A pal of mine gave me the grand tour. She’s entirely sweet about putting up with my touristy picture-taking.
Note the mighty bobcat that I bravely confronted.
Pictures absolutely cannot do this place justice.
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(They’re generally more congenial anyway.)
When I want an intelligent answer on a national security question, do I trust Sean Spicer?
I’d rather trust the Spice Girls.
Midnight Existential Angst (Revisited)
I wrote this two years ago today. It’s truer now than then.
Midnight existential angst. It is always at its apex when, in silence and under cover of darkness, one day supplants another. Sleep recedes, drawing back like the tide of an ever quickening, warm ocean.
Freud wrote that we are driven by two basic needs: the sex urge and the desire to be great. Is it a sign of advancing age that the latter eclipses the former?
When I was young, I chased young women. But at midnight now my mind will chase the racing, red, flame-bright hare of purpose, that year by year gains distance from me with its burning slim legs, as the years ahead themselves grow fewer.
I’m supposed to be eating healthier.
But I just got back from shopping, and I’m pretty sure I bought ALL the Taco Bell.
I’ve occasionally run pictures of me on this blog, and, I swear to you, I am carefully endeavoring to hide my giNORmous pot belly. I look like I’m pregnant. I look like I have a beer belly, and I haven’t had a beer in years. I look like my “spirit animal” is a pot-bellied pig.
I might just ask for help from the Internet community. I might publish my cell phone number on this blog and on Facebook, and just ask everyone to call me at all hours of the day and night, and just scream at me to “STOP EATING SUGAR AND FATTY FOODS!!” And then just hang up. That’ll teach me.
This madness has got to stop.
Also … you people could also scream at me to do my laundry on a timely basis, and to stop being such a prick about people’s religions. (I could use some mellowing out.)
“When you see a superior man …”
When you see a superior man, then seek to equal him; when you see an inferior man, search yourself for his faults.
— Confucius
WALKER LANE.
A friend of mine lives on this street in Salem, Virginia.
She says the rents are dirt cheap, but it sucks having to keep the windows boarded up to keep the zombies out.
Can you imagine if the cross street was named “Grimes Avenue?” That would be F%*#ing EPIC.
“The Door,” by W. H. Auden
“The Door,” (Part I of “The Quest” by W. H. Auden)
Out of it steps our future, through this door
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.
Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.
We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made
Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.
Photo credit: By Tim Green from Bradford (Door, King’s Manor, York) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Railroad tracks in Roanoke, VA
Under the Wonju Street overpass in Roanoke SW, heading north.
“This empty junction glitters in the sun.”
“The Crossroads” (Part XVI of “The Quest”), by W. H. Auden
Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
Photo credit: Martyn Harries [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 