Compulsively Aimless

  Over the years, I tallied up the number of references to Ohio in movies and television shows. If a TV show wants to portray the average middle-of-the-road American setting Ohio seems to be the default. Alternatively, Ohio is used as an unsophisticated foil to the glamorous setting of the coastal elite. My hometown of Sandusky seems to get more than its fair share of references. Satirist P.J. O'Rourke's comical short story, The King of Sandusky uses the plain settings of north central Ohio towns and landmarks as a contrast for his plot of medieval intrigue. I once met him at a book signing and asked him, "why Sandusky?" He said it was because he couldn't use hometown of Toledo and Sandusky was his next best stand-in. Here’s a partial list of my tally of TVs and movies set in Ohio. There's plenty more out there, feel free to add your own. Television Shows Family Ties - suburban Columbus, OH. A 1980s sitcom starring Meredith Baxter, Michael Gross, Michael J. ...

    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 ...

In 1917, my maternal grandfather enlisted in the U.S. Army as the U.S. entered WWI in Europe. He was sent to Camp MacArther, Texas as part of his basic training. Traveling by train, he sent a series of postcards to his mother, my grandmother (not yet married), and friends. He died in 1958 after a series of strokes, years before I was born. Among his artifacts were journals and postcards of his travels. Here are a few postcards from 1917-1918:

Before there was the digital world wide web there was the analog web or what I like to think of as libraries. One book leads to another. You read about a person mentioned in one story and want to know more about them and pick up another book and so on, not knowing where it will lead. Perhaps your subliminal is leading you down a path where you start to develop themes. I had this experience over the past year and I’ll call this theme, "Midwest Innovation." I suppose it came from the fact I'd grown up in a rust-belt town that had gone through it's own cycle of build, boom, bust, and transformation.   The journey started with Robert Laceys book Ford: The Men in the Machine focused on the extraordinary rise of Henry Ford and his automobile dynasty.                 Ford took his inspiration from Thomas Edison the great inventor who held more patents than any other American in history.  Ford met Edison when he was a young man working in ...

Sweeping more fragments out to the curbside blog Combos Where I Couldn ' t Make Up My Mind   Heat and Stupidity Heart and Stupidity   Comic Dance Cosmic Dance   Honor a Horror Horror of Honor   Maniacs Ate Grapes Great Apes Ate Grapes   Dark Hoses Dark Horses Dark Houses   Unclaimed Baggage (fragments left in my notebook) Reach in the falling rain and descant that drink  in your easy jeans ***   A child raised on maps sits on the crust of the earth ***   The cat uses silence as a weapon ***   We've Never Been Here   Do you ever wake up and think, " I 've never been here before." Here being this point in time; and neither has anyone else.  Every moment is unknown for everyone. Infinite Questions   Does infinity have a map Does infinity have a tail Should I call it Mr. or Mrs. Where does infinity send its children to school Does it have a handicap Does infinity envy any other fact of nature It's What You've Been Wa...

Every so often when I finish a book, I try to write a poem from it, this one is a Cento from Robert Price's Ford: The Men and Machine   The Rouge One of capitalism's alters a vast satanic cathedral All night the Rouge growls its fires and flares cast flickering shadows its furnaces glow dull red around the base of its brooding bulk The industrial guts of America Europe has its palaces but America celebrates her native genius with monuments of a rougher sort. —A Cento with credit to Robert Lacy, Ford: The Men and Machine

I mentioned I liked roads. It's a recurring theme of this blog starting with my cross country drive of my own. I've collected a lot of books on roads. Here's one category of books on the history of roadbuilding and of particular American highways.    1.   First Highways of America: A Pictorial History of American Roads and Highways from 1900-1925 , John Butler (1994). A history of the dirt-rock-to-pavement of America's early roads.  Fantastic black and white pictures of early cars, road construction and landscapes.  Bought new. 2.   Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908 , Curt McConnell (2000).   A collection of early automobile adventures across the the U.S.  The appendix includes a great chronology of early automobile trips. Bought new.       3.   U.S. 1: America's Original Main Street , Andrew Malcolm, Photographs by Roger Straus III (1991). Sometimes called America's original Main St...

Every so often you return to a book that influenced you growing up.  Maybe it's a clique but On the Road by Jack Kerouac was one such book for me.  I read it soon after I finished law school and it pushed me to do my own frenzied road trip— and Odyssey representing freedom and the unknown. The book is now sold over 3 million copies since its first printing in 1959. During the pandemic, I've returned to the book, waiting for that moment when we'll have freedom to move again. To get in the car and drive. Here's my short list of On the Road books that includes a couple others who attempted to retrace and re-kindle Kerouac’s spirit. 1. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (Penguin 1986). I can see how much of an impact made on me since it’s heavily annotated with my pencil markings. I suppose the high points and stay with me always are when he describes is the most fun cross country ride of his life on the back of a flatbed truck with a cast of characters from Iowa to Wyomi...

    Do you need a good, clean, unused fragments to complete a poem or maybe as a spare part in case you run into unexpected writing trouble?  Our  inventory has grown and we need to make room for next year's models so  we're holding a clearance sale. We've got fragments for every budget--from a single sentence to a full stanzas, some complete with metaphors. No  reasonable offer refused. Trade-ins considered. Test drive for thirty days  and if not completely satisfied return for a full refund. Check out these models:   *** You keep whispering to me  but you don't say why. ` *** I got paid in diamonds and dynamite. *** Out in the void secure in his ship  sails an off-course astronaut ...when will he know? *** After the last leaves fall unfed ghosts hang one or two from a tree waiting for what the wind brings them. *** She was not measured on the ordinary scale of gods. *** I would like to catwalk among the parapets wea...

Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains - a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself.                          --Marcus Aurelius Everyone has their happy place. Mine is "up north" on Michigan's Leelenau Peninsula where I've gone since I was six to meet up with Aunts, Uncles, cousins, and annual friends. Here's my small collection of books on the area.  1. Above the North: Aerial Photography of Northern Michigan, Marge Beaver (2006). Beaver captures a four season, bird's eye view of the Peninsula, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Lake Leelenau and the lakes of of Crystal, Roch, Elk, and Glen. Gift. 2. Leelenau: A Portrait of Place in Photographs & Text, Ken Scott & Jerry Dennis (2000). Extraordinary collection of timeless pictures around Leelenau County.  A gift from my sister July 2003 after our largest family reunion up north.     ...