On Sunday, I spent the day shopping around in Russellville at thrift shops and pawn shops to try and find some cool things. Back home, this was one of my favorite pastimes, as you never know what cool things you will find a shop for just a couple of dollars. On this occasion, however, it was not what I bought, but rather what I got for change at one of the shops that was interesting.

I had stopped at a convenience store for a quick drink and had decided on a bottle of IBC Cherry Limeade, and had queued up to checkout. In front of me, however, was a woman, and she was engaged in a deep conversation with the woman at the register. The two were stooped over some sort of coin on the counter.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” said the woman at the register. “Is it real US money?”

“Yes, it is,” replied the other woman. “I have a few of them at home, and when I go on vacation, I spend them at little shops like this. It’s fun to see the looks on people’s faces when I pay with them.”

The woman walked away, and I approached the counter to pay for my drink just as the woman was putting the coin into the machine. I quickly asked to see it, and she told me she’d trade it to me for it’s value: one dollar. I eagerly traded a dollar bill for this large (and heavy coin), and I ended up with a United States Eisenhower 1776-1976 Bicentennial Dollar Coin.

Below are images of the front and back of the coin (with a quarter for scale)

This past weekend, my mother and my grandparents drove down from Fayetteville to visit me on campus. Among several other things we did, we drove the thirty or so minutes from my dorm to Mount Nebo State Park in Dardanelle. The drive up to the summit of the mountain was a bit ridiculous, being around two or three miles of steady upwards climbs and hairpin turns, but when we reached the top, we were adequately rewarded for our efforts.

The view from the top of Mount Nebo is a sight to behold: from the top, you can see down into the entire Arkansas River Valley. It offers stunning and gorgeous views of Lake Dardanelle and Lake Dardanelle State Park, Arkansas Nuke One, and the city of Russellville off in the far distance.

Furthermore, if one decides to take a short hike up to the other side of the mountain, as my family and I decided to do, you can come upon an overlook area where families tend to congregate to observe the valley below them. It truly offered an even better view of the Arkansas River Valley than the first photo op we parked at. Unfortunately, it was so crowded with people that I was unable to get up into the structure to take a photo from it, so I had to settle with a picture of the valley from nearby.

I’ve visited several Arkansas State Parks, but I must say, this one has one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen in the world. It was not a wasted trip.

When I was in 7th Grade, I was a huge fan of whole Slenderman creepypasta. I had read the mythos front and back many times, and I had played each of the games, from the Eight Pages to the Arrival. But my crowning achievement involving the series (albeit the cringiest of the them all) was when I wrote full-length novel. The novel was entitled: “Slender: Hospice.”

As one can tell by the original hand-drawn artwork and the abundance of trees dotting the landscape, I was passionate about this project. I had even gone to the extent of including each of the eight landmarks from the Arrival in the drawing: the ruined farm, the oak tree, the lighthouse, the powerlines, the silo, the boulders, the river, and the stump.

The novel, which ended up counting at just under two hundred pages, fifteen chapters, and months of my life wasted, followed the story of a young epileptic man named Alex who, after a particularly nasty episode, is transported to the hospital in a comatose state. When he awakens, he finds that the hospital is abandoned and finds a strange note to him from a mysterious “Kate.”

After a few hours of confinement, he works up the courage to leave his padded room, and he realizes that the hospital is not as empty as he previously thought.

Throughout the novel, Alex has to flee from Slenderman and his minions while attempting to rescue Kate. It all comes to a climax as Alex is forced to flee the hospital through the woods directly adjacent to the hospital. A few years later, he returns, and (for some reason) the last two chapters consist of a Matrix-style shootout in which Alex slays Slenderman and all of his minions and rescues Kate.

All in all, definitely not my best work.

 

I discovered the board game Forbidden Island in the summer of 2015 when a good friend of mine brought it to my church‘s Wednesday night youth program. We would always arrive about four hours early to the service in order to play video games on the TV together, but on this night, my friend had a different idea.

We started unboxing the game, and after a brief setup period, we started the game. Immediately, I was in love.

Forbidden Island is a game where you and up to five of your friends play as adventurers exploring an ancient island, searching for four treasures. This, however, is not a competitive board game. Your party has to work together to overcome challenges like animal attacks and even flooding as the island begins to sink back into the ocean.

