Thesis: To consider what the chance intersection of ideal beauty and intellectual confusion would mean in determining the fate of Earth. Phase 1: While touring San Francisco, I stayed at the Sir Francis Drake. The bartenders were adequate. Phase 2: I began a blog. I learned romance might exist, but depends upon whether a man and a woman can tread the maze individually and reach its center at the exact same instant in time. Phase 3: The center comes and goes as if it were a mirage.
Here are two of my favorite photographs. They were taken a couple of decades ago in black & white with a 35mm Nikon F3 for print publication as well as for memory purposes. The upper one was shot during an "island hopping"
excursion in a canoe along the length of the south shore of Lake Superior. I am on a cliff on an island. It was (still is, I suppose) about fifty feet to the water below. A few minutes after the photo was taken, I jumped off the ledge .... into about fifty feet of pristine, icy cold water. It was a cold day, too, but the sun was wonderfully warm and the brandy was delightfully delicious. The lower one was taken at an overnight camp while canoeing the length of the Minnesota River. It was nearly sunset on a wretchedly hot day, and I was contemplating whether to eat or to swim. I swam. I am nostalgic for many places and many people these days -- but, also eager to find a few new memories. I used both of these photos to accompany posts in 2009 and, when I noticed someone had visited the posts a few days ago, I decided to publish them one more time in case a few "purists" still exist. The reason they are so technically dismal, by the way, is because they are photos of framed photos behind glass .... but, you do not mind my laziness, right ??
A verse from the poem
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening" by Robert Frost 1916
The woods are lovely,
dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Still walking away .... how about you, Renee ??
So many aspects of life are interpretations which may or may not be reality. We see a smile from across the proverbial room, and wonder what it means. We hear / see three bands play the same song, each giving it a sound of its own. We walk down a street, confident and immortal, until the street disappears
-- and we, along with it. Under those circumstances and such a scenario, here we have a third version of, "Walk Away Renee," this one by Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes. Really, really cool, baby .... it reminds me of singing a few bars closed as late night became early morning. I frequently get hooked on a song and cannot break away from it without listening to it for a thousand times or more, to include every variation of it I can find .... Time and again: I am having a hard time with this .... this being the blog. I had planned on closing it on Tuesday, the sixteenth, but here it lingers beyond that date. Remember, I am superstitious. Some steps in life take deliberation. One thought which frequently rolls through my mind is to wonder why, what if, how come? These thoughts are common to many, and often they involve questions which can never be answered satisfactorily. My "wonderments" go so far as to question why, once upon a time, I stepped to the right instead of to the left and, simply because of that, remain alive today .... events like that have happened to me on at least five occasions which immediately come to mind .... but, now I am ranging into six-drink talk. A young lady .... actually, she was quite a woman -- age twenty-five, three daughters, married twice, divorced one and one-half times -- once told me that I fell in love too easily. I probably have mentioned this before. She was right, I guess, and it sends me back to the half-thought / half-belief that I never have experienced actual love. Oooouuuuffff .... dialectic thought can ruin a guy. Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and their patron saint, Karl Marx, are living proof of
that.
Still more bits of repetition: I have mentioned before -- again, more than once -- that I believe I had experienced everything there was to experience in life -- in one form or another, to one degree or another -- by the time I was age twenty-five. Since then, life has been repetition. My blog often is repetitious, which is another reason it is necessary to slip away and allow it to either fade away or find a new form in which to exist. I do not think people are meant to spend a lifetime in the same place doing the same thing -- yet, so many do just that. Incidentally, I have used Robert Frost's poem before, too, and probably will again in various places at various times. I am beginning to realize that the number of things I think truly are wonderful and absolutely incredible, like Frost's poem, are growing fewer rather than becoming greater.
Just one more time: It has been assumed that Neanderthal (homo sapiens) and modern man (homo sapiens sapiens) began interbreeding about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Based on "material" found in Siberia, it appears that number will be pushed back to just over 100,000 years ago. It simply crushes me, smashes me, overpowers me utterly when I try to comprehend the enormity of the lives and the lives and the lives that have been lived during that span of time and to capture it all within the confines of some manner of conceptual reality, much less quantify it against the conceit each of us has when we believe we actually are .... well .... you fill in the blanks .... and, this is not even to attempt to include the countless lives during millions of years when there existed those long-ago-vanished hominid "creatures" which came before us. As I am fond of saying, the anonymous writer of Ecclesiastes had it right, no doubt ....
