"
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.


"

Young, smart, and beautiful girls

have formed an Army of Putin

It's a book!

The Soul of Spain

Part III

There is no night life in spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.


PART IV of the same story

After a while there were no bull fights. What the hell no bull fights? No bull fights. No you really can't mean it no bull fights. But there were no bull fights.


Part V follows

We got on a train and went somewhere else.
 
 
 
 
--Ernest Hemingway

James Taylor and The Endurance

Paul Rudd Quotes

"Having an AOL address is like wearing Ocean Pacific shorts. It’s so uncool that it’s cool.”

Ripped From the Headlines

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

Manual of Zen Buddhism

Prayer of the Bell

Would that the sound of the bell might go beyond our earth,
And be heard even by all the denizens of the darkness outside the Iron Mountains.
Would that, their organ of hearing becoming pure, beings might attain perfect interfusion [of all the senses],
So that every one of them might come finally to the realization of supreme enlightenment.




[source]

Surfer Song

A length of lightning falls through the air and slips like a pole into the sea¹. We watch it fall. This is the end of the afternoon. We climb the beach but the sand doesn't make a sound².

It's a big lot but it's mostly empty. The car is there. And some other surf cars spaced out where the empty spots were when it was busy earlier³.

Christ it's hot. A blue shaped covalence. Atmospheric. For all we know it's how it's always been. Now is forever⁴.

---

1. I mean like it's not a bolt. It's not bolting out of the sky. Or anything. It's slow like it's falling through the air vertically on end. The long way. You know those rides at the fair where it's like a big swing? You have to pay extra and they haul you up in the air and you look out over the fair and you have to pull the cord? To make yourself fall? When you pull it you hang there forever. Like you hang there for a long time and then you start to finally fall. And you go faster and faster but it's slow at first. And it's long and thin and falling like a pole would fall. And it slides long and vertically into the water. That's the lightning.

2. You can tell the age of sand by the sharpness of its edges. The sharper the sand the younger it is. Old sand has spent a billion years banging around into everything. The oldest sand is a perfect sphere^#.

       #. The oldest sand will sing your ears off.

3. You just need any car where the seats fold down. The back ones and you tie the trunk down. Unless you're real good and you ride a slick little fish and then you can drive whatever.

4. Always.

Voyager 1 Approaches Jupiter

The human heart is a chump.

"I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breath, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

"It turns out that bliss -- a second-by-second joy+gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious -- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never know will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom."




David Foster Wallace - The Pale King

plate glass sea

a wake

in the no wake zone

*  *  *

air like water

curls

hair like a wave

*  *  *

and christ

it's hot

Landfall on Misery Island

A real song that I heard

we are pirates
see our earrings
we are pirates
see our peg legs
we are pirates
see our parrots
see our parrots with their peg legs
we are pirates, yeah
yeah we are pirates

Camerado, I give you my hand!

Song of the Open Road - You should read it!