"... if our times are difficult and perplexing ..." - Robert Kennedy

"Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary ..." - Robert Kennedy

“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.” 

― Robert F. Kennedy

when the moon goes wrong

that child

stuffed his empty places

with the pain

that milled around him

~children.

~elders.

~in-betweeners.

donors all.

infused agonies

seared and softened

parched nerves -

empathy by immersion

decades later,

lives later,

the fire sings to him

like dram to its drunk

when the moon goes wrong

and the darkness clots

and pools between his toes.

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses..." - Henry Miller

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.

That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. 

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. 

We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. 

We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” 
― Henry Miller

“There were always in me, two women at least ..." - Anaïs Nin

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” 
― Anaïs Nin

“I ... choose a man who compels my strength ..." - Anaïs Nin

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” 
― Anaïs Nin

"The Unbeliever and Christians" - Albert Camus

I don't think any reasonable person can deny that Camus was a person of integrity and concern for justice.  While he never considered himself a person of faith, his internal struggles were in harmony with a great many Christian existentialists.  At the same time, he never failed to speak out against injustice, and was deeply involved in the French Resistance during WWII.  Even now, his example can remind us that a person can be anchored in his/her own certainties, and still participate in dialogue that at least attempts to move us toward a respectful and just society.

(fragments of a statement by Camus at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg in 1948, excerpted from his book, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death)

Inasmuch as you have been so kind as to invite a man who does not share your convictions to come and answer the very general question that you are raising in these conversations, before telling you what I think unbelievers expect of Christians, I should like first to acknowledge your intellectual generosity by stating a few principles.

First, there is a lay pharisaism in which I shall strive not to indulge. To me a lay pharisee is the person who pretends to believe that Christianity is an easy thing and asks of the Christian, on the basis of an external view of Christianity, more than he asks of himself. I believe indeed that the Christian has many obligations but that it is not up to the man who rejects them himself to recall their existence to anyone who has already accepted them. If there is anyone who can ask anything of the Christian, it is the Christian himself. The conclusion is that if I allowed myself at the end of this statement to demand of you certain duties, these could only be duties that it is essential to ask of any man today, whether he is or is not a Christian.

Secondly, I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.

...

Having said that, it will be easier for me to state my third and last principle. It is simple and obvious. I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians. The other day at the Sorbonne, speaking to a Marxist lecturer, a Catholic priest said in public that he too was anticlerical. Well, I don’t like priests that are anticlerical any more than philosophies that are ashamed of themselves. Hence I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

…

And why shouldn’t I say here what I have written elsewhere? For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force. It seems that that voice did speak up. But I assure you that millions of men like me did not hear it and that at that time believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude that continued to spread as the days went by and the executioners multiplied.

It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced. But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not at all clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood! Who could fail to feel where the true condemnation lies in this case and to see that this example by itself gives part of the reply, perhaps the whole reply, that you ask of me. What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a man; he is a dog just like one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog.

…

And now, what can Christians do for us?

To begin with, give up the empty quarrels, the first of which is the quarrel about pessimism. … By what right could a Christian or Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. I was not the one to shout Nemo bonus or the damnation of unbaptized children. I was not the one who said that man was incapable of saving himself by his own means and that in the depths of his degradation his only hope was in the grace of God. And as for the famous Marxist optimism! No one has carried distrust of man further, and ultimately the economic fatalities of this universe seem more terrible than divine whims.

Christians and Communists will tell me that their optimism is based on a longer range, that it is superior to all the rest, and that God or history, according to the individual, is the satisfying end-product of their dialectic. I can indulge in the same reasoning. If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man. And not in the name of a humanism that always seemed to me to fall short, but in the name of an ignorance that tries to negate nothing.

This means that the words “pessimism” and “optimism” need to be clearly defined and that, until we can do so, we must pay attention to what unites us rather that to what separates us.

…

That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear that they will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and that after an interval of two thousand years we may see a sacrifice of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges you to join us?”

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively. Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it awakens in me. And what I know – which sometimes creates a deep longing in me – is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices – millions, I say – throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men.

"New Orleans Waltz" -- Grayson Capps

"Washboard Lisa" - Grayson Capps (from A Love Song for Bobby Long)

I'm all in favor of women baring their breasts in public. I'm also all in favor of ...

... women not baring their breasts in public.  

What it comes down to is that I'm ALL in favor of us men not telling women what they can and can't do with their breasts, their hair, their nails, their careers, their relationships, their uteruses, etc.  

I'm busy enough figuring out what the hell I'm doing with myself. 

What fair and honest person has time to tell others what to do or not do when it doesn't affect them?

"Queen of New Orleans" - Bon Jovi

Ten Rape Prevention Tips - guys, this is for you (and save the whiny "But I ... ")

from Can You Relate?

