When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I don’t want to grow up… I’m a Toys R Us kid… they got the best… for so much less… you’ll really flip your lid… from bikes to trains to video games… it’s the greatest toy store there is… gee wiz… I don’t want to grow up… cuz baby… if did? I wouldn’t be a Toys R Us kid… 🤷♂️
Gonna Go Huntin’ Tonight 🎶 Here I Am Fallin’ Again
Hey yall… got two more good ones for you… The first one’s fast… the second one slow…
As I was selecting the songs for this one… I was reminded of my first Hank concert… I think I was 14… it was me… my best friend Joey… my good buddy Chris… and two neighbor girls… April and Ashley…
Ashley’s mother was a police officer… and she and the chief of police for our town took us all to the concert that night…
It was a crazy and fun night… I won’t go into details… other than just to say… everyone had a lil too much to drink… including Hank…
And I ended up spending the night at Ashley’s house… Got the T-shirt!
My mother was not happy the next day… cuz she was worried about me… …but you know how us Gen X kids used to roll 😎…
So let’s get to the music…
🎵 Gonna Go Huntin’ Tonight — Strong Stuff — 1983
🎵 Here I Am Fallin’ Again — Habits Old and New — 1980
Oh! I also included a pic of the mountain Hank fell off… with a lil diagram… showing the path of his fall… just a miracle that he survived (it was 1975… Ajax Mountain near Wisdom, Montana)
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had…?
I’ve done a lot… I love a lot.
Sports… fishing… music… writing… working out pretty religiously these days… and I’ve always loved driving… oh… I’m a people and animal whisperer too…
I drove 18-wheelers all across the U.S. for 17 years… professionally. Spent time training student drivers with FedEx Ground… that part stayed with me… something about watching it click.
Same thing with teaching guitar and music back in the day… there’s something about passing things on.
But if we’re talking secret skills…
I can juggle.
Learned it as a teenager from a guy at a pool hall… with billiard balls.
And this one’s a little ridiculous but true…
I can throw grapes so high they disappear… wait… track them back down out of the sky… and catch them in my mouth.
Oh… and I can juggle grapes and eat them at the same time…
Yeah… I know… lol…
Nothing special… just a fun way to feed your face.
Not today though… too much other stuff to juggle…
˙uoıʇɔǝlɟuı ɥʇıʍ ƃuıs I sɐ ƃuol oS …ʎɐs I ʇɐɥʍ ɹǝʇʇɐɯ ʇ,usǝop ʇI
Yesterday, the Lord dealt with me all day about writing short stories in the future.
He reminded me of a time when I was about 10 years old. I shot and killed a bluebird that was resting on a clothesline. I was so sad. I held it in my hands, crying.
I took it to my mother, thinking we could save it — but it was too late.
Yesterday, God brought that moment back to my mind.
And He gave me an idea for a story… how that bird could represent Christ dying for me.
He also gave me the title
Soft Blued Kings
I spent three hours last night just trying to write the opening sentence. With His help, this is what I came up with
Way up in a lone Georgia pine, proud were the wings of two — a bird of a father, a son true blue.
This story will take some time.
I’m going to take it slow… and allow the Lord to help me write every bit of it.
It will be my first short story like this, and maybe the first of many.
What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
My middle name is Loia, and for most of my life, it was a mystery.
It’s funny this WordPress prompt comes up today… because I’ve spent decades carrying that name without really knowing why.
I always knew it was rare. I knew it sounded different. But beyond that, it was just this odd, beautiful word that sat between my first and last name like a secret I didn’t yet understand.
What I did know was that it was also my step great-grandfather’s middle name.
He wasn’t related to me by blood at all. He was my great-grandmother’s second husband, and they never had any children together.
On paper, he and I weren’t really connected at all. But life doesn’t always follow paper.
He was always around as I was growing up. He loved me and helped raise me like I was his own. He was an extraordinary man, steady and present, and he stayed in my life until he passed away in the mid-90s.
That middle name tied us together, even if I didn’t know where it came from. I just knew I shared something with him, and that felt important—even if I couldn’t put it into words.
When I started my blog back in November, I chose Loia as my pen name. I wasn’t even sure why I did it at the time.
It just felt right… like the name was waiting for that moment.
Maybe it reminded me of him. Or maybe the name had just been sitting there all along.
Either way… I typed it into the author field. And it just felt right.
Recently, I started digging into it… really digging.
I wanted to know what I’d been carrying all these years.
I found out that Loia was my step great-grandfather’s mother’s maiden name.
She was an Italian immigrant, and she gave that name to her son as his middle name… so he would carry it with him—to keep her lineage from being forgotten.
That’s when it really hit me.
She didn’t want her name, her people, her story to disappear into the dust of time.
So she planted it in her child’s name like a seed.
And now, somehow, I carry it too.
I’m not Italian at all, at least not by blood. Yet here I am, bearing the same name she fought to preserve.
Somehow.. I became part of what she started… long before I was even born.
And somehow I’m the one who ended up running with it.
I traced Loia back to its Latin origin and into the early Roman Empire.
I followed it as far back as the 12th century, to the Loia family in the southern Italian peninsula, in places like Campania. There may even be some Sicilian roots branching off that same line.
I read stories about relatives from those eras, names.. dates.. fragments of lives, and it was fascinating.
It felt like finding my name written in a story that started centuries before me… even though none of them are my blood.
Apparently it’s a rare surname.
Old as dirt…
the kind of name that has seen things.
I could have kept tracing it back even further, but at some point.. I decided to stop.
I knew enough.
