Yearly Archives 2013

In 1966, following a humiliating 51-0 thrashing by longtime intersectional rival University of Notre Dame, University of Southern California head football coach John McKay consoled his dejected team in the locker room by telling them, “There are 750 million people in China who don’t even know this game was played.” (McKay, one of the wittiest football minds ever to pace a sideline, reportedly later said, “The next day, a guy called me from China and asked, ‘What happened, Coach?'”)

McKay’s comments are what’s called “putting things in perspective,” and let us at least hope and imagine the insight helped to ease his players’ minds for the briefest moment, before enduring the rigors of the post-mortem on the practice field the following week...

I have been off my beloved streets and more homebound than not for three days now, hobbled by what I fear is a broken little toe and amused hardly at all by the irony of every physical step being a pain while immersed deeply, from my reclining position, in the literature of walking. And while reading about walking is never as good as an actual walk, at least it does not require 10—or even any—functioning toes to go about its business.

These are the consolations a devout walker clings to when denied his daily wanderings.

Such a simple thing, a walk is, yet with such overwhelming evolutionary force behind it. In her Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit traces the invisible evolutionary string pulling us aright from our four-legged ambulation to our eventual “bipedalism.”

After this life- and consciousness-shattering development, nothing was the same for homo sapiens and the earth we came ...

How is a poem like a prayer like a peach? In this season when farmer’s markets (if we’re lucky enough to live by them) and our backyard trees (if we’re luckier still) lavish us with an almost guilt-inducing abundance of textured, fleshy, bursting-with-juicypleasure peaches, what can we glean about this world—and our inner worlds— from their continued bequeathal of life-giving goodness that so richly satisfies both body and soul?

I remember when futurists were predicting not only that we’d be zipping around in our own solo aircraft someday, but that we’d also get all the nutrients we need in a single pill. The first hasn’t yet come to pass and I don’t much care whether it ever does, but the second—wait wait, a world without peaches?

Not my world, not now, not ever.

And to come across the poem From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee, I think it is safe to surmise not his world, either.

This achingly ...

Too much fun, too many fine memories & associations, too much heart-gladdening goodness & grooviness not to share this trio of songs on this glorious NorCal morning. You no doubt have your own favorite songs of the season, your own lovingly tended images of tops down, sand in every nook and cranny of your skin, barefootin’ and bare whatever-else. Savor them, indulge, slow the hell down for just a minute or two or quite a few more—it’s a good day for it.

Happy solstice, dear readers–now get going on that epic amblin’ & shamblin’ along that restores and reminds us how thoroughly life is worth livin’.

O.K., this is more like it. You know: It. The peace, the glow, the warm enveloping vibe spreading through your body & soul like a sweet dreamy transfusion, a triple dose of calm, clarity, cohesion.

Exhaling now, are we? Nice ‘n easy, sip a bit o’ lemonade, let the inhale just follow all natural-like, while these geetar and fiddle and bass players turn us a tune?

Ahhhhhh…yesssss….

No alcohol. (Dry county, not a brown bag nor slightly deranged looking character in sight. And no bar noise spilling out onto the square louder by the hour.)

No amps. (Acoustic county, not a plug nor sound console to be seen on the lawns nor under the gazebos and porches that host maybe 100 or so musicians in variously sized groupings and affiliations on any given night in this music-drunk Ozark town.)

Mountain View is in this way a dream, a kind of still life artwork, a Thomas Kinkade portrait of a country and its ways th...