walking stick

last Friday the bus driver wouldn't drop me off in front of Borders, so i had to walk back to it from the mall.

when scaling down the hill at the edge of the parking lot, i passed a tree who had apparently been assaulted by a snow plow, since a broken-off branch lay on the ground nearby.

i continued on to Borders; but on the way back i picked up the branch and took him home, vowing to adopt him into my family of walking sticks.

now he leans against the wall by the door, awaiting my attention.

Shall we play a game?

LOGON: joshua

GREETINGS, PROFESSOR FALKEN.

sometimes i wake up and realize that we made it through the '70s, and we made it through the '80s, and we made it through the '90s . . . and we didn't all blow each other up. we didn't.

the things we feared most didn't happen. whatever tragedies we've experienced have been minor, compared with even a limited nuclear exchange; minor.

maybe there's hope after all.

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

sun after snow (before rain and then more snow ;-)

yestermorn, after an early snowfall, the sun came out for an hour or so; and i grabbed my camera for a few pictures on my way down the hill to the café (before the sun & breeze blew the fresh snow off the branches).

more Annie Dillard

[the next paragraph from AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, p11.]

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and i was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

---

i'm afraid that some people don't ever wake to their lives very much -- it's easier not to; sometimes it's frightening to be self-aware and responsible for your own actions.

the best, from Annie Dillard

[from AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, p11. i so love this.]

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: "in media res," surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

cold quantum comfort

sometimes the idea of other realities comforts me, realities where history has taken different turns than it has here and where things are different.

perhaps those other realities can't easily be reached from this one; but i still believe they're there, like unread books on a library shelf.

physics & math say that every quantum reality *can* exist -- if you can imagine it, there's probably a alternate quantum universe like it somewhere there in the multiverse.

and it's why i like fiction so much; it takes me most of the way to a variety of realities.

time to check the Lost & Found

i bicycled home from my late class last night; it was cold, so i was all bundled up. when i got home i shed my sweaty clothes, used the bathroom, and then realized that my rings were gone. aack!

frantically, i dug through my backpack, the pockets of my jeans (which i'd changed out of at school) and jacket and gloves. nothing. normally i was very careful with my rings, never taking them off or setting them down except at home. but not this time.

one is a sterling silver ring that a dear friend gave me (an irreplaceable token of our bond). the other is a 14-karat gold graduation ring (that i'd painstakingly modified to add a 1/2 to the 92). both gone.

maybe i'd left them in the school bathroom where i changed out of my jeans; maybe i'd left them in the classroom when i gathered my stuff to bicycle home; maybe i'd left them outside when i put on my gloves before riding off.

i remember seeing them on my hand while i was sitting in the cafe, so i knew i'd really been wearing them. damn.

i searched through everything i'd had with me again, one last time. i'd finally given up and was willing to let the silver ring pass back into the chaos of the world in which my friend originally found it. and my graduation ring? my wedding ring to academia (as i thought of it)? my donation to oblivion. despair had set in.

those parts of my life were over and done. good-bye and fare well. and then i walked into the bathroom to take a shower. there, on the metal lid of the wastebasket by the toilet, where i'd set them when i first came home, were my rings. salvation.