So August isn't my month for reaching beyond myself to post here or keep up with the posting of others.

stuck

I've been stuck and I feel like I am beginning to be unstuck. I wake now feeling that there is something I have to do I just don't know what it is and I don't know how to discover what it is.
These are not questions but merely statements or self observations.

I want lightening and thunder.

I've gone visibly more gray in the past week.

my coffee cup is 9/10 low on the magic elixir and what is left has grown cold and uninviting.

i realize that someday I may regret my tattoos. who knows how difficult it is going to be to charm and cajole other octogenarians with sagging tattooed flesh. Maybe the secret will be to continue to gain weight once the skin is no longer elastic until the body is ravaged by diabetes and heart disease only to then regret these errors as I die a painful and premature death before I've even reached the eighth decade.

" I always thought that life would get easier as I aged, and it doesn't."  - a cousin of my deceased father in law.



I feel so much better now.

post #212

and I hate elevator music.


    Fragrant cyclamen
line the walk, pointing
        toward the sun.

 - Hoc Scripsi


I drink from a coffee cup that I bought while vacationing in the Outer Banks, North Carolina - fittingly, imprinted on the mug is - "North Carolina".
life changes so quickly and every morning I think that if I don't get out of bed it will cease to change at all. Of course I am incorrect, of course I eventually get up, get dressed and enter a day already begun, of course I've missed breakfast.
I love breakfast as I usually eat it with my son who lately has been unable to rouse me from my morning delusion. If only I could get to the mind correcting coffee before I flail about in fantasy land where things only make sense the more schizophrenic it is.


'Frank and Earnest' and "The Other Coast" comic strips have spider punchlines today.

post theft

Lily Hoang posted these quotes on HTML Giant. I've been aware of them and in some form everyone has heard them or at least will have soon enough to make the statement as close to truth as need be.
I am stealing her post now and only hoping that she doesn't mind too much.

Alexandre Dumas said: The man of genius does not steal, he conquers.
And Robert Schumann said: Talent works, genius creates.
And Oscar Wilde said: Talent borrows; genius steals
And Pablo Picasso said: Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Or maybe Pablo Picasso said: The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.
And Igor Stravinsky said: Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
And T.S. Eliot said: One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

 My response is as follows and I am stealing it from the comments section of same said blog -

I can’t find a way to agree with the statements without saying that I believe I am a thief.

Am I great or merely good? I don't truly know and think I may possibly be fooling myself and my readers into thinking I am greater than a dead fly - but I do know that I steal like a master thief. It is one of my few vices.

Vices:
coffee
theft
sport fucking
mental illness

I did not steal her found image though and for that you will have to follow this link.

some people say to leave them (readers) wanting more... bull shit - leave readers feeling like they are totally used up and can no longer function because of what you have done to them.

death in the morning

I should really get back to the business of blogging now.
My father-in-law and friend, Bob, died this morning. We have long known this day would come and the suddenness was unexpected all the same. Tomorrow would be his 63rd birthday. Happy birthday Bob. a short and simple obit.


for Bob, death in the morning

you are beyond the grave and soon will be ashes
how short this life!
how this pain has ended!
I am not sorry for us, for
we had known you,
I am not sorry for death
as it is mercy;
I am not sorry for you
as you were magnanimous
and not even death can
remove this magnanimity.


 - Hoc Scripsi

Monday and Tuesday

the second and third - 2&3 - 23, isn't there something significant about that?

my father-in-law is dying and I am losing a good friend, a man I deeply admired.
I've switched to autopilot and my wife has had to be the stronger of us.
I don't grieve well and I do so silently, she headlongs into projects and gets everything done. my wife, my constant hero and I do what I can for her.
Eventually the words will come and for now I cannot convey the depth of my sadness. his wife, his daughter are in mourning's bondage and we are all walking with him to the end of his many years of struggle.
We go to hospice tomorrow - it is an unfortunate 2 hours away in a veterans home - he has lived there for the past 6.5 years.

It has taken me a long time to write this much. it is hard to lose such a good man.




I grieve

I grieve slowly,
quietly.

occupying the hours of
a day with meditations

of death and the dead.
often I consider my own death

and am not unnerved by it as
death is one end only.

it is ever the patient student
of the dead that practices life

so fully
as to die with ease.

 - Hoc Scripsi

nights and weekends

I just can't get this post finished.

so fuck it.




Killed a bug: my
life should be
so important.

________

   Tulips blooming
already have no place
               to go

________

  It's a small talent;
     sweeping pine cones
   off the driveway.

_______

open windows
cat meows ever loudly
caught a mouse


 - Hoc Scripsi