Hey, Kitten, what's going on?

As Operation Esptein Fury is unleashed, all I can say from my privileged space is that I'm super lucky to be so busy at work - juggling 3 different audiences and courses, multiple times a day, with an added bonus of our team's all-hands onsite this coming week - that I can (and must) compartmentalize.

Well, mostly.  The siren song of social media keeps drawing me into the doomscrolling shoals, even as I try to distract myself with broken lab environments and Unrivaled playoffs.  I'm really getting too old for this shit.

On occasion, the kids have asked me what my favorite decade was.  Hands down, the 90s.  I was young, and full of optimism because the Cold War was over, so it really was a rocking time with as close an approximation to a peaceful world as I've ever known.

In a related vein, Sadie asked just this morning if Sam was pranking her when he said I'd met Bill Clinton.  I did!  Well, I shook his hand, at any rate, when he came to Burlington for a rally in September of '92.  

Pat Leahy introduced him, and proceeded to shout himself hoarse over the course of the event.  The following Monday at the office, I announced that I had shaken the hand of our next preznit.  One of the rare times I've been right about anything political.

And that makes me 1 (one) handshake away from Trump, Putin, and the Dalai Lama, so I got that going for me.

Pax.

An eighteenth century brain

In a twenty-first century head.

intellectus agens corvorum

Business of Ravens:

What are these ravens doing in our trees,
Calling on doom and outworn prophecies?—
Flying in threes.

Their sinister shadow, their funereal wing
Blots the fresh color out of everything.
They do not sing,

Nor shake their throats like all the other birds;
But, in cracked monotones or broken thirds,
Their crooked words

Cowardly and contemptuous are thrown
At scarecrows who, with business of their own,
Let them alone.

Louis Untermeyer.

Мама, я знаю, мы все сошли с ума

Mama, I know we all went crazy.

Keeps on Slippin'

Time:

There are places things go to be forgot—
the tip of your tongue, the back of your mind—
like retirement colonies (the Linger
Longer Mobile Home Park), like the bridges
suicides spurn, like the last spot 

you remember seeing your car keys.
One of them is memory, city of ghosts.
We have catch phrases for them, but they're still
uncaught. Storage is easy and retrieval
hard, but no salesman tells you this 

because the product bought you long ago.
Me too. We're like the perfume in a room
a woman left yesterday for the last
time. We're here. We're stale but sensible.
We need somebody to remember us. 

William Matthews.

#throwbackthursday

Nary a snowflake on island this winter, which would've greatly disappointed Bailey.  (Feb '22) 

Bless your soul, you've got your head in the clouds

Is this song about AI?

And You Are...?

To an Intra-Mural Rat:

You make me think of many men
Once met to be forgot again; 
     Or merely resurrected
In a parenthesis of wit,
That found them hastening through it
     Too brisk to be inspected.

Marianne Moore.

Now somebody, anybody, everybody scream

In HS, my friends and I were walking by a public tennis court singing, "we don't need no water..." and these older folks (likely about my current age) scolded us for our cursing.  We meekly said, "sorry," they went back to their game, and the roof burned on...

Pacem

Desert:

Where there's a river,
that tastes of direction. 

Where there's an orchard,
that says survival. 

Where there's a desert,
that changes everything, 

as if earth hadn't wanted
to fill only her own need. 

Patricia Hooper.

Our Fortune Grows Each Day, It Multiplies, It Lights Our Way

Fun fact: one of Sadie's besties lives in a yurt.

Somnus

To Sleep:

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,

      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,

      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close

      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,

Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws

      Around my bed its lulling charities.

Then save me, or the passed day will shine

Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—

      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords

Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;

      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,

And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

John Keats.

Friend is beyond redemption

Friend is Renegade.  He must be cast out.

And the Noise Was Heard Afar Off

The Old Weep Gently:

These old trees
Sigh in every leaf,
Look down their trunks
As if back down the years.
Old knots stay
Where limbs were torn away—
Little fist-rubbed faces
Of gargoyle grief ;
While shadows
Slip down the trunks
Like tears. 

Yvor Winters.