To thine own self be true

Harry Belafonte, 96.

“So I’m sad to say I’m on my way
Won’t be back for many a day
My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston Town”

are not really safe places anymore for the regular or average library-goers, particularly (unaccompanied) children. Bathrooms can be especially dangerous. There are way too many bums, street people, and druggies frequenting them (and, historically, they have long been around in downtown libraries like Edmonton’s going back to 1968!). Large libraries today need at least 2 cops to act as deterrents and to deal with the problem street bums that potentially threaten innocent patrons who totally mind their own business and use the libraries for their actual intended purposes.

Russia drops a bomb on its own city.

“We do it to ourselves” is half of human history.
The other half is “And we do it to others.”

*This is also one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to, with Frank’s entertaining Irish accent and his bang-on voicings of typical reluctant high-school learners.

A bona-fide high-school English teacher classic.

Loved his epiphany about using excuse notes by the likes of Al Capone and Hitler as a motivational writing exercise!

And the anecdote about having his English students recite or sing recipes from recipe books while other students played flute, bongos, and other instruments!

I noted the minor headline about a chartreuse shortage which suggested that monks would know the reason for.

A little while later, while reading “Maples in a Spruce Forest” a poem by John Updike, I got to the ending “The fretted gloom/Is dappled with chartreuse.”

Just saying, it’s not like I see this word much, if at all. But….

And it’s not like I go searching for mysterious, odd designs, patterns, coincidences, or random synchronicities. But….

Daily the universe throws out these random patterns, connections, and coincidences for us to encounter as it (patiently?) waits for our slow, limited perceptions and consciousnesses to discover and perhaps make sense of them.

Argal, much depends human actors and individual consciousness in these myriad, superficially unrelated contexts that often beguile us whenever they occur.

I originally joined the Stroll in 1990, its first year; I am still connected to many kindred spirits via this splendid aggregation, now in its 33rd year, and have given many readings and workshops over the years.

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear’d the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker’s back –
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp’d it out of sight,
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I’d find it on the green.

And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most surely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.

-Sir John Betjeman

people are suffering and dying in a major public disaster, songbirds like robins and finches will continue to sing brilliantly and miraculously, completely oblivious to the human world.

And they will continue to sing long after one is long gone.

in apartment lobbies, on shopping mall lots, in food courts, at school bus stops, etc.
Sounds very much like T.S. Eliot’s warning that civilization will end with people killing one another on the streets.

Alberta has become incredibly violent and dangerous to live in. This morning, we will start to take a walking stick for self-defence on our morning ramble around the neighborhood, the times being as such.

An annual weekend to be creative and imaginative.

A time for love, sacrifice, rebirth, and treats!