WELCOME TO MY AUTHOR PORTFOLIO
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Robert Zimmerman
Who?
You know...Robert Allen Zimmerman, the man who became Bob Dylan. The Dylan surname was adopted to honor Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Bob Dylan, the American folk singer who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2016, wrote the song Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door in 1973 for the movie Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, a film directed by Sam Peckinpah starring James Coburn as Pat Garrett and the late Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid.
The actual Billy the Kid, born Henry McCarty, later assumed the alias William H. Bonney and was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881 at the age of 21 (hence the kid part). In the movie, Dylan’s song plays as Sheriff Cullen Baker, played by SlimPickens, slowly dies from a gunshot wound. Slim Pickens, by the way was born Louis Burton Lindley Jr. (Doesn’t anyone keep the name they were born with?) and famously rode a hydrogen bomb in the movie Dr. Strangelove.
The song Knock on Wood was written by Eddie Floyd in 1966 and later covered by Amii Stewart in the better known disco version. You better Knock knock knock on wood the song goes, referring to the superstition of knocking on wood to deflect evil or bad consequences.
Knock knock jokes do not require the third knock. Two’s fine. Knock knock jokes date back to the early 1900s and, surprisingly, were not universally popular at first. Some actually dared to knock the knock knock joke.
You Don’t Knock (you just walk on in) is a gospel song that says one needn’t knock on heaven’s door at all—not once and certainly not three times. "Don’t knock, ring, push, or hold. Just walk on in"---a somewhat different message than that in the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: Rage rage against the dying of the light...
OTHER PUBLISHED STORIES... AND ESSAYS
How To Eat Right
How To Manage Your Money
How To Stay Healthy
The Fall Of Squirrel
Cake Walk
Do-gooders Gotta Eat Too
Of Peas and Queues
Three O'clock in the Garden of Good and Evil
News Item
The Visitor
Mr. Blinkie To The Rescue
The Point System
Elements Of Success
She Spits to Conquer
The Tree Remembers
Christmas Time Is Here
The Sodfather
What MLK Day Means To Me
Thanks, Mussolini
The Cure
Tarzan In Decline
Side Effects
Greatest Of All Time
The Last Hundred Days
Plight Of the Humble Bee
AWARDS AND HONORS
2017 Pushcart Prize nomination from Hawaii Pacific Review for The Last Hundred Days
2018 First Honorable Mention Short Story Division AWC contest
2018 Second Place Chattahoochee Valley Contest Short Story category
2019 First Place Flash Fiction Division AWC contest
2020 First Place Essay Streetlight Magazine
2020 Top ten finalist for The Opossum Prize
2020 Honorable Mention Stories That Need To Be Told Anthology
2020 First place Flash Fiction category in Seven Hills contest
2021 Second place Streetlight Magazine's Flash fiction contest
2021 Second place Seven Hills contest for flash fiction
2021 Second place Seven Hills contest for essay/memoir
2021 Third place Seven Hills contest for non-fiction
2022 First Place Seven Hills contest for flash fiction
"Life is a moderately good play with a poorly written third act."
-Truman Capote
"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past."
-James Joyce
"Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
CURRENTLY READING
...or just finished
Anaximander by Carlo Rovelli
The Body by Bill Bryson