All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

(It makes a high-pitched wine.)

Tried to spray this goddam squeaky door with WD-40; now it just sounds like pop-reggae fusion.

Turns out I was actually spraying it with UB40.



“Christmas Eve at the John Wanamaker’s Department Store, New York,” Franklin Booth, 1916

wan

(And keep your hands off mine.)

Portmanteau of the day — better + burrito = betterrito.



“It becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented.”

“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

― Agatha Christie, in her autobiography



Agatha_Christie

Photo credit: Agatha Christie plaque -Torre Abbey.jpg: Violetrigaderivative work: F l a n k e r, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Throwback Thursday: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984)!

“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) was the first sequel to 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but it was technically a prequel — its story is set a year prior to the events of the first film.  I was predictably obsessed with seeing it when I was a kid.  I even remember getting excited over the tagline you hear in the trailer below — “If adventure has a name, it must be ‘Indiana Jones.'”

But I was a little late for the party, and a few of my sixth-grade classmates saw it before I did.  They even blabbed about the rope-bridge finale in class, which I guess is the first time in my life that spoilers were ever an issue.  It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the movie, however.  (Somewhere, the shrinks at UC San Diego are smiling.)  I was over the moon for this “second Raiders movie.”

If memory serves, I even had the story on audio cassette.  I think it was a birthday present.  I had the novelization too; that was even more fun!



Cover to “The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones” #1, Terry Austin, 1982

Marvel Comics.

indy

Kinda breaks my heart every time I read it.

357414979_6739113296108474_7253449437353533777_n

Nifty little sunroom at Roanoke Public Library.

Eric tested, Nolan approved.

South Jefferson Street, July 2023.

People still say “nifty,” right?



IMG_20230703_183302761

“The Embrace,” Gustav Klimt

emb

“You’ll live forever in your own private library.”

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive.  But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories.  A room like the stacks in this library.  And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards.  We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.  In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore



Exif_JPEG_PICTURE
Photo credit: Haruki Murakami nappa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons