T = Dustin Hoffman

Well, it's past midnight on a weeknight, so of course I can't sleep. And I figured I'd slap some updates on here:

The other day T was asking someone how long something or other was set to happen. Actually, I think she was asking Flavia how long she would be staying when she came back. "Two weeks," came the reply. "Oh, so fourteen days," T says, and continues eating her pudding or whatever the hell she was doing.

A few seconds passed, and then I addressed those assembled, looking back through the fog of the intervening time and reassessing what I'd seen, asking, "Did she just multiply seven by two in her head?" "I think so, yeah," came a few responses.

So Q asked her, "T, what's seven times two?"

"Um...Twenty-five."

So the Rain Man thing comes and goes, it seems.

Soccer update: I showed up around 2:00 to watch the tail end of Q's soccer day, and saw the entirety of Argentina (Q's team) versus Costa Rica. Costa Rica was previously undefeated - but then Q fired an opposite-corner left-footed goal off a steal, and Argentina won, 1-0. As soon as he'd scored it, he sprinted around the field with his index fingers high, arms spread wide, and baby-blue tee shirt pulled up over his head.

Nice to see they're choreographing the celebrations.

Sport-O-Rama

Hello again, sports fans, and welcome to another installment (that word really has two "l"s?...) of Wonderboy, starring Q Johnstadt. This week's sport? Soccer!

Actually, it was last week's sport, too. Q spends Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 3:00, at the Soccer Academy on the Williams campus. There are probably sixty kids at this week's session, and there were around a hundred at last week's. Q is one of maybe thirty holdovers. He's playing in the lower division (you have to be at least 8 to attend, and he turned 8 quite recently), and last week his team was Spain, coached by a young man named Joe who, I think, plays for Williams. The shirts they got were red, and I wrote "JOHNSTADT" and a big number 8 on the back. They would play other countries and at the end of the week, one of them would win. Last Friday they announced that Spain was tied with Sweden, but that Sweden won the tiebreaker because they scored more goals. Q was pretty heartbroken.

But that was soon remedied, because each country gave out a medal for "Best Attitude", and Q was last week's recipient. In his presentation speech, Joe said, more or less, "It seemed like everybody on our team wanted to play center-forward, but we had one player who was happy to play anywhere. 'Who wants to play goalie?" 'I DO!' 'Who wants to play center back?' 'I DO!' And that voice was always Q's." He was ever so proud, as was I, standing back behind the bleachers where the end-of-camp meeting was being held. I was chatting with the fathers of Q's friends Eli and Brady, who were on other teams.

And who each also won the "Best Attitude" medal for their teams. It was a very weird moment, as each of us congratulated the other men on our sons' performance. In a sea of probably 130 parents, we all happened to be standing together. I can't quite figure it out - seems there must be some significance. But maybe not - like those parades of some not-normally-social insect I remember reading about that occasionally marches in columns that are hundreds of yards long, rivers of them, heading off in a direction for a purpose no one knew. Turns out it was a drought, and they were all trying to cannibalize each other, while avoiding being cannibalized, and that tension between the two desires shook out, in a sort of brownian motion, into a parade to nowhere. Maybe it's like that. Somehow.

ANY-hoo, Q is back in soccer practice this week, and is really enjoying it, though this week his team appears to be less of a powerhouse. He didn't score any goals today and his team played to two ties and a loss. I tried to buck him up by telling him that you can often learn more, and improve yourself more, by playing on a poor team than on a winner. That seemed to help him cope.

Though it was also probably the fact that we were getting closer and closer to the Willliams College Pool, a facility to which all campers are entitled access after each day's practice. Very few take advantage, but Q insists on it - and after running for miles in the sun for six hours, he deserves it. So we always go, he and I, and take a dip. His swimming ability has skyrocketed lately - he does a proto-freestyle crawl, and also fires himself off the side of the pool and dolphin kicks for several seconds. And he asks me about Michael Phelps a lot. Must be watching some commercials here and there about the Olympics. Which should be fun to watch - I hear the air is so bad in Beijing that you can actually sometimes unexpectedly inhale turds. Should make for an interesting marathon. i think the helicopter shots might not be as effective as they were in, say, Sydney.

T, meanwhile, continues to charm and amaze. She and I took a bike ride after supper on the Burley Piccolo while Q played ping-pong with Janneke, and she went into a very long and detailed narrative about why it was that one should never live close to a farm. I didn't really follow the logic, but it was so heartfelt and supported with so many strangely unintelligible details that I felt quite convinced by the end of it.

