Disturbing

 

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Midland

Midland in Nacogdoches, 27 April 2024
 

Maps

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I like maps that are not literal.

Flowers

 

 

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The top picture shows a yellow "weed" that is every bit as pretty as the flowers we paid for.

The big green plants in the bottom picture are sunflowers, ringed with four-o'clocks coming up underneath.  If you look closely, you'll see a birdfeeder in the middle of it all.

The sunflowers are planted for us by the birds, a fair exchange for the seeds they eat.

When I was a little boy I collected seeds from my grandfather's garden and planted them (with Mom's help) at my own home.  Several moves and more than fifty years later, these four-o'clocks are the latest generation of his flowers.

I still miss you, Grampy.

Wafted Away

 

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My dad worked for a paper mill in the 60s, and they had a slogan painted on the wall:  "The Solution to Pollution is Dilution!"

People really believed that.

(But not my dad.)

Zippy the Pinhead is on the web HERE.

"Factors and Considerations"

The email I received below is just hilariously inept. "Various factors and considerations?"  I cut-and-pasted it below, in its entirety.  There's not a cliche she missed-- it's a case-study in obfuscation:

From:  Karla Cooper <Karla.Cooper@uthet.com>

Dear Silver Elite Member,

We hope this message finds you well. We are reaching out today with some important news regarding our Silver Elite Program.

After careful consideration and evaluation, we have made the decision to conclude our Silver Elite Program effective May 31. This decision was not made lightly, and we want to assure you that it was based on various factors and considerations.

We want to express our sincere gratitude for your participation and support of the Silver Elite Program. Your engagement and loyalty have been invaluable to us, and we truly appreciate the opportunity to have served you through this program.

While the Silver Elite Program is coming to an end, please be assured that our commitment to providing excellent service and support to all our patients remains unwavering. We are here to assist you with any questions or concerns you may have during this transition period and beyond.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out. We are here to help in any way we can.

Once again, thank you for your participation in the Silver Elite Program and for being a valued patient. We look forward to continuing to serve you in the future.

Best regards,

Karla Cooper
Marketing Manager
www.uthealtheasttexas.com

Interesting but Unworkable

Excerpted from Broadsides from the other orders: a book of bugs by Sue Hubbell, ©1993:

I once entered into a world without categories and found it interesting but unworkable. Along with two other people, I took mescaline, and for the hours that the drug acted on our brains everything we saw appeared the same, equal, lacking classification. Perceptive held, but figure and ground did not; all elements were significant. Selectivity of perception had been lost; thought was impossible. We went for a walk in the woods, and when we sat down on some pine needles it was as if we had discovered pinecones for the first time. The light brought out colors we had never noticed; the shadow revealed their surfaces in a way we had never seen. We sat there sopping up pineconeishness but also sopping up pine needles, our hands, the pine's boughs, the texture of the earth, the blood pulsing in our temples, the warmth and pleasure of our companionship, all equal and all equally scattered because we were unable to focus on any element. There were no elements, in fact, only aspects of a whole. We were immersed in a warm oatmeal of perception. It was enlightening in several respects, but not much could be done with it.

And that old man is me…

I'm sittin on the back porch, kickin' my legs back,
Rockin' in my rocking chair, and sittin' there
On the little back porch is about to fall apart
So I think I might repair it
Just as I'm thinkin' about repairin' it,
Some little friends come along
With some two-string, one-string, no-string guitars
And they all plug em all in to the back porch
And they sit around playin' all their favorite songs
They's kickin' back feelin' real good,
Real fine, real full of the wine
And everything's fine, everything's beautiful,
Everything's great, I just feel so good…

Full lyrics HERE.

 

It Would Look Like

"For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone.  The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes.  To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction."  ~Cynthia Occelli

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vive la différence

 

Mona and I each bought a set of measuring cups.

I picked functional ones made of stainless steel, with the volume stamped on the handle.

Mona picked a set that is equally functional, but is multicolored and a lot prettier.

Taxa

 Excerpted from Broadsides from the other orders:  a book of bugs by Sue Hubbell, ©1993:  

These names that we use for orders-- Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, and all the others-- do not stand for anything in the real world…  The order names are sorting words, or taxa, that we humans use to group a dizzying array of individual bugs that otherwise we would find too many and too confusing to think about.  Because of the way we have evolved, we have sorting kinds of brains and feel more comfortable if we we put what we see in the world into various piles and categories so that we can get a handle on them.  But this says more about us and our brains that it does about the world outside our heads, and we shouldn't mix up these categories-- the taxa-- with reality.