"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand." - The Flitcraft Parable

[ ~ Since I haven't been able to make any of my own words work the past week or so, I'll borrow ones that do work ~ r ]

(from The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett)

 In his bedroom that was a living-room now the wall-bed was up, Spade took Brigid O'Shaughnessy's hat and coat, made her comfortable in a padded rocking chair, and telephoned the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo had not returned from the theatre. Spade left his telephone number with the request that Cairo call him as soon as he came in.

 Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened.

 At the beginning Brigid O'Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness, obviously more surprised by his telling the story than interested in it, her curiosity more engaged with his purpose in telling the story than with the story he told; but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

 A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

 Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

 "He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand."

 When he had reached this point in his story the telephone bell rang.

 "Hello," Spade said into the instrument. "Mr. Cairo?    This is Spade. Can you come up to my place - Post Street - now? . . . Yes, I think it is." He looked at the girl, pursed his lips, and then said rapidly: "Miss O'Shaughnessy is here and wants to see you."

 Brigid O'Shaughnessy frowned and stirred in her chair, but did not say anything.

 Spade put the telephone down and told her: "He'll be up in a few minutes. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles - that was his first name - Pierce. He had an automobile business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season."

 Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade's room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

 "I got it all right," Spade told Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her--the way she looked at it--she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

 "Here's what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office building that was being put up--just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger--well, affectionately--when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

 Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

 It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

 "He went to Seattle that afternoon," Spade said, "and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

 "How perfectly fascinating," Brigid O'Shaughnessy said. She left her chair and stood in front of him, close. Her eyes were wide and deep. "I don't have to tell you how utterly at a disadvantage you'll have me, with him here, if you choose."

  

Duke & Ella not just taking the "A" Train, but owning it, lock stock and barrel

Medianoche dancing to "St James Infirmary" at 3rd Annual New Orleans Burlesque Festival

Because it's Friday - Lula Houp Garou and her 3 hoop act

Raymond Chandler on the complementary roles of Art & Science

"There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. 

Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. 

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous."

Raymond Chandler, from Red Wind

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” 

― Raymond Chandler
     Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories

"Pity the nation ... " - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty. 

― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Don’t Let That Horse ..." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti (today is his 96th Birthday)

Don’t let that horse

                              eat that violin

    cried Chagall’s mother

                                     But he   

                      kept right on

                                     painting

And became famous

And kept on painting

                              The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it

he jumped up upon the horse

                                        and rode away   

          waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it

to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings   

                                     attached

Ted Cruz's Dad preaches an American Theocracy of Christian Wealth by Plunder

Don't believe me?  Here's Rafael Cruz's own words:

God anoints priests to work in the church directly and kings to go out into the marketplace to conquer, plunder, and bring back the spoils to the church. The reason governmental regulation has to disappear from the marketplace is to make it completely available to the plunder of Christian "kings" who will accomplish the "end time transfer of wealth." Then "God's bankers" will usher in the "coming of the messiah." The government is being shut down so that God's bankers can bring Jesus back.

Cruz and his Clan aren't just preparing for the "End Times" as most "mainstream" Christian millenialists do - they're hoping to precipitate the end times, to force a collapse of structures outside of their control.  They're being "annointed" to plunder.  

There's no Christian care or love in that process.  

In that respect, they're no different from ISIS - hiding behind their bogus faith, when in reality, their only faith is in themselves.

Ted Cruz: Slouching toward the Presidency

Ted Cruz: the "Annointed by God" for the Endtime

Not scared yet? Hear the "prophesy" from Ted's dad.

"Overtime" - Lucinda & Willie - great song & great duet

"Into the Mystic" - Mick Sterling

"Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die" - Willie Nelson

With Trombone Shorty in the house, it's always "Hurricane Season!"

Kermit Ruffins - "Drop Me Off in New Orleans" - Do what the man says!

nocturne

Mists of moonlight 
fall from cool heights, 
filter through trees’ 
leaves and branches, 
waft through window, 
cloak the table 
where the watcher, 
silent, waits. 

Moonlight poet, 
bathed in quiet, 
waits for phrases 
dancing slowly. 
Tales of life and 
songs of loving 
flowing lithely, 
pen to pad. 

Softly glowing 
words of knowing 
etch themselves 
upon the page. 

Cobalt blue curves 
‘tween the grey lines 
speak of night hues 
laid upon day’s 
brash designs.

Marry night’s dreams 
with the day’s schemes 
weave the mind and 
soul together. 
Integrate the 
poet’s vision 
with the will that
gives it life. 

Are the words and 
will his, solely? 
Are they old fruit 
now come ripe, 
planted by some 
other poet 
writing somewhere 
on his heart?

From Home

Because we have named them our friends,
The stars will one day call our children away. 

