quote for today

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Franz Kafka

team pie

I can't believe I ate cake on pi day yesterday. Oh well.

cleaning house musical medley

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record!
Oh, yeah? Well, don't get so distressed
Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?
A yellow-headed woman
Brings you nothin' but pain
Take all you give her
She leaves only shame
Flowers on the hillside blooming crazy
Crickets talking back and forth in rhyme
Blue river running slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever and never realize the time
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye
Will you think of times you've told me
That you knew the reason
Why we had to each be lonely
It was just the season
If you're in Heaven then you'll forgive me, dear
Because that's what they do up there
If you're in Hell, then what can I say
You probably deserved it anyway
Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it
Walk with me now under the stars
It's a safe and easy pleasure
It seems we can be happy now
It's late but it ain't never

apparently I joke too soon..

silly dog, you're not a clown

musical medley on a moody day

let me take your hand
i'm shaking like milk
turning
turning blue
People watch me as they move past
A guy wearing plastic antlers
Presses his bum against the glass
My will and self-restraint
Have come to fail now, fail now
See, I'm doing what I can, but I can't so you know
That's a bit too hard to explain
I don't think I told you, I feel terrible
I've been sitting in this chair since Sunday
In the same clothes with unwashed hair
There was four Italian sausages cooking
On the outdoor grill
And they were sizzlin'
I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When do you think it will all become clear?
Well it ain't that tough
Just more of the usual stuff
One heartache is more than enough
I really should have known
By the time you drove me home
By the vagueness in your eyes
Like an idea
Like an Atom bomb
Sly as a fox and crazy as a loon
Payday comes and he's howlin' at the moon
Oh, experience is cheap
if that's the company you keep
and a chance is all that I need
and I've had it
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad
They'd stick by you if they could
But that's just bullshit
People just ain't no good
Help Me Sing It, Ma Ma Se,
Ma Ma Sa, Ma Ma Coo Sa
Ma Ma Se, Ma Ma Sa,
Ma Ma Coo Sa

Don't let mistakes be so monumental, and
Don't let your love be so confidential, and
Don't let your mind be so darn judgmental
And please let your heart be more influential

ALL causes?

So, apparently the clowns are going to eat me 6 years earlier than they would have. Because of my sweet, sweet diabetic blood.

Birthday Wisdom

It has been a beautiful birthday eve, upon which I share this wisdom:

"The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death."

--Albert Camus

At A Loss

Things I have left behind/lost this week:

1. my blackberry
2. my keys
3. my purse
4. a folder of important documents for a meeting
5. another document with important signatures
6. the jazz game, big time

Ok, maybe "I" didn't lost the game, but I feel like they definitely picked up on my losing jinx. That game sucked.

New Year's Resolutions

1. Enjoy various kinds of movement
2. Spot some critters and beasts
3. Observe the workings of the universe
4. Lean and loaf at my ease
5. Sound some barbaric YAWPS

Best line read today.

"She despised Langlois for the sweat that pasted his trousers to his buttocks when he stood up and for the panic which seized him in the presence of the head of the firm and occasionally on the phone when he heard the name of some lawyer or even of some idiot with a de in front of his name."

"Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things."

Last night was the first really heavy snowfall of winter (sadly not the first snowfall, which came early in October). As happens when you live in a neighborhood with many old trees, branches came down everywhere and inevitably some power lines did too. Cut off from the electronic world, I decided to head out to the natural one. I bundled up in my big gray hoodie and set off for a walk through Memory Grove.

Earlier this summer, while camping at the Swell, I was on a walk with M and B when I remarked that camping and hiking and just general trekking always brings to my mind The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It is not that I am expecting dragons, orcs, or elves around the next tree...it is not the pure fantasy elements of Tolkein that appeal to me, but that sense of the elemental journey that he captures, where it is just you and a simple pack--and if you are lucky, some faithful companions and a bit or two of magic--against the forces of nature and of humankind. The finding and losing and possibly finding again of the road, and how it goes ever on and on; the convergence of small individual lives with the larger flow of history; the pleasures of home and of not-home.

And on snowy days like today I always think of the Robert Frost poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. A meditation on death it may be (and really, so is The Lord of the Rings trilogy), but I like to think of it as a meditation on the differences between work and purpose; the allure of losing the road, and how the woods go ever on and on (lovely, dark and deep); the trampling of small individual lives under the larger flow of history; the pleasures of the journey and the not-journey.

Home again and in a hot bath with sea salts from New Mexico (by way of Japan, I suppose) called to mind yet another novel that has stuck with me, and one that I always think of when traveling through desert landscapes--Death Comes for the Archbishop. I read this novel long, long ago and have to confess that I don't remember the plot at all, except that part of it (a long part, in my mind) involved a journey by donkey through the New Mexico landscape. This book sticks with me not in words and plot but in images and, well, that feeling you get only in the desert. The meditation it evokes doesn't come in words, it comes only with the real desert air on your skin.

Last night we skyped with J and S and T and the BB. Snow and darkness here, sun and palm trees there. That instant video across the miles still freaks me out a bit (in a good way), but I'm thankful for the technology that allows those who are so far away to seem a little bit closer.

I'm glad I took a walk outdoors today. I'm glad I can walk, can move in any way at all. I know so many who have lost that ability, or who never had it, or who have it only with great difficulty and pain. This week of Thanksgiving I am thankful for the ability to move in this world, and for journeys great and small.

time to start again

Perhaps someday I will start blogging regularly. Perhaps not.