And in that room…

 The poems below are excerpted from Poems From the Sanskrit translated by John Brough, ©1968.

My copy is yellowed and the pages are brittle.  I'm sure the pages are on the verge of falling out, and when that happens I'll have to put a rubber band around it.  It's long out of print, so I can't just buy a new one.

It's formatted very strangely, so it's not always clear who the poet is being translated.  They've all been gone for several centuries, so I suppose it's not crucial.  I did my best to credit them, just the same.

26
No, but look here now, this is just absurd,
The way our famous poets talk of girls
As weak and winsome.  Weak?  Is this a word
To use of those who, with a shake of curls
And with the triumph of a modest glance,
Can lead the very gods a merry dance?
     ~Bhartyhari

54
Those whom the gods would keep
In safety, they protect,
Not as a shepherd guards his sheep,
But by the gift of a wise intellect.

Nor do the gods appear
In warrior's armour clad
To strike down with sword or spear.
Those whom they would destroy, they
                                              first make mad.
     ~Bhartyhari

79
Although I conquer all the earth,
Yet for me there is only one city.
In that city there is for me only one house;
And in that house, one room only;
And in that room, a bed.
And one woman sleeps there,
The shining joy and jewel of all my kingdom.
     ~Śūdraka

87
Dearest, if you will love me true,
What use are joys of heaven to me?
But if you will not love me true,
What use are joys of heaven to me?
     ~Śūdraka

114
My best respect to Poverty,
The master who has set me free:
For I can look at all the world,
and no-one looks at me.
     ~Harşa

This, not That

 Excerpted from Broadsides from the other orders:  a book of bugs by Sue Hubbell, ©1993:  

My first husband is an electrical engineer, and it was he who made me suspect that I was not going to be comfortable in these times, although he certainly had no intention of making me think so that day back in 1957, when he was explaining to me the difference between analog (the comparative, the sweep of a clock's hand, figure and ground, this but maybe partly that, too) and digital (yes or no; one, two; off, on; this, not that).  After he had done so he said, "And the future is digital," and I realized with one of those flashes of understanding that come now and again that I was going to be analog in a digital world.

And that reminded me of this:

but I can see

Star Hole
by Richard Brautigan
 
I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,
 
watching light
pour itself toward
  me.
 
The light pours
itself through  
a small hole
in the sky.
 
I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things are
  faraway.

Corporal

Excerpted from Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan, ©1963:

Once I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.

It was very exciting and went something like this:   If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private; seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal’s stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiraling pounds of paper leading upward until finally you arrived at being a general.

I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can't remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.

I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I'll have to admit that I was a little disappointed I don't know where I got the idea that the house was just filled with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It's an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.

I didn't let it throw me, though. I marshaled my energies and went out and started going door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.
An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of Life magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.

At the next house, there wasn't any paper, not even a used envelope because another kid had already beaten me to it.

At the next house, nobody was home.

That's how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block until finally I got enough paper to­gether to become a private.

I took my God-damn little private's stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn't even bother to have the stripe sewed on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with some socks.

I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of Collier's from somebody's base­ment which was enough to get my corporal's stripes that im­mediately joined my private's stripe under the socks.

The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spend­ing money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of maga­zines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.

Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.

Jugular

"That's the trouble with working-class people throughout the world.  They always try to spur their hatred onto what they see as being lower down the scale, rather than going for the fucking jugular of the upper- and middle-class bastards who are keeping them down in the first place."  ~John Lydon, from his autobiography Rotten: no Irish, no Blacks, no dogs ©1994

That 70s Show

In the 70s, every sitcom had a catch-phrase that you could count on hearing once per episode, and you could usually buy it on a t-shirt and poster.

These are the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

 

Fonzie:                              Ayyyyyyy!
Chico:                                Looking Good!
JJ:                                       Dy-no-mite!
Billy Crystal:                   You look marvelous!
Vinnie Barbarino:         Wut?  Where?  How?
Mork:                               Shazbat!
Flo:                                   Eat my grits!
Lenny and Squiggy:      Hello!

Time

 Excerpt from The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye, ©2014:

And Sidi always had time for Aref, since he was retired now and never wore a watch.  He didn't like watches.  He said time felt heavy on his wrist.  He hated rushing and thought the world was hurrying so much that people were missing all the good parts.

And that led to this:

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."  ~Ferris Bueller (source)

And, of course, this:

 Full lyrics HERE.

Like a Sparrow

 “読書中に何か思いついたら、読むのを中断してでも書き留める。その思いつきはベランダに降りてきた雀のようなもので、不意に飛んでいって二度と戻ってこない。” - @shigotanon

 

✩

 

"If I come up with something while reading, I write it down even if I stop reading. That idea is like a sparrow that lands on the balcony, suddenly flies away, and never returns."