I had already learned more than I ever expected to… and the mystery started feeling like it belonged to me.
Growing up, I pronounced it “Loy” like “Joy,” because that’s how I was told by my mother to say it.
Only recently did I learn that the Italian way is more like “LOH-yah.”
It’s interesting hearing the same name two different ways—one from my childhood, the other from Italy.
And then there’s this other detail that feels too poetic to ignore…
My girlfriend is also an Italian/Sicilian immigrant and an American citizen.
The way we met, the timing, the circumstances around it—it all carries this almost storybook quality.
“Coincidence” doesn’t quite feel like the right word anymore.
I don’t know how to explain it fully.
It just feels like there’s a hand at work in my life right now… quietly lining things up.
This old, rare name. The man who loved me like his own. The Italian mother who didn’t want her lineage forgotten. My choice of pen name. My girlfriend’s story.
All these crooked lines seem to be converging in ways I couldn’t have planned if I tried.
So what is my middle name, and what is its meaning or significance?
My middle name is Loia.
It’s the name of a man who helped raise me, the name of an Italian woman who refused to let her family disappear, a name that has survived centuries, continents, and bloodlines to land here, in my life, on my byline.
It reminds me that family isn’t always about blood… and that sometimes the things we carry our whole lives… finally make sense.
“It’s not what you got… it’s what you give. It aint the life you choose… it’s the life you live.”
Last night.. I dreamed I stood alone in a wild, untamed land — a place so alive it felt almost unreal. The trees burned with impossible colors, and the sunlight shot through everything in thick, glowing rays, like you could reach out and grab the light itself.
As I turned in slow circles, trying to drink it all in, a voice from nowhere said,
“Look! Here they come.”
And then I saw them.
They were ghosts — unmistakably ghosts — the spirits of Native American people, sliding out from the deep woods and rising up from the ground itself. Semi-transparent, otherworldly, they moved in long, silent lines, hundreds of them drifting past… some straight through me…
They didn’t look at me… didn’t react…
they just kept moving… wrapped in a silence I didn’t dare disturb.
It felt exactly like if you were sitting alone on your couch and suddenly the walls opened and your whole house filled with transparent figures.
When the last one passed through… the voice spoke again
“Now go, and paint what you saw.”
And I woke up — shaken and moved — knowing those words weren’t going to leave me alone.
…
I’m a dreamer… all my life…
many powerful ones…
but this one hits different…
This 👆 is a super cool video.. just found it
Me
Also.. I don’t paint or draw
when it comes to my dreams.. I have discernment.. I know when they are from above.. I know when they are bad.. I’m also able to tell when they are just my mind.. or meaningless random stuff.. and also over time I usually get the interpretation for many of them.. that comes from above as well…
Psalm 16:7 (KJV)
“I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel… my reins also instruct me in the night seasons…”
I’ve got two lottery stories. Here’s the first—one that’s stuck with me for years.
Back when I used to work delivering top-grade fruits and vegetables to restaurants all over Atlanta, one of the guys I worked with told me this story about his aunt and uncle up in Michigan. They were the kind of folks who played the lottery religiously—same numbers every week, knew them by heart. His uncle worked construction, his aunt stayed home.
One day, the uncle was on the job, radio on in the background, when the lottery numbers came up. One by one, he heard them read off… and they were his numbers. Every single one. He stood there frozen, trying to grasp it—he was a millionaire, just like that. He felt like Jed Clampett, like George Jefferson—about to “move on up,” as they say. He couldn’t believe it—after all that time, the numbers finally hit.
Trembling, he grabbed his phone and called home. His wife answered. He could barely get the words out—“Honey, we won. We won!” You can imagine that rush of joy, disbelief, tears, laughter—the whole spectrum of emotions hitting at once.
When they finally calmed down, he asked her, “Where’s the ticket?”
Silence.
She didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. They searched every corner of that house—you name it: drawers, kitchen counters, coat pockets, even the trash—but the ticket was gone.
Never turned up.
It was a multimillion jackpot—ten million or more, my coworker said. They never recovered from it. They ended up divorcing. He drank himself into an early grave; she lost her mind and eventually wound up in a mental hospital.
I’ll never forget that story. They were just one missing ticket away from a whole new life. Makes you realize how thin the line is between winning big and losing everything…
…
…
The second story’s a little different—it’s about the strange brush I had with the lottery once.
I don’t normally play. Honestly, it had probably been ten years since the last time I bought a ticket. But one day, these numbers just popped into my head out of nowhere. They felt… random, but not really. So I scribbled them down and thought, why not? Maybe I’m supposed to play these.
That evening, I bought a ticket for the Fantasy Five drawing. Later that night, I sat down in front of the TV, ticket in hand, heart doing that nervous little dance while I waited for the numbers to roll out.
The first one—bam. I had it. The second—got it. The third—hit again. The fourth—yes! Four in a row.
Now it all came down to the last number. If it hit, I’d be holding a ticket worth half a million dollars. I was right there on the edge of my seat, waiting… the winning number flashed on the screen—29.
I looked down. Mine said 30.
Missed it by one digit. Just one.
Still, four out of five wasn’t bad—I got a hundred bucks out of it. Not life-changing, but it sure made for a good story.
Funny how luck works, isn’t it? One number can mean the difference between a payday and just another story before bed…
So I guess if there’s any moral here, it’s this—don’t store your hopes and dreams in things that can be lost… store them where they’re eternal — that’s where the true jackpot is waiting…
Matthew 13:44 (NIV) “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field…”
Heart of Loia `'.,°~ 