We have painted a room orange and cleaned out the basement in anticipation of the arrival of the van de Stadt side of the family (or most of them) in the coming days - Monique arrives Thursday, and three days later, I think, come the Chipi-Ripis from Alabama, followed in quick succession by the Bidi-Boos aus der Schweiz. Most are staying with us (two in the aforementioned orange room), but a few are going to be billeted in the house of Magnus and Margaret, who live up the street and who will be away for the length of the families' visit. So let's have a round of applause for Magnus and Margaret!

Magnus, despite his name (it's not his fault - he's from Iceland), is a nifty guy, who, having seen me doing some jogging around the neighborhood, invited me to go on a ten-mile jog with him and his brother last Sunday. He's training to run in the NY Marathon. I laughed, and then accepted.

I had never run that far before (10K was my previous max), and it was downright pleasant! We rolled along at a little more than nine-minute miles, and I tell you, this whole "Chi running" thing is working out wondrously. (Aside to Jim: I just had the book sent to you. It's going to change your life.) I haven't been hurt running in...Damn. Shouldn't have said that. You know the next time I run, my knees are going to spontaneously combust. It's now absolutely bound to happen.

Ah well, it was good while it lasted. I ran non-stop for damn near two hours on Sunday, and am none the worse for wear! In fact, I used the nifty mapping tool that Magnus and Brad told me about on Google Earth to map out a route that would be precisely 6 miles, and ran that bastard this very day, once again at nine minutes a mile. Feeling great! Sassy, even! Y'know what, actually? I can't BE injured! Come on, universe! Injure me! I dare you! You can't stop me! To quote my favorite politician: "I am a f***ing steamroller!"

Ten points to the first reader to tell me who this politician is...

What I Do

I throw back my head and howl like Chewbacca did when the doors closed at nightfall on Hoth, with Han still unaccounted for.

Brett Frickin' Favre

Well, there’s a call from a longtime reader for my thoughts on the Brett Favre saga. For those readers who are European (or who have lives that are fulfilling enough on their own without requiring any input at all from professional American football), here’s the basic deal:

Brett Favre played his entire career, except for his rookie year, with the Green Bay Packers. He played something like 16 years for the Green and Gold, and broke all the career passing records that mean anything at all. He won a Superbowl in Green Bay, played in another, and last year took us to within a drive of a third. And at the end of the year, after a few months to think it over, he held a press conference and tearfully said farewell, saying he lacked the fire in the belly for another year on the gridiron. He had thought about retiring for a couple of years – the Packers had to all but beg him to come back for the last two, especially after failing to sign Randy Moss, a wide receiver who might’ve done for us what he did for New England this past year. But we didn’t sign him – our general manager, Ted Tompson, thought we could spend the money better somewhere else, since we already had a solid corps of very young wide receivers with huge potential. Brett didn’t like it, but he came back, and proceeded to have one of his best years ever with these youngsters catching his passes. But he was too mentally tired to go through it all again – the preparation, the training camps, the time away from family, all for another year that, given this year’s success, will be seen as a failure unless Green Bay were to win it all. He couldn’t face it any more, he said; he had no more to give, he said. So we all shed a tear, tossed back a Leinenkugel’s, and waved goodbye as he receded into the distance, bound for the backwoods of Mississippi whence he had originally sprung.

We moved on in Green Bay. The Packers have a young quarterback they’ve been grooming for a few years to be Brett’s successor, and they drafted young quarterbacks to provide him with backup (and a possible future should he not work out). We’ve got the youngest team in the league, even more so now that Brett’s no longer bringing our average up. (The guy is 38.) And we went 13-3 last year and almost made the Superbowl. There’s nervousness in Wisconsin, but a lot of excitement, too. After all, Brett left a crucial game this year with an injury, and Aaron Rodgers, his heir apparent (hey – just thought of his nickname: “Heir-on Rodgers”. But it only works in print…), came in and lit the place up. He scrambled like only a young, fast quarterback can, he threw well, he showed no fear of contact…People got excited about the future. And we’re still riding that nervous wave into the new year. Training camp’s just around the corner!

And then Brett called up in July – July! – after spending some time among the crawfish and the gators, and said, “Hey, I changed my mind. I want to come back and play again.”

The Packers are in a fix. He has two years left on his contract - if he plays anywhere, it must be in Green Bay.

