My New GPS

Traveling home on the Tacanic State Parkway w/my new nav system, the TomTom Go 720. Great if you know an address, not so good to locate POIs near you (no real option to just browse POIs in vicinity)

Barnes & Noble

The reason why B & N can afford to have people milling about in their store all afternoon with nary a sale is that they charge so frigging much for a book! MSRP. Retail. Full price.
But if you want a nice place to hang out, with a clean bathroom & good coffee, or maybe want a paperback right now . . .
I'm just saying: Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Barnes & Noble price $16.16 ($14.95 + tax), Amazon $10 & change, free 2 day shipping w/my Amazon Prime account.
And this is a cheaply made paperback, content not withstanding - that flimsy off-white paper & thin paper cover. Sniff the pages & it smells like grade school, that cheap brownish paper that made the best spitballs - more pulp than paper. I think it is the wood fibers you can smell. I remember the taste.
Rip. Chew. Spit. Thwack. Bulls eye!

Mathew's broken wrist

Mathew's wrist looking like a snake after collided with the wall in a pickup basketball game.

Three plus A.M.

Laying awake,
light snow in moonlight falling,
a glowing fog outside the window.
Is it you I should be calling?
For whose sake?

I resist the tossing & turning,
at least on the outside,
yet my brain cells are burning,
decide and then undecide.
Spinning, whirling, straight, then curling,
only to return to square one and start the process over again,
and again, and then again.

Not easy to be poetical at three a.m. plus,
knowing I need to rise in a few short hours.
Short hours?
They are passing like slugs in sand,
slowly, painfully.

Choices

The choice we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determines who we are.
- John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Time Traveler

Do you ever wish you could close your eyes here and open them in your past? Perhaps not to change things, but just to see how events really unfolded. Naw, really, I am talking about a cosmic do-over.

If you could still be you now, but do some of it again, have another crack at it, would you?

If you had spent your life as clueless to the here & now as I did, there'd be no question. I lived a life without a present tense. Maybe it's like George Carlin says, there is no now. There is almost now and there is then. 'About to be' becomes 'was.' 'In a moment' becomes 'the past', and flies by so fast we never really experience now. It keep changes to then.

And, since the cosmic do-over is not an option, why let the here and now continue to chew you up & spit you out?

As the Facebook profiles say, "It's complicated." You know who you are.

(sigh)

Don't let the desire for a cosmic do-over spoil the memories you have.

Oh, let us all abandon the sappy crutch of "I wouldn't change a thing because then I wouldn't be me …"

Bull shit! You'd do it over, too, if you really thought about it.

And YOU would still be YOU.

[Damn, late night/early morning, strange bed, ever present headache, start of a new week - and this - - is what you get]

{Pssssst. Skip down to the previous post - maybe you'll find it more interesting, more content full}

(Damn you, email blog posting, and your lack of formatting capabilities!)

A Night at Suzette's

The smell of the sheets and the geranium on the nightstand sends me back to my youth, just 8 or 9 years old, and we were living at my Nana's house. Funny how the memories of nearly 40 years ago can swirl around so fresh and clear, like a slideshow of movie clips. We had just returned from Iran and were staying with my mother's mother while my father finished his tour. I slept in my grandmother's sewing room off the living room. I can remember sneaking out of the room to watch the news, army-crawling across the floor and ducking down behind a chair. I would hear the announcers say "and now you may want to have your children leave the room" or some such ans it would draw me out. And I would watch while the news showed the daily clips from Viet Nam. It was like watching a war movie, but more real in some way.

It wasn't like the Gulf War, where you could follow the war 24 hours a day. It wasn't like the Iraq War, with its embedded reporters chronicling every fire fight. In my Nana's house, it was a time of Lawrence Welk and Pro Bowling during the day, and body counts from Viet Nam each night. There was footage of men in trenches shooting over the edge, medics caring for wounded, reporters shoving their microphones out into it all. And then the news was over, and you'd watch Laugh-In or the Smothers Brothers, or Sony & Cher; whatever you could until some grownup caught you and sent you back to bed. Looking back, very bizarre.

Oh, there are lots of other tangents I could follow in the swirling mist of memories, but that is where I leave it tonight.

It is hard to believe I was, I am, that cute little boy. The connection escapes me.

I am,
disconnected.