Just as our parents have seen us frantically trying 
to catch the attention of the moon, 
our children will turn a cold eye on earth 
and lunge for the stars, 
riding the long ships we made them, 
using the science we gave them. 

Seduced by their haunting, singular song, 
Our children will follow their own gaze out 
through the harboring sky. 
Into a place that does not love them, 
Toward a star that does not know them. 

Swept along by solar winds, 
they sail to the next charted bright spot, 
and are surprised to discover 
it’s nothing like they thought. 

Though wondrous, 
it’s not the wonder they sought.

Maybe their own children’s stars 
will answer what could not be asked from here. 
Maybe when you’re far enough from home 
that it’s lost in the shadows 
Can you truly see it in your heart.

Pulling a muscle on poetry

Damn.

I just pried out about forty words for a poem I'm working on - and destroyed twenty others in the process, and I feel like I've been breaking boulders with my bare hands and grinding gravel with my teeth.

There's the popular expression, generally attributed to Hemingway, but not original with him, to the effect that's it's easy to write - just sit down at a typewriter, open a vein and bleed onto the paper.

I do feel that.  I know the sensation.  I've had many days and hours of that visceral self-rendering and surrendering that writing fiction requires.  But as wrenching as that is sometimes, there's still no comparison - for me, anyway - between fiction and poetry.

By poetry, I don't mean rosey-posey fluff that's never seen dressed in anything but a rhyme scheme.  I mean big-shouldered, bitter cold, lead-gift-in-the-twilight, Buffalo Bill, ballsy, back-from-the-edge, slouching toward Bethlehem, climb the cross of the moment, because I do not hope to turn again, defeated by greater and greater things poetry.  I mean poetry that  kicks you repeatedly in the ass, rattling your teeth, until you set it down on paper - and set it down right, or as right as you can make it.

I mean poetry that always sends itself back to you time after time after time, insisting you make it more lean, more pure, more real, more elemental.  Poetry that whispers in your ear that, only by saying one single thing that's absolutely true can you open a door to all the true things.

Writing great fiction may be scaling a Fourteener in Colorado - or a string of Fourteeners - but writing a great poem is scaling Denali, and sometimes scaling it on your knees.

To be fair, though, the more completely a novel or short story is its own universe, the closer to poetry it is, and the closer to Denali the writing gets.

To be even more fair, there's plenty of good light verse, and I've even written my share of light poems, but even when I'm in the middle of one, the hammer sits in the corner in case the poem decides it needs forging into something more substantial.

Ok, I'll shut up now.  So many spurious words - bla-bla-bla bla-bla-de-bla.  Such fucking noise.

"... but you laugh inside ..." - Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.” 
― Charles Bukowski

"A Drinking Song" - W. B. Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

"The Stolen Child" - W. B. Yeats (refrain)

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand.
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

"We are the music makers ..." - O'Shaughnessy

We are the music-makers, 
And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 
And sitting by desolate streams. 
World-losers and world-forsakers, 
Upon whom the pale moon gleams; 
Yet we are the movers and shakers, 
Of the world forever, it seems. 

With wonderful deathless ditties 
We build up the world's great cities, 
And out of a fabulous story 
We fashion an empire's glory: 
One man with a dream, at pleasure, 
Shall go forth and conquer a crown; 
And three with a new song's measure 
Can trample an empire down. 

We, in the ages lying 
In the buried past of the earth, 
Built Nineveh with our sighing, 
And Babel itself with our mirth; 
And o'erthrew them with prophesying 
To the old of the new world's worth; 
For each age is a dream that is dying, 
Or one that is coming to birth. 

"She" - 'I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?' - Theodore Roethke

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel her presence in the common day, 
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be. 

"Journey Into The Interior" - Theodore Roethke

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly. 

"Tor House" - Robinson Jeffers

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:

Perhaps of my planted forest a few

May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress,      haggard

With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.

Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art

To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:

It is the granite knoll on the granite

And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the      Carmel

River Valley; these four will remain

In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-      fragrance of the wind.

Nine things that are NOT Consent

Of all the images I've seen for Pi Day, this one is ... the most unique ...

One more Pi(e) Day offering - my favorite Key Lime Pie recipe - from Emeril Lagasse

Key Lime Pie

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick butter) melted
• 2 (14-ounce) cans sweetened condensed milk
• 1 cup key lime or regular lime juice
• 2 whole large eggs
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon lime zest

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

In a bowl, mix the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter with your hands. Press the mixture firmly into a 9-inch pie pan, and bake until brown, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature before filling.

Lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees F.

In a separate bowl, combine the condensed milk, lime juice, and eggs. Whisk until well blended and place the filling in the cooled pie shell. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes and allow to chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

Once chilled, combine the sour cream and powdered sugar and spread over the top of the pie using a spatula. Sprinkle the lime zest as a garnish on top of the sour cream and serve chilled.

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