Unlonely

This album could have titled "John Prine and the Heartbreakers."   He's backed up by Tom Petty's band and it's produced by Howie Epstein.

Full lyrics HERE.

Ephiphany

Vontae Davis retired from football unexpectedly, in the middle of a game (source): 

"I went to the bench after that series and it just hit me:  I don't belong on that field anymore.
 
"Leaving was therapeutic.  I left everything the league wanted me to be-- playing for my teammates while injured, the gladiator mentality-- it all just popped. And when it popped, I just wanted to leave it all behind. So that's why I don't care what people say. That experience was personal and not meant for anyone else to understand. It was me cold turkey leaving behind an identity that I carried with me for so long."

 
It's rare to have an epiphany like that.  Usually realizations creep in more slowly.

I'll tell you why...

Someone took the time to slow the classic 70's rock song down and make it a dance groove.  It works pretty well.

Full lyrics HERE.

Nails

"I do not extend my fingers when I examine my nails.  I, by God, double my hand like a man."  ~James Thurber, From "The Case of Dimity Ann" in Thurber Country, ©1953

It hadn't occurred to me that there is a masculine and a feminine way to check your nails.

Without Hesitation

Excerpted from "The Casebook of James Thurber" in Thurber Country, ©1953:

The case of the Gloucester Sympathizer was similar to the Case of the Young Woman Named Sherlock Holmes, a problem I solved the easy way a couple of years ago.  George Spencer had told me that a guy he knew named Harry Huff was going to marry a girl named Sherlock Holmes.  I said this was nonsense, because there isn't any girl named Sherlock Holmes.  He said I didn't know anything about it.  I said it was dangerous to believe everything one heard, and to go around repeating it.  He snapped the leash back on his dog's collar, picked up its throwing stick, and went away.

I got out the phone book.  There were two Henry Huffs listed, and I called the first one.  "Nah," he said, "I'm living in sin with Dr. Watson.  I thought everybody knew that."  He was obviously the wrong Henry Huff, and I hung up on him.  The second one turned out to be the right one.  I asked him to spell out the name of his fiancée.  Without hesitation, he said he didn't want to, so I mentioned George Spencer and what he had said about Sherlock Holmes.  Huff was annoyed, but he finally told me the name of the girl he was going to marry, one Shirley Combs.

Siggy and Jimmy

 "Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks.  We cannot do without palliative remedies.  There are perhaps three of these means:  powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratifications, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.  Something of this kind is indispensable."  ~Sigmund Freud

Or, worded slightly differently:

This Time Around

"In the Eastern tradition, the state of your consciousness at the last moment of life is so crucial that you spend your whole life preparing for that moment.  We've had many assassinations in our culture recently and when we think what it was like for Bobby Kennedy or Jack Kennedy, if they had any thought, what it would have been.  'Oh, I've been shot!' or 'He did it,' or 'Goodbye,' or 'Get him,' or 'Forgive him.'  Mahatama Gandhi walked out into a garden to give a press conference and gunman shot him three or four times, but as he was falling the only thing that came out of his mouth was, 'Ram…' The name of God.  He was ready!
 
"At the moment of death you let go lightly, you go out into the light, toward the One, toward God.  The only thing that died, after all, was another set of thoughts of who you were this time around."  ~Ram Dass, from Grist for the Mill ©1981

Creative/Destructive

"Nature and I have long felt that the hope of mankind is womankind, that the physically creative sex must eventually dominate the physically destructive sex if we are to survive on this planet."  ~James Thurber

Thurber visited Paris at the end of World War I and again at the end of World War II.

The new manatee stamps are here!

 

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But,

 "Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at the never-ending sunset.  'Dying is no solution,' he affirmed.  'And living?'  I asked.  'Not living either,' he conceded.  'But, who tells you there is a solution?'"  ~Elie Wiesel

Heroism

 

And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Five years ago my mother was dying in a nursing home.  I visited her every day.

It was hard.  I felt like my role was to cheer her up and give her a happy break from the tedium, but all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball.

I would blast "Heroes" to give me energy, to remind myself that I didn't have to be heroic forever-- just for today.  Then I did what I needed to do.

Inspiration doesn't always come from wise old men sitting serenely on mats under trees.  Sometimes it comes from tall gravelly-voiced men covered with tattoos.

Pyramid

 

 

"I saw a human pyramid once.  It was very unnecessary."  ~Mitch Hedberg