Not Written with an Erasable Pen!

When we were out on Saturday night, we stopped at Olsson’s (local book and record store chain) on the way home and I bought what I thought was the new Fiona Apple CD. It was late when we got back, and I was way busy on Sunday, so I didn’t get to open the package until last night. Would you know it was one of those combo DVD/CD things? Which says in teeny-weeny print on the label that it may not work in all CD players? What the heck? And of course it doesn’t work on my CD player and I refuse to sit at my computer at home to listen to this stupid thing. I didn’t think anything of it when I bought it because it was the only kind they had . . . but now I am way annoyed . . . I guess I should return it, but I feel kind of stupid because it does have a warning on the label, even though it was in tiny print . . .

Hope to be updating the sidebar with some new links soon, so you can fully see the breadth of randomness which my brain focuses on . . .

I only saw the last 15 minutes of VH-1’s “I Love the 80’s in 3D” but, darn, those stupid shows always suck me in. I don’t know, I guess seeing stuff from one’s childhood always makes one feel better. Remember erasable pens? They had those on the show, and I remembered instantly how much I hated them . . . remember how you would try to write with them and the ink would be real gloppy and smear all over the place, and when you’d try to erase the ink it would just leave a big stain on the paper . . . ick!

There seems to be eighty things going on at once . . . I must remember to breathe! I am sleeping better at night, thanks to my doctor, but the days are becoming quite overwhelmed with work. I do try to leave work at work, so I can try to fully decompress in the evenings . . . it is hard sometimes, though.

This weekend is the Marine Corps Marathon and Mr. Random is still deciding if he will do it or not. He really wants to . . . and he’s going to pick up his shirt and bib on Friday . . . but he feels really nervous, because he hasn’t trained as hard as he has in the past. I keep telling him that he doesn’t have to finish, but he says he knows that if he starts he will feel compelled to finish. Normally, I would tell him to just try again next year, but I know that if he doesn’t do it, I will hear about it from now until next October on how he SHOULD have run it . . .

I really like the imagery in today's poem . . . hope y’all like it, too:

The Pier Aspiring
Thomas Lux

See if you can see how far out it goes; see? You can't see the end!
I'd take you out there
but it's a six hour walk
and the work redundant: one board laid down after another.
When the sun is high
the boards are hot.
Splinters always pose a problem walking any other way but straight.
What keeps me working on it, driving piles,
hauling timber, what's kept my hand
on the hammer, the barnacle scraper,
what keeps me working through the thirst,
the nights when the waves' tops pound
the pier from beneath, what keeps me glad
for the work, the theory is, despite the ridicule
at the lumberyard, the treks with pails
of nails (my arms
2cm longer each trip), the theory
is this: it's my body's habit,
hand over foot, pay check to pay check,
it's in the grain of my bones,
lunch box to lunch bucket.
It's good to wear an X
on my back, to bend my back to the sky, it's right
to use the hammer and the saw,
it's good to sleep
out there — attached at one distant end
and tomorrow adding to that distance.
The theory
is: It will be a bridge.