Start with a quote, they said. Don't stare like that, they said. You'll go blind if you keep doing that, they said. They were right with the first one, but thankfully they were dead wrong on the other two. Though I do need glasses to see perfectly, if one can ever do that.

"Love, the forgiving hand of victory."
O'Sullivan Beare family motto, Edward Whittemore.

I want to spend the night reading Jerusalem Poker until I'm sobbing in unadulterated awe at the words E.W. uses to give unto history best book ever...

But a trip to Chicago is in the near future, and thus sleep before it is recommended by my lover, and even though her marvelous moonlit form isn't next to me, warming me and giving me that cliched but correct sense of perfect coolness that comes from a lover on a hot night...
I'll read her letters in my head until I wake up.

Goodnight folks.

Soon, expect actual posts to resume on this blog, as I've decided to get back into the fray of writing...

Prompted largely by the inspiration of marvelous folks around me, recent meetings with friends that have been friends so long neither of us can recall how we met, though we're pretty sure it was ten years ago that we first connected, and by remembering how much writing helps me stay mildly more sane...
and in the weeks, months, years to come...
I'm going to need all the sanity I can get, just to stagger forward at a geologic pace...
towards the glorious eventual ending in however many billions of years...

Iesu Christo, Pelecanus Mundi, as they used to say.

Jesus Christus Pelicanus.
Iesum Christum Pelicanus salvat mundi.
And all similar attempts to butcher Latin for my own ends.
It’s actually a very old (early Medieval, later Aquinian) thing in Catholic theology.
Called as such because it was believed the Pelican, to feed its young, pierced its breast and fed them on either blood or pieces of its own heart when no other food was available. Either that, or it killed its young and then resurrected them by stabbing itself in the breast and dripping its blood on their bodies, causing them to spring to life and continue right on growing up into good, moral, upstanding pelicans. This is…well, a direct allegorical link to the whole sacrifice of Christ on the Cross thing…also aided by how pelicans and cormorants dry their wings by spreading them out…in the shape of a cross…and generally looking all Jesus-like…for birds, that is.

Earthquake Weather

It's Monday.
It's the middle of July.
It's around 90 degrees, plus the humidity.
Bloomington is a nice place to spend the summer, especially if you don't mind the slow and torpid languor that seems unique to Indiana. I wish I could flee north, though.
North to the polar region, the land of ice, Amundsen, more ice, and the probable remains of Amundsen entombed in said ice until such time as the ice melts due to global warming and gives his body (plus Robert Falcon Scott, etc) unto the living again.
It'll be an exhumation of the dead, courtesy of greenhouse gases and people ignoring the Kyoto Protocol, which wouldn't have helped much anyway, but might have kept things back a few decades, given man the time he needs to thoroughly despoil the land before it is inundated, before Holland is a memory, before everyone who matters is watching Bangladesh sink into the Bay of Bengal from the Dyson sphere habitat that eventually replaces the International Space Station.
And it could be worse, that's the terrifying thing. Praise Johnson for the Clean Air Act.