thundering thursday

the sign of the homeless veteran said ‘anything will help.’ i gave him the hair straightner heather asked me to pick up.

just kidding. thought i’d play that one for laughs.

i’ve rearranged my friends online. now i pine for a cheeseburger. aren’t you sorry you tuned in?

a trip to Augusta, GA and 4 more office days left…

then i’ll blink and find myself in another nation.

reckless

good form, kid. now let me try.

Monster Jam

create your own explanation…

3 am

fell asleep on the couch tonight. i invited it i suppose. this being, afterall, labor day weekend and i responding to not having to work tomorrow (now today) by not putting myself to bed in my bed. this is how i carouse these days.

now with that wifi signal trekking out from some neighbor’s abode at a robust three bars i find myself surfing…

i start here. mattblum.com.

according to his ‘about’ section, matt blum has been doing photography for 3 years (maybe it’s more now and he just hasn’t updated his bio). my response to that is ‘are you kidding me?!’ the images are unreal. i get stuck on his photoblog everytime i visit. usually a couple of weeks have gone by since my last look, so i can just trace his days of shooting starting from the end and moving backward. it’s clear this is what he’s meant to do.

then after checking email i find this link. www.spu.edu/prospects/grad/academics/mfa/index.asp.

seattle pacifica has graduated their first cohort from their young, low-residency, creative writing MFA program. congrats grads.

which brings me to me. after all what is a blog for, if not for the public airing of a narcissistic diary keeper?

i pulled out an old issue of The Sun on Saturday. If you’ve never seen it, do check it out sometime. It’s my favorite magazine ever. No ads. Usually a main interview, some fiction, some poetry and stark black and white photography. And other incredible features such as a place for the readers to send in thoughts and anecdotes based on the issue’s theme. and then there’s “Sunbeams,” the last page, it’s full of famous quotes from mostly famous folks, also grounded in the issues theme. How appropriate that on this weekend, i pick up the issue that was based upon the idea of work.

Here are some notable sunbeams:

Find a job you like and you add five days to every week. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it, but because he can’t think of anything else to do. — W.H. Auden

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy. — William Faulkner (read this and then heard this quote on the radio, later on saturday).

“What is my job on the planet?” is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over an over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else’s job and not even know it. And what’s more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and mabe a prisoner of it as well. –Jon Kabat-Zinn

If a man is called a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Appropriate that I found these in a previously overlooked issues of The Sun, first because it’s labor day, right? Appropriate second because at the end of September, I will be leaving my position at White House Custom Colour. Expect our national ad tagline to change from “It’s all here.” To “It’s all here, except Phil,” come October. Okay maybe not.

But I again find myself looking down the business end of that “now what?” shotgun. Aside from some time in Mexico with H (“Well we knew that,” says Mom), I’m looking pretty cautiously at options. Tonight the two ideas were either to become the next Matt Blum or the next Flannery O’Connor. How about the next Philip Hussong answers the choir of positive thinkers, self-help pop-psychologists, and well wishers.

But really, is 29 too late to be a prodigy? i’m certain there’s a colony somewhere, where mere exposure to its inhabitants could infect you with genius.

at any rate whatever tonight’s waking dreams are, i was reminded early in the day (now yesterday) of another one time dream. i remembered it while listening to an incredible young jazz saxaphonist. i’ve told this to a few people over the years, most recently a photographer friend in kansas city, who had a good laugh at the image. it’s a bit of reminder of how i take on dreams, and have done ever since i was little.

i chose the saxophone in 7th grade because i loved the idea of this picture: it’s in black and white mind you. a man sitting in the windowsill with all the neon of the city below blinking up at him. he is wearing wool baggy pants held up by suspenders and a white ribbed under shirt, what they call a wifebeater now, which i find to be a horrifying name. he has a hat on, a fedora, slanted off kilter and down slightly so one eye is concealed by the brim. he blows into the horn sending the bluesy wail out into the city air, sending his soul out along with each heavy sigh of a note. this was going to be me.

in reality i was horrible at the sax. i didn’t like the taste of the reed, nor the feel of vibrations against my teeth, nor the spit collecting at the mouthpiece and valve, nor the john philip sousa-style songs we played. and i found out i wasn’t really much of a musician. my brother got that gene from our father. i got the distracted, yet deep in thought slash daydream gene instead. whaddya gonna do?

i suppose you have to give it a shot, anyway. blow on the horn and see what comes out. awkward squaks and all.