By the way, the twenty-second is the target cutoff date now. And, to close this post on a note of common sense, indisputable wisdom and irrefutable logic: Words spoken by Alice
in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) 1865 "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is .... oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!"
"Still finds a way to haunt me" A last song for now .... a bit of "Bach-Rock" from the 1960s .... "Walk Away Renee," one of the most beautiful melodies ever composed and created (would you believe ??) by a sixteen-year-old boy. Keeping details to a minimum (unusual for me), the first version is the original by The Left Banke. The composer, Michael Brown (aka Michael Lookofsky), is on the keyboards in the video. The other version is sort of unique (i.e., sort of weird) and I really, really like it. This rendition is by Cyndi Lauper, whose music, to me, is fabulous and who, when young, looked a lot like my first actual love .... and Peter Kingsbery, who looks a lot like an older version of a
baseball pitcher who I rarely hit back in high school and who, consequently,
drove me crazy. Strange brew, as someone used to say. I hope you love the song as much as I do. Almost time to run away for a while, but first .... Three more thoughts: There have been queries about the photograph in my February 7 post, so I will elaborate a bit. It is one I took of a painting in the Royal Castle in Warsaw. I do not recall the name of the artist or the title of the painting, but, maybe, I will mention them next autumn after I have been in the presence of the painting once again. Hint, hint .... seems like a location where a search once sort of stalled out would be a good place to later resume it .... And, yes, it is relevant that I am very, very superstitious ....
And, most importantly, although two weeks early: Happy Birthday, Grandpa ....
An enigmatic photograph on this occasion -- or, should that read a photograph of an enigmatic painting? Whichever .... the image represents the past and the future for me, and I will say no more other than it stirs my memories and causes me to smile and makes me wonder .... if I did say more, neither the photograph nor the painting could continue to be enigmatic.
Words spoken by the Earl of
Salisbury
in Act 3, Scene 2, of the play "Richard II" by
William Shakespeare "One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,
"Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth:
"O, call back yesterday, bid time return ...." Abbreviated
thoughts .... So-called
journalism: The most difficult aspect about having once been a
practicing newspaper journalist is seeing how corrupted the system has become today, especially television news and, even more so, the publicists and propagandists on the internet who fraudulently call themselves journalists while they misrepresent their opinions as actual facts. Alone still
and again: When I began this blog, I had been divorced about a
year and one-half. I thought there was a fair possibility of connecting with someone on the sea of blogs and, possibly, relocating to wherever she was or we to wherever we might decide to go. I frequently wrote that I would never spend
another winter alone. There have been opportunities, one of which "felt right" and resulted in not spending the winter of 2010 alone. Well, things did not work out and every winter since then has been spent alone. The
result of this isolation of sorts is that I have grown accustomed to being alone, and think I will keep it that way. I do miss not going to films or museums or concerts or out for dinner with a special someone, but, conversely, life is simpler and, in ways, more pleasant without having to involve anyone else in decision-making matters. Now is a time for endings and beginnings .... perhaps, now is time also to put an end to following the searchers, Perceval and Galahad .... to stop "questing for" my own rendition of a Holy Grail. A place
in the sun: I am not referring to Theodore Dreiser's novel, "An American Tragedy," or the film version of it, "A Place in the Sun," but, rather, I am still dwelling on a place to slip away to for a while. I recently tried compiling a list of places I would like to visit and then narrow it down to the
one I would choose above all other places. Ridiculous as it might appear, I can
think of nowhere which seems special to me -- nowhere particularly intriguing or
mysterious or even sufficiently interesting to draw me to it. Anyway,
I have not given up on this idea and expect there will be a few "voyages of
exploration" in the weeks ahead: "The good times are coming "When they come I'll be there "With my both feet firmly planted way up there "In mid air ...." Just to
tease: Hominins living 300,000 years ago at the site of Schöningen in Germany were more like modern humans than had been previously thought, according to recent findings. Homo heidelbergensis lived in social groups, conducted coordinated hunting parties, and communicated about the past, present and future. Excavations at Schöningen have recovered well-preserved Paleolithic wooden, bone and stone tools, including a unique hammering tool made from the humerus of a saber-toothed cat. The site also has yielded evidence of the hunting and butchering of large animals. This
blog: As I mentioned a post or two ago, I think I will be shutting my blog down temporarily. It does not serve me any purpose at the moment. I probably will resume it from time to time. We shall see .... The
music: John Barry went from playing rock 'n' roll to creating many of the most beautiful film scores ever composed. How I envy his talent -- powerful and prolific music, for sure. The first piece is from a motion picture Western classic, the original version of "Monte Walsh." It is sung by Mama Cass Elliot, whose voice is melodious and resonant in the same breath. The second piece is from one of my favorite films, "Somewhere in Time," which came from one of my favorite novels, "Bid Time Return," by Richard Matheson, a writer as prolific and versatile as Barry was a composer. Matheson also has a few motion pictures to his literary credit. And, yes, I have posted both of these songs in the past. As a footnote to the video accompanying the "Somewhere in Time" piece, unfortunately, I do not see "she" in the paintings of the video. But, there always is the possibility of a next time. A clever individual might find a way to slip from the pathway to oblivion and turn back and discover an entry, a doorway, to return for another search .... search ?? Search for what, for whom? A search for the perfect kiss, I suppose. Remember ?? This is a long post, but remember: I need the space because all my stories have happy endings and, just in case, I want this post to have one.
