rambles, continued.

Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti.
So we begin our chant. Our prayer. Our boon. Whatever it is, we begin with peace and end with peace.
We must at least attempt peace and mindfulness every day, especially on the days when all we want to do is take up the sword and torch and visit fire and blood upon our enemies, especially on those days, and oh, oh they are many. This blog started as a sandbox for me, an experimental place where things will come into being and then be shaped by me, where I will learn to share my work and be quite willing to let people stomp all over it, because it is just sand in the end. In the beginning, it was rock. But now, some thousands of centuries later, it ends up as sand. That there are industries devoted to making sand, harvesting it from otherwise inert and strong rock, speeding up the geologic timescale--which can take epochs to fully realize itself in the battering down of coastlines into something soft and warm on which half naked Brazilians can lounge with ease--into the course of an afternoon's work. I've been to gravel pits, limestone quarries. I find them equally terrifying in their grand design--harvest the very rocks of which our civilizations have been built...but on a scale that outdistances anything that has come before. Such is the march of progress, the March of Time, as the newsreels would say in the smoke-filled darkness of a wartime theater while Spitfires protected the skies. I realize that the March of Time was, if memory serves, exclusively an American thing, but...well, maybe they sent it over for servicemen to watch before they launched the great Crusade on Europe. My grandfather was a part of Eisenhower's Crusade, landing at Normandy on the first day, getting knocked off the boat by shrapnel which he carried in him until his death in 2004, and surviving to see St. Lo and the Bulge along with the last push into Germany. His bayonet and hat, all that remain of his wartime kit (everything else having been given away by an aunt to whom I still don't speak to for that and other reasons) sit on my nightstand, reminding me of my origins. But enough about that. I want to dwell on...different things, happier perhaps, perhaps more depressing (thanks largely to the major depressive disorder that I try to silence with the proper pharmacist-combined chemicals, and also to my natural Irishness, which tends towards the depressive) things if that is where my mood and thoughts lead me. I haven't written on here in a very long time, but that doesn't mean I've just been off avoiding writing. Far from it, in fact. I've been firing up the typewriter from time to time and remembering the dark old days when I would spend hours punching out an essay on that machine just for the fun of it. None of the essays survive, or if they survive, they have been secreted away, perhaps like the texts found by Poggio...which were never really hidden at all, just kind of sitting on the shelf to the left of everything currently being read. Poggio...makes it seem like a treasure hunt, and to the thinking man, that is exactly what it must have been. Without him, well, I shudder to think where we would be. I probably wouldn't be writing this, that's for sure.
Interlude:
My mother, addressing my father in the next room: "Hey, do you think if we start going at it really loud, John will close the door and make the light in his room stop keeping us awake?" Yep, this is my family, this is why I want to get a place anywhere in the world with Alex and return here once or twice a year to play with the dog and dig through the trove of books I'm reasonably sure I'll leave hidden away somewhere.
Now I'm watching From Dusk 'till Dawn--I actually fast forwarded to the scenes in the bar...largely because the first part of the movie is rather droll once you've seen it two or three times.
And now, before I cut this ramble short, a picture of my  bookshelf...guess which one it is?

http://www.lookshelves.com/lookshelves/?currentPage=3