Compulsively Aimless

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...