The “island” board is made up of tiles, with each one corresponding to a location on the island. Players must attempt to make their way around the board and collect four of a single artifact card to collect that treasure.

All the while, however, small pieces of the island are becoming flooded, then sinking back to the bottom of the ocean entirely. This requires players to spend one of their three moves to “shore up” a flooded tile, essentially removing all of the water and making the tile safe again. If a tile is selected to be flooded while it is already flooded, it sinks and is permanently lost. This can become a real problem over time, as once tiles are lost, they can destroy paths to other tiles and even paths to the treasures.

I have played Forbidden Island for three years now, and it remains one of my favorite board games of all time. It is one that I would recommend to anyone who likes Dungeons and Dragons or other tabletop games.

DISCLAIMER: As a thought experiment, I have been assigned to argue the opposite of my actual views on a controversial subject. Please note these are not my actual views.

Before the end of the first four months of 2018, there were 23 confirmed school shootings in the United States with a combined death toll of 43 persons, including two Kindergartners. This is ridiculous to say the least, as in our modern society, we could have easily stopped all of these senseless acts of violence with restrictions on firearms and ammunition.

Specifically, firearms used in most mass shootings, such as assault rifles and high-capacity firearms should be banned entirely. No good arguments can be made for keeping these weapons of mass destruction legal, as they are simply constructed to have the highest rate of fire possible with the lowest possible amount of time required to reload them. These are objects made simply to have high kill counts in a wartime situation, but for a civilian, they only have one use: gun violence.

Let’s take a look at the Arkansas Tech Campus, for example, but more specifically, my dorm, Turner. I live on the third floor of the Turner building, facing out across the second largest parking lot on campus. From my window, I can see across to Paine Residence Hall, Witherspoon, and I even have an almost direct line of sight to the Pavilion and Baztech, the most popular walking path on campus.

If I were someone with a mental disability or a grudge against Arkansas Tech University, in today’s society, I could easily obtain a high capacity and high rate of fire assault rifle, open my window and start taking shots. It we be almost like a repeat of the Las Vegas concert shooting almost a year ago. If that wasn’t a large enough indicator that we need to ban assault rifles, I don’t know what is.

Ever since Christmas of 2016, my dad has made a type of homemade candy called Heath Bar Brickle from a recipe he found online. The recipe was an instant success with my family, and has become known as “Christmastime Crack” with several members of my family. Because of its rising popularity, my dad has done his best to conceal the recipe, but I’ve tried to find two that seem to be similar here and here.

At one point (I think it might have been last year, if I remember correctly), my dad made a complete batch of the stuff around the start of December and intended for it to last until Christmas. Unfortunately, however, he forgot to factor in the fact that I am addicted to it, and by about the time Christmas break started, it was all gone.

I would actually consider the Heath Bar Brickle to be my favorite candy of all, even beating name brand candy bars and sweets. In addition, I do not consider myself to have much of a sweet tooth, as I prefer snacks like crackers or Slim Jim’s to a cookie or Little Debbie, but the brickle ignites some sort of dormant hunger for sugar inside of me. I guarantee that, if it were placed in front of me and there was no one there to tell me I couldn’t, I could eat an entire batch of it in one sitting: even in under five minutes.

I think I can attribute my addiction to the infusion of brown sugar and salted butter that makes up the base mixing perfectly with the chocolate topping. All of this is brought to perfection with a sprinkling of crushed pecans, giving the brickle a little extra crunch.

I am truly grateful for my father, especially when he comes to visit on Family Weekend, bringing me two entire large Lock-in-Lock containers full of Heath Bar Brickle.

Thank you so much for that one dad. You’re the best.

On Saturday, September 8th, I went an entire 24 hour period without using an form of modern technology (no cell phone, laptop, Xbox, etc.). The intent of this technology deprivation was to see how the human body and mind react to being without technology in the technologically inclined world we live in today. Below are my “ramblings” as I went through the day, all pulled directly from the notebook I was using to record my thoughts throughout the experience:

(9:30 AM) Hour 1: I’ve been awake for about an hour, and I am still lying in bed, trying to deny my impulse to reach down and check the notifications on my phone of everything I’ve missed overnight. That’s usually how I start my days: pulling my phone out of the pocket that hangs from my bed, maintaining my streaks on Snapchat so I don’t forget to do them later, etc.

