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Showing posts from March, 2013

The Life of Brian

I hope no one ever makes a documentary of my life. Not because I feel incapable of great deeds or am unsure of their coming. Rather, it seems that every biography papers over the indecision, angst, and apprehension that I sincerely hope has plagued the luminaries before me. I understand that Ernest Hemingway's bad poetry and Jeff Tweedy's shitty mix tapes make for poor prose, yet it makes relating difficult. The biography kick I have been on recently has made this obvious. A paragraph about lost years capping off a lengthy list of dates and places intended to sum up a childhood and family history, the dryness of which may only be topped by your neighborhood police blotter. Perhaps I'm not the target demographic, but if the telling of a lionized figure's life is not inspiring future genereations of partially-molded minds then what, praytell, is the point? We either need better authors or better youth. I suppose this entry forgoes the latter conclusion by its very e

The lament of an aerial naturalist.

As the sun set just beyond the horizon, the curvature of the earth became thunderously apparent. Less so in the bend of the horizon, but rather in the gradual transference of orange to blue in grand striations. The lights of a familiar city receded as the creep of rural America extended far beyond areas best remembered. It's hard to imagine manifest destiny fulfilled when in flight. It seems less likely that man has conquered nature with his feverish grappling when viewed aerially. Rather, I see a species huddled in mounds and clumps, steeled against an enveloping blackness far afield of these hives of commerce. A journey into these dominant wilds with pack and pole only reveals this precarious state. And yet we journey on, perhaps for this very reason.