I try to go for a long walk (6 – 7 miles) every morning and then a shorter walk (about 4 miles) every evening. I try to time my evening walks so that I catch the sunset over the Mississippi River – they’re pretty stunning and last night was no exception. Sometimes I’ll share the…
Why I Moved to Memphis
Nearly every summer for the past 16 or 17 years I spent the third Saturday in July at an all-day blues picnic in Morrisville, PA. The picnic is sponsored by The Bucks County Blues Society, which claims to be the oldest, continuously operating blues society in the country. It’s not a terribly old organization –…
Reading Alone
Reading is a solitary activity. There are ways to make it less solitary such as book groups and, I suppose, even audio books. But technically, it is a solitary activity. I’m not a student of the science or art of reading, I don’t know what happens in the brain during the process, and I’m too…
Stuff
Materials, supplies, or equipment used in various activities. To dunk (basketball). Writing, discourse, talk, or ideas of little value. Trash. To fill by packing things in. Random things. According to Wikipedia, Stuff is a New Zealand news media website owned by Stuff Ltd and the biggest media website in New Zealand, with a monthly unique…
Chewing the Cud
Cows are ruminant animals and must chew their food twice in order to digest it properly. They spend nearly eight hours of their day chewing their cud (food softened by saliva, swallowed, moistened by digestive fluids, and then “regurgitated” back up for a second round of chewing). Mentally, I can be a lot like a…
Sunsets and a Little Swagger
I spent my afternoon reading and editing some of my older posts. I also revised and still didn’t send the email to my ex-fiancee that I mentioned in my earlier post. There’s a good chance I won’t send it. When I’ve reached out in the past a few different things happen. First, I almost immediately…
Living with Grace
With only one cup of coffee in me and wanting to get outside before the heat set in, I re-read yesterday’s post and a few others, skipped reading the news, and was out of the apartment before 7:30am. It was an intense walk. I was thinking about a lot of different things, seemingly disjointed things….
Freedom Rock
Apologies up front – this post has nothing to do with the musical box set or the amazingly cheesy commercial for the box set… “turn it up, man.” I honestly have no idea where my day went today. I spent a lot of time this morning reading through old posts, thinking about having to move,…
Is it FOMO or Something Deeper?
Tonight, I was scrolling through Facebook, killing time as usual, when I came across a post from a friend who is out hiking in the Pacific Northwest. We’re not close friends, more like acquaintances from BBQs. Every year she goes on a hike or adventure like this. She goes alone. Her husband stays back with…
There Is Always Hope…
I’ve mentioned (and lamented) my new, old habit of wasting time on social media and non-social media (or I guess what could just be called regular old media – news). Entire hours go by, which bleeds into the day, and the next thing I know that cat is bugging me to feed him dinner. The…
Stickman at Sunset
Given the fiction I was composing earlier this morning, one might have thought I’d have spent my afternoon writing. One would be wrong. After my deliciously simple lunch, I had coffee and read a little bit. It occurred to me that this morning I read poetry, which might have gotten the creative juices going. This…
Quietly After
It was definitely thunder that I heard…. the sky was clear, but something was brewing. In lots of places around the country, summer brings pop-up thunderstorms. My experience in Memphis is that these things come out of nowhere pretty quickly. I stood on my balcony for a few minutes watching the lightening, and then the…