Six-Thirty Report by Beamish (2026)

07/04/2026

Like any artist, I decided to paint a picture tonight when history is at the crux of a pretty significant crossroad. During primetime viewing, our military will be ordered to eliminate a civilization from the face of the earth during a four-hour window tonight if they do not agree to our demands before six o’clock mountain time where I live. If what the entire world has been told over the last few days holds true, our lethal military might, strength, and power will come down full force on their country in a four-hour window if Iran doesn’t freely let oil through the strait tonight.

As a longtime military man—a basic, simple soldier at heart—this kind of talk creates emotions in me that are difficult to explain. So I drew a sketch on my iPad this morning of the painting I want to paint. If it turns out, it will be the lead image for my very first chapter where I talk about me wanting to be an unknown hobbit who paints in obscurity in his old age. The image is of me when I was just eighteen years old living in the town that smelled of dead fish about forty miles from the ocean in Oregon.

I am wearing the clothes required of box boys working at Roth’s IGA on the corner of Hill and Nineteenth Streets, not far from the Boy’s Club where I spent my time as a young boy. We had to have our hair cut short and wear blue jeans with a white short sleeved shirt and a clip on green bowtie. The railroad tracks were not far from the store. So when I worked on the weekends, I would go down to the tracks where an old hobo lived in a tent during my lunch hour. I’d bring him a can of Campbell’s soup to warm up over a little fire next to his tent.

I’d sit and read a book while he fussed with his belongings while mumbling about his adventures riding the freight cars as a homeless creature. I was always attracted to the rail yard, even since I first lived near them when I was six. I would dream of just running away by jumping on one of those cars with him to a destination unknown. I guess that is why I liked in there with the smell of old grease and oil soaked into the rocks. It was a door to an escape that I chose to never take, at least in that war. I felt the comfort, though, to sit there in the atmosphere of danger, risk, and fear.

I don’t know why talk of basically obliterating a country today makes me think of this image of me down by the railroad tracks reading a book while wearing a green bowtie. Yet it does. It makes me feel safe.

—Beamish

17/03/2026

As you know, this space is for my potentially daily experimental writings and selective artwork reflecting on the mating rituals of wild animals I have observed in my life of fun and adventure traveling around the world, and that these pieces may or may not end up as starters for bigger things in that door stopper book that I am writing on the theory of art—My Art Thesis. I always thought the world would fight its next big war for something like everlasting peace—once and for all!—throughout the entire world. That it would be a war declaring the failure and end of all war to end our little differences amongst nations.

Yet here we are three weeks in a war fighting over nukes and oil.

I never told you that in my classification of wild animals regarding their mating rituals, I include human beings. My favorite story in the Bible, and I don’t really know why, is the one in the Old Testament where one of the tribes or groups of God’s People were living in a city of Heathens. Guess what? The Heathen men r***d the women and young virgins among God’s People. So the men in God’s People decided the best way to avenge this cruelty was to become friends with the Heathens and convince them to become men of God by getting circumcised.

Yes, it took years for God’s People to infiltrate the Heathens in that city and to earn their trust, but the menfolk of the one group whose mothers and sisters were r***d convinced the menfolk of the other group who did the ra**ng to cut off skin from their very own s*x organs! And they did it. The rapists did it. Perhaps the most profound and telling part of this story, though, is God’s People waited a few days until the men among Heathens were weakened with the excruciating pain in their groin areas, and God’s People attacked them and killed them all and did it at their weakest point.

I guess the world was a complicated place to live in, even back then, given this whole concept of power s*x mixed with the ends-justifies-the-end mentality in religion. Of course, today the problem of our big war over in Iran has far different implications. We are shooting down cheap drones costing up to fifty thousand dollars each with four million dollar missiles. We’ll probably put boots on the ground so that we can get their weapons-graded uranium and they will strangle hold the world’s access to oil.

At the end of the our first world war, men like Picaso and Hemingway and Steinbeck—and many others—had aversions to war. There was serious belief that mankind could end war through the arts. If we could just somehow communicate to each other through visual imagery in paintings, sound in music, and other human senses through the arts in general the excruciating pain of human suffering caused by war, we could end war. We are now more than a hundred years of experimenting with that idea and here we are.

—Beamish

17/03/2026

Can Art Change Man?

