pirates

Saw Pirates of the Carribean last night and it had some really good scenes. I think this one is called, "End of the World." Keira looked fine. While the first Pirates is my favorite, Keira looked so fantastic and had such a strong role in this one that I would recommend it. There are some embarrassingly ridiculous moments in all three of these movies but I guess that's inevitable when the objective is to squeeze out amusement park dollars. It would be great to see Keira as a pirate queen with an all female crew wreaking havoc on all challengers and a pair of Jamaican sweethearts (female).
Johnny Depp is quite good again. He and Cary Grant have to be two of the best male actors of all time. The more textured the script, the better Johnny does. End of the World has another tight script. The weakness seems to be in the producers trying to force some unrelated element into the plot. In the first Pirates, why did they put the "skeleton ballet" in? It's just good business?

WINNERS

Last night was beautiful, clear and brilliant. A National Championship was won. Now winning isn't the only thing in life. Winning is fun. Winning is important, though it isn't as important as understanding nature. Here's the list:

LOVE

NATURE

WINNING

Keep these close to your heart and high on your mind and you will do well sister.

Here's to CHAMPIONS, the 2007 Georgia Tech Women's Tennis Team!

kayakayaka

Last Saturday, I went for my first kayak ride. There's a place close to here that rents kayaks for twenty bucks for a five mile trip. It took me about two and a half hours to complete. It was a lot of fun. I flipped over in less than five minutes and was totally soaked. Now these kayaks were open, not the typical kind that has legs contained. It was really too shallow for that type, but there were a few on the water. The neat thing about kayaks is that you can lean back, get real comfortable and paddle at the same time. It is tricky keeping balanced at times. It was only my first time and I had only one spill. I enjoyed it and will do it some more over the next few warm months.

happy hour

bad, bad, bad

I am sad now. A person who is gaining my respect so fast that soon it will become devotion seems to be leaving blogging.
Goodbye. (tears)
More power to YOU. Right is always right. I'm extremely impressed by your tenacity at staying true to your path.
I might not be able to help you at all, but never hesitate to ask.

b and c = a

She asked me why b and c didn't have the same information as a. I explained the information for a was the same for b and c. Simple enough. Heck no. She goes to the gm. Gm comes to me. Says drafting needs to change. I explain the simplicity of the status quo with less drag on productivity. He agreed with my point. She's made a very big mistake. Hey, ya know right is right and it always will be. I know the numbers and she's got very small ones. I'm a team player. Don't ever go behind my back. So the question: Do we change to accomodate her? Or the other question: Does she get on board with the team plan? She starts looking for another place to be mediocre.
It was just so uncalled for in view of the total picture.
So who cares?

On the floors of tok yo oh
Or down in london town to go, go
With the record selection
With the mirror reflection
Im dancing with myself

Oh dancing with myself
Oh dancing with myself
Well theres nothing to lose
And theres nothing to prove
I'll be dancing with myself

When theres no one else in sight
In the crowded lonely night
Well I wait so long
For my love vibration
And I'm dancing with myself

If I looked all over the world
And theres every type of girl
But your empty eyes
Seem to pass me by
Leave me dancing with myself

So lets sink another pink
cause itll give me time to brink
If I had the chance
I'd ask the world to dance
And I'll be dancing with myself William Idol

somewhere

cause it's the new Mother Nature

taking over

it's the new Splendid Lady

come to call

it's the new Mother Nature

taking over

she's getting us all The Guess Who

Who pushed us inside? Why did we go? What is this definition of sanity all about? Nah, wouldn't understand it anyway. Just a bunch of words without heart, soul, or meaning. Commercial viewing and zeroed nutritional content on shelf upon shelf upon shelf. Oh yeah, another new plastic sign.

I'm one weird flippin' cat.

