Bits and Pieces

On one of our frequent visits to Red Lobster, I noticed a framed saying on the bathroom wall: “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist believes it will change; the realist resets his sails.” I think I’d like to add, “And the dreamer spreads his wings and rides on it.”

Last night a thought struck me: the similarity of the words martial and marital, I mean, just the placement of the “i.” So I came up with this: “If the eye wanders, marital blisses might become martial hisses.”

I described a round of golf I’d played a while back as “quicksand slow.” I wonder why they call it quicksand when one sinks into such a place at such a slow rate. I’ll have to look it up. I did and was unable to discover anything. But the more I think of “quick” the more I think it means “alive” (as in “the quick and the dead”) instead of “fast.” When one is sinking into quicksand, it would almost seem alive as it swallows you up. Yeah, that must be it.

James Lee Burke quote: “I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, I thought, we treat it as a decaying memory. At the same time, it’s the only measure of identity we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are.” I think that’s why I’m so preoccupied with my past, having to look back on it over and over, then write about it. I want to “keep it alive in order to remember” who I am. Thank you, James Lee Burke, for that thought.

I was up early early this morning, having to obey Charlie’s need to go out on the back patio. It was still dark when I went out to get the paper, and the new moon was just up in the eastern sky, a tiny sliver of a jack-oh-lantern smile of a new moon right on the bottom of the gray-tinted full moon. This is the only place I’ve ever been where one can see night skies and moons that look totally phony. Phony but beautiful.