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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Aftermath


There is nothing more depressing than a pile of post-Christmas morning, unwrapped gifts. This is largely due to my belief that there is a Schrödinger's cat quality to wrapped gifts. They hold so much more promise wrapped than they do unwrapped. It's not that I'm not happy with the gifts themselves once they are unwrapped. It is more the excitement they hold before you unwrap them and lose the mystery.

I think most of life is like that. The promise is always more intriguing than the ultimate reality.

But I am just wallowing in the after the holiday blues. It's the seam between Christmas and the New Year that gets me the most. The old year is crawling out the door and the New Year is smacking it on the butt screaming, "WooWoo, it's my turn!" Little does it know that it's time to whoop it up is going to be briefer than it can imagine.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Where have all the bloggers gone?


As I sift through my posts of the past in an effort find relevant content to share on Twitter (part of an experiment I'm engaged in with trying to understand social media), I've grown nostalgic reading all of the comments I used to get from fellow bloggers. Most are from my early years in blogging...2006 and 2007 were my peak years. And I've grown a bit melancholy wondering where did all the bloggers go?

I know I've harped on this topic off and on for years, but it still nags at me. It's one of those mysteries like why pods of whales beach themselves or what happened to the Roanoke Colony. Why did my little band of fellow bloggers who used to comment regularly vanish?

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Art by accident


The concept that maybe great art may be more a product of accident then design was posed on my latest binge-watching obsession, Six Feet Under. If you are not familiar with Six Feet Under, you should be. It's far better than just about anything on television today. Regardless, it is an HBO series that ran for five seasons beginning in 2001. It is the story of the Fisher family and their funeral home. It is also the story of life, death and love (not necessarily in that order).

Anyway, 18-year old Claire Fisher (played by Lauren Ambrose), posits her theory about accidental art as she struggles with self-doubt in her first year of art school under the tutelage her sadistic art teacher (who is having sex with her brother's ex-fiances mother and her boyfriend...no wonder Claire is confused). The line about maybe great art being an accident struck me as profound and kudos to whomever the writer was that wrote it for troubled teen Claire to utter.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Tribute to the Elvis tree

 

Writing about the Elvis tree seems to be becoming almost as much a tradition as decorating it each year. I posted photos of me taking it down one year. Shoot, I even posted a video of it one. But my earliest post was in 2005

I won't go into the history again here. Click on the links above if you want to know something of its origins. Suffice it to say that it has been around my various houses for more than a decade.