16/03/2026

Jackpot! Been trying to win a sweepstakes all my life and finally did. My mom got me hooked on entering these contests when we were dirt poor living over near the railroad tracks in a town in Oregon that usually smelled of dead fish where I was born. We’d walk to Piggly Wiggly that was just down the street and next to the Linger Longer Tavern where men would get drunk. I learned that was a good place to look for loose change and dropped five dollar bills all lost as the drunk men searched through their pockets for their car keys and, then, when found, would drive, well, drunk.

My dad, who fought in the big second world war, was one of those drunks who loved the Linger Longer place that to a young boy sort of stank. He wrecked a lot of cars driving in those days. My mom was usually optimistic that we’d win one of these drawings at the corner grocery store and, if we didn’t, she was certain we’d find some money on the sidewalk if we just looked down as we walked. My drill sergeant later told me there was no need to look down as that was my habit when I marched because there wasn’t any discharge papers on the ground.

I never told him, but I didn’t want out of the Army. I was looking for the prize (that I finally found fifty years later in the Power of 9’s t-shirt give away)!Anyhow, one day when we walked to the Piggly Wiggly store, she told me that she dreamed she could win enough money to buy me the brand new stingray bicycle that I saw in the magazine that came in the mail. Well, when we got to the store with these big arches over the entry door, there was this big box next to the bulletin board.

The sign said to fill out the slip of paper with your name, phone number and address, then put it in the little slit at the top of the box and you’d have the big chance to win the big prize. I don’t really remember right now what the big prize was on this particular day, just that when I looked in my mom’s eyes I saw the glimmer of hope that this would be her day. I just knew that she wanted a way to give something special to her boy and that there really was no other way other than winning in a sweepstakes.

Of course, my life went on beyond that of a six-year-old and my dad stopped drinking and we all found our own somewhat dysfunctional ways. For me it was the Army and that was all it took to get where I am now in a place to type these stories onto a keypad. But through the years, and now with social media, I always enter online enter-here-to-win-season-tickets-to-Denver-Broncos-football-games give aways thinking of my mother and her elusive dream. But, like her, I never have the winning number.

Finally, I have won the sweepstakes. It came from a bunch of senior enlisted boys and girls from our nation’s military who call themselves the Power of 9’s in their social media group. By the way, the apostrophe is a singular possessive. I told them if I won the t-shirt, I’d wear it down at the coffee shop that is next to the sushi place where I go to write these little stories in the mornings on regular days.

—Beamish

15/03/2026

Just curious. There are seventeen hundred followers to this page. How many of you awake? Do you wanna hear a bedtime story?

15/03/2026

Snow is falling down here in the “purple mountains majesty” as we near Spring—and more of the world’s boys and girls are dead in war—so I might as well bang out a few more words on the keyboard. I think that is the big problem with the precision and speed that Artificial Intelligence and all that technology brings us today. Just consider the bombing of the school in Iran that killed all those kids. We sure didn’t intend it, but AI and technology is only as good as the data going in …

… if it is wrong or not current, the precise consequence sure can be deadly even for the wrong people in an unintended target. In other news, Winds are stiff and cold this morning, blowing snow swirls as if in a harsh winter blizzard. No sun or blue skies to be seen for us today in my little hamlet as our Kings and Queens attempt to rule with their narrow version of an iron fist of justice. I hope we all survive. I think that you know I will not be silenced, even with their latest edict they intend to deafen the ears of the peasants.

Yesterday I saw a pregnant lady within days of her due date and who I know from Fort Carson over at the corner coffee shop. She was reading the paperback version of the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Yes, that means this book was first published nearly ninety years ago as World War II was brewing two years before Germany invaded Poland and well before we had smart bombs. We spoke politely as I was getting to go and she sat comfortably on the leather couch.

I told her—please get the nuance here of me an older man nearing the end of life telling her these things as she sat there nearing the birth of her child reading a book about a character created before a great war who had naturally lived his life in isolation and then went out for adventure to help fight good and bad—I have decided that now I want to be the Hobbit before the adventure. I told her of the hobo and how I gave him a can of Campbell’s soup that he exchanged for my first copy of the book.

I hope you can read through my ramble of stormy weather, Kings and Queens, death and destruction of civilization, with war and characters in a book to see the truth I am trying to get through. Anyhow, I told her of the scene down by the railroad tracks that smelled of oil and kerosene with a little campfire warming a can of soup and a hobo as I read the book for the first time when I was a senior in high school. It was there that I decided to go out for my adventure and it is here that I have found my retreat.