Accidents are not exactly rare on interstate highways, and I missed one by a matter of feet a few days ago. I was at the end of a line of proverbial bumper-to-bumper traffic in the outside "fast lane" where we all were going exactly at eighty miles-per-hour. In the lane next to us, the traffic was moving at about seventy-five. A car driven by a young man with another in the passenger seat came up behind me clearly travelling somewhere between eighty-five and ninety. He began weaving from lane-to-lane passing. Abruptly, he side-swiped the car just ahead of me in the opposite lane. Just like Talladega, baby !!
The driver of the offending car lost control and suddenly it was moving sideways down the road just ahead of me, its rear end whacking guardrails. The driver overcompensated his steering and the car shot across into the other lane, nearly hitting the side-swiped car again, rear end leading the way, and off the road it went, about thirty yards down a forty-five degree embankment. Had it been bare ground that vehicle hit as it went off the road instead of sliding and gouging a path through snow about two feet deep, it would have flipped and flipped and flipped and smack. Snow saved the day and, very possibly, the lives of a couple of idiots. What was truly amazing was how ten or twelve other drivers all kept their cool and avoided a major, high-speed pile-up. (Obviously, none was a politician, or surely we would have crashed and burned.)
The driver of the car that was struck maintained control. As I "flew" past, I saw it in my rear-view mirror pulling off to the side of the road, along with a few other vehicles from the inside lane carrying people prepared to assist. People do stop to help in places like Minnesota and the Dakotas, you know. And, I guess, when you think about it, this is a story with a happy ending.
Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English (= literature) and history (= reality). Master of Arts in literature. Once upon a time, U.S. Marine Corps = Semper Fidelis. These things pretty much explain everything there is to know about me.
Other than that, ask, if you actually are curious .... I like to drift where the current takes me within this endless sea of blogs, read what others write in their blogs, observe, learn, question and, hopefully, understand, while offering a few comments of my own along the way .... by the way, the photo of me actually is me .... was me .... will be me .... hmmmm ....
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
-
Classics Club book 43 (1818/1831) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley FROM
AMAZON’S BOOK DESCRIPTION: “Frankenstein was published in 1818 by
21-year-old Mary Shel...
On the Wings. Landing is Never Graceful
-
There is a saying that you can't step into the same river twice. When last
week I saw again the squadron of pelicans flying towards me again I felt
lik...
COSAS DE NIÑOS
-
Atención: Spoiler
*Cosas de niños *no son cuentos infantiles, aunque la mayoría de sus
protagonistas sí lo sean.
Hay niños solitarios que piden un ab...
Inramare tricouri fotbal / Hai Romania! :)
-
Graphis Advertising se ocupă de imprimarea și personalizarea tricourilor și
oferă rame Click din aluminiu pentru înrămarea acestora. Iată cum
f...
Winactie: win een fotografie-workshop naar keuze!
-
In september begint het nieuwe cursusseizoen 2024/2025. Dan staan er weer
allerlei fotocursussen en workshops op het programma. Met deze winactie
maak je...
Cárabo común (Strix aluco)
-
Paseando por un entorno boscoso con paredes de roca caliza, localizo a
simple vista a un *Cárabo común (Strix aluco)* descansando a plena luz del
día. C...
update
-
I think a little up date is good
Det er lenge siden jeg har vært her og blogget
Men her er noen søte svaner med baby
Jeg syns de er veldig fine og ...
Taituroiva orava
-
Orava (Sciurus vulgaris) Nähtävissä on että talviturkki alkanut
muuttua jo ruskeammansävyiseksi. Useita oravia on pihapiirin
lähettyvillä. Vauhdikasta m...
The Portable Jack Kerouac
-
I have lots of things to teach you now,
in case we ever meet, concerning the message
that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina
...
A Carteira Perdida!
-
*A Carteira Perdida é uma belíssima história de amor verídica, que recebi
já traduzida faz um bom tempo por via e-mail. Ao procurar quem escreveu uma
car...
Time to Press 'Pause'
-
I'm not quitting, just taking a break
In my natural habitat (photo by Deborah Jaffe)
I started this blog in June 2007. After an uncertain beginning, it pr...
UNIWIGS
-
Hello my beloved readers! I am glad that there are still so many of you
with me. Even though I'm not the best blogger, haha. Let's start with what
really ...
Blogini osoite ja nimi on muuttunut
-
*Tervetuloa lukijaksi uuteen blogiini*
* te kaikki tämän vanhan blogin lukijat*
*sekä myös uudet lukijat.*
*Pääset tästä linkistä uuteen ➣ Kuvallista bl...
4 years ago
Romance, from Fram
I discovered Romance might yet exist, but it depends upon whether a man and a woman can tread the maze, individually, and reach its center at the same moment in time.
The Actual Instant of Love, from Fram
I am a jealous guy, of the sort John Lennon sang about. Any man who says he is not a jealous guy either has no genuine depth of feelings for the woman he is saying it about or is a liar. I can remember very distinctly, for example, when my feelings for my wife vanished. It happened in an instant. When love vanished, so did jealousy.
Actual love happens in an instant, I believe, although it does not always seem to be that way. I am not talking about "love at first sight," but, rather, "love at first instant." This means two people might have known each other for weeks, even for years, before the "instant" occurs. It comes with a single sentence spoken by one, or a single action taken by one, that strikes the other like lightning.
Affection grows; love is born. Love also disappears in an instant, I believe, although it does not always seem to happen that way. Incidental to my point, I do not believe in "love at first sight." That is no more than simple, physical or emotional attraction, which is the cause of countless and never-ending problems.
Happiness is momentary, from Fram
When I was age eighteen, a wise, old man of twenty-six told me that happiness is a momentary thing. It might last for minutes or days or weeks or, sometimes, even for a few years. But, like life itself, happiness is a transitory thing and, like fate, it is capricious. At some point along the road, I came to realize this wise, old man had been right.
The Three Sorts of Friends ....
Though friendships differ endless in degree, The sorts, methinks, may be reduced to three. Acquaintance many, and Conquaintance few; But for Inquaintance I know only two -- The friend I've mourned with, and the maid I woo!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge poet & philosopher Fragment 10: "The Three Sorts of Friends"
Time retains ....
Time retains its sacred right to meddle in each earthly affair. Still, time's unbounded power that makes a mountain crumble, moves seas, rotates a star, won't be enough to tear lovers apart: they are too naked, too embraced, too much like timid sparrows.
Old age is, in my book, the price that felons pay, so don't whine that it's steep: you'll stay young if you're good. Suffering doesn't insult the body. Death? It comes in your sleep, exactly as it should.
When it comes, you'll be dreaming that you don't need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it's part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.
Wislawa Szymborska poet, essayist & translator Nobel Prize for Poetry 1996 "Entropy"
Yesterday is History ....
Yesterday is History, 'Tis so far away -- Yesterday is Poetry -- 'Tis Philosophy --
Yesterday is mystery -- Where it is Today While we shrewdly speculate Flutter both away.
Emily Dickinson poet "Yesterday is History"
Never the answers
The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
Will Durant historian, philosopher, teacher
The equality of man
Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.
Thomas Jefferson president, patriot, free thinker
The audience
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly writer, editor, literary critic
I am free
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. Robert Heinlein science fiction writer philosopher
Marine Corps Forever, from Fram
To all Marines, those among the dead, those who still live, those yet to be born: Semper Fidelis, to the end of time ....
Have gun .... will travel
Once upon a time: "She said, There is no reason ...."
Time & again ....
Time .... he's waiting in the wings .... he speaks of senseless things .... but, if you could heal a broken heart, wouldn't time be out to charm you?
Voluspo 28-29
Alone I sat when the Old One sought me .... The terror of gods, and gazed in mine eyes .... "What hast thou to ask? why comest thou hither? .... Othin, I know where thine eye is hidden" .... Deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir .... Mead from the pledge of Othin each morn .... Does Mimir drink: would you know yet more? ....