October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October
I just realized tequila makes me sad. So, so very.
October Ides tipped the hat today, in a poppy-red sweater. Today despair said goodbye, having drunk her fill. Tomorrow the whirlwind. I'll be taking a trip.
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October 01, 2009
Harvest moon
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33122632/ns/technology_and_science-space/
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September 17, 2009
the post office
I'm pretty happy with the post office, and the people who work there. The service is reliable and inexpensive. The lines move at a fair pace. They generally do what they say they'll do, in the time they say they will. If the post office didn't exist, we would have to invent one, and if we did, I don't think what we would come up with would be a heck of a lot different, and it might be a heck of a lot worse.
If I have any complaint it is much more about the drekle they are forced to deliver day after day, but that's not their lookout. I'd be willing to pay fifteen dollars a month to be on a first-class-mail-only distribution list, but probably not much more than that. I think it would be great if their vehicles all ran on natural gas. The way the price of stamps keeps going up is kind of silly, but that's probably much more a symbol of how the value of money is going down rather than anything else. A dollar today has the purchasing power of a nickel in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was established.
In 1968, a first class letter cost 6¢ to mail. We had stamps that looked like this:
gas was 34 cents a gallon.
a pack of cigarettes, 40 cents.
So when I hear complaints or jokes at the post office's expense, I don't really get them. What more do you want from them? They go to every mail box in the country, six days a week.
How hard would it be to leave your postman or postwoman a thank you note tomorrow?
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September 04, 2009
I'm not anybody, but
I wish I could write like this guy. I can't, but I sent him this email.
When I was sixteen I was invited to a special program at West Point. It was the summer after the cheating scandal had been in all the papers, 1976 or 77. I went for a week of orientation that was meant to encourage me to consider military service as a career.
There was a group of perhaps 80 or a 100 of us. We ate at the cadet's mess, we had classes in aeronautics in which we used the computer to design airplane wings. We tore down the engine of a jeep. The seniors were there, preparing for their final year. We saw them running here and there every day. We were shown the spectrum of the education that we could expect if we were to become West Point cadets.
On the last night of our time there, I remember drowsing in the bed in a large room on the top floor of the dormitory among all the others. A boy came upstairs and said that we should come downstairs, they had found something. We went to the basement, to a locker room. Someone had found a locker that had no locks, full of magazines, most of them, if they had writing in them, were not in english. There was a frenzy in the room as we tore at the pages, throwing handfuls of the slick paper to each other, devouring the images, the pink and the black.
To call it pornography would be too charitable. I have not seen images like those to this day, although I'm sure I could find them if I wanted. Women having sex with animals of every kind, and other equally vile stuff.
The next day, on the bus leaving to take us home, we passed the group of seniors, at parade in the courtyard, drilling in their dress uniforms, readying themselves for the coming year, I remember gold buttons and the sun glinting on silver swords. As our bus drove past them standing at attention the swords they held to their chins clicked in alignment in the perspective the same way that trees in an orchard do as you drive past. I could not reconcile in my mind the order and disorder that I had witnessed, there was a dissonance between the precision that they had achieved and the darkness and ferocity of the other side I had seen the night before.
I did not choose a life of military service.
I discovered your writing recently, and have been captivated by the integrity with which you choose your words, your nakedness as you confront the limitations and possibilities of language to convey your observations of what is. However, your dispatch entitled Gates of Fire caused something in me to break, something that needed breaking, all these years later, and I am grateful to you. What I saw in that basement locker room was only one thing, and not, as it seemed to me all those years ago, the main thing.
Thank you for freeing me from a mistake in judgement based on incomplete information.
Someday, I hope to hold in my hands the book you will write about your observations of birds. You have been gnawing at something that you must do for your own purposes, and I think you will accomplish your aim. That book will be the evidence that you have set that bone down having tasted all the marrow, the bitter and the sweet of war, being satisfied and done with it. I do not presume that this will happen, but have only hope that it will. Your writing is evidence of the strength with which you love life.
It is indeed the smallest things that make the biggest differences. Please keep safe.
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September 01, 2009
How would it be, if a house was dreaming?
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August 31, 2009
Election Day Afghanistan
read all about it.
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August 28, 2009
"Every day, every minute, every hour, I'm worried," she said.
"It's constant on my mind and there ain't nothing I can do, ain't nothing I can do."
Melody Wiggins body found 2005
Christine Marie Boone, missing Jan 16 2007
Jackie Nikki Thorpe missing May 8 2007, body found August 27 2007
Joyce Renee Durham, missing June 2007
Ernestine Battle disappeared Feb 2008 DNA id'd May 2008
unidentified, body found Feb 2009
Yolander Lancaster missing Feb 2009
Taraha Shenice Nicholson missing Feb 22 2009, boduy found March 7 2009
Jarniece Hargrove, body found June 2009
they've formed M.O.M.S.
http://missingormurderedsisters.ning.com/ and they're holding bake sales for justice. in the USA.
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August 27, 2009
on the nature of time
Procrastination is the mother of invention.
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