Archive for May, 2005

Elle Dort

Posted by on Sunday, 22 May, 2005

She was at the Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve. So all the hospital stuff said HUG. She must have liked that.

Kathryn Z. Weed
Dec. 5 1945 – May 22, 2005

L’Etranger

Posted by on Sunday, 22 May, 2005

Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
-Albert Camus

why try at all when everything’s out of reach
at times i feel just like a stranger on the beach
they’re looking for shelter from the pain
i’m so sheltered, i can’t see the rain
– Less is More, “Wasting”

The call came around 1:00 am. From my father, he was there.

The rest of us had fallen into routine. Get up. Shower. Eat breakfast. Go to the hospital. Wait. I found it surprisingly easy not to think about exactly what we were waiting for. But occasionally I would remember. When this is all over, my grandmother, my sister, my father, myself, we all go home to empty houses – some of us for the first time.

Go, Go Gadget…

Posted by on Saturday, 14 May, 2005

I needed a number off my old phone today. Of course, since I haven’t used it in half a year, the battery is rather dead. But I plugged it in, and I’m hoping it will turn on eventually. Right now the screen just reads, “Will power on automatically.”

I sure wish I had a setting for Willpower on.

False Quotations

Posted by on Sunday, 8 May, 2005

This was a post I had planned to write last summer but never quite got around to it. Later, I knew that there were two things that I wanted to mention, but I could not remember the second one at all… until today.

Over the summer, there was a small group from my church that frequented the Redlands Bowl. Inscribed over the stage is the phrase, “Without vision, a people perish.” Growing up in Redlands, I had occasion to read this a great many times. However, one evening, a speaker there mentioned that the phrase comes form the book of Proverbs. It does? WHERE? For at the time, I was actually reading through the entire book once a month, and never caught it. The problem, I discovered, is that I was reading Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint (Prov 29:18), which, I dare say, is not quite the same thing.

Mother is the word for God on the lips and hearts of children everywhere. This was one of the better lines from the movie, The Crow. In fact, if you do a Google search, you will likely find it attributed to Brandon Lee. This is wrong. First of all, the quote is in the comic book that the movie is based on, so it really ought to be attributed to the writer, James O’Barr. It turns out, this too is wrong. Also last summer, I was surprised to read that quote in Vanity Fair. (The book, not the magazine.) I don’t know exactly when it was written, but I believe that Thackeray was a contemporary of Dickens.

I Could While Away the Hours…

Posted by on Monday, 2 May, 2005

…Conferring with the flowers,
Consulting with the rain…

I would not be just a nothin’
My head all full of stuffin’
My heart all full of pain.
I could dance and be merry,
Life would be a ding-a-derry,
IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN

I have been considering making a final recording of all my old songs- for posterity and all. Yet, thinking through Puppet Game, The Art of Letting Go to Wasting and Last Night I Slept in the Garden, maybe chasing it down with A Secret – I have to ask, “Who would want to listen to this?”
(Those of you who are volunteering out of pure curiosity, put your hands down.)
The point is, these songs are all the same. The first three are all in Em (the lowest chord you can play on a guitar in standard tuning), the next is close by in F/Dm, and well, I’m not even sure about the last one, but it’s awful dark. All <LiM> tunes have a tempo of 100 bpm, of course, and since I don’t actually sing, I could probably mix and match any mumbled set of lyrics with any song.

One would need a pretty stiff drink, I would think, to sit through a whole cd of that drag.