Unless we were to trade him - but who would give up what he's worth, when he only has perhaps 3 years left?

We could bring him back to the team as our starter - and watch Heir-on Rodgers say, "OK, guys, at the end of this year I am gone. My contract is up, and I won't play where they jerk you around like that." Years of training and big-time salary down the tubes.

Or we could bring him back as a backup, paying him giganto-money (hey, he has a contract) to hold a clipboard.

Or we could unilaterally release him and allow him to sign anywhere he wants.

Like Minnesota? Like Chicago? Who are both in our division? Whom we play twice a year? Who are both a quarterback away from being really, really good? Why on Earth would we do that? We are under no obligation to do it.

There are no good options. All brought about because the petulant Favre cannot be taken at his word, arrives at life-altering decisions that are complete opposites of each other every six months.

How did this happen? How could this guy suddenly turn into such a psychotic infant? How could he be so willing to toss his legacy into the toilet, becoming the same laughing-stock as Reggie White was in his final year(s?) in Carolina? Or Joe Namath in - Where the hell did he play again? Or Johnny U in San Diego? Or (forgive me, Christian) Joe Montana in Kansas City...? Well, my brother Jim called me the other day, and he summed it up well. He blames it, symbolically, on Ricky and Rodney.

Ricky and Rodney are two of our cousins from Gays Mills, my home town. My uncle Judd’s boys. Judd and my own father are brothers, but they are very different. Dad got out of the Kickapoo valley a little bit, saw the world, preferred to bring home a salary from outside while trying to build up a land, cattle and timber empire based on the family farm. It didn’t all work out the way he would have liked, but he’s a real leader in the community, somebody people look up to and / or resent. But everybody respects him – he’s something of a force of nature. Dashing and athletic as a young man, sparkling eyes and a sharp wit…He is the aging King of the Ocooch Mountains. Think Little Joe from Ponderosa, then project him forward to age 80 and cross him with Theoden. Only grumpier.

His kids are smart-alecks who didn’t grow up on the farm, but near it; we know it well, but we didn’t get submerged in it, and we all left the Valley for careers elsewehere. To the rest of the world, we may seem like rednecks, or like members of a lost tribe - people who know their way around the woods, have known what blood on our hands feels like, and aren't afraid of large animals. Someone exceptional out there in the concrete jungle. But to Ricky and Rodney, we’re the soft cousins they think of and shake their heads, smiling at our citified ways.

Uncle Judd is Hoss, only far less jocular. He ran the farm while Dad worked outside the state. He’s a big, big man, with a lantern jaw and a voice as gravelly as Clint Eastwood’s and as deep as James Earl Jones’. He’s quiet, brooding; he stayed on the farm his whole working life, except for some time in WWII. (The thought of Judd at war makes me shudder. It would be a lot like that Iron Man movie.) He is permanently dressed in overalls and engine grease, and his jaw has only gotten bigger with age. As Dad put it, when asked to describe a young Judd: “That was a hell of a man.”

His son Ricky is probably fifteen or twenty years older than I am, and if he and I were to drop the gloves, the result would be laughable. He is, according to Dad, hands-down the strongest human he’s ever known. He has a handlebar mustache and walks like a lion, muscles absolutely everywhere – none any bigger than they need to be, all hard as iron. As far as I know, though, he’s all but never done any exercise on purpose. He gets a truck out of the mud and fixes a tractor and wrestles a steer to the ground before breakfast. He dances on pool tables and breaks pool cues over people’s heads; he walks the hills deerhunting at the age of 55, carrying a rifle and smoking a cigarette, as fast as I could run them in gym shorts at the age of 19. He may have graduated high school – I would wager that he himself isn’t even sure. He stood in the parking lot of Michael's Pub and watched his son get beaten bloody in a fair fight. he took no action at all, standing honorably by. And when the worm turned, and his son started to get the upper hand and lay it on the opponent, and the opponent's relatives moved in to stop it, Ricky shook them by the collar and said "It was alright to watch him deal it out, so why don't you stand back and watch him take it. Unless you want me to bring the fight to you." He is as redneck as they get – so redneck that he would never think to call himself one.

Rodney has the same face, the same mustache, the same endurance. He’s a more sardonic and sarcastic shadow of Ricky. He builds fences through the woods in the summer for a living; he is immune to briars, burrs, blackflies, mosquitoes, and the charms of women. He’s made completely of leather, but with Dad’s twinkle in the eyes. He knows the Kickapoo Valley, and that’s about it; he makes jokes about the outside, keeps it at arm’s length, shakes his head in disdain at the stupidity of the world beyond Crawford County.

