Farewell!
This will be my last post before my trip to Houston. I leave very early in the morning, and by lunchtime tomorrow, I’ll be with my baby. I have dreamed of this moment for three years, and finally it is coming to pass. Over the last few days, I have felt every emotion you could imagine, but now it is all excitement, somehow tempered with a sense of peace and tranquility. Finally, I will leave my world and enter his.
Don’t know if/when I’ll post again.
Much love,
Josh
Busy-ness and Heroism
I apologize for the lack of posting here lately. I’ve been quite busy and haven’t had the time or the inclination to post. I had to go to driving school yesterday for my accident back in May, and I’ve been going down my list of things to do prior to my upcoming visit with Asa.
For his part, Asa has also been busy. Yesterday, while he was getting a cup of coffee before work, a older man had a seizure while driving his car in the parking lot. He crashed into the coffee shop’s dumpster, and everyone ran outside to see what was going on. While someone called 911, Asa climbed into the vehicle, put the car in park, and looked to see if the man was wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet of some kind. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. He’d bitten his tongue, and saliva and blood were running out of his mouth. Careful not to get any on him, Asa wiped the man’s mouth with a napkin and talked to him, telling him help was on the way and that he was going to be OK. A woman came to the car and said that the 911 dispatcher said not to touch or move the man, so Asa just stayed there close at hand until the paramedics arrived. When the man was taken away, Asa called me at work and related the story, and as I heard his somewhat shaking, adrenaline-fueled account of what happened and what he did, I remembered one of the things that made me fall for him in the first place: he is a genuinely good person. I am always proud of him, but I was especially proud yesterday.
Only a few more days now until we are together at last.
The Streets of Alexandria
…as I walked out of the mourning house,
noticing the smell that remained
I felt something soft land on my cheek,
warm and delicate like a lover’s kiss
the air was filled with falling ash
and murmuring overtook the street’s fanfare
I saw the aged men sitting at a table,
drinking and moaning of some great loss…
…I cared not to stop and talk
as the stink of the widow remained
so I kicked through the sullen piles
and made my way to the great square
where women and men were wringing their hands
and looking toward the glowing edge of town
the darkened sky with its billowing pillar
stretched away beyond the known world…
…and I was unamused by this
since her malodorous attractions remained
I heard a bald man telling a child,
“It is gone, gone, the world has closed her eyes”
citizens with white tunics all sooty and smudged
filed back into their now-cavernous homes
and Alexandria wept for its lost heritage
as the words of the elders filled the gutters
…but ash and smoke could little conceal
the guilty stench that remained
Summer Solstice 2007
Above: The view from atop a Macedonian megalithic observatory.
Below: Druids and other celebrants (roughly 19,000 of them) gather in Avebury at perhaps the most famous monument to sun-worshippers anywhere.
Finally, fans of the street artist Banksy celebrate the solstice at his current work, “A Pile of Crap,” affectionately known by some as Potty-Henge. It consists of a series of port-o-johns arranged in the same configuration as Stonehenge. The graffiti on these particular stones is not Banksy’s, but that of his following.
Thinking Blogger Award
It seems that I have won a 
. I have been told this now more than a few times, but I suppose it’s high time that I finally acknowledge it. I don’t really know what I have done to deserve such a thing, since most of my crap hits you at the gut level rather than at the brain level. But, I am glad if a teeny tiny fraction of what I post on my blog makes my readers think. Thinking is an exercise that, while practiced more commonly among my readership than amongst the general public, is still somewhat rare in this day and age.
I will replace the audio comments section with the , since the former seemed to go over like a ton of bricks. I don’t blame people for not wanting to leave an audio comment; it’s nice to remain pseudo-anonymous online. I’d probably be loath to leave a comment on other peoples’ audio comments boxes too. No harm, no foul.
I’m going to opt to not put up a bulleted list of blogs for y’all to visit, because I think all the blogs on my blogroll engage my thought processes to some extent. However, I will recommend my friend Matt’s blog, it is full of mystery and wonder. Matt was the one who turned me on to Google Reader, and for that I am in his debt.
Thanks again to everyone who nominated me for a !
Adventures at Work: Happy Fun Time with Dieter
Hello friends, and welcome to “Happy Fun Time With Dieter”! For those of you just joining us, Dieter is a coworker of mine who is quite proud of his German heritage and who is more than happy to voice his opinions on all sorts of things, even when no one asks for it! Fascism, sexism, conservatism, military idolatry, and all sorts of fun things regularly spill from the mouth of Dieter, with a predictable tone of frustrated righteousness filtered through the thickest of Appalachian accents. To bring you up to speed, here are a few classic Dieter-isms:
Whoa, looks like we’re outnumbered.
–Uttered just before Dieter and I went to lunch with three men who happened to be black
Man, I hate to see those Japanese… I think they’re the worst, but the Chinese aren’t much better… I hate to see them on vacation. You know how those Orientals are, they travel like a herd of animals. And they take pictures of everything!
–Uttered during a casual discussion of vacation
Hey, that works.
–Response to my explanation of how (and why) Alan Turing killed himself
The thing I hate about all the Democrats is that they’re all pro-gay and pro-abortion.
–Uttered out of the blue during a lull in the conversation one day
What really bothers me is that all our boys go over to Iraq and Afghanistan and fight, and get injured, and die, and meanwhile you have all these welfare niggers and white trash sitting on their asses. I mean, I’d be willing to fight and even die for my country… but not for them.
–Explanation of his fondness for the military and his reluctance to serve
It’ll prevent churches from posting Scripture on billboards. Man… It’s a crying shame that now they’ll throw you in jail just for calling someone a faggot.
–Conjecture made when he (on his own) brought up recent hate speech legislation during lunch
I’ve had to work closely with Dieter since I started my job last year, and it’s been all I can do to not say something to him. The main reason I have held back is because Dieter possesses a great deal of technical expertise, and I’m supposed to be cross-training with him in anticipation of his departure from the group. If I said or did anything about his ignorant drivel, it would most certainly make such one-on-one training all but impossible. But Monday’s anti-gay spiel pushed me over the edge, and I reported his ass to our supervisor. What will come of it remains to be seen. I have a feeling Dieter will survive… but his ass might end up less like Erwin Rommel and more like Arnold Toht.
Updates!
Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been somewhat busy lately. Here are some updates:
- There was apparently a big-ass bear at my house this weekend. It got up on my porch and took a big bite out of one of the boxes sitting there… then it decided it didn’t like the taste of cardboard and left. I didn’t actually see it, but it had to have been a bear, based on the tracks it left and the fact that there have been bears spotted in my neighborhood over the last 2-3 weeks.
- I continued my long-running Ravenloft campaign this weekend, after about a 6-month hiatus. New characters were introduced, and my players have had a favorable reaction so far. The campaign seems to have taken on somewhat of a steampunk tone, but that’s ok, since that’s currently my favorite subculture. Since writing D&D material takes a considerable amount of creativity (how much depends on who you ask), I may have to sacrifice some blog creativity for that. We’ll see.
- I have been nominated for a Thinking Blogger award yet again. I think this is the second or third time I’ve been nominated! I should probably listen to the cosmos and do something about it this time.
- I’ll have updates for my “Adventures at Work” series soon. There have been some interesting happenings as of late…
- I took some of these tests and discovered some of my biases, including a slight preference for gay people over straight people. Sorry, straight readers, Harvard says you’re second-fiddle… but don’t worry. To paraphrase the words of one of the fine products at www.someecards.com, you all are pretty understanding for heterosexuals.
- Ricky Martin, just come out of the closet already. It’s nice out here.
The Old Popularity Index
