Category: Uncategorized

Blurgh, I’m getting a cold.

Good meal at Pescadou tonight with realitylost. Onion soup, blanquette de veau.

I spent a fair amount of time today working on some scripts for work, and a fair amount of time chasing the cat around the house. Now she’s asleep so I can finish up the scripts. Unfortunately I just got a cold. Hope you didn’t get it too, Susie.

I just finished reading Double Down, by Steven and Frederick Barthelme. Recommended. It’s the account of two brothers, writers and professors at a college in Mississippi, who became obsessive gamblers and lost a quarter million dollars at the boats down there. They were eventually charged with felony blackjack cheating. Quite a story in its own, and the heartbreak of their family and upbringing is woven into the story beautifully. I had always thought that Donald Barthelme, the famous short story writer, was their father, but he was just a much older brother.

I received no less than five (5) disturbing weblinks today from a combination of odradak, bruisedhips, and one other person. Thanks, team!

beware of cheap grace

Change is what happens when we’re doing other things. Beating eggs, reading street signs, peeing, sleeping, suing each other, renewing library books. Meanwhile the pancreas is slowly failing, the childhood trauma is slowly healing, the earth is slowly cooling. The big epiphanies that we log and revisit and obsess upon are mostly fakes and mirages. The real thing is imperceptibly slow.

Look at the oil tanker out in the ocean. Still as a rock, but look out again an hour later and it’s across the horizon. A million useless seagull screeches and clanging bells later that ship will be in Dubai.

A hundred hundreds of times in my life I thought I’d broken through to some victory, or thought I’d been destroyed. Never true. Whatever frees me or kills me is tectonic in its pace.

move to alabama, bought us some more scotch instead

   
    THAT is no country for old men. The young
    In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
    - Those dying generations - at their song,
    The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
    Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
    Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
    Caught in that sensual music all neglect
    Monuments of unageing intellect.

    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
    Nor is there singing school but studying
    Monuments of its own magnificence;
    And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
    To the holy city of Byzantium.

    O sages standing in God’s holy fire
    As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
    Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
    And be the singing-masters of my soul.
    Consume my heart away; sick with desire
    And fastened to a dying animal
    It knows not what it is; and gather me
    Into the artifice of eternity.

    Once out of nature I shall never take
    My bodily form from any natural thing,
    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
    Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
    To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
    Or set upon a golden bough to sing
    To lords and ladies of Byzantium
    Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

— W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium