I need an adventure. There is a tempting hill here, near the bay. I've decided that I'm either going to hop the fence and hike the hill to take some photographs or, more likely, find out who owns the land and ask if I can hike, etc., etc. Each day when I drive past it I look up to see what herds of cattle or sheep have made their way up, and how far, whether they're in groups together or spread out across the southern face.
Last night I went into work early so I also got off from work early and drove home in the waning daylight. It was a pleasant change as I am used to going in later and driving home in darkness. When I reached this part of the drive, where I pull off from the 4 lane highway and onto the two-lane blacktop, the color temperature of the sun's setting made this hill look particularly inviting. If I ever get two days off in a row again I will take the initiative to do what should be done.
I should state, for the record, that I have never seen a human on this hill. I will very likely be the first ever to reach its summit. If I do not return then tell The Pope's Son that the winds took me, The Holy Spirit swept down from on high and cradled his little lamb up into the heavens.
Nope, let me go make a tea and try again.
Why can't I just write nice things? I was reading Selavy's site last night and I wanted to go back to a point in the post to re-read, I did a search for the word "remember" and found 16 of them. That's strange, I thought. Then I realized that I was searching several pages at once, so I went back and looked at each use of the word. Indeed there were many moments of reminiscing or simply recalling. It made me want to take on another volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," the recognized masterpiece about recollections and the effects of memory. I read the first volume, "Swann's Way" about two years ago as part of a faux book club that my friends and I had created that never quite congealed in the intended way. We ended up each reading whichever books we each chose individually and largely ignoring others' selections.
The one book that we all did read was "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates. It was okay.
Don't get the wrong impression, dear readers, that your faithful correspondent is one who joins book clubs. This loosely formed literary clan was mostly a joke. We had named it The Finer Things Book Club after the group by the same or similar name from the television series The Office. It was part tongue-in-cheek, the other part farce, and only a thin patina of substance. Wait, is patina a layer of rust? Or, is it why the statue of liberty is green? I don't know. I haven't been able to get anybody to read a book with me since. I tried with Rachel and Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" but she gave up about halfway through, even though I was encouraging her almost daily to make it to the latter half where the themes, characters and plot really start to coalesce. Que sera, sera.....
A good friend once convinced me not to pursue teaching as a career. Many of my other close friends have suggested that it is my lost calling. I do so love the sound of my own voice.... even when I am only sitting here typing it out I can hear myself speaking the words as they appear on the screen in front of me like a verbal Rorschach test.
I've never understood what those blobs are meant to mean, all of them look like pterodactyl vaginas. What's the point? I once playfully made the mistake of telling a doctor that each of them looked alarmingly like pterosaur labia and he did not find it nearly as funny as I did. He kept wanting to talk to me about why I would find that funny, as if there was something wrong with me. I asked him how long he had been administering this strange form of psychological test and he told me off and on for several decades. I reminded him that man was not yet walking the earth when the mighty pterodactyls flew above, that my free association was purely imaginary, that I had no first hand experience with pre-historic genitalia, and that perhaps it was him that needed to look carefully into the dinosaur vagina and laugh.
He then asked me to say the first word that came to mind when he said a word. He proceeded to say, "mother." I responded immediately with "mother." He explained again to say the first word that came to mind after he had said his word, "family" Without a moment's uncertainty I smilingly offered back, "family." I could see his frustration growing. I offered that if he had wanted me to say the second word that came to my mind after the word that he had said then why didn't he just say so. Can you believe they pay people for this stuff? He administered some other tests on me, all of which came back inconclusive, to my knowledge. He told my parents that I was hostile to both the concepts of therapy and authority. Can you imagine their surprise. I'm certain that my mother offered to beat me for him.
No, I only kid. It is all a fabrication. I just don't have much else to write about this morning. The world is changing for the worse and I am trying to avoid polemics. Laws are being regularly signed into effect now that violate the basic principles of freedom and due process. Obama has done it again. But not to worry, it made a little ripple on Facebook, where I'm sure Obama will soon go to seek out the public's opinion on such matters. I'm certain he will quickly do an "about-face" on any law that gives him too much power.
I work with quite a few young people and I have taken notice at how few of them know anything at all about either The Constitution or The Bill of Rights. Picture me trying to casually interject such a thing into conversation... Funny, right? It has occurred to me for some time that if you are to take rights away from people who do not understand that they have them, then no one will notice, or care. That's exactly what seems to be happening. The abuses of power even at the lowest levels have become too egregious to dismiss, yet they are. But when it gets mentioned among a group of kids they seem to think that the Occupy protesters sort of asked for it.
I mean, they should have know that the cops weren't going to stand for that shit, right?
That seems to be the general feeling about it. That anybody who speaks up gets what they deserve. I hear the NSA is building a new centralized database out in the Utah desert where they can compile secret archives of information about us and our online behavior. Wired magazine thought enough of it to put it on the cover this month. Do kids even read Wired any more, am I really in my 40's....?
Why Utah...?
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