywood at a Pitch Fest, trying to get his screenplay accepted.

·  BLAME IT ON RENO: a romantic comedy screenplay treatment about two couples, lifelong friends, who go to Reno to get married, but get so drunk on the wedding night, they marry the wrong partner and live happily.

·  THE HAPPINESS ALCHEMIST: The adventures of Aloysius Williams and how they tested his belief in the need for happiness.

·  JAKE, THE SNAKE: A complaint about a friend who was a bully, coward, and successful businessman.

·  CANE & ABE: The story of two friends whose lives go in opposite directions yet somehow teach the same life lessons.

·  PUSHING ON A STRING: An American and an Anglo-Caribbean discuss culture shock while traveling across the Sahara desert.

·  THE HELPER: A poem.

·  THE POET: Working with poets is like pushing a string up a hill; only those with limitless patience need apply.

·  PULLING ON A STRING: What is the meaning of life? Perhaps you find it going for a swim?

·  LIGHT-FINGURED LOUIE: The adventure of a thief and his conversion to Christianity.

·  TIE ME UP, Tie me down: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a twentieth-century marriage – the perfect imperfection.

·  ANOTHER COUNTRY: An African-American man and an Anglo-Caribbean man meet in Israel and discover that it’s a culture that connects and divides people, not color!

·  MONEY: PUSHING ON A STRING: If all economists were laid end to end, they would still not reach a conclusion. A study of the origins of the term “pushing on a string” and a look at how economists screw up the economy.

·  CULTIVATING BLINDNESS: A poem.

·  SEASONS ON A ROPE: The trials and tribulations of an immigrant who does everything to fit into American society but runs afoul of a twist of fate.

·  HAWAIIAN HANG-UP: A son returns to his family in Hawaii for his father’s funeral and finds himself caught up in the family’s gangster past and present – “Do the meek inherit the earth?”

·  ROLL OF THE DICE: The ills of gambling clash with the sensitivities of a man who only wants to help.

·  THE PRODIGAL FATHER: No matter what he’s done (or hasn’t done), you can’t give up on your father!

·  ONLY IN AMERICA: A young boy from Ghana comes to America on a visit and is confounded by the use of a ubiquitous and uniquely American word.

·  THE VANITIES OF DESIRE: A poem.

·  THE END OF MY ROPE: After eleven years enduring petty racism, obdurate spitefulness, pointless bickering, and cowardly and deceitful behavior, I had had enough

Should Auld Acquaintance    

And too soon this will end and another begin

we check ourselves for revisions

but the New Year demands newness not regurgitation.

So we meditate on our ki, adjust our yang

and make love to our synapses.

All is ready

just wait for the bell to toll

the clock to strike

the kisses to smack

the mistletoe will do the rest.

But wait.

We did this last year, and the year before and the year….

So why should this year be different?

A year older, lonelier, bolder, surer?

Yes, of our new destiny!

Let us go back then to

the beginning of our time here.

It was about our acquaintances, friends

bookends that held the 

leaves of our meaning together.

Yes, that was it.

We start again each year

reminding ourselves of our

loved ones pining for each other

in some forgotten region that we

have not entered for the past 365 days.

Divine Providence 

Suffering –

God given for

punishment

&

edification?

The sacrifice

of suffering offers

no reward

but

the consciousness of the self

floating

in

a void

of its own

misunderstanding.

Pain –

is the measurement

of

our trial

through

this

life,

The

litmus

test

of our

machine

existence.

Man will give up everything but his suffering!

God if you are near

God if you are near

Listen to my heart.

If I’m a short distance

Tell be how far.

In your garden of senses

I breathe in butterflies

Littering the sky

As the dank putrid earth

Blossoms in jasmine.

Alone with the creatures of your roots

I mark my place - forgiven, forgotten.

THE RITUALS FOR SUCCESS

THE RITUALS FOR SUCCESS

Imagine rising each morning, exercising (nothing frantic- perhaps a short walk) some stretches, sit-ups; Tai Chi; meditating 15-20 minutes on just 3 things you plan to be successful at today. You recite your prays and affirmations eat a healthy breakfast and leave your home with a simple ritual for success!

This simple ritual for success, of a good diet, exercise and mindfulness about your day ahead,  if cultivated, will increase and reward you continuously throughout your days, weeks, months and years to come. Because the first rule for success is consistency that builds confidence! And confidence like many things can be learned if we are consistent! But, it requires a daily ritual for success to remind us of what is important, meaningful and rewarding to us.

My name is Ian Moore, Life & Career Coach, Teacher, and Writer. I want to share with you how to build confidence by developing a consistent daily ritual for success.

I do not come to you as someone who studied these things in college. I’ve not written any dissertations on the migrating habits of career birds or the disillusion of lost Jobs in the age of technological. No! I come to you as an entrepreneur who has had to re-invent himself, many times over. I come to you as someone who has learned that the golden rule of life is that you must never ever, EVER give up!

I want to discuss 3 ideas that are saboteurs to consistency and success:

One, what frustration teaches us about how we see the world?

Two, why we are so down on ourselves, and

Three, how can we transform negativity into confidence?

No Good Deed

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

Joyce was my cousin, from the Islands, and we’d had such a good time when I was there on a recent trip, I felt close to her. And so, as I was always in need of family love I agreed to be a co-signer for her daughter’s student loan. It did flash across my mind that my cousin had more close family members living in the States who could have been the co-signer, but of course, I ignored those primal feelings of reason and dread and went happily to the gallows placing my head in the noose to be strung up.

To be continued http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/icmoore

A Writer

A Writer

        “…and he was a foreigner from a former colony and so I completely missed him in my youth, distracted as I was by all the imperial notions of ‘proper’ writing. When I did find him, forty years later, it was through movies and sketches and bits of hero worshiping stories some true but mostly false.”

        “…it was in a movie, I got the first glimpse; a famous actor who played Him, whose claim to fame was that he’d been sued for having a big dick, and He was a drunk in Spain hanging around matadors and beautiful people drinking in cafés in some mythical Hollywood time. And He’d been injured and couldn’t fuck even though He had all these romantic encounters. I thought it really strange and it kind of added sexual tension to the narrative and the story went on until it just ended, like His short stories that I read much later and put down because they had no plot except running out of well-described words.”

        “…I preferred adjectives and adverbs and modes and explicit sex and adventures and narratives that took me to another time, country, sensibility, and culture; a plot that could drag me out of the prison of my youth. Bottled-up as I was on an island full of words and words on words written over centuries, dissected, pruned and graded by great universities and great myths and great legends and brilliant critics. It was safer for me to remain on the sports fields and the margins of industry and the dusty roads of the former empire scratching out songs of painful memories than admit that I could be….”