—Beamish

14/03/2026

A friend of mine not in this clique posted this little snippet in his social media feed this morning. He was a soldier with me long ago when the uniforms that we wore had no patterns and we had to starch. Drab olive green and sometimes khaki. Our boots and shoes were spit shined—well, mostly so—and our hair was really short. Pretty much buzzed. He was the Soldier of the Quarter for the entire post. I got it next. It was a big one in Oklahoma, that Army post. Maybe you heard of it, Fort Sill, where the artillerymen go.

What? How could you win that title of the best amongst the artillery and infantry and fighters when you were just writers when you were young? You see, we weren’t just writers and we didn’t just take pictures when we were young soldiers. We lived on those guns with those soldiers and we ate the huge Meers Hamburgers with them outside the back gate where there were buffalo standing in the road when we got back from weeks in the field. One time an artillery soldier crashed into a big one driving an artillery tank—self-propelled howitzer, still tank sounds better—on our way back in the rain.

I still remember the baby grand piano in that dilapidated place eating that savory hamburger bigger than the twelve-inch plate. Our appetites that big. So why the long story instead of short? Because we learned to suffer with those soldiers as they trudged in the mud and lived in the rain and figured out how to get the steel onto the target in order to make our stories ring true for the mothers and the fathers and the brothers and the sisters and all the others reading the words. It was the greatest lesson from a first sergeant, not a writer, who taught us in those days.

Yes, we were soldiers once younger and please don’t forget it because we have not changed. We learned to pull the lanyard and to load the heavy shells into the tube because we wanted to feel how it feels when there was the mind-numbing shudder and loud bang that shook the bones in our frames and caused a sort of blackness in our heads that we’ll never forget. It was the greatest lesson for us as writers when we were just privates and young specialists of lowly rank among some giant men and women who did the dirty hard work of soldiers for this great land.

It sounds patriotic, but it really is not. So I was reminded this morning and told him: “Tell me how long your hair was and the tint at the ends. I wanna know about the cracks in the road and how one of them rose higher than the rest as you walked along on your lonely quest. Help me feel the cold on your neck as the wind howled in the dark, rustling the rest. Tell me about the skunk unseen who left the scent in the air. Stir my senses as I hear the words of your adventure on this earth. Oh yes, don’t spare the words. Do—please do—make your story long so that I can join you in your song.”

Thanks my friend for the post: “Forget the ‘long story short.’ I’m shifting to ‘short story long’ and giving you bonus scenes, extra details, and director commentary.” Those words prompted my sentences written in response. It was fun.

12/03/2026

Victory. The coffee shop where I go a couple times a week is not far from my house and just down the street from the main gate at Fort Carson, in the Safeway shopping complex next to a sushi place and another place that cuts hair. The pet store is on the corner. I groaned on Monday morning when I was the first to open the door at six o’clock. The sign taped on the window said new hours beginning next Monday would be seven to five. I asked the retired first sergeant who owns and runs the place why open up an hour later as he took my four bucks for a cup of regular joe.

Time change—he said because we switched to Daylight Savings time the day before, seven is actually six so he was just adjusting to the new time. I let his logic hang in the air a moment as we locked eyes. I think he expected me to argue with him. Instead I shrugged, smiled and said, OK. He gave me a quarter in change without a word. I took my normal spot back in the back of the store with my favorite mug—the one with my name on it—and started to type. How could it make sense?

About thirty minutes later, he came to my table with the signs folded in his hands. “Mike, do you think I should still open at six?” Without a pause I looked up and said yes. “But now that soldiers can’t be late for PT anymore because the gates get backed up, not many come in until after seven.” Who cares? I said. You still have your regulars like me who can’t sleep, and stragglers coming in in that hour. We’ll all go to Starbucks a mile down the road where it’s cheaper and they open at four-thirty. Plus, your barista’s can bake the pastries and pies that you sell in the hour that it is slow.

I smiled this morning when I came to the glass door where the new sign now reads six to five. “Let me think about it,” the young retired first sergeant who is now a proprietor in my community had said when we last spoke. I had left him with: You won’t get the cash if you open later, something you need and want—making money in your business is hard. So today I had a grin on my face when I told the new barista that I wanted a regular small coffee, telling her I was happy to hear they’d still open at six.

Her face brightened a little more than it was. She didn’t know me, I think this is her first day. “Yeah, we’re all very happy that we will still be able to see the beautiful sunrise every morning!” I never thought of that, I thought as I conducted my routine to get to the back table and start typing on my keyboard. In the hour it took me to write this—between six and seven—and drink my cup of Joe, I counted thirty-seven customers who each paused at the door to look at our beautiful sky as the sun rose over the front range.

