Compulsively Aimless

    Storm Spiders   At night after the storm  broken branches litter the road  like giant tarantulas.   My Grandfather's Gun I have my grandfather's gun, a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I don't know if he ever fired it. I also have my other grandfather's gold deputy sheriff's badge for Kent County, Michigan. Both enlisted in the Army in WWI. By WWII, they were in their 40s. As the younger men went off to war, both served as volunteer Deputy Sheriffs. Both had John in their name. Named after their fathers.    Reading About Jack Kerouac All the life put into him: the books, the trips, the loves, the seasons. And then one moment. like everyone else, it's gone.   Expiration Date   Time arrives in crates from a far off distributor unloaded in the back room and sold retail.   The Optimist Creed The green light is always waiting for you at the busy intersection.

An all time favorite travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote among other things, a trilogy of books about his walk from the hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was 18 at the time and crossed through Europe in 1933-4 as it was slowly moving toward a war footing. Fermor is a favorite because of his gift with language -- his travel narratives descriptions are more like poetry than prose. Later, he fought in WWII in a British commando force conducting raids in Germany occupied Crete, including the kidnapping of a German General. He was later knighted for his services. Fermor's writing is truly one of a kind by combining adventure and his gift for language, he keeps you turning the page to see what person or village he would encounter next. I even wrote a Cento poem derived from the first book, A Time of Gifts that was published. Sharing a random sample of some phrases I like (this is about a tenth of what I underlined): I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and se...

Every few months I clean out miscellaneous scraps from my journal and set them on the back porch. Offering these up on Black Friday for your minor amusement.    World Travel   If I'm sitting at my local coffee shop it's everday. If a person from Mongolia is sitting at my local coffee shop it's world travel.   Band Name Generator   The Papal Snoods The Terrible Suggestions The Eckington Dump Leper's Squints Popskull [19thC slang for cheap whisky]   Shopping Blahs   Low fat  this and that   Memory Climate   The cold ember  of a hot memory Cento from The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja It was a voluntary madhouse a museum of expired vices a final cry  for ruined lives.   Night Time   Sometimes midnight is not  late enough for midnight thoughts Maybe 3am or thereabouts When I can hear the flag rustling  in the cold wind.    Memorable Names from the book, Journey to a War, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwoo...

If there is a theme for this post it's information, knowledge, and memory. As we're still struggling with the early growing pains of the Information Age, we're trying to understand what effects technology have had on humans changes  and what changes it have on us in the future. We take for granted that the information at hand is correct and easily accessible. But easy access to information is only a recent phenomena. There is an irony here in the Information Age, we are more challenged in understanding whether information is true and correct. It's nothing new that political powers have always sought to control access to information and even to control its existence.   Here's a short collection of books from the last year or two of reading on the topic.   1. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch (2021). In the Information Age, it's hard to believe that we have to go back to basics know how we know things about the world. Philosophers ...