i may give out but i won't give up.

- mr. tom overton, age 109 and the oldest living wwII vet

love people and use things.

- minimalism documentary.

wondering if you're happy is a great shortcut to being depressed

- 20th century women quote

A sage has said, "This is the oldest we have ever been." and also "We will never again be this young!"

- a xmas card from former neighbors (wally and norma)

be good first and first second.

-grant tinker

If I only did what I was qualified to do, I'd still be pushing a broom.

- Naval Ravikant

Even if all the bright intellects who ever lived were to agree to ponder this one theme, they would never sufficiently express their surprise at this fog in the human mind. Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives--why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives. You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! people are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. So, I would like to fasten on someone from the older generation and say to him; "I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundredth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose: how few days have passed as you planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore it's natural expression; when you mind was undisturbed; what work have you achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.

So what is the reason for this? You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply--though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all the you desire. You will hear many people saying: "When I am fifty I shall retire into Leisure; when i am sixty I shall give up public duties." And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life and to devote to wisdom only the time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end? How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run toward the body's lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from outside as a dark, soft patch of ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman's agreement to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body's innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hours earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance; however everything around them is quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness.

i think i could set a world record for finding something in a messy room. i'd do better than clean people because they expect things to be where they go so they don't know what to do when they're not there.

Q: What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn't?

A: I'd do a special on race, but I'd have no black people.

Q: Well, that would be much more revealing.

A: Yes, that would be an event. Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Q: Right. It's ridiculous.

A: So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress. There's been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship's improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, "Oh, he stopped punching her in the face." It's not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner's relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn't. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let's hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Q: It's about white people adjusting to a new reality?

A: Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.

cleaning your room is work.

keeping it clean is not.

-bookguy

"Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it."

André Gide

it's hard on me when you travel.

at delmar harvard i remember i used to slide into my seat at lunch time and the last time you went skiing, i didn't slide in like i always did because i was sad and everyone (at the table) noticed (i didn't slide in) and then i started crying.

but that is the last time i cried at school about you traveling.

It's amazing how you can write like a woman.
Marty

and, it's amazing how much you write like a man.
troy

When I got my cancer diagnosis in November I was completely blindsided. I went in on a Friday afternoon to get a lumpy piece of my chest checked out and the doc, calm as a hurricane eye, stepped back from the table and crossed his hands.

"You're...how old?"

"I'm 23."

"This is going to... sound strange. I'm nearly certain that this is cancer. You'll need to get it cut out as soon as possible."

I went out to my car and had an earthshattering bawlfest that lasted a brief 4 minutes. Then I called my brother Seth, the programming half of our studio.

We are a two-man team, doing everything from inception to launch on the games we make. In telling him about the diagnosis I admitted I was terrified that this cancer would take our fledgling indie studio and throw it under the ground, as it may throw me. Seth reassured me and became my chauffeur for the next week as we went up to Iowa from St. Louis to do surgery, get the diagnosis complete, and figure out treatment.

It was Stage 4 lymphoma. It was on my spleen, my liver, my pelvis, my entire lymph system. The docs at the time said it might even be in my spinal fluid. A PET scan showed that my insides, rather than consisting of nice fleshy pinkness, were a coating of tumor. Despite how aggressive the cancer was, I was given a 65%-ish cure rate. Chemo was to begin the next week before I decided to up and die from tumor load. 

The two weeks between diagnosis and treatment was a true whirlwind of activity and emotion. It wasn't until after I received my first chemo infusion that my anxiety settled and Seth and I sat down to begin again on our project at the time, Extreme Slothcycling.

As we began to plan a wry feeling started bubbling up from my chest. Something about this was wrong. Hysterically wrong. I interrupted Seth as he was in mid marker-swing across the whiteboard.

"Seth. I don't want Extreme Slothcycling to be the last game I make before I die."

when the boys come into the bathroom when i'm showering i have to hide behind africa until they leave.

I'm very thankful that i was born in the great old USA. I was born to a mother who was just about the greatest woman a man could ever want to be around and into a great family. They taught me that service to your fellow man is a great thing. We're not the only people on the planet. It led me to a life of teaching and sharing. I hope you'll all help somebody and remember what you're thankful for on this great day.

take it back low and slow bro. low and slow.

Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

mom still owes me twenty dollars for calling me the c-word.

DNA possesses genes, small snippets of biological instructions, that guide everything from how tall you become to how you respond to stress. A lot of genetic material fits inside that yolk-like nucleus. Nearly six feet of the stuff are crammed into a space that is measured in microns. A micron is 1/25,000th of an inch, which means putting DNA into your nucleus is like taking thirty miles of fishing line and stuffing it into a blueberry. The nucleus is a crowded place.

One of the most unexpected findings of recent years is that this DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is not randomly jammed into the nucleus, as one might stuff cotton into a teddy bear. Rather, DNA is folded into the nucleus in a complex and tightly regulated manner. The reason for this molecular origami: cellular career options. Fold the DNA one way and the cell will become a contributing member of your liver. Fold it another way and the cell will become part of your busy bloodstream. Fold it a third way and you get a nerve cell—and the ability to read this sentence.

In design, where meaning is often controversially subjective or painfully inscrutable, few things are more apparent and lucid than the presence of passion. This is true whether the design of a product delights you or leaves you cold; in either case it's difficult not to detect the emotional investment of the hands that built it.

Enthusiasm manifests itself readily of course, but indifference is equally indelible. If your commitment doesn't encompass a genuine passion for the work at hand, it becomes a void that is almost impossible to conceal, no matter how elaborately or attractively designed it is.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence
New York City, April 4, 1967

Wife texts husband on a cold winter's morning: "Windows frozen, won't open."

Husband texts back: "Gently pour some lukewarm water over it."

Wife texts back 5 minutes later: "Computer really screwed up now."

- author unkown

Ben and Anthony were trying to decide what to do. They didn't like my suggestions, so Anthony decided to call upon God for advice. He yelled, "God! What should we do?"

Not sure if he or she answered, but they are on the trampoline now!

THE CLOCK MAN

"How much will you pay for an extra day?"
The clock man asked the child.
"not one penny," the answer came,
"For my days are as many as smiles."

"How much will you pay for an extra day?"
He asked when the child was grown.
"Maybe a dollar or maybe less,
For I've plenty of days of my own."

"How much will you pay for an extra day?"
He asked when the time came to die.
"All of the pearls in all of the seas,
And all of the stars in the sky."

From Shel Silverstein's final book Every Thing On It

lick your finger and push down on it

in life, always:

1 act with respect.
2 make mature choices.

honor those and you will sleep well and hit life's end line content and grinning.