They are fiercely loyal to their family, protective of those they care for, unafraid to speak their minds on anything at all, unaware of any reason why the fact that their opinions might be less than completely informed should temper the enthusiasm with which they hold them. They brood over beers and reach decisions that are immutable, hold tight to them until their dying day. They might not know much about the subject at hand, but they know what they think about it. And if their cousin Joe tries to argue with them, they laugh and slap a hand like a catcher’s mitt on his back and say, “Does everybody who goes to Madison come back a weirdo?”

And this is what Jim said about Brett Favre’s decision to come back:

“Brett goes back to Mississippi and gets all his career advice from Ricky and Rodney.”

ADDENDA:

Naught to do with Brett, but two things I also want the world to know:

I was reading "Stina's Visit" to Tess yesterday. There's a part where one character says of another, who is content to be where he is: "He says it's like living in Paradise." Tess usually says at that point, "Yo quiero vivir en Paradise." (I want to live in Paradise.)

I usually respond, "Sabes, yo creo que mas o menos ya vivimos en Paradise." (Y'know, I think we pretty much already do live in Paradise.)

Yesterday she screwed up her face when I said that, recoiled and looked at me like I was crazy. "Nosotros no vivimos en Paradise! Esto no es Paradise!" (We don't live in Paradise! This isn't Paradise!)

A moment of thought - then: "Tal vez Wisconsin es Paradise..."

(Maybe Wisconsin is Paradise...)

And the other:

The birds living on our front porch mean that we go in and out through the garage door. At night, I walk the dogs, then come in, and let them into the kitchen; then I stand there in the kitchen doorway, with the garage light on, and hit the button to close the garage door against the night. Often it's the first time it's been closed all day. And I stare through the garage at the door coming down, wait through the ten or so seconds it takes, and when it touches the floor, finally completely closing out the darkness, I do something.

The question, to those of you about my age, is this:

What do I do?

First one to guess wins a prize!

Tent

Hi folks, Max the singing jeweler here...(If you weren't within maybe 60 miles of LaCrosse, WI, around 1977, you have no idea what I'm talking about. But if you were, you have just been transported. You're welcome.) The kids and we had some outdoor adventures the other day, and here they are for your enjoyment. Tell your friends.

Burying, Unearthing

Hello, all, and welcome to a quick and newsy edition of Meet The Johnstadts.

Q and T have both had tennis camp this past week. T, Tuesdays and Thursdays for 45 minutes, and Q Monday throught Thursday for ninety minutes. And both have enjoyed it a lot. Q was scheduled to be in a camp for 8-9-year-olds, but it was canceled, which we didn’t find out until Janneke was there to drop him off. But someone informed her of a concurrent camp for older kids up the road a piece, and she took him there, where, after assessing his skills, they accepted him. And he has really flourished there – since T doesn’t have day care this week (a wholly different saga that is beginning to tick us off), I would drop him off there and take T to a park for 45 minutes or so, and would come back expecting to see them curled up in the shade, suffering in the heat. But he was always skipping from game to game, getting into his stance with renewed energy all the time…The instructor made a point of coming over to Janneke on one of the days she picked him up and saying “He’s a very good tennis player.” Janneke said “Thank you,” and the instructor repeated it, emphasizing: “He’s really very good.” So of course I rocket straight to thoughts of enrolling him in classes at the indoor tennis facility in Pittsfield, then growing a paunch and wearing sunglasses everywhere, getting thrown out of a few tournaments for aggressive and strange behavior, then glowering over him at a press conference, leaning down to take my cigar out of the side of my mouth and whisper something in Spanish into his ear before every reply, immediately after he wins Wimbledon at the age of 17. Promptly thereafter he'll quit tennis and join a Mexican ska band. I'll have to shake my schedule around some to make all that happen...

T’ camp, meanwhile, consists of a lot of variations of tag, meant to teach them the sections of the court, and basick ball-whacking. She really enjoys it and is proud to be going. There are only two or three other kids there when she goes, and it’s at the North Adams public courts, which have saggy nets and a fair amount of litter. So it can be a somewhat disheartening sight when you drive up. But she loves it, and the instructor is great. T gets a very serious look on her face when we arrive, and also when the kids get together at the end to do their cheer. Typically it's "Tennis!", and you can tell she believes with every ounce of her being in the cheer every time she gives it. They use spinner balls, oversized foam balls that bounce remarkably well and which the kids find easier to locate and to hit.