Mom

We koa'd our way across the USA. Mom made us these cool tote bags with elastic shoulder straps. She made 'em in her sewing room before we left for the Grand Canyon trip. There were three different sized bags; the smallest was a little bigger than a hip pocket. I had rocks from all over the lower 48 in my big bag. Those bags served many duties over the years. They're still in her house. Those bags are a great example of incredible craftmanship. Made to last.
When we were at the Grand Canyon, Mom made us enchiladas. The light, tastey tortillas that she made were out of this world. I can't walk by tortillas today without remembering the meals from that trip. That trip has a lot of great memories. Mom wasn't just about cooking and sewing though. We were all little kids on that trip. Mom had planned an elaborate sight-seeing win a toy adventure game. She'd helped Bacchus' mom make one too. Bacchus' mom gave up and just handed 'em all over by Texas. Maybe we learned something about earning on that trip.
It was a fun trip and we've all laughed for years at some of the things that happened.
One year we went North. Dad stood at the edge of green field with a far off look on his face. It was a place called Gettysburg. I looked to where he was looking but didn't see what he saw. He was seeing regiments and squads and a disastrous charge. We mainly crawled over some cannons saying boom. The best memory from that trip was a breakfast that we had on a sandy campsite. We had stopped at this place that had huge sand dunes and cold ocean water. One day we picked blueberries that were near camp. We had blueberry pancakes the next morning. That place was called Cape Cod. There were a lot of good memories from that trip as well. Waking up with a warm sun, ocean breeze and hot blueberry pancakes is tough to beat, though.
Mom isn't just about cooking and sewing though. She is excellent at both. She worked and worked hard. She taught in the classroom and then became a media specialist. I think that I learned a lot about work ethic from her. We were still in elementary school and, while still teaching, she went back to school herself to get a Master's degree. I was impressed then and I'm amazed now. Mom gets things done. It's no mistake that MOM is WOW turned rightside up.
Thanks for a great childhood, Mom.
Much love, Endy.

humming

The day earned some sunshine early.

It began to rain before I made it to the creek.

Enjoyed a light show.

Then the rain broke long enough for a picnic.

Saw a water bird.

Got a little wet.

Zap

I had the best childhood friend a kid could have. His name was Zapthrus Zenith and he could turn a joke quicker than a politician can lie. He was drawing his own comics by the fourth grade. Zap had been born in Olympus but I didn't know him there. Oddly enough, we both ended up here. After the famunit moved from the green box, Zap only lived down the street and around the corner. We went from first grade to seniors together. He was one of the most insecure people I've ever known. He was probably the smartest. His dad never played sports with him. My dad was always playing sports with me. Zap and I loved american football more than anything on earth. We played football for hours, one on one, kiddo e kiddo. We played until exhaustion and neither asked nor gave quarter. When we were juniors in high school, we won a state championship in football. Zap was kinda skinny in high school but he had a monopoly on guts.
If we weren't playing sports, we were collecting baseball and football cards. We'd have 'em all lined up by teams in our rooms. They were sacred. We never had to say things like be careful or don't bend it. We stood in awe and respect at the luck and finesse of how each other could accumulate such prodigious collections of beautifully colored, thin cardboard. Zap gained an unfair advantage in the fifth grade. His dad opened a pharmacy and sold baseball cards. I never bought any cards there. Zap had already been through them and picked the ones he needed. You couldn't tell by looking at the pack. Like I said, Zap was smart. Zap was smart and skinny. I was lucky. Zap would stare in disbelief at certain cards that I had acquired and were, as yet, unattained by him. I was always taught and always believed that in life, a superior foe could be out hustled. You can't win every game, but quitters never win. I spent unseen hours sweeping my granddad's station floor and moving cases of oil for enough change to buy one more pack.
Behind our neighbors' house was the Bamboo Forest. Here the Universe was saved. Zap and I didn't seek gratitude; it was all in a day's work, ma'am. Evil hated us and our frequent visits to the Bamboo Forest. Evil hated to see us even coming in its direction. Evil did put up a good fight. Sometimes it took every ounce of energy in our evil-proof bodies to buy one more day of existence for the human race. You could kill a lot of evil with the right bamboo sword and a fierce warrior by your side. It's interesting that now kids sit in front of television consoles pushing buttons with prefabricated imagination before them. Maybe that's why evil is so prevalent today. It's probably because derelicts like us sit on our butts without doing anything about it.
Derelict or not, Zap was a great friend and we had a heck of a lot of fun growing up. (Not that we ever really grew up.)

I been trying hard to do what's right
but you know
I could stay here all night
and watch the clouds fall from the sky
because this river is wild The Killers

tutu

It was the fall of my fourth year and Olympus was far away. We had lived near a placid body of water in Olympus in a large villa. Now we lived, precariously perched on a hill, in a shoe, european styled, box. It was green though and that went a long way toward soothing my trauma. The people next door were really friendly, or so I thought. They smiled and laughed a lot. They showed me a room full of blue, red, yellow, white and green ribbons. There were pictures of horses on every wall. Tug was a year older than me and he didn't say much. I know why now. We spent a lot of time on the creek behind our boxes. The slope was so steep, you could practically lie back and slide down to the water. I don't remember why Tug's father wasn't ever there. Maybe he told me and I forgot or didn't understand. Maybe he just never talked about it. I do remember that he did everything that his older sisters, Penelope and Lulu, told him to do. I always thought they were pretty and fun to be around. Tug didn't think the same way though. I was looking for Tug one day when I saw Penelope, Lulu, and two other girls dancing on the pool. The pool was two houses over and sat on top of the ground. It had a cage around it and I always wondered if there might be a not so funny reason for that cage being there. There they were though, dancing on that plank that surrounded the pool and hanging on to the cage. Not having too pressing a schedule that day, I stopped looking for Tug and watched them dance. It sure did make me glad that I wasn't a girl. Aw, the goofy things you have to do to be a girl. I was just about to turn back toward my box with a very thankful heart when I realized that someone was standing close to me.
"Tug?" I hoped.
"Hey little Endy. Whatcha doing?" Lulu questioned with a tone that unsettled the Daniel Boone in me. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It was a look of weird happiness and it was unfamiliar. I turned away from those taunting eyes and looked at the now impossibly long distance between my little feet and our green box. I was not going to spend any energy answering her question.
"Do you want to learn to dance, Endy?" she asked. How goofy could girls be? Surely she knew that Daniel Boone didn't dance. I just shook my little noggin. Slowly I turned my view back toward the rockettes. They weren't dancing now. They were just giggling now like ... like a bunch of girls. They were intently watching Lulu and me and waving our way. Something was wrong, way wrong. As I turned to look back at Lulu she grabbed my forearm. Oh, for the love of a milkshake. This girl was touching me. I was ...I was forever humiliated. She was squeezing my foreman so tight that I thought it was going to snap.
"Well, WE are going to teach YOU how to dance. Yep, I guess today's your lucky day. Oh yeah, and we're going to put a pink tutu on you while we do it," she laughed visciously, as she pulled me toward the pool, with as much pleasure on her face as anyone I've ever seen in my life, so help me, Davy Crockett. Now I might have gone down there and danced a step or two just to see what was in that pool, and it probably would have made me a better person, but there was no buttermilkin' way that a bunch of girls were going to put a pink tutu on me. Lulu was laughing so hard that it shook my soul. I just turned into a tornado right there. I spun and twisted and jumped and fell and all over again with every ounce of everything that my little body had in it. She laughed the whole time and probably couldn't hold on to me because she was laughing so hard. I made it back to my green box though and to this day, have yet to worn a pink tutu. White and mauve, yes, but not pink. It's funny how hard a female can make little guys run.

do your duty
shake your booty

spring spin

I really do enjoy spring. I hope you enjoy it too. It's cool if you don't. One day you'll be dead and it will be just too bad that you didn't enjoy the moment. Yet I've only got so much time and a limited amount of brain juice to spin you around.

canoe

The sunshine pierced the clouds at about two-thirty this afternoon. I was able to canoe for a couple of hours. It is very good fortune that my father took me canoeing at a very young age. Canoeing is very simple and for me, that's the beauty of it. It is simply you and the water. There were not many people on the creek today. It rained most of yesterday and was overcast this morning and part of the afternoon. So weather kept a lot of people away. There might have been five fishermen out my way, which is pretty ideal for canoeing. Smooth water

while meeting my new bud,

Yvette. Now this little lady has it pretty good, keeping her trailer close. Wonder what she's gonna be doing tomorrow morning while I'm chasing dollar bills. Keep swimming, girl. Turtles have been in existence for 200 million years. Gotta be doing something right. She's probably about a year and a half to two years old. Looks like a box turtle, but she could be a snapper. Of course, she might be scrambling here and yon dodging air surveillance tomorrow.

SUPPORT

My heart is with Greensburg.

creek

I wasn't born here. I was born in Olympus and it never snowed there. Green Death was close and came out of the sky at night. Death was on our side. We were pretty skinny and very fierce. We never quit in Olympus and I never got over leaving. The worst thing about leaving Olympus was moving to a place that didn't have ice cream trucks. The musical, ice cream trucks that brought frozen heaven on a stick with looney lyrical tunes piped soothingly into developing medulla oblongatas leaping sprinklers and quickly dashing for coinage at the first note are fondly remembered. The drivers wore sharp, white clothing with white hats and shiney change dispensers. The ding-a-ling man cometh. The next worst thing about leaving O was moving to Bacchus' backyard. Now Bacchus is more fun than you can shake monkeys at but his betrayal is quick. We have the same grandmother. One Christmas at her house, he informed me which room the presents were in. I walked down the hall and opened the door. I didn't look in the room. I didn't want to know. Knowledge is over-rated. An hour or so later, Grandmother returned. The first words out of Bacchus' precious little mouth,
"Endymion looked at all the presents." Fatherjacker. Bacchus is fun, but his betrayal is quick. He drinks expensive wine and used to know silly, beautiful girls. He knows only one now and she's billboarding. As a man sows, so shall he reap. He dated Emotion briefly. She wasn't silly, but she was extremely beautiful. We had gone to see theatre together with Emotion and her sister, Passion. I thought Passion was very attractive and a few months later asked her for more time. We shared some time together but she said no and I never ask twice. Emotion lured me close months later.
"Passion might not like this," she said.
"Do you like this?"
"Yeah. Bacchus could take lessons from you," she said.

Augusta, Bacchus's mom, is elegance times twelve. Her face is symmetrical perfection with a faint hint of softness that prevents total blindness upon viewing. The hint is faint and merely a sculptor's illusion. I've often gotten lost in a private paradise of amber harvests and rose-petaled milk baths on proleterian shores of production while looking upon her beauty. She always treated me like the best chocolate nibble in the box always saved for special consumption. I have seen her rage and thanked my (beautiful) guardian angel's protective, titanium wings for covering my visibility. Bacchus says things sharp-tongued sometimes. We weren't that little or that big when he spoke with misplaced wit at his villa one day. Outside the sun was shining, but it was dimmed by the fury Bacchus had just incited in Augusta. I'm not sure if he miscalculated her humor or his but something went bad wrong and it went quickly. Augusta went about setting him straight and popped and tossed his sweet little self all across the room. I really found the intensity amusing (once I was certain that this was a solitary beating and had slipped into a nearby watercloset where I nearly laughed myself past silly and soiled loin cloth).
Bacchus is territorial, but hey, who isn't? We had a lot of good times together. I've learned many things from him. I learned how much more I prefer kindness to butt-kicking. I learned how much fun goofing off was from Bacchus and he is a good teacher. We have enjoyed much good wine and danced with intelligent women. We did have to dodge fire arrows once or twice but nobody chooses every step with perfection. Do they?
Now Bacchus' pappy ain't got no softness. Well, he does now but didn't when we had subhuman height. It was raining heavy drops one sleepy Saturday when Bacchus et moi decided we just absolutely, positively without equivocal shade had to perigrinate to Zimba's, the closest trading post on our global locators. It tweren't far. We made the painful mistake of not informing, though consciously, the full humans of our whereabouts. By the time we made it to the creek, we were already soaked through wet with zero thoughts about discipline and it made one hundred percent fun sense to ride the overflowing waters the rest of the way. In we jumped and the water was warm and fast. Sink, push off bottom, break surface, breath, repeat. We dolphined the rest of the way to Zimba's and whatever we needed and whatever we got faded quickly behind the eager thoughts of returning to the creek. Maybe we did backtrack a time or two and spent an extra moment more than was necessary. When we did return down the hill to Bacchus' villa, yep; Augusta met us halfway down. Tongue-lashed, I was completely sympathetic to Bacchus this time. After we had been marched into the kitchen and stood to attention at the refrigerator, white with a sporty black trim, Bacchus' pappy took off his belt and I knew that fun never wandered far from full human view. I took my licks and it felt like hades being napalmed. Visit to Zimba's: tanned ass. Creek dolphin swim: priceless.

ping-pong

She was fresh from the battle of lawn. Brown, leatherish weed-kicking boots and green bandannaed skull properly impassive to ignore desparate, anguished pleas for mercy, she stood.
Dropped in on Cleopatra yesterday burning into this morning. Her prominence has faded; her glory brightened. She can still light many candles with a clutched fist, tucked high and mighty. She spoke of Mercury and won me over for another thousand years. She spoke of justice and won my action. She spoke of Dreamgirl and won my imagination. She spoke of everything with the pace of a thoroughbred and the impact of a heavyweight.
We laughed silly, played ping-pong, cooked shrimp and ate watermelon. The watermelon was from Texas, the shrimp from Louisiana, the ping-pong from Mexico, and the laughter was from Tibet. No kickin' idea whence the foosball came. Talk of the unfed and distant shores, art, music, architecture, an unlucky brilliant brother-in-law, an unlucky derelict brother-in-law, and untainted childhoods chequered the conversation.

"a face I know is beautiful
with fire and gold of sky and sea
and the peace of long warm rain"

dimmed cool

My cousin, Mercury, could make lines dance and bend with his hand and a pen. Architecture he wanted to do at U. He hadn't planned on us burying him in the spring of his sixteenth year. What youth plans to be buried by their family? Our most gifted scion now grows to eternal lines in time. Shattered and red-eyed, we stared far off and away and wondered what we were doing the moment before we stood still. Beautiful, bright and fast, he pulled two thousand to the temple for a quiet, sad goodbye while not even breathing. Death looks like sleep on youth, odd and unpeaceful.
He had sat on my lap and heard outlandish tales. He stood poised and smiling at the door of my room when I taught at his school. He showed me his earring first, beaming. He cheered my tale on never giving up. He won at art and wrestling and girlfriends. Maybe he's still winning. Maybe he lost the only endeavor that ever matters. Either way, planet Earth is dimmed by the loss.
Sometimes we would just sit in the truck and eat the banana splits where we stopped. It was usually the three of us, Mercury, his brother and me. Sometimes Bacchus and Apollo were there. Sometimes we'd walk down railroad tracks and just laugh because Earth is beautiful and we were full of life. We stopped and photographed at trains. We sledded down empty, snow covered streets and listened to radiohead, the cure, cake. We fished on red clay banks. We all went to the beach the summer before that spring. Pure, crazy fun for a mess of rednecks with nothing much to lose.
Mercury whispered to me a few nights after the burial. He hasn't said anything since.
It only takes a moment to die.
"yet all experience is an arch
where through gleams that untraveled world
whose margin fades,
forever when we move."
Can you forget your muscles? Can you forget your poverty? Can you forget the thirty-eight cents shortchanged? Can you forget your best victory and brightest brilliance? Can you forget your beautiful imperfection? Did you prove your love this morning? Nothing in this world is more important, more relevant, more cool than your LOVE.