(10:30 AM) Hour 2: For the past hour I’ve remained in bed, reading No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and listening to vinyls on my record player (as per the rules of the detox, analog technology was allowed to be used, as well as necessities like clocks, lights, and temperature controls). Currently, I’m listening to “The Red Pony Suite” by Aaron Copland, one of my favorite pieces and composers. The music brings to mind vivid images of a prairie in the Midwest. My only complaint is that every time the record side ends I have to go and flip it, so I never get to hear the transition from the 4th to 4th movement.

(1:30 PM) Hour 5: I chose not to write entries for hours 3, 4, and 5, because they mostly consisted of reading and listening to music, then I left to go get some lunch with my roommate. Now we are back, and I have returned to my book and records, while he now sits at his computer and plays “Slay the Spire,” one of his favorite video games. Thanks, bud. Way to rub it in.

(3:30 PM) Hour 7: I decided to pull out my electric keyboard (hopefully that’s allowed) and play some music on it from my piano music folder, and even worked on writing an original piece. I jotted down a few notes on the rhythms and chord progressions. I’ll have to work on expanding on that later.

(6:30 PM) Hour 10: Another large time skip – my apologies. All that elapsed during this time is that I’ve started to feel VERY anxious about what is going on in the world at the moment. I get this same sort of feeling when I’m at summer camp in the wilderness of Oklahoma: like something important could happen in the world, and I wouldn’t even know about it. I like to pride myself in being up-to-date on the news and reports of the world, and when I’m unable to, I feel out of touch. It’s not a good feeling.

(7:30 PM) Hour 11: I had an idea for a new short story, and out of habit, I sat down at my computer, opened it, and turned on the screen, all before I even realized what I was doing. I closed it as quickly as I opened it, hopping up onto my bed and laying down. I feel so bored. There’s nothing to do!

(10:30 PM) Hour 23: Something has just occurred to me: since I went to sleep at 11:30 PM last night, technically it has been 23 hours since I last used technology. That being said, it’ll be one hour until I finish my detox! THANK GOD!

(11:30) Hour 24: I’M DONE FINALLY! THIS IS THE LARGEST FEELING OF RELIEF I HAVE EVER FELT IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!

Sampled on August 28, 2018 at Chamber’s Dining Hall

My first visit to Chamber’s Dining Hall had made a bit of a bad first impression on me: it was the first day of Freshman Orientation, and my small group’s two orientation leaders had held us a few minutes late so we could complete our “Food Name-Game” icebreaker. So, there I was, entering the Dining Hall with the rest of my small group at 12:24, almost a half-hour late to our lunch break, and the entire building was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with students waiting to get food. I fought through the horde for about fifteen minutes and was only able to get a dry salad from the salad bar (they were out of every dressing but some kind of vinaigrette).

So, reasonably, I had been avoiding the Dining Hall for quite some time, assuming that every day would be as chaotic as the first day of orientation, but after just over a week of eating three meals a day at Baz-Tech, my roommate convinced me to join him at the Dining Hall for dinner. He persuaded me that he had worked out the schedule of the crowds, and that he could help get me in for dinner before the bum rush started.

We headed out of our dorm Tuesday night at around 5:30 PM, and true to his word, my roommate had figured out the schedule. We walked into Chamber’s and in front of us were massive platters of food and, at max, ten or eleven students. The food we had that night was wonderful, but two of my dessert items stand out.

The first of these two items was soft-serve Italian ice. I was originally going to try the strawberry, but the machine merely put out a strange red soup when I tried to put it in my bowl, so I moved on to the blue raspberry dispenser, pulled the lever, and did my best to make a professional swirl. On my way back, I noticed a few slices of cake sitting on the bar next to a sign that read “Mountain Dew Cake.” I grabbed one of the slices, intending to eat it after I dug into my Italian ice. Back at my table, I dug into the frozen treat. It was very refreshing and hydrating, almost giving me the same sensation of drinking a large glass of water as opposed to the usual reaction one’s body has to eating an ice cream cone. It also had a surprisingly strong, almost naturally flavored fruit taste, combined with an unexpected aftertaste of mint.

Upon finishing my Italian ice, I noticed something alarming: my roommate had robbed me.

A disaster. A national tragedy.

After he ate it, he did kindly tell me that it tasted nothing like Mountain Dew at all. I guess it wasn’t much of a loss after all.