10/03/2026

I think the important thing is that I have decided on the focus of my memoir. It will be about war. Well, not really about war exactly. More about art. It will be my personal art thesis. Now, everyone knows a thesis needs a statement, something you believe you can prove. Art is personal. So is war. I suppose war is a good thing to avoid—and art is not—although it seems like either war or talk of war has pretty much been a constant since when? The American Revolution? Our nation is coming up on its two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, and this means you and I have about seven generations of men and women with blood on their hands in the fight for our freedom.

When you are a young writer of eighteen or nineteen setting out on your journey of life, you dream of one day writing your memoir, but you don’t think about the most critical ingredient: Who cares? It’s all fun and games believing that one day you’ll sit down at a keyboard and re-tell the stories of your adventures in life that to you are important. Then, when you actually do it as an old man, you realize nobody actually cares about this stuff done long ago and the best your book is gonna do is end up in the bargain book bin for a dollar-ninety-five at Barns and Noble over by Starbucks.

If you’re lucky to even get ink on paper in a printed, published book, that is. Mostly these days, book ideas can turn quickly into nothing short of self-published unedited garbage that nobody will read. So why write the book? I am not doing it for fame and fortune. Not even for attention. I honestly don’t care if a book I write fails. What I care about is that I am somehow able to do justice to the huge topic I am tackling just to shed a little light. I am doing it because I think the story fits into the fabric of understanding war through art.

—Beamish

10/03/2026

I am still toying with a working cover. There are nearly 2,000 followers on this page gathered over the years. If you are still with me, do me a favor and let me know. Sound off on which one you like best. Beamish

09/03/2026

Constant change. The hours down at the coffee shop in the Safeway parking lot not far from me moves to an hour later beginning next week, according to the guy at the counter when I bought my cup this week. What, with the new war in Iran and all, things are getting crazy around here. I stared at the sign taped to the glass door for a long time before I opened it right at six o’clock. Seven to five, starting next Monday. So I asked the man why. He said because with the time change yesterday, seven is the old six.

Let me say that again.

I asked why he was changing the time to opening an hour later on weekdays. He said it was because of the time change (which makes no sense). My mind raced with the retort that people still have to be at work at the same time regardless if we are on standard or daylight savings time. Work schedules didn’t change, the time did. Instead, I said, okay and left it at that. Later he came over to my table with the sign for the new time in his hand. He asked if I thought he should still open at six. I said yes, for regulars and early morning stragglers. Plus your workers can bake your pies when it is not busy.

It gave him pause and he tore up the sign. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder what is in the head of men and women who rule our world these days.

—Beamish

07/03/2026

Six to eight inches of snow fell onto the oasis yesterday. I still think about war. I don’t really know why. The moon dropped in a clear blue sky as I contemplated these silly things. War is silly. Think about that. I mean, we talk about killing and bombing and bullets and missiles and torpodos and dead people and doing whatever it is we want to have our final say as if we are talking of a picnic down in the park.

This is likely what bothers me most. It is casual: Hey, the guy threatened my life and I got the last laugh. What? The crisp cold air freezes the snow in the dark of the night. As the moon disappears, a new dance comes to the canvas as the bright sun causes the snow laden branches of winter to cast shadows long into the snow covered meadow. Is this normal to relish in the thought of the terror that comes in war? Really?

We are talking about our families, our children, our lives. War is not a chess game or challenge of skill. No, no, no. Two dictators gone, now comes the third? To what end is this terror, the third world war? Are we now bullies who brag in drunken macho storytelling late in the night in some dive tavern down by the tracks with women sc****ly clad about our exploits and how we were bad? These men will be fathers of boys and girls to be born, and they have blood on their hands.

This is hard. War is bad, but it is not wrong. Honestly, it is sacred and honorable and even heroic to stand for what is right in the world, to take up arms for your nation to defend against threats to our freedom, our way of life. Our words about war should honor the bravery of men. Have you ever felt the hand of the man who fought in a war? I have as a very little boy. Yes, they were loving and the kindest I have felt.

Yet even then I knew there was something different deep in his soul. Perhaps it was timid. Perhaps rage. Maybe caution, maybe pain. I really don’t know. Still there is white snow. With the warmth of sun and blue in the sky without darkness, it soothes the madness in the world of today that we know. The branches of the scrub oak are now perfectly still as there is no wind at all to be felt. We should be solemn and sacred when we talk about war.

—Beamish

Six-Thirty Report by Beamish

07/04/2026

17/03/2026

17/03/2026

16/03/2026

15/03/2026

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14/03/2026

12/03/2026

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