Compulsively Aimless

  PHRASES AND FOUND POETRY OR CENTOS A FROM BOOKS I READ IN 2026 Enjoyed a wide variety of books for 2025. Mostly non-fiction, history but also a couple books of poetry,  one kids book, a handful of great novels, two books on Johnny Carson, and toward the end of  the year, read a handful of books from Oxford University Press series, A Very Short Introduction to…  My year end list is here at Good Reads .  Sharing a few notes and minor amusements.  Tales of the Northwest , William Joseph Snelling I never killed a man who wore a hat.  Beauty, and I are strangers. The Living Great Lakes , Jerry Dennis The North Shore of Lake Superior, la marge sauvage , the wild shore.  You see glimpses of time’s broad scale. The wind roaring overhead in the rain, spattering and gusts.  The waves hitting the oldest rocks on the planet.  We could hear the crawl of the centuries out there. Native American Stories In 2025, I read a couple of books on Native Ame...

In the film Metropolitan , there’s an exchange that has always struck me as both funny and devastating. Tom Townsend, earnest and slightly wounded, asks his high school love interest, Serena Slocum about their correspondence: Tom: “You threw away all the letters I wrote you?” Serena: “I throw away nearly everything. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life with the mail I got when I was sixteen.” Tom: “I’m surprised. Someone goes through the trouble of writing a real letter—I save it. People don’t write many personal letters anymore.” Tom, the archivist; Serena, the minimalist; and the rest of us floating somewhere between keeping just enough paper to feel sentimental, but not enough to require zoning permits for storage. I thought of that scene while sitting beside the shredder in our basement office that sounded increasingly triumphant with each page it devoured. I had decided whether bravely or foolishly, to unclutter decades of correspondence in what I had proudly collected t...

  One Last Score It will be an inside job From the unmarked van. We'll synchronize watches  and our fast-talking ex-con wearing a stolen waiter’s uniform, will slip past the guard distracted by the spilled coffee while the trained monkey steals the keys. The loot is sure to be ours. No loose-cannon cop with a chip on his shoulder, or his desk-pounding police chief three days from retirement will have a last-minute revelation, to connect the dots from the hidden clue in plain sight. But I swear, if I go down, I’m taking you with me.   O, an Ocean of Nonsense Say it ain’t so, Geronimo— you don’t need to swap a feather from your weather-worn, war bonnet just to know what Columbus didn’t know. You never had to sail the ocean blue when oceans sailed others to you. Say it ain’t so, O-hi-o. Here you are  round on the edges, high in the middle  In your heart is Columbus without an ocean blue anywhere near you.  Say it ain’t so, old Pla-to— you stacked your question...