Here I am, safe and sound, full of vim and vigor. It's 6am. Going to take the best little canine in the world for an early morning walk. Words to approximate how I feel: relieved, happy, enthused, good tired, grateful. Nothing over-the-top, just low key, deep seeded and wonderful. Perfect. For the first time in forever I don't have to be in a hurry. I don't have to have the pervasive anxiety, always wondering, will I ever have a life that I want? When will my life begin? So good, and it's just beginning.

Men, said the Devil,
are good to their brothers:
they don't want to mend
their own ways, but each other's.

-a "gruk" by Piet Hein

from Wikipedia:

"A grook ("gruk" in Danish) is a form of short aphoristic poem. It was invented by the Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein (he wrote over 7,000 of them, published in 20 volumes). Some say that the name is short for "GRin & sUK" ("laugh & sigh" in Danish), but Piet Hein said he felt that the word had come out of thin air. His gruks first started to appear in the daily newspaper "Politiken" shortly after the Nazi Occupation in April 1940 under the signature Kumbel Kumbell. The poems were meant as a spirit-building, yet slightly coded form of passive resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II. The grook are characterized by irony, paradox, brevity, precise use of language, sophisticated rhythms and rhymes and often satiric nature."

I like this one too:

DRIVE ON
Schadenfreude Grook
Flare spoor, white powdery burns:
Like funerals without the urns.
Mark the passages of lives before eyes
And the uttering of inhuman cries.
Still we're always glad to see'um,
Cause it means we didn't be'em.
— Anon.

one more, by Piet Hein:
ROAD SENSE

God save us, now they're murdering
another winding road,
and another lovely countryside
will take another load
of pantechnicon and car and motorbike.
They're busy making bigger roads,
and better roads and more,
so that people can discover
even faster than before
that everything is everywhere alike.

Here's a bunch of them, replete with charming illustrations.

"Newarthill Primary School
3.2.04
Dear Itchy Coo,


We were aw chuffed tae bits that you came tae visit us on Monday. Before you came it was a dreich day but you made it a bonnie day.

You made us start birlin and touchin oor heids and also booncin on oor hunkers. It was like an earthquake when we aw lowped thegither the school nearly fell doon. Ah was fair wabbit (in other words, puggled) fae aw the shooglin. Ah think ah slapped ma bahookie a wee bitty hard but it was still guid.

You were cheery and funny when we were listenin tae you speakin Scots. When you had tae shoot the craw, we were smilin like bylt haddies.

Aw the best frae P6."

Kast Zeteltje, 1950



Paul McCobb



George Nelson for Herman Miller Clock, 40s



Paul McCobb, 1950s

1. Writing a treatment for a Twilight Zone episode. There are, unknown to the viewers or characters, actually more than one Twilight Zone plots taking place on top of one another, a ten car pile-up of situations and twist endings. If executed properly this plot when completed could open up a hole in the fabric of reality (not in the story - in reality-reality). I'm almost afraid to go through with this one. The further I get into it, the scarier it becomes, knowing what could happen.

2. Make the least fun coloring book ever and distribute it to children. The pictures they are meant to color are drawn from antique books (particularly architectural and natural history drawings). The children will be so bummed out.

3. Silk flower displays made from black and white silk. I think these will be very pretty. One of my biggest peeves growing up was that my mother kept fake flowers and plants around the house, but never real ones. I think it would be useful to revisit some things from my past that I couldn't wait to forget, then totally own them.

This morning a woman at Ground Zero ordered a soy latte for her four year old daughter.

Just got back from Fargo. My efforts to find out more about the small town and countryside that my grandmother grew up around were thwarted. I asked questions, like "were there any weird people or people who didn't fit in around?" But all I got was the same story about when she met grandpa and took a train to Kentucky when he had German Measles and couldn't go to Europe for WW2 yet and then ended up going and she worked in a restaurant where the owner was so impressed that she could cut meat that he gave her a one dollar an hour raise. It's a nice piece of history to know, but really I could use others.

In Perham, my mother and I found a nice quilt store. The quilts ladies make these days don't do much for me. They all go for an old-timey traditional feel, but their quilts don't look anything like the ones my great grandmother made. They were strange and wonderfully cozy made from sugar sacks and old dresses and corduroy bits. I found some nice fat quarters of repro fabrics some mod looking ones and a few beautiful florals. Lots of them are perfect for my black and white quilt.

This Arne Vodder sofa and this lamp:

.

I've been trying to find out what happened to Ernest Mann. The ramshackle website that posted issues of the LFP stopped at 1996. There isn't much mention of him on the internet - fitting. I wondered if maybe he had retired, but suspected that at his age he was probably dead. It turns out that he was killed by his grandson in the trailer they shared. Such a sad end for both of them. I'm fascinated to know what happened exactly, those little details that only people who are very close to one another know. Of course, it's none of my business and I'll never know exactly.

http://www.cs.unca.edu/~edmiston/msrrt/1996/jun96.html#mann

and another notice,

"We are sorry to have to announce that author Ernest Mann has died, and under very tragic circumstances. On the evening of March 12, the 69-year-old Mann was bludgeoned to death by his 17-year-old grandson Eli B. Johnson. The troubled youth had dropped out of school in 1994. Unable or unwilling to live with either of his parents, Eli had been living with his grandfather on and off, sharing a trailer house in southeast Little Falls, Minnesota where the murder occurred. After the crime, Eli fled to a wooded area near town and took his own life with a .22 caliber handgun that had been stolen, probably by Eli, in a burglary months before. The tragedy was reported in the Morrison County Record, 3/17/96 and 3/24/96."

Ernest Mann's given name was Larry F. Johnson. I don't know why I've been so interested in him lately. However sincere he may have been, he was a pretty unexceptional person. He didn't leave anything behind to speak of -- I suppose he represents something elusive, a personal utopia that is available to anyone at any time and requires no money, no emotional investment into belonging to a group. Something like Buddhism I suppose: the ability to fully enjoy a beautiful spring day even if your whole world Is collapsing around you. I've been choosing to enjoy every day of my life while I sort out the details and it's nice.



I'm in the middle of a short story by Pär Lagerkvist called "The Eternal Smile". In it, the dead are hanging around in darkness, trying to recollect what was essential in their lives. It seems as if the more important they were in life, the less they can remember about it. Most of the dead are talking, trying to express to one another what they were while trying to hold on to it themselves. One character sticks with me: the man who spent his entire life attending a subterranean lavatory, handing out toilet paper for a penny. He remembers everything but doesn't feel compelled to tell the others in the afterlife. It seems trite, I know, but his humility not only preserved his true nature in tough times but allowed him to participate in life completely, not living in the past or future and in the story it's touching.