Q went to a two-hour baseball clinic put on by the Steeplecats, the North Adams summer college league team that put on the 4th of July game last week. We went and watched the whole game, analyzing everyone’s batting stance as we watched, and then watched the fireworks. T did much better on the fireworks this year – that is to say: She sat in my lap with earphones over her ears and hands over the earphones for good measure, and softly cried. Last year, she bolted and had to be corralled and held inside a store by Janneke to keep her from pulling her own head off. But the game was fun, and Q was thrilled to spend two hours getting fist-bumped and high-fived and butt-slapped – oh, yes, also: coached – by twenty of the coolest college athletes any kid ever met. They gave him a tee shirt and a free hot dog, and cemented Q as a lifelong fan, all in one swell foop. When he did his round of batting practice, I sat in the stands and watched – we’d been practicing a lot lately, trying to remember to keep his weight on the back foot, and he did really, really well at it, hitting all but about two of the thirty or so balls pitched to him. (Nice when the pitcher can reliably throw strikes.) A man in the stands noticed me clapping softly to myself when Q finished, and asked if that was my son. I said it was. “Kid’s a player,” he said. “I said so to my wife right when we got here. You can just tell when a kid’s got it, and he’s got it.” And his wife happily confirmed it. They were there with their own son, who was six, and was off in another group, being taught to run bases. Nice people.

Bought a bird bath today and set it up, and when I was showing it to the kids, they found a dead robin, right by the deck. Probably died in the storm we had a couple of days ago – pretty fresh, and very young. Barely out of the nest, still largely speckled, and with undeveloped underfeathers. We buried it by the bird bath – it’s under the slab of stone visible to the left of Tie, on the ground. (There’s also a stick on top that has “Robin’s Grave” written on it in Sharpie.) I posed the kids to show their sadness, and to show the new birdbath. Q began to sing a very sad, haunting little refrain while I dug the hole and he and T kept watch over the robin. “Goodbye” was its only word, but it was extremely catchy and memorable. And after a few rounds of it, he did a key change up the scale a ways and repeated it, and my heart just about broke. It literally sent chills up my spine. Here's the photo:



When I was leveling out the patch to put the concrete slab that the birdbath sits on (it’s been leaning up against our fence since we bought the place), I found seven or eight rectangular slabs of what I think is marble. All broken, one of them over four feet long, most less than three. They were laid out on the ground under where I put the brid bath, covered by a layer of soil and creeping weeds. Very strange thing to find – they look so much like tombstones. I’ll have to find something to do with them.

OK, more photos, and then I’m off to bed. It’s getting late:



T shows everyone how to make absolutely anything look good. Thank you, Flavia, for the outfit!



The kids were playing around, pretending to nap, and bang!, they were asleep. That's napping: Dangerous stuff.



More napping adventures - Siblings of mine: Remember that picture of Ma napping on the couch where she looks dead...?



YOU write a caption that does this justice. I dare you.



Yeah, I'm bushed too. Off to bed.

Pictionary

I went to Leonard's True value the other day. They know me there now, at least by sight - I have a card I use to get discounts, they ask me jokingly how much more dehydrated cow manure I'd like, since I bought five bags of it on three separate visits over the period of a week...Nice people, very helpful. Just across the line in Pownal, Vermont. I think I was in looking for grass seed.

But the thing that happened, happened in the parking lot. I pulled into it on a hot and hazy day and curved around to an open space, right next to a very rusty, old pickup truck, with sheets of cornflake-thin metal falling into rust and onto the ground from every bit of it. The truck had originally been red, I think, but now had panels of a number of colors. Vermont plates, coated in the almost-orange, sticky mud, now dried, that underlies the actual fertile soil here - where a vehicle gets covered in that, is where holes and ruts have been dug for a very long time, through anything that could ever have grown a decent plant. Old and unkept farms, clearcut slopes, mountain roads that have never been paved... All of which are found in great abundance in Pownal.

I stepped out of the car and looked into the cab as I swung past it. A very young man, late teens or early twenties, sat in the passenger seat. He was small - shorter than me, rangier - but tightly muscled, with a thin mustache and thick, black eyebrows. He seemed to be squinting and drifting off to sleep at the same time, slouched, pushed up against the dashboard more closely than I would have found comfortable. Shirtless, with a baseball cap.

