December 2011
Seattle Culinary Artist Dies at 34 →
A close friend and family member of mine lost his sister, Christina, last night. She was an extraordinary person in many ways and a lot of people I love dearly are in an almost unimaginable amount of pain today. Please keep them in your thoughts and hearts in the days and weeks ahead.
The amount of knowledge I’m supposed to have as a a parent is truly astounding. You never know what random questions you’ll be expected to know the answer to from an ever curious 5 year old and her hyper verbal 2 1/2 year old brother. But oh, there will be questions!
A sampling of things I was expected to know yesterday, for example:
“Why does this song not having singing...
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of...”
– William Blake, Songs of Innocence
“Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you...”
– A.A. Gill, “Fatherhood” - from Is Further Away
(via winesburgohio)
“The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on...”
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
a bright wall in a dark room.: It's A Wonderful... →
brightwalldarkroom:
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our…
A Word on Statistics Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. Unsure of every step: almost all the rest. Ready to help, if it doesn’t take long: forty-nine. Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: four — well, maybe five. Able to admire without envy: eighteen. Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:...
WatchWye Oak (w/ help from Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg) covering The Kinks’ “Strangers”…
2 tags
“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time;...”
– Charles Dickens
Love Poem With Toast
Some of what we do, we do to make things happen, the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc, the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do trying to keep something from doing something, the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting, the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery powering our passage through the days, we move, as we call it, forward,...
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
Writing out Christmas cards to people today made me realize how very much I miss writing letters. Back in high school I met a girl at a summer camp and we spent the next few years communicating almost entirely through letters (and recorded audio tapes). When I met new friends in Europe the summer following my high school graduation (1996), we didn’t exchange email addresses, because nobody...
1 tag
“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
2 tags
So please, remember me finally And all my uphill clawing, my dear But if I make the pearly gates I’ll do my best to make a drawing Of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl An angel kissing on a sinner A monkey and a man, a marching band All around a frightened trapeze swinger.
- Iron & Wine, “The Trapeze Swinger”
3 tags
1 tag
Everyone is broken in some way, and the point of life is not to go through it without getting broken somehow, but rather to learn how to pick up the pieces and reassemble them in some meaningful way. And to learn how to give thanks, continually, for the opportunity to do so.
1 tag
2 tags
The 26 Best Films of 2011 (The New Yorker) →
Number one? Miranda July’s The Future.
(Which I will finally get to see tomorrow night, time permitting. And I don’t care what the Miranda-haters say, I think she’s entirely brilliant.)
a bright wall in a dark room.: Keanu Reeves Week:... →
brightwalldarkroom:
YOU MIGHT BE A KING OR A LITTLE STREET SWEEPER, BUT SOONER OR LATER YOU DANCE WITH THE REAPER
by Michelle Said
I assume that you are familiar with Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, they of metalheaded duncehood and the time-travelling phone booth. And I will assume…
Michelle on Bogus Journey, aka The Seventh Seal II: Station!
1 tag
We grow, including the intellectual and the spiritual, without being deeply aware of it. In fact, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in...
ecantwell:
chriscantwell:
markbringelson reblogged your photo: In case you were wondering, here’s as much of the…
[Re: It’s a Wonderful Life] Ok, I suspect I understand why perfectly intelligent people like this film, but honestly I cannot stand it. Basically, I loathe it. Stewart is annoying as hell all the way through; one of his worst performances. The film itself was shot like a frickin’...
“I told a lie once in a verse. I said
I said I said I said ‘The heart will...”
– John Berryman, To Bhain Campbell
(via gowaltzing)
1 tag
Oh Yoko! - John Lennon
@BWDR →
A Bright Wall in a Dark Room has joined the Twitter masses. You know what that means. Follow us here!