“You have brains in your head,
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own and you know what you know
And you’re the one who’ll decide where to go.”
Dr. Seuss
Giving Thanks
On a rare occasion, I had a few days off and was close enough to my parents to go home for Thanksgiving. It was great to finish the first leg of our tour in time to meet up with both my immidiate and extended family. We decided to hand out stationary so everyone could jot down the things they were most thankful for this year. Having temporarily lost my voice the first night back, I had enough quiet time to compose my thanks in verse complete with a rhyming quatrain prologue. I hope you had a brilliantly grateful and serene holiday.
Had I my vocal faculty
I’d say this with verbosity
But from my sore necessity
I’ll state it with simplicity:
I’m thankful for my fam’ly, ev’ryone,
And for th’ amazing things that you have done;
Through times of war your fight has won me peace;
By working sleepless nights you bought me dreams;
You raised me right and true through all your pain,
With late-night talks of God that weren’t in vain;
Of course I can’t forget to mention sis,
Your very presence here’s enough to give us bliss;
Without you I couldn’t be called a man
For you ar’the giants’ shoulders’ on which I stand.
C is for … Change
Change is either neither good nor bad or both good and bad; your perspective, your choice. That’s the subjective nature of reality, as I see it. It could be written with your own loving hand on tear stained paper, or casually revealed as a piece of a movie montage. The life we choose to view in any given moment only illuminates the path perceived by peering through one pair of spectacles. But if we dare to peek outside that singular frame of reference we see we’re suspended in a sea of spectacles, each one just and true within themselves.
Whatever way it’s viewed, the one thing change will always be is inclusive. Change touches everyone every way; from the trivial to the tragic. A misplaced appointment can scramble my synapses and hijack my intention of health; a simple call from a sibling cancertainly stir dreaded thoughts of mortality from the silt in my soup-kettle soul.
How should we view this? Where should we turn; to friends, family, and loved ones; to God above; to the God within; to hell with this victimizing bull-shit and write our own story with depictions of realistic immortality?
…
My world has changed.
Although, as much as my melodramatic imaginations would blind me to the fact, her’s has changed more, with less sense or sympathy. Why would a brother be denied his only life-long friend; mothers their sleep; or a son his mother’s milk, all as she is forced to believe in heaven while bounding through hell.
I cannot see the glory through the gloom,
But yet I pray, for my dear sister’s sake,
This cancerous cloud will, like my nimble mood,
Have need enough its own great change to make.
Adventures in Aging
About the time the rust was falling to the floor
My knee took on a red-orange glow,
Unfortunately forced to head for the door
Waiting to watch what The Dude might know;
Now at home with my pain and my peas
Some saline signals the need for change,
With acupuncture, pills, and trees,
I believe again in a dancer’s range.
Overdue Poem
Well it’s about time I think, being just shy of two months hibernation from the blogging world. There is nothing that can make the wait worth the while so the anticipated entry might as well be a frivolous poem on the nature of man and drink. Not the masterpiece I thought it was when I wrote it, but it serves its purpose. I hope you enjoy.
I’m light of heart with laughter that’s deep,
The true nature of man comes in drink,
For when the time comes when I am drunk,
I hear my true heart’s beat as loud as a drum.
Bicycle Acquisition
I have now officially entered the ranks of the authentic Austininte; I have a bicycle. It has been a long and largely languid road trip for my sturdy Schwinn. I purchased it in Tennessee, destined only to have a flirt with self locomotion before the chills of the north necessitated my dependency on fossil fuels. After my brief sojourn in the shadow of Nashville, we parted ways; as I hitched a ride north to my Ohio origins, ol’ Red was strapped to the back of a hatchback little VW Beetle, blending in all the way to Dallas. About the time I hopped a flight to Sacramento, he hopped into a Ford bound for Austin. Once I caught up with him here in central Texas it was only a matter of time until the weather, the wheels, and we were all back in sync. Welcome home Red. 
Atonement
Ok, ok, ok. So I’ve been lax in my blogging. Alright, totally delinquent is a little closer … or is it? It is true that I have not been posting over the last two weeks, but I have been cataloging my experiences, day by day via pen and paper in order to submit them en mass here. Why you may ask? I wish there was a higher artistic principal at work here but alas there is not, I was lazy, in the midst of travel woes, getting wireless internet set up, then overwhelmed with the amount of blogs I had to enter, … you know the plight of the procrastinater. But now I am back on-line and if you simply scroll you will witness the fruits of my lazy labors. I hope you enjoy perusing my profundities. Heh heh, yeah right; or at least enjoy a few cheap laughs at my expense.
Death By Distraction
Work, moving, busted internet, laundry, and the occasionally necessary five chord progression, has made it difficult to blog on-line, so I’ve composed these last few entries in the old-school fashion of bringing pen to paper. Looking ahead at the next few days, I’m resigning to the notion that I will not yet commit these mental yarns to cyber-memory for a few days days to come. Although the mere formation of this entry creates in me an interestingly intense ‘tenseual’ trepidation: should it be in the past, present, or future tense at the time of entry to the blog page? An interesting conundrum. At the time I physically write this I am speaking about the past condition of my distracted nature, my present state of lethargy, and my hectic future which will cause a lag time between the creation of these thoughts and the communication of them to anyone, including my future self. If this entry is placed in the present tense, then at the time of posting to the site, which is currently the future, it will be to me, in that moment, the past, and yet I will need to type these words as though they are the present, knowing full well that when you read them you will note that it is posted under a previous date and categorize them as being in from past! So what does this all boil down to?I’m lying to you.
Austin Countdown
I’ve been in Austin now for four days, working for three, back in an apartment meant for two, and in one more day the Buckeyes will play … pretty good start I’d say!