Yes, the relationships with our children matter most, but I found myself wondering if my son had learned enough from me, whether he was prepared. So what do I want him to have learned as I send him on his way, off on his own? What do I want him to understand about life? What will help guide him through any difficult times? If I could only just tell him.

Hey wait! I can!

Here is what I want him to know; some words of wisdom that will guide him reasonably happily through life.

Always know that—

• No matter what happens to you in life—no matter what ups and downs life may bring—you have all the health and well-being inside you that you will ever need, it can never be destroyed, and it contains the wisdom and common sense to guide you through life.
• All you need to do to hear it is to quiet your mind or clear our head (which you can do in any way that suits you), and it will speak to you in the form of common sense thoughts popping into your head—so all you need to do is trust that it's there.
• When you feel frustrated or angry or irritable or down or bored or lazy, or any of those emotions, the more you know that those feelings are coming from your own thoughts, and those thoughts are coming only from the way you're seeing things at the moment—and that can change—the less you will be controlled by those emotions. The more you notice and are aware of what you're feeling at those times and the less you take those thoughts too seriously because those thoughts are just tricking you by giving you faulty messages, the less you will be controlled by those emotions. The more you can't let go of something, the further way you are from that healthy, but you're the one making it up—inadvertently.
• The more you understand that everyone sees the world in a completely different way from everyone else because of their own way of thinking, and their world makes as much sense to them as yours does to you, and you can't talk anyone out of their world any more than they can talk you out of yours, the less you will be bothered and troubled by others.
• The more you recognize your moods, and that you think differently about the same situation depending on your moods, and the more you wait until your mood rises before acting or saying anything, the better off you'll be and the better people will respond to you.
• If someone does you wrong or treats you badly—it's just that he's lost—his world is telling him to act that way, and he is just doing the best he knows how to do at the time, given how he sees things. If you can see him as innocent because he can't see a better way at that time, and if you see him with compassion because he must be hurting to be taking it out on you, and if you don't take what they do or say personally, you will be protected emotionally from what he and others do [Note: This does not mean not taking appropriate action, when necessary.]
• Whenever you're down in the dumps or caught up in your emotions and you can't seem to change your thinking, all you need to remember is that your thoughts will eventually change and, with them, you will see your situation or that person differently. What you see as "reality" or "the way it is" now will change as your thinking changes—and it always does. So you don't have to get so caught up in the way you think it is now—because how it looks now is guaranteed to change, eventually.
• The way you treat others creates what you get back in return.
• People who achieve what they want in life believe they can do it, trust that what they want will fall into place for them, if they work hard to get it and don't give up. And if it doesn't work out, have faith that you will be okay—it is all unfolding perfectly—no matter what.
• We will always be there for you if you need us.
• We will always love you no matter what you do!

Two of the most valuable things we have are time and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life.

look, all i have to remember is my name and my password. that's it.

Neither the woman on the plane nor my friend Elizabeth was in denial about her feelings. Neither of them was pleased with what was going on, but neither of them had a choice about it. The only choice they had was the style they selected for passing the time. Having the ability to choose a style seems to me to be a great liberation. Perhaps it is the ultimate meaning of "freedom of choice."

Right Aspiration is what develops in the mind once we understand that freedom of choice is possible. Life is going to unfold however it does: pleasant or unpleasant, disappointing or thrilling, expected or unexpected, all of the above! What a relief it would be to know that whatever wave comes along, we can ride it out with grace. If we got really good at it, we could be like surfers, delighting especially in the most complicated waves.

What Right Aspiration translates to in terms of daily action is the resolve to behave in a way that stretches the limits of conditioned response. If i want to build big biceps, I need to use every opportunity to practice lifting weights. If I want to live in a way that is loving and generous and fearless, then I need to practice overcoming any tendency to be angry or greedy or confused. Life is a terrific gym. Every situation is an opportunity to practice.

Ritual, Willpower, and the Final Push
When writing his most recent book, Be Excellent at Anything (2010), Schwartz structured his day into three ninety minute writing bursts that allowed him to complete the book working only four and a half hours a day for three months. Our brains, Schwartz discovered, become easily fatigued. They need breaks in order to refuel, to be able to refocus, create, and produce. When we don't give them the needed time to refuel, they more or less start to shut down and ratchet up the mood crank factor until we have to listen. By then we've often spent hours at work, without actually accomplishing a whole lot of work.

But it's not just the lost creativity, cognitive function, and productivity that take a hit when we don't stop to refuel on a regular enough basis. Willpower is annihilated and fear and anxiety run amok when you don't give your brain a chance to refuel.

In his book How We Decide (2009), Jonah Lehrer points to the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the seat of self-control or willpower. The problem is, the PFC is easily fatigued.

...

Willpower, it turns out, is a depletable resource. Tasks that involve heavy thinking, working memory, concentration, and creativity tax the PFC in a major way and ... it doesn't take all that much to draw your willpower tank down to near zero.

Why should you care? Two reasons. What we often experience as resistance, desire, distraction, burnout, fatigue, frustration, and anxiety in the process of creating something from nothing may, at least in part, be PFC depletion that reduces our willpower to zero and makes it near impossible to commit to the task at hand—especially if the task wars with our creative orientation. In addition, what so many creators experience as a withering ability to handle the anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty as a project nears completion may actually be self-induced rather than process-induced suffering.

Think about your own process. As you near the launch of a new venture, the completion of a manuscript, or the creation of a collection of artwork for an upcoming show, you tend to put in more hours. You work for longer periods of time without breaks. You sleep less and do so more fitfully. You stop exercising, meditating, listening to music, and creating deliberate space in your day. You eat like hell (or don't eat enough) and push away conversations and activities that take you away from your endeavor because you just don't have the time (or so you think). You abandon your more humane creation routine and rituals in the name of getting it done.

What happens? All those things stack on top of each other to systematically juice your PFC and empty your willpower tank, then keep it empty. You'll very likely experience that loss of willpower and hit to your ability to self-regulate your behavior as the evil, nasty resistance getting stronger as you get closer to completing your endeavor. In reality, a series of subtle shifts in your own behavior are causing much of the distress.

If you're someone who creates largely in a vacuum, as you get closer to the end of your endeavor you're also starting to get to the place where you've got to go public or at least reveal your creation to the first line of your potential "judges." Exposure to judgment and risk of loss begin to become far more real to you. That kicks the amygdala's fear and anxiety responses into high gear at a point when your PFC is too wiped out to do much to counter it.

Well-planned, burst-driven creation rituals with recovery periods go a long way toward taming the evil nasties that arise as a project progresses by allowing the PFC to refuel along the way. I experimented with this when writing this book. When I wrote my earlier book, Career Renegade, I spent the final week slumped on the couch in the tattered remains for an extra-heavy Champion sweatshirt from college-writing, sweating, thinking, muttering, spinning, and randomly cursing for the better part of sixteen hours a day. Not fun. I felt a bit like I was waging creative warfare.

This time around, I committed to a ritual that was much closer to Schwartz's. I still donned the ancient sweatshirt. And the week before the manuscript was due, I still had a ton of work to do on it. But i stuck to my bursts, took breaks to meditate, eat, play guitar, walk outside, play with my wife and daughter, and talk to friends. Amazingly enough, the work still got done, the the process became substantially more humane. lesson learned.

the horse still galloping, galloping its shadow into the dust, the road descending now toward the creek and the bridge. It was of wood, just wide enough for a single vehicle. When the horse reached it, it was occupied by a wagon coming from the opposite direction and drawn by two mules already asleep in the harness and the soporific motion. On the seat were Tull and his wife, in splint chairs in the wagon behind them sat their four daughters, all returning belated from an all-day visit with some of Mrs . Tull's kin. The horse neither checked nor swerved. It crashed once on the wooden bridge and rushed between the two mules which waked lunging in opposite directions in the traces, the horse now apparently scrambling along the wagon-tongue itself like a mad squirrel and scrabbling at the end-gate of the wagon with its fore feet as if it intended to climb into the wagon while Tull shouted at it and struck at its face with his whip. The mules were now trying to turn the wagon around in the middle of the bridge. It slewed and tilted, the bridge-rail cracked with a sharp report above the shrieks of the women; the horse scrambled at last across the back of one of the mules and Tull stood up in the wagon and kicked at its face. Then the front end of the wagon rose, flinging Tull, the reins now wrapped several times about his wrist, backward into the wagon bed among the overturned chairs and the exposed stockings and undergarments of his women. The pony scrambled free and crashed again on the wooden planking, galloping again. The wagon lurched again; the mules had finally turned it on the bridge where there was not room for it to turn and were now kicking themselves free of the traces. When they came free, they snatched Tull bodily out of the wagon. He struck the bridge on his face and was dragged for several feet before the wrist-wrapped reins broke. Far up the road now, distancing the frantic mules, the pony faded on. While the five women still shrieked above Tull's unconscious body, Eck and the little boy came up, trotting, Eck still carrying his rope. He was panting. "Which way'd he go?" he said.

On Nov 20, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Troy L DeArmitt wrote:
bella,
welcome to the world of email.

may it not overtake your life.

dad.

On Nov 20, 2011, at 9:35 AM, Bella DeArmitt wrote:
Dear Dad,
Thank you so much for setting me up an account. i'm sad to say that this will probably, sadly, overtake my life and I will use it as an excuse to get onto the computer, thanks for giving me the account.
love,
Bella

i wish half the world was made out of candy and the other half was made out of amulet books.

Son, it is very rude to ask a man where he is from. If he is from Texas, you will find out, and if he's not, don't embarrass him.

Old age can be both miserable and joyous. It all depends on the facets we choose to examine. But one thing we do know is that positive aging must reflect vital reaction to change, to disease, and to conflict. Thus, perhaps there is a third way for us to view old age - one that does not try to paint old age as either black or white. A 55-year old Study poet underscored the dignity even in dying. He rhetorically asked, "What's the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments before death has a nostalgic grin on his face, as if to say, 'Boy, I sure squeezed that lemon' and another man who fights for every last breath in an effort to turn time back to some nagging unfinished business? Damed if I know, but I sure think it's worth thinking about."

YOU AND I
Only one I in the whole wide world
And millions and millions of you,
But every you is an I to itself
And I am a you to you, too!

But if I am a you and you are an I
And the opposite also is true,
It makes us both the same somehow
Yet splits us each in two.

It's more and more mysterious,
The more I think it through:
Every you everywhere in the world is an I;
Every I in the world is you!

Next I followed a practice learned from the best officer I ever had. He was Charley Edwards, a major of middling age, perhaps a little too far along to be a combat officer but he was a good one. He had a large family, a pretty wife and four children in steps, and his heart could ache with love and longing for them if he allowed it to. He told me about it. In his deadly business he could not afford to have his attention warped and split by love, and so he had arrived at a method. In the morning, that is if her were not jerked from sleep by an alert, he opened his mind and heart to his family. He went over each one in turn, how they looked, what they were like; he caressed them and reassured them of his love. It was as though he picked precious things one by one from a cabinet, looked at each, felt it kissed it, and put it back; and last he gave them a small good-by and shut the door of the cabinet. The whole thing took half an hour if he could get it and then he didn't have to think of them again all day. He could devote his full capacity, untwisted by conflicting thought and feeling, to the job he had to do—the killing of men. He was the best officer I ever knew. I asked his permission to use his method and he gave it to me. When he was killed, all I could think was that his had been and good and effective life. He had taken his pleasure, savored his love, and paid his debts, and how many people even approached that?

Communities, like people, have periods of health and times of sickness—even youth and age, hope and despondency. There was a time when a few towns like New Baytown furnished the whale oil that lighted the Western World. Student lamps of Oxford and Cambridge drew fuel from this American outpost. And then petroleum, rock oil gushed out in Pennsylvania and cheap kerosene, called coal oil, took the place of whale oil and retired most of the sea hunters. Sickness or the despair fell on New Baytown—perhaps an attitude from which it did not recover. Other towns not too far away grew and prospered on other products and energies, but New Baytown, whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales, sank into torpor. The snake of population crawling out from New York passed New Baytown by, leaving it to its memories. And as usually happens, New Baytown people persuaded themselves that they liked it that way. They were spared the noise and litter of summer people, the garish glow of neon signs, the spending of tourist money and tourist razzle-dazzle. Only a few new houses were built around the fine inland waters. But the snake of population continued to writhe out and everyone knew that sooner or later it would engulf the village of New Baytown. The local people longed for that and hated the idea of it at the same time. The neighboring towns were rich, spilled over with loot from tourists, puffed with spoils, gleamed with the great houses of the new rich. Old Baytown spawned art and ceramics and pansies, and the damn broadfooted brood of Lesbos wove handmade fabrics and small domestic intrigues. New Baytown talked of the old days and of flounder and when the weakfish would start running.

He didn't take the Spettle boys with him, for he had brought no spare horses. But the boys started at once for Lonesome Dove of foot, each of them carrying a blanket. They had one pistol between them, a Navy Colt with half its hammer knocked off. Though Call assured them he would equip them well once they got to Lonesome Dove, they wouldn't leave the gun.

"We've never shot airy other gun," Swift Bill said as if that meant they couldn't.

When he took his leave, Mrs. Spettle and the six remaining children scarcely noticed him. They stood in the hot yard, with a scrawny hen or two scratching around their bare feet, watching the boys and crying. The mother, who had scarcely touched her sons before they left, stood straight up and cried. Three of the children were girls, but the other three were boys in their early teens, old enough, at least, to be of use to their mother.

"We'll take good care of them," Call said, wasting words. The young girls hung onto the widow's frayed skirts and cried. Call rode on, though with a bad feeling in his throat. It was better that the boys go; there was not enough work for them there. And yet they were the pride of the family. He would take as good care of them as he could, and yet what did that mean, with a drive of twenty-five hundred miles to make?

He made the Rainey ranch by sundown, a far more cheerful place than the Spettle homestead. Joe Rainey had a twisted leg, the result of an accident with a buckboard, but he got around on the leg almost as fast as a healthy man. Call was not as fond of Maude, Joe's fat red-faced wife, as Augustus was, but then he had to admit he was not as fond of any woman as Augustus was.

Maude Rainey was built like a barrel, with a bosom as big as buckets and a voice that some claimed would make hair fall out. It was the general consensus around Lonesome Dove that is she and Augustus had married their combined voices would have deafened whatever children they might have produced. She talked at the table like some men talked when they were driving mules.

Still, she and Joe had managed to produce an even dozen children so far, eight of them boys and all of the them strapping. Among them the Raineys probably ate as much food in one meal as the Spettles consumed in a week. As near as Call could determine they all devoted most of their waking hours to either growing or butchering or catching what they ate. Augustus's blue pigs had been purchased from the Raineys and was the first thing Maude thought to inquire about when Call rode up.

"Have you et that shoat yet?" Maude asked, before he could even dismount.

"No, we ain't," Call said. "I guess Gus is saving him for Christmas, or else he just likes to talk to him."

"Well, step down and have a wash at the bucket," Maude said. "I'm cooking one of that shoat's cousins right this minute."

It had to be admitted that Maude Rainey set a fine table. Call had no sooner got his sleeves rolled up and his hands clean than supper began. Joe Rainey just had time to mumble a prayer before Maude started pushing around the cornbread. Call was faced with more meats than he had seen on one table since he could remember: beefsteak and pork chops, chicken and venison, and a stew that appeared to contain squirrel and various less familiar meats. Maude got red in the face when she ate, as did everyone else at her table, from the steam rising off the platters.

"This is my varmint stew, Captain," Maude said.

"Oh," he asked politely, "what kind of varmints?"

"Whatever the dogs catch," Maude said. "Or the dogs themselves, if they don't manage to catch nothing. I won't support a lazy dog."

"She put a possum in," one of the little girls said. She seemed as full of mischief as her fat mother, who, fat or not, had made plenty of mischief among the men of the area before she settled on Joe.

"Now, Maggie, don't be giving away my recipes," Maude said. "Anyway, the Captain's likely et possum before."

"At least it ain't a goat," Call said, trying to make conversation. It was an unfamiliar labor, since at his own table he mostly worked at avoiding it. But he knew women liked to talk to their guests, and he tried to fit into the custom.

"We've heard a rumor that Jake is back and on the run," Joe Rainey said. He wore a full beard, which at the moment was shiny with pork drippings. Joe had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint other men, he had never him use it. If you happened to be directly in front of him, Joe would look you in the eye; but if you positioned a little to the side, his look went floating on by.

"Yes, Jake arrived," Call said. "He's been to Montana and says it's the prettiest country in the world."

"It's probably filt with women, then," Maude said. "I remember Jake. If he can't find a woman he gets so restless he'll scratch."

i think you guys would appreciate this. i'm listening to this audio book during my commute right now called 'little heathens', a memoir about this woman recounting her childhood growing up during the depression on an iowa farm.

...and, naturally, the topic of outhouses comes up...about how they, especially the kids, would try to get their bodily works on some kind of reliable schedule, so as not to have to trudge outside to use the outhouse at night and in the dead of winter.

but, in times of emergency, they kept a chamber pot at the top of the stairs which then had to emptied, cleaned and replaced the next day. a chore no one liked to do.

the kids called the chamber pot "the piss pot"...seems logical enough....the older men called the chamber pot "the thunder mug"
...

now, i don't know if you guys have ever heard that term before, but it was a new one for me and i almost crashed my car from laughing so hard.

the question now is -- will i ever call a toilet anything else?

If we equate the age of the earth to the period of our familiar twenty-four-hour day, the time that elapsed prior to man's appearance equals twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes. And of the two remaining minutes, representing man's time on earth, the period of civilized man is less than the last half-second!

dear mom,
i hope this got to you in time, sorry if it didn't. i hope you are having a good day (or had). lately i have been hearing a lot about adoption and i hear girls talk of insecurities they would have in adopting children. they think that the kids would want to find their biological mom. and i hear adopted kids say they want to find their mom. i hope you don't have any such insecurities regarding me, because i assure you, you don't need to. to me i have only one mother and she it the greatest mother in the world. i love you very much and feel very fortunate to have been blessed with you. thank you for everything and never forget that i love you very much. thank you for everything mom - i love you.

your son,

troy.

Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn't rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half-gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at the marsh hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him.

"You're looking up my legs," she said.

"No I wasn't."

"If you're honest you can kiss them."

"I was."

He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.

let's play ogre in the bed and you're the ogre and i'm the food. my head is orange juice. my legs are ketchup. my belly button is m&m's and my stummy is gummy bears.

if there is one thing my daughter isabella has taught me, it is to never, ever act or make decisions when you're angry. nothing good ever comes of it.

"A textbook case. Trust you me, young man. Go after your girl. Life flies by, especially the bit that's worth living. You heard what the priest said. Like a flash."
"She's not my girl."
"Well, then, make her yours before someone else takes her, especially the litle tin soldier."
"You talk as if Bea were a trophy."
"No, as if she were a blessing," Fermin corrected. "Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it."

Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a 1000 guineas. The money may be soon spent, and the regret only remaining of having foolishly consum'd it. But in the other case he escapes frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, & of their sometimes, dirty fingers, offensive breaths and dull razors. He shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument.

I had never heard of Stieg Larsson or his novels until I wrote a paper about him earlier this year. He died intestate and his live-in girlfriend of 30 years received nothing from his estate. Everything went to his "estranged" father and brother (at least his girlfriend claims they were estranged). Larsson was a heavy smoker and died of a heart attack after walking up five flights of steps because the elevator was broken. He died before any of his novels were actually published so he never lived to see literary success. His fourth and final novel is on a laptop that his girlfriend is holding as ransom. So maybe it's only fitting that the technology reference remains...it probably references the computer that holds Larsson's last novel.

What the hell happened to all these sons of the rich in Wally's generation, these well-brought-up boys who went off to the private schools? These damned schools were producing a new kind of scion of the elite: a boy utterly world-weary by the age of sixteen, cynical, phlegmatic, and apathetic around adults, although perfectly respectful and maddeningly polite, a boy inept at sports, averse to hunting and fishing and riding horses or handling animals in any way, a boy embarrassed by his advantages, desperate to hide them, eager to dress in backward baseball caps and homey pants and other ghetto rags, terrified of being envied, a boy facing the world without any visible signs of the joy of living and without ... balls ...

i'm not saying you were fat before but you look less fat than you used to. i mean you look skinnier than you used to. but i'm not saying you looked fat before.

I saw something that, for reasons I can't figure out, reminded me of you... or at least struck me as something you'd have liked. It was a SUPERB example of the importance of punctuation, particularly commas (the prime example is "Let's eat Grandma!" vs "Let's eat, Grandma!". It was on a blog (a technical forum, not that it matters). There had been some good-natured back and forth banter and one person had thought the level of ribbing was not up to par, so he posted "C'mon! We can do better guys". And not two minutes later someone else posted "What's wrong with the guys you're doing now?"

our office was immensely non-plussed by the announcement. for andrew to not be first in line for a new apple technology is wholly unprecedented and says quite a lot about the offering.

i find it to be a totally uninspired and non-compelling bauble. but i also feel it is an absolutely necessary step to get these eReaders and tablet devices to a place where like technologies need to be. you could liken it to the mac cube which was commercially a flop but instrumental to subsequent innovations.

the kindle is a way more thoughtful and practical eReader device, and even it is still not where it needs to be and has many game-ending shortcomings. the touted 10 hours of battery on the iPad is laughable. first off, you probably only get that 10 hours if you have all functions and features turned off, the screen dimmed out and are just looking at it. if you're actually using it (with its features in play) i reckon you get less than half that advertised duration and this in something designed to be a mobile/portable object.

and people talk about it being smaller and a more compact technology solution. this would be true if you could dump all of your other machines and devices but you can't and since you can't you're actually broadening your tech footprint and adding exponential complexity to your tech dependencies and cost.

for that same money you could fund a close friend to travel to your city, play a round or two of tennis, and treat him to a fine steak dinner which i feel would, in the end, be a more enriching and satisfying use of your finances. especially when that friend is me.

to be a college professor you just need to remember two things: make sure you always have a box of kleenex in your office and never scratch your balls with chalk in your hand.

if you wanted to give a dozen oranges to your neighbor as an expression of love, you obviously would need to be in possession of twelve oranges. if you intended to purchase a new automobile for you parents to show your gratitude to them for putting you through medical school, naturally you'd need to have the funds to do so. likewise, you can't give love away to others if you don't have any for yourself. you can't show respect for others if you lack self-respect. you can't give happiness away if you feel unhappy. and of course, the reverse is true.

you can only give away what you do have, and all that you're giving away each and every day are items from your own personal inventory. if you give away hatred, it's because you've stored up hatred inside of you to give away. if you give away misery, it's because you have a ready supply available from which to select and distribute.

Never before had I witnessed such shock and solemnity—and fixed concentration—emanate from a congregation of the Winesburg student body. One could not imagine anyone present who even to himself dared to cry, "This is unseemly! This is not just!" The president could have come down into the auditorium and laid waste to the student assemblage with a club without inciting flight or stirring resistance. It was as though we already had been clubbed—and, for all the offenses committed, accepted the beating with gratification—before the assault had even begun.

...

"Does any one of you here," President Lentz began, "happen to know what happened in Korea on the day all you he-men decided to bring disgrace and disrepute down upon the name of a distinguished institution of higher learning whose origins lie in the Baptist Church? On that day, U.N. and Communist negotiators in Korea reached tentative agreement for a truce line on the eastern front of that war-torn country. I take it you know what 'tentative' means. It means that fighting as barbaric as any we have known in Korea—as barbaric as any American forces have known in any war at any time in our history—that very same fighting can flare up any hour of the day or night and take thousands upon thousands more young American lives. Do any of you know what occurred in Korea a few weeks back, between Saturday, October 13, and Friday, October 19? I know that you know what happened here then. On Saturday the thirteenth our football team routed our traditional rival, Bowling Green, 41 to 14. The following Saturday, the twentieth, we upset my alma mater, the University of West Virginia, in a thriller that left us, the heavy underdogs, on top by a score of 21 to 20. What a game for Winesburg! But do you know what happened in Korea that same week? The U.S. First Calvary Division, the Third Infantry Division, and my old outfit in the First War, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, along with our British allies and our Republic of Korea allies, made a small advance in the Old Baldy area. A small advance at a cost of four thousand casualties. Four thousand young men like yourselves, dead, maimed, and wounded, between the time we beat Bowling Green and the time we upset UWV. Do you have any idea how fortunate, how privileged, and how lucky you are to be watching football games on Saturdays and not there being shot at on Saturdays, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays as well? When measured against the sacrifices being made by young Americans of your age in this brutal war against the aggression of North Korean and Chinese Communist forces—when measured against that , do you have any idea how juvenile and stupid and idiotic your behavior looks to the people of Winesburg and to the people of Ohio and to the people of the United States of America, who have been made aware by their newspapers and the television of the shameful happenings of Friday night? Tell me, did you think you were being heroic warriors by storming our women's dormitories and scaring the coeds there half to death? Did you think you were being heroic warriors by breaking into the privacy of their rooms and laying your hands on their personal belongings? Did you think you were being heroic warriors by taking and destroying possessions that were not your own? And those of you who cheered them on, who did not raise a finger to stop them, who exulted in their manly courage, what about your manly courage? How's it going to serve you when a thousand screaming Chinese soldiers come swarming down on you in your foxhole, should those negotiations in Korea break down? As they will, I can guarantee you, with bugles blaring and bearing their bayonets! What am I going to do with you boys? Where are the adults among you? Is there not a one of you who thought to defend the female residents of Dowland and Koons and Fleming? I would have expected a hundred of you, two hundred of you; three hundred of you, to put down this childish insurrection! Why did you not? Answer me! Where is your courage? Where is your honor? Not a one of you displayed an ounce of honor! Not a one of you! I'm going to tell you something now that I never thought I would have to say: I am ashamed today to be president of this college. I am ashamed and I am disgusted and I am enraged. I don't want there to be any doubt about my anger. And I am not going to stop being angry for a long time to come, I can assure you of that. I understand that forty-eight of our women students—which is close to ten percent of them—forty-eight have already left the campus in the company of their deeply shocked and shaken parents, and whether they will return I do not yet know. What I reckon from the calls I have been receiving from other concerned families—and the phones in both my office and my home have not stopped ringing since midnight on Friday—a good many more of our women students are considering either leaving college for the year or permanently transferring out of Winesburg. I can't say that I blame them. I can't say that I would expect any daughter of mine to remain loyal to an educational institution where she has been exposed not merely to belittlement and humiliation and fear but to a genuine threat of physical harm by an army of hoodlums imagining, apparently, that they were emancipating themselves. Because that's all you are, in my estimation, those who participated and those who did nothing to stop them—an ungrateful, irresponsible, infantile band of vile and cowardly hoodlums. A mob of disobedient children. Kiddies in diapers unconstrained. Oh, and one last thing. Do any of you happen to know how many atom bombs the Soviets have set off so far in the year 1951? The answer is two. That makes a total of three atomic bombs altogether that our Communist enemies in the USSR have now successfully tested since they have discovered the secret of producing an atomic explosion. We as a nation are facing the distinct possibility of an unthinkable atomic war with the Soviet Union, all the while the he-men of Winesburg College are conducting their derring-do raids on the dresser drawers of the innocent young women who are their schoolmates. Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear. Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily-warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won't be oblivious for long! You can be as stupid as you like, can even give every sign, as you did here on Friday night, of passionately wanting to be stupid, but history will catch you in the end. Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times! Most sickening of all is that it is just that ignorance that you are purportedly at Winesburg to expunge. What kind of a time do you think you belong to, anyway? Can you answer? Do you know? Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all? I have spent a long professional career in the warfare of politics, a middle-of-the-road Republican fighting off the zealots of the left and the zealots of the right. But to me tonight those zealots are as nothing compared to you in your barbaric pursuit of thoughtless fun. 'Let's go crazy, let's have fun! How about cannibalism next!' Well, not here, gentlemen, not within these ivied walls will the delights of intentional wrongdoing go unheeded by those charged with the responsibility to this institution to maintain the ideals and values that you have travestied. This cannot be allowed to go on, and this will not be allowed to go on! Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The insurrection is over. The rebellion is quelled. Beginning tonight, everything and everyone will be put back into its proper place and order restored to Winesburg. And decency restored. And dignity restored. And now you uninhibited he-men may rise and leave my sight. And if any of you decide you want to leave it for good, if any of you decide that the code of human conduct and rules of civilized restraint that this administration intends to strictly enforce to keep Winesburg Winesburg aren't suited to a he-man like yourself—that's fine with me! Leave! Go! The order has been given! Pack up your rebellious insolence and clear out of Winesburg tonight.

The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy's office, in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods Store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet of the many who had gone before. The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way.

At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the doctor's door. To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish. Old chairs, carpenter's horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the darkness waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of rubbish belonged to the Paris Dry Goods Company. When a counter or a row of shelves in the store became useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it on the pile.

Doctor Reefy's office was as large as a barn. A stove with a round paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled sawdust, held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a huge table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrik's Clothing Store and that had been used for displaying custom-made clothes. It was covered with books, bottles, and surgical instruments. Near the edge of the table lay three or four apples left by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy's friend and who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as he came in the door.

At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache. He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much occupied with the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.

i cannot trust someone who is too lazy to wear something other than sweatpants in public.

watch out, you almost hit my tenders.

The conviction was growing in me that the besetting problem was our culture's blindness to the distinction between the tool and the automatic machine. Everyone tended to treat them alike, as neutral agents of human intention. But machines clearly were not neutral or inert objects. They were complex fuel-consuming entities with certain definite proclivities and needs. Besides often depriving their users of skills and physical exercise, they created new and artificial demands - for fuel, space, money, and time. These in turn crowded out other important human pursuits, like involvement in family and community, or even the process of thinking itself. The very act of accepting the machine was becoming automatic.

she is the blonde woman who drinks coffee and smokes and is afraid of horses but is trying to do something about it.

Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that's the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every hour, every floor of every house — the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend's family apartment — came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd's; we knew one another's every physical attribute — who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family's different set of circumstances sent each family a distinctive difficult human problem.

if i'm so happy, i've got everything to lose

Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity—perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.

never mention winning. my idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game and you can win when you're outscored. i've felt that way on certain occasions at various times. i just want my kids to be able to hold their head up after a game. i used to say that when a game is over and you see somebody that didn't know the outcome that i hope they couldn't tell by your actions wether you outscored and opponent or if an opponent outscored you. that's what really matters. if you make your effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be, not necessarily what you'd want them to be, but they'll be about what they should be.

so your buttcheeks are sticking together?

hello, this is bella dearmitt. i was calling to see if bella would like to come play at my house tomorrow and if she would like to come to my house on march 6th for my birthday party. ok. again, this is bella. bella dearmitt. thanks. goodbye.

he's known for using the f-word as a comma.

There was a time when I thought I was all green coast and fertile marsh, that my interior lands were bounded by the Appalachian mountains, the skyline of Savannah, the citrus country of central Florida, and the eroded beaches on barrier islands threatened by the moon-swollen tides of the Atlantic. But as I grew older and explored my own starker regions more assiduously, I kept stumbling across pyramids, Mayan campfires, the rubble of Huns - civilizations that had no right of access to the terrain of a Southern boy's soul. I wanted desperately to find out why I felt different from the other boys at the Institute, why I felt more like Poteete than the rest of them. I wanted to find out why I was lonely and why I never felt lonelier than when I marched with the regiment, in step with the two thousand. When I picked up the yearbook on my desk, flipped through the pages, and looked at the faces of my friends, I thought I was looking at a field guide to ruined boys. That was not true. The Institute had helped many of those boys to find themselves. But as I turned to my own photograph and stared at the immobile smiling stranger who shared my features and my name, I realized that only one boy had been ruined. My task for the year was clear: I had to discover why the boy in that photograph loathed himself so completely and so violently.

the girl made her hand into a ball and threw it at another girl's face. and blood came out of her nose.

i sat in the grass at the back of the house with my baby in my arms. the white clover smelled of honey: it was the time in the afternoon when it is easy to drowse and slip into light summery dreams. i fed my baby until she fell asleep on my breast. her lips let go of the nipple and her head tipped backwards a little on my arm. her mouth was slightly open with a thin trail of milk at the corner. i wiped it away with my finger. i ran my little finger over her soft gums and felt the tips of the two new teeth, like embedded grains of rice. her eyelids were closed, the finest film over her black eyes. they fluttered now and then and her lips quivered in fleeting secret smiles.

First, how many minutes a week does the average father spend with his children in on-on-one conversation? According to a study done a few years ago, the number is seven minutes - seven minutes in an entire week! Is it vital that we spend time with our children, one-on-one? I think everyone would agree it's vital; it has great value. But is it urgent? No. Why not? Because the child is always there. We can do it anytime we want. So we tend to put off the highly valued task because we're dealing with urgencies all day.

Second, how many minutes a week do the average husband and wife spend in one-on-one conversation? According to the study, the number is twenty-seven minutes. Is it vital to spend time with your spouse? I think we'd agree, it's vital. But is it urgent? No. Why not? Same problem - the spouse is always there.

As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens - think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.

Excessive wealth engenders self-satisfied mediocrity.

now the first hour (of the interview) was all pre-intercourse information and then he would ask you if you ever had intercourse. if your answer was yes you stayed another hour. boys on campus figured out girls who stayed two hours had had intercourse and so they would sit out there. if you came out after an hour they were not interested in you. if you came out after two hours they made a pass at you.

it's like my husband always says, never trust a man in a suit who has a tan.

some people think little brothers are an ache in the neck but i don't think that. alex and anthony are a love in my neck.

I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen as simply and as naturally and as gradually as a season coming on or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in the end. She was young — she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded — and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn't any squealing, squawking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that's-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anyone-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Certainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implication or color of shame or fear or desire to be "nice." For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I shared ownership, which had suddenly dropped to us out of the blue, and which, in our ignorance, we had to study with the greatest patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute, scholarly detail without knowledge of which everything would be wasted. So it was a period of the most delicate discrimination and subtle investigations, with her seriousness mixed with a graceful gaiety, ... a gaiety to which the words didn't mean much but the tune meant everything, a tune which seemed to come from the very air as though it were full of invisible strings and she simply reached out at random in the dark to pluck them with an idle familiar finger.

...

We went quite a long way, that summer, and there were times when I was perfectly sure I could have gone farther. When I could have gone the limit. For that fine, slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered mechanism which fascinated Anne Stanton and me, which had dropped to us out of the blue, was a very sensitive and beautifully tuned-up contraption. But maybe I was wrong in that surmise, and maybe I could not have hurried the massive deliberation of that current in which we were caught and suspended, or hurried Anne Stanton's pensive and scholarly assimilation of each minute variation which had to be slowly absorbed into the body of our experience before another could be permitted. It was as though she was aware of a rhythm, a tune, a compulsion, outside of herself, and devoutly followed it in its subtle and winding progression. But wrong or not, I did not put my surmise to the test, for if I myself was not truly aware of that rhythm and compulsion which bemused her, I was aware of her devotion to it, and could find every moment with her full enough. Paradoxically enough, it was when I was away from her, when I was withdrawn from her context, back in my room at night or in the hot early afternoon, after lunch, that I was savagely impatient of the delays and discriminations. This would be especially true at those times when she wouldn't see me for a day, the times which seemed to mark, I came to understand, some stage, some milepost, we had passed. She would simply withdraw herself from me, as she had done that night after we first kissed, and leave me, at first, confused and guilty, but later, as I came to grasp the pattern of things, merely impatient for the next day when she would appear at the court, swinging her racket, her face so smooth, young, healthy and apparently disinterested, though comradely, that I could not equate it with the face I remembered with the eyelids drooping and the damp, starlight-or-moonlight-glistening lips parted for the quick, shallow breath or the unashamed sigh.

There were a good many folks in the store, men in overalls lined up along the soda fountain, and women hanging around the counters where the junk and glory was, and kids hanging on skirts with one hand and clutching ice-cream cones with the other and staring out over their own wet noses at the world of men from eyes which resembled painted china marbles. The Boss just stood modestly back of the gang of customers at the soda fountain, with his hat in this hand and the damp hair hanging down over his forehead. He stood that way a minute maybe, and then one of the girls ladling up ice cream happened to see him, and got a look on her face as though her garter belt had busted in church, and dropped her ice-cream scoop, and headed for the back of the store with her hips pumping hell-for-leather (*) under the lettuce-green smock.

   I took the card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm's length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, then he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank. Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. "You done come a piece," he said.
   "That's right," I said.
   "What you come fer?"
   "To see what's going on about the schoolhouse," I said.
   "You come a piece," he said, "to stick yore nose in somebody else's bizness."
   "That's right," I agreed cheerfully, "but my boss on the paper can't see it that way."
   "It ain't any of his bizness either."
   "No," I said, "but what's the ruckas about, now I've come all that piece?"
   "It ain't any of my bizness. I'm the Sheriff."
   "Well, Sherriff," I said, "whose business is it?"
   "Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let 'em."

Hell for leather is a statement that is often confused with "Hell bent for leather". Hell for leather, in American vernacular, refers to an arduous walk that may have been strewn with difficulties and was a strain on footwear. A long and difficult walk, such as over rough terrain, might be referred to as hell for leather because of the abuse the leather footwear sustained during the walk.

"Hell bent for leather" has many uses and the most popular american use goes back to the 19th century american west when a particular livestock animal, such as a cow, bull or horse would be particularly difficult to handle. One of these troublesome creatures would cause their handler so much trouble that the owner or handler considered slaughter of the animal and turning the carcass into leather. When a horse or cattle became difficult to handle they were called "Hell bent for leather" meaning that the animal was hell bent to become a leather good.
source : phrases.org.uk

My fictional character Sarah lived in Pennsylvania in the early 1700's, when families living on farms had to raise, grow and make almost everything they needed to survive. Most colonial homes were a single room, often with a sleeping loft for older children. Parents and younger children slept on the ground floor in front of the fireplace, and almost everyone slept on mats of rush or feathers, which were rolled up during the day.

Chairs were expensive and were usually used only by the father of the family — everyone else sat on benches or stools. But during meals, children were not allowed to sit, and they were NEVER allowed to speak while eating — for any reason at all.

The women of the house did the cooking, and in those days, many young women died from their clothing catching on fire. Spoons and knives were the only eating utensils, and often just one mug was passed around from person to person. Water was considered unsafe to drink, so everyone drank beer, including babies and children. (It was brewed to be barely alcoholic.)

New clothing was almost all handmade, and it was a very time-consuming process. A girl would wear her only dress every day for as long as it fit, even it is was a year or more. It was an exciting day when a girl got a new outfit to wear!

No set of discipline techniques will give you a good relationship with your children.

Discipline techniques are only fine-tuning mechanisms. As on a television set, the fine-tuning knob will only work when the signal is strong enough. The feeling is the signal.

The feeling is what we feel in our hearts, and the relationships we build ... If the right feeling is not present, our discipline will not work. At best we will get temporary, begrudging compliance.

In essence, two understandings lie at the heart of parenting:

1. Our children always carry within them all the mental health and well-being, wisdom and common sense they will ever need. It only needs to be drawn out and nurtured in the kind of loving environment that will help it flourish.
2. Our children can access this innate health and wisdom by understanding that they have it, by seeing how they think in ways that keep them from realizing it, and by quieting or clearing their minds of such thinking so their health and wisdom are unveiled and available to guide their lives.

The same is true for parents. We can access our health, well-being and wisdom at any time to guide our parenting.

As trees in a forest naturally gravitate towards the light, when we create the kind of environment that draws out this natural health and wisdom, we naturally guide our children in healthy ways and away from unproductive feelings and disruptive behaviors.

no biting, no kicking, no pinching, no hitting. alex, no hair-pulling. bella, no bear-hugging.

dad i brought you your underwear. i need you to get up and fix the dvd player.

it's not a kid show but i'm a kid who watches it.

i used to exercise and work around the house til exhaustion, now i'm pretty much just awake til exhaustion.

The founding prophet of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, started polygamy because he said it was a revelation from God. And so he and other elders in the church took dozens of wives, many of them in their early teens ... the only reason the church stopped sanctioning polygamy was because the government told them they had to. So? God was wrong? God answers to the American government?

Mormons believe that polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife ... If Mormons truly believe their religion they have to believe that polygamy is their destiny, so why are they always trying to distance themselves from it?

I thought of you today when a young man started telling me about why children had to wait. Part of the reason had to do with money, which made some sense, although no one will ever have enough money to have kids. Then, he told me that a little girl "tossed her cookies" in church, yesterday. It was "nasty", he said. I sent him the link to your site, and told him to come talk to me after he'd taken a look at the babies of an avowed .... What? .... Perfectionist? .... Wild-eyed crazy? .... Idealist of the first order?

First, let no one rule your mind or body. Take special care that your thoughts remain unfettered. One may be a free man and yet be bound tighter than a slave. Give men your ear, but not your heart. Show respect for those in power, but don't follow them blindly. Judge with logic and reason ...

you can't be a leader if you don't know where you're going.

If there is a recurring theme in (President James) Garfield's diaries it's this: I'd rather be reading. That might sound dull and perfunctory, but Garfield's book fever was a sickness. Take, for example, the commencement address he delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. Traditionally, these pep talks to college graduates are supposed to shove young people into the future with a briefcase bulging with infinitive verbs: to make, to produce, to do. Mr. Loner McBookworm, on the other hand, stands up and breaks it to his audience, the future achievers of America, that the price of the supposedly fulfilling attainment of one's personal and professional dream is the irritating way it cuts into one's free time. He tells them,

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure - the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

the only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word "dude." Keep in mind that at that moment Garfield was a presidential candidate. The guy who theoretically wants the country's most demanding, hectic, brain-dive-denying job stands before these potential gross national product producers advising them to treat leisure "as your gold, as your wealth, as your treasure." As Garfield left the podium, every scared kid in the room could probably hear the sound of the stock market crashing him back to his old room at his parents' house where he'd have plenty of free time to contemplate hanging himself with his boyhood bedsheets.

wow, you have really ... ethnic hair.

last night was a troy commemorative evening. stopped at the asian market 2 miles away to pick up a tin of cafe du monde. warmed up the barbecue while brewing a tall glass of the delicious liquid crack. tossed a couple of porterhouse steaks on the grill for just the right amount of time and plowed through the whole thing. one hour later, an appetite refreshing no-wiper followed up with a bowl of ice cream on the deck.

now i feel like i'm at home.

oh no ... i don't think so ... well maybe once ... in college ... but i was drunk ... and trying not to look ... or trying not to notice at least.

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has specials needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and i won't go to prison.

Considerable evidence suggest that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods - such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job - then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer - and happier - lives.

During pretrial hearings, Ron's behavior in the courtroom served to underscore his lawyers' contention that he was mentally incompetent. He appeared with a cloth sign attached to the seat of his prison jumpsuit that read, EXIT ONLY; his attorneys explained that he wore the sign to ward off the Mormon angel Moroni, who Ron believed was an evil homosexual spirit trying to invade his body through his anus. He believed that this same sodomizing spirit had already taken possession of Judge Hansen's body, which is why Ron made a point of shouting profanities at the judge and addressing him with such epithets as "Punky Brewster" and "f*cking punk."

Under the new rules, Matilda was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn't present, and she had to wear a dress at all times. The children were pulled out of school and forbidden to play with their friends. Dan decreed that the family was to receive no outside medical care; he began treating them himself by means of prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies. In July 1983, when their fifth child was born, a son, Dan delivered the baby at home and circumcised the boy himself.

They began raising much of their own food, scavenging the rest from dumpsters behind grocery stores, where stale, unsold bread and overripe produce were regularly discarded. Dan turned off the gas and electricity. No publications of any kind were allowed in the home, except Latter Day Saints books and magazines. Dan even got rid of all their watches and clocks, believing the should "keep time by the spirit." When Matilda disobeyed Dan, he spanked her.

Spank was the verb Dan used. According to Matilda, the blows he delivered felt more like "thumps". And when he thumped her, he often did it in front of Dan's mother, his brothers, and all their children. Afterward, he warned Matilda that if she continued to disobey, she would be forced out of the marriage without her children - who, according to the principles elucidated in The Peace Maker, were the father's property.

Dan also announced that he intended to engage in spiritual wifery at the earliest opportunity. And the first woman he proposed taking as a plural wife was Matilda's oldest daughter - his own stepdaughter.

hey, where's jesus and all his people.

With my pride in one hand, I walked balls first, brains last, into over extending myself.

he stopped to return some unused clay pigeons from the bear gap pig roast.

dad, come here and smell my diarrhea. it will die you.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse; to keep you you.

...

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.

How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.