February 11, 2008
It’s Not Enough
Filed by Trevor at 4:13 am under General
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To wake up every morning.
To have faith.
(We are drawn to edges,)
To be your own best friend.
(to our own parapets and sea-walls)
You find out that the years don’t span wide. They hang flaccid, rotted. And remain so.
You wake up not the same person, but as someone who willfully exchanged time for hollowness.
More insular. More brittle. All of this in the name of protection.
(finding our lives in relief)
So many faces, so many lives, and you wake up: you must bear the cross of allowing them to have fallen away.
(in some forked storm.)
I watched my grandmother’s hands, with their parchment-like skin, scooping coffee, making a sandwich, cutting a banana. Those mundane tasks that in ten years time will have become so dear as to be excruciating. And you realize: everyone deserves to have someone to love. It really is that simple.
We rob these of others; we’re doing it now. And we rob ourselves of the same.
(Returning with our unimaginable gifts,)
To keep moving.
To live for the moment, for self-pleasure.
(badged with salt and blood,)
You wake up: not with a lifetime, but with thousands of days lived in one spin of the earth.
You wake up: not as the same person, but as someone else. The number of your counted days eroded past recognition.
(we have forgotten how to walk)
Flaccid, rotted. Protected.
(Thinking how much more we wanted)
And you discover that single-mindedness is seldom rewarded with instant success. Few things are.
To reflect.
Reading a tome that spilled from your fingers, but long before you sold your soul to mediocrity.
(when what we had was all there was;)
And every day bleeds you out, silently, painlessly. A thousand pinpricks.
To start over.
(looking too late to the ones we loved,)
To pick up where you left off.
For you must willfully be something else entirely.
But you wake up: to continue yesterday’s work.
(we stretch our our hands as we fall.)
And you sleep: on a crest, to ride it out to shore.
(”Apart” ©2002 Robin Robertson)
February 7, 2008
Yes, Clotille, there is a Loup-Garou
Filed by Chelsea at 11:05 am under Religion, The South
2 Comments
Tuesday, 5 February 2008, was Mardi Gras.
You know, the holiday where a million tourists descend upon New Orleans to drink themselves into oblivion and commit random acts of nudity for the price of crappy plastic necklaces? It’s all about decadence and exposure and making a fool out of yourself before the church-imposed wasteland of Lent, right?
Well, kind of. Not really.
(Keep reading…)
February 2, 2008
The Choice of a New Generation
Filed by Bil at 9:39 pm under Politics, Pop Culture, Social Issues, The Arts
8 Comments
Recently, Devon and I acquired a new vehicle. It was a tough choice between a Scion xD and a Honda Fit; ultimately, the xD won the prize. The choice was unusually hard – a car is not something you want to buy now and regret later. And it’s not like you can just get another car if the first one doesn’t work out. We’re very happy with our little Scion, especially considering that we drove the shopping carpool this afternoon making trips to PetSmart, CostCo, and Trader Joe’s (three people and three cats will be fed for many weeks to come) and we were able to cram all our groceries into the car with no problems.
The timing could have been better – the day we drove it off the lot was the start of a week of snowfall. But aside from that, it’s really the ideal car for us – it’s a hatchback, meaning it’s bigger on the inside than the outside would let on. This is good if you have a ton of groceries or a ton of theatre props. I can’t imagine we’ll ever get a plain old sedan ever again. Also, it gets great gas mileage. It’s not a hybrid, unfortunately, but we’ll still be able to stay away from gas stations more than we were able to before. So, again – we’re both really, really pleased with the car we got.
The decision to get the car was easy enough; without it, Devon would be taking a series of busses to get to Skokie for work. But the decision on which car to get did not come lightly. It was the result of roughly one week of intensive online research (conducted by Devon) into what cars had the best mileage, safety, interior space, warranty, MSRP, etc., etc., etc., followed by about two weeks of searching the ad websites like cars.com, Vehix, and AutoTrader, test driving cars, phone calls to dealerships (conducted by me), and – finally – about a week and a half of waiting for the dealer to search a five-state radius and find us a Scion xD that wasn’t silver or white.
This is about the same length of time it took me to decide on which albums to purchase with an iTunes gift card I had received for Christmas.
(Keep reading…)