Behind him, in the area where my Dad used to lose things between the seats and the rear wall of his pickup trucks, sat a thin young woman. I saw the back of her head and the curve of her hunched shoulders, framed by the swoops of a tank-top. Her hair was straight, and long, and she sat in the same curled, folded, lethargic posture as the man in front, facing sideways, much lower down, sitting as she was on the floor. There was no way for her to put her feet toward the front. It isn't a seat, this area - it wasn't meant for people. I felt immediately claustrophobic looking at her, but she was unworried, or seemed so from behind. Patience, was what I felt from her, and from him. Or maybe just a complete lack of expectations.

The strangest thing about them was that they didn't shift, didn't adjust themselves, didn't speak. Just looked, each in his or her own direction, and waited. Their vehicle had arrived just before mine, and was still clicking and hissing as it cooled down. But this arrival, change in their status, hadn't altered their outlooks. They waited.

I rounded the back and saw the bed of the truck filled with thick, black, old sewer pipes, seven or eight inches across. The bed was just filled with them - dozens, jangled in among each other, haphazard enough to look like they'd been dumped, but also fairly densely packed with some evident care. Messy and purposeful, at the same time. No tools, no tarps - just the pipes. Salvaged, I felt sure, and on their way to sale somewhere.

Passing the end of the truck, thinking about it still, interested in it without knowing why, I saw the driver, leaving the truck and walking toward the store. Shirtless - he was producing a tee shirt from somewhere as we both moved toward the store, roughly parallel. He saw me, said "'Lo", as if obligated; he nodded quickly, and looked even more quickly away, toward the store, his mouth firming under its black mustache. As he walked he pulled the tee shirt over his head and his shoulders - the head wore a baseball cap, the shoulders were prodigiously muscled - but again in a wiry way, and he, like his passengers, was very small. Barely more than five feet tall, with wavy black hair and dirty jeans. He walked more quickly than I, as if wanting almost to run, and moved into the path my own steps were describing, six feet ahead and pulling away. The tee shirt fell over him just as he pushed open the door. He was so very like the man waiting for him in the truck that I felt certain they were brothers.

I didn't see him inside the store - the grass seed is close to the front, and I made my purchase quickly. But as I came back to my own car, I looked carefully again at the truck, and sneaked another scan of its waiting passengers. The man's face turned languidly toward mine, saw it, but looked again toward the front without acknowledging. He had not moved the slightest in my absence. The woman either - her head had some motion to it; otherwise I could have believed she was a slouching mannequin. They were absolutely silent.

I drove home and ran the whole scene over again in my head. I didn't know why - I couldn't stop looking at my brand-new memories of them. They were familiar; I had seen them before. Maybe not these specific people, but people like them. Where?

I knew it before I arrived back at my driveway, a mile away: Indians. Ecuador, in the mountains. They were often similarly poor, similarly marginalized and resigned to it, similarly floating in what they saw as their lives and their lots. Ritually similar to each other in their clothing, whispering in their own language, aware of their poverty and of others' disdain for it, and for them; unable to hide either identity, their economic or their ethnic and cultural one, they endured on every trip in to town the stares and the insults of almost everyone around them with a stoicism that was equal parts selective deafness and jaded, numb indifference. Unwilling to talk to each other on these forays into the world that looks down on them - because, I always felt, the voice of each speaker would remind the other of his company, and of their station. So they stare silently, thinking more comforting thoughts, and wait until they are back among their own.

And I was reminded of what Bill Bryson wrote in "A Walk In the Woods", his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He quotes a nineteenth-century visitor to the mountains of Georgia, describing its inhabitants as "cadaverous", and many other unkind things. But the one word that struck a chord with me was this:

"Melancholy."

The pathological, culturally institutionalized sadness of Andean Indians should have cemented that word for me for all time, but somehow it didn't. I didn't knowingly taste "melancholy" until I thought a while on my ride home about the hot, cramped wait, in that parking lot, in that truck, with a load of salvaged shit-pipes, in dead, deathly, accepting silence, at the age of maybe 20.

Films Out Yon Wazoo

A new movie for all fans of Q, T, furniture, baseball, drug-induced fantasies, and high school Spanish:



That should clear up a lot of memory on my computer...

Meet The Robinses

These are the robins that are nesting outside our front door. Watch and be amazed!