Dots

It's late, and I've had my Pop Tarts. The actual name brand Pop Tarts are better than the Target knockoffs. I'm kind of surprised.

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I've got not much of anything to share. Still, this compulsion nags at me.

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Total money spent on car repairs this week: $1100

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Wolfboy won't be in school tomorrow, so we'll spend some quality time together. Well, after I work on the leaves, and maybe on the van a bit too.

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Good info from Toland on the 100 songs list. I love "30 Days" by Chuck Berry.

And somehow I've not yet heard Opeth. I need to rectify that.

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From Larry Brown’s novel, A Miracle of Catfish:

He stood there and felt the wind stirring in his thick hair. The leaves on the big pecans were starting to waft up and show their paler undersides, and he saw a bolt of pure white light up the inside of a gray cloud far off. Deep thunder rolled booming out of the sky echoing again and again and the wind picked up as the ceiling blackened and moved his way. Birds fled before it, scattering in the wind, wavering, dodging in its path. The sky rumbled and Cortez saw the beauty of the world God made.

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THEGIRL turns four next month! She only tells us every single day that her birthday is TOMORROW. She's more than once announced this to, say, a daycare teacher as we walked out. And the teacher would always say something nice, even as we parents shook our heads like our child was some tiny escapee from an asylum.

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Got the heavy bag mounted in the garage, again. I got a genuine mount for it this time, so hopefully it won't come crashing down, again.

As soon as THEGIRL saw it back up, she smacked it with both fists and yelled, "Krav maga!"

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Some things get said, some don't. Sometimes the things that don't mean just as much as the things that do.

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Anyone have any idea how the latest High On Fire is?

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Forgive the long quote, but I find this passage from a recent Rolling Stone article about Dr. Drew Pinsky to be fascinating:

His own fame rising, he decided to study the idea of celebrity itself as a kind of personality disorder. Along with Dr. Mark Young, a colleague of his at USC, Pinsky spent a few years surveying famous people with a respected test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. They interviewed 200 stars -- LOVELINE guests were grilled during commercials -- and the result was the first empirical, academic treatise proving that celebrities are in fact substantially more narcissistic than the rest of us.

Of course, this seems an obvious conclusion -- until Pinsky gets talking about it, at which point he launches into his theory about the Way We Live Now. "I believe something has shifted," Pinsky says. "Frankly, something substantial happened when we devleoped antibiotics and hormonal contraceptives. Before 1950, almost half of American families could expect a child to die. Way more women could expect to die during childbirth. Living past fifty was sort of extraordinary. Now death and dying don't really exist for us. We don't need to deal with it. And then with birth control, sexuality became unhinged from a biological reality. Throughout human history, sex carried with it heavy consequences. It could kill you. Suddenly we were unhinged from that, and I think our culture has been rattling ever since. In 500 years, people will say the biological circumstances of human life changed profoundly, and it took them 150 years to figure it out. They'll say everyone became narcissistic, obsessed with instant pleasure, they stopped taking care of their children, and all hell broke loose." A meditative pause. "Listen, in the days of Freud, narcissism was a footnote in psychological journals. Now it's the standard personality of our culture. Nothing but grandiose narcissistic thinking everywhere!"

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Add Pinsky to my Man Crush list.

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The dots don't always connect like we wish they would. Turns out, sometimes a curved line is appropriate.

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BB's current therapy: "Set It Off" by Audioslave

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From Barry Hannah’s introduction to A Miracle of Catfish:

He told me he had introduced bigger, faster-growing Florida bass minnows into the pond where he let me fish. I fished like God’s expert in the following years and caught exactly one Florida bass one happy afternoon alone. (Rubber bream minnow with spinner.) For that fish I at last say thanks to my gone pal. He is buried beside his infant daughter at this pond on family land.

It’s that last line that rattles me. Here's why.

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Good night.