Man, the abuse I am getting on Facebook for posting this quick and tasty snack. It’s mild Italian sausage, diced and added to some good ol’ Ramen noodles.
Hey, it works for me.
My friends actually have a loooooong history of disapproving of my culinary choices. As always, that just means there’s more for me.
“A Roanoke Thanksgiving”
I am thankful for
fine friends, gracious neighbors, and presently forgotten adversaries,
the smell of smoke outside, its rich and deep and ageless burning notes that sound upon the palette,
the hills under all my days, which pluck up my breath,
all the countless “hellos” their slopes will yield,
the mountains’ incandescence in this cooling season,
the colors now igniting their high and wooded perches,
this new home, this Old South,
this ranging, easy vale of firming winds and firm tradition,
its gentle people, and their surprising hearts —
this fair, far Star City.
~ Eric Robert Nolan, Thanksgiving 2019
Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy this 1984 holiday commercial from Carvel Ice Cream. (I am linking here to the Youtube channel for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.)
Or entropy or ennui. Seriously, have you ever been there?
practice the ancient
art of combining haiku
with Tai Chi — hai-chi.
*A college pal suggested to me that “Tai-ku” might actually be the better portmanteau here. I admit he’s got a point.
Construction proceeds slowly but surely off Campbell Avenue at the site of the now-extinct bus station.
I love the phrase “extinct bus station” — like it was too big and slow to adapt, and stone age hunters ran it down to oblivion.
A woman I know is into Wicca (or Druidism, possibly?). I don’t know. She needed a lighter for a candle-light … thing, I dunno. Maybe it’s the Equinox again. Girls like her have an Equinox they can invoke anytime they feel like getting witchy. Last year, there were like seven of them.
Anyway, she asked me to pick her up a lighter. I stopped off at a service station before I met up with her.
This is the lighter the dude behind the counter handed me. I did not request it. Nor did I notice the artwork until I handed it to my friend for her ritual. It was awkward, is all I’m saying.
There were plenty of regular, plain lighters behind the counter! Why did he hand me this one?!
I think the user experience on Twitter has definitely deteriorated somewhat since Elon Musk took over the company — at least it has for me. It just looks like the algorithms have changed for what appears in my newsfeed (or the scroll, whatever).
I seem to be reading far fewer tweets from people I want to hear from, and far fewer tweets that I enjoy. I’m reading vague yet grandiose religious tweets … if you know me at all, you know that those don’t appeal to me.
And I’m being targeted by spam in tweets for the first time ever. It’s happened only a couple of times, though — so I shouldn’t complain too much.
Maybe I shouldn’t bitch at all. Twitter is free. (And, no, I don’t think I’ve ever made a purchase due to advertising on the site.)
But I will say this — it definitely isn’t as fun as it used to be.
This is from 1988 — it was my speech when I ran for president of the International Student Organization at Longwood High School.
I even had buttons made up. I was quite the extrovert back in those days (and a nerd too, in case you hadn’t noticed). But I wasn’t exactly Marcus Antonius, even if I wanted to be.
Note the use of a dot matrix printer! 😀
And “primitive.”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 