Stillness (a poem)

Trees fall

startling all

with a cacophony

unremarked.

Colors shift

so swift

And the toy lies

unloved.

Emotions lie

smiles shy

in a tender wasteland

unrequited.

Nonetheless …

Shift, lift

share, care

the tease of hope

resumed.

The Passing of the greatest Dragonrider of them all

I'm sad to report that Anne McCaffrey, the famed sci fi writer who broke ground for female sci fi writers, and brought new light on the abilities of supposedly disabled people ("The Ship who Sang") passed away yesterday. I read her earlier stuff while I was in college and it was amazing to picture such drama and passion on a planet so far away.

If you've never heard of the book series "The Dragonriders of Pern," get on over to Amazon or fire up your Kindle - you will not be disappointed by this legendary series of adventures.

Here's a blurb about her passing:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/anne-mccaffrey-sci-fi-author-of-pern-series-is-dead/2011/11/23/gIQA1WiFoN_blog.html?hpid=z4

Drip (a poem) (by someone else!)

Here's something I stumbled onto from my new fav feed -- www.everydaypoets.com

It's a superb example of why I love this website. I encourage you to sign up for their daily feed:

Drip, by Karen Jones

http://www.everydaypoets.com/drip-by-karen-jones/

Rain traced

a perfect heart

on my window,

filled it in,

drop by drop,

while night

dripped on into

morning.

As always,

you were lacking

the vital beat.

---

Karen Jones is from Glasgow. Her prose has appeared in several magazines, anthologies and ezines. She was short-listed for the 2007 Asham Award and won third prize in the Mslexia short story competition 2010. Stories will soon appear in Spilling Ink and In the Company of Women. She rarely writes poetry as she already has a well-developed case of OCD.

---

Shortcomings

There are so many infrastructural flaws in our world. Forget the thousand dollar toilet story. I’m talking about the more mundane.

Ever push a door and wonder why it’s awkward? I’ll guess it’s a matter of the force applied is mostly lost as you teeter the door at some odd angle left- or right-ward.

Bus stop shelters. I was in one this wet morning and it held six folks. Just six. When it easily could hold 15 if the designers had thought to pull in row rails or something for those folks obsessed with their spot in the line.

Commuter rush hours. Why? It’s in large part due to zoning, co-locating businesses in an area and dwellings elsewhere. Helps the restauranteurs but not us slogging Joes.

No kitchens in many workplaces vex me because we’re pushing folks to wash dishes in a bathroom

{say it with me, folks: “Euuuuw!]

Indirectly, it wastes our time to fetch prepared foods not as healthy nor wholesome as homemade.

Lastly, let’s ponder busses. [“Yes” to the gallery, it’s my BFFtopic] In the well-meaning world of aiding those with disabilities, we don’t have double-decker busses. For the same footprint on the pavement, you’d get over 110 folks on a single conveyance.

Not easy fixes, even if you agree that anything is actually even broken. If I solved one of them, I wouldn’t need to even be on this bus anymore!

Au revoir, mes amies!

Elocution and The Ear of Indian Corn

I’ve wondered, and been asked, just how an reasonably intelligent person like me can write one rambling wreck of a blog. This despite my well-known ability (at least at work) to put intelligent sentences together in to a paragraph.

Wow -- it’s all about me today - I’m Jones’ing now!

It’s simple, like dancing kernel-to-kernel across an ear of corn, preferably the multi-hued Indian corn that so confounds the eye. You pick a spot to start and, well, you start. It doesn’t matter where you start since it has no relationship or bearing on where you’ll end up. Kind of like the famous Hollywood game, ‘Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ in which we all are related to Kevin at most seven times removed.

So, I skip-hop-dawdle-puddle hop-jump from topic to topic however I wish. At some point, I’m hit by time limits, common sense, aneurysm of the humor bone, or my keyboard’s refusal to type any more of my drivel.

BAM! The truth hurts, but some of my stuff confuses even me afterward. It’s a shame because my decoder ring should work retroactively, right? Hey, I hear laughter out in the gallery. Do you know something that I don’t?!

As revenge, I throw this (real) song quote at you as something that starts ordinarily and ends up on the dark side of some moon:

And the thing that you’re hearing

is the low spark of high-heeled boys.

Steve Winwood & Traffic

Soft Colors that fade to Grey

Autumn is so vibrant a time of year. I’m reminded of that illusion when reading books like S.M. Stirling’s post-apocalyptic series, where autumn was a harsh time of rushing to buttress the enclaves against the Oregonian winter.

For us, it’s about colors, smells wafting beneath the limbs and feelings that touch on the eternity around us. I see what I see, touch the roughness of the leaves and realize those feelings color how I in turn see the world. If that makes any bit of sense, congratulations on your intuitive prowess.

That thought chain is kind of like listening to Bruce Springsteen, during a 2005 VH1 Storytellers gig, explain some of his songs, with his comments being written down at his kitchen table. Wow, just wow, sweet chariot of musicality, take me away. That guy has a heckuva mind and some horse sense too.

And why is it ‘fall’ instead of the more noble, the more ethereal, “autumn?” Can we do an 'Occupy The Royal Academy of Sciences' and get them to agree to purge our lexicon of “fall?” That word conveys faltering, sad endings and such. As my Opa, my grandfather, would say, “Quatsch!” (aka Rubbish, Bull-puckies).

As the leaves brilliantly tumble, we get back to the garden, espying a change around us that reminds winter is here, a season of starkness that relaxes me because there’s no fluff – the trees stand barren, telling their own story, and it all is what it is.

The Waddling Matilda Waltz

It’s been a long time since I rock n’ rolled with pavement passion. You know, the cool pretense of jogging around a city and scoping the challenging blocks ahead. “You’re mine, baby!”

So it’s with humility that I say that a month ago I ran my furthest (non-stop) time in over ten years – 45 minutes at about a 11-12-minute pace. Sometimes faster, sometimes trudingly slower, but onward and onward I went. Especially when I got lost and took a left instead of a right back toward work. Oh well, I still found a highway underpass and just extended the run. Nice since just a few weeks ago I was capping runs at 30 minutes on purpose. But why be well-preserved later when today’s challenges need today’s vigor?

My Oma (German for grandmother) always said if you have your health then you can get on with life. Or something like that, lost in the muddled translation in my addled cortex. Whatever! She was right. But let’s see how this plays out when I try to get out of bed tomorrow. I mean, I already look like Humpty Dumpty, so maybe I’ll fall apart like Pinocchio (you know what, that name is FUN to type).

And, to the gentlemen in the audience I pose a question: bowties. Cool or not? Do they work for you? And just how does one tie it? [sigh] I figure out one thing and falter at the next step. Guess Mrs. TMM will continue to buy me the most awesome Jerry Garcia collection ties!

P.S. I wrote this last week and forgot to post it. So, last week, I hit 51 minutes. Not non-stop but it sure felt good…

‘Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace’

Today marks the end of a heckuva crazy 120 days of the eldest Junior-TMM-son (aka Chris) living back at home with us. Having taken a breather between rental leases, he now goes off to the wilds of the Petworth neighborhood of NW DC.

I type with a heavy heart, thinking of him again dervishly spiraling out of our daily lives, but with pride and a smile at the adventures ahead. Everyone should have such a smart and damned good looking son (the latter attribute from my wife’s gene pool).

To you, my son, the blog’s title is my dedication to your success. It's a song by the group Big ‘n Rich that so well paints the inspirational intensity you bring us all…

From the father, the friend, the fellow traveler,

TMM