Self-Portait in a Foucault Pendulum
Life's pretty wierd, I guess, I don't know. I'm not so down like I was last blog post. I had 133 pictures on my digital camera that I downloaded just now. In a sense there's an advantage to working for a company that sucks if you own a bicycle and a digital camera. You have down time, and something to do in it. Problem with my down time is that I never know just how much I have though, so I can't relax as I might if I knew exatly when I could be goofing off and when I had to get back to work.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was at the little swift terminal in Avenel NJ which happens to be within bike distance of where my old girlfriend erica was from. The one who was killed in the car crash where my arm was broken. I stopped by her parents house but they weren't in, they do craft shows on the weekend. I went on down to the church garden where her ashes are buried, first time I'd gotten back there since the burial in 2004. I went over to Galloping hill, the hotdog stand near her house where they have the best hotdogs in Jersey. Union NJ is a very happy smiley benign looking town, sort of the ultimate american place to be from, you might say. It is odd to be 37 years old and to be able to see the town through so many lenses or filters if you will, of ways of knowing about it. I know about how hard people work to make the money that makes the existence of a town like that possible. I know about students from erica's school who died of drug overdoses. I know about summer camps where kids watch deer that are half tame and unafraid of people.
Since Erica was a teacher I tend to wander through the campuses schools as they remind me of her. There's this weird sort of disconnect between my buddhist perspective of impermanence, and the way in which minds like Erica's build this tremendously cohesive and powerful vision of the world and of the potential of persons and of the supportiveness and power of community, this being something a mind can take refuge in. Erica worked tremendously hard to make herself a part of the solid, stable, supportive and positive aspect of the world. She had a tremedous faith in herself and in me and in her pupils. I feel a terrible sense of the repudiation of who she was in her having died so young.
Well, after I was done wandering about Erica's hometown I headed back down through Rahway, and I was nosing around an ancient cemetery I found there, looking at a lot of gravestones of persons who had been killed in the revolutionary war, when a fellow colossal dork on a bicycle, who was from that area noticed me and gave me a tour of the cemetery, showing me where the african american Civil war veterans were buried, and where an unknown woman, a murder victim from 1885 was buried. The date was correct for her to be a possible victim of one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, but noone really knows.
This was on an old International Harvester Grave digging tractor I found in another old cemetery south of Boston.
Last week I was in Columbus Ohio for a couple of days while I was taking a couple of safety classes due to my accidents and my truck was in the shop not having its clutch problem fixed. Columbus is one of my favorite places to have some downtime, I could have stopped there today but I'm on my way home and I stretched my drive time today as far as it would go, as Columbus is at the very ragged edge of where it's possible to get home from in my legal 11 driving hours.
Both days I went down to the German Village, had great food at the Sausage Haus, and the first day I had great beer, but when I got the bill it was a six dollar beer so the next night I just had a coke. The first night I also hung out at a little coffee shop and watched a live band play, an intimate setting with perhaps a dozen people listening to the band out in the patio next to the coffee shop. The next night I went down to Schiller Park and watched the summer shakespeare folks do King Lear.
There was a "band" that played the Sausage Haus both nights, though one night It was called Scnickelfritz and the next night they called themselves Squeezin and Wheezin. They may have had slightly different lineups, I can only say the drummer was the same both nights, but the Accordion player was far away and behind a post the first night I was there. If you'll take a close look a this particular picture you'll notice that the drummer was making the audacious move of bongoing with his bare hands on his bald head. I talked to him and he was a pretty cool guy. First time I'd ever seen anyone wearing real lederhosen. At least that I remember.
I daresay people must have near infinite patience to do picture blogs, resizing everything and browsing them out of folders. Tonight I'm at a Pilot truck stop on I 71 in Ohio, where the plugs are curiously high up on the wall. I was nice enough, I daresay, to climb up on a chair to plug in a little chinese woman's laptop for her.
Also read the new Harry Potter. Trememdous. I can't imagine how they'd make a movie of it in which people would get what happens; it has a marvellous, intricate, complex plot.
Hopefully I'll make it home tomorrow, see the cats again. Be kind of a longish time to stay home through the weekend, but It would vex me to take just take till friday off and then have no freight to pull If I got on the truck on saturday or sunday. So maybe I'll say I'm taking just through saturday off and not bother getting back on the vehicle on sunday when noone's going to be in the office or have anything for me to do anyway.
I guess that's not all I could possibly write, but it's a blog. Be well, everyone.
Life's pretty wierd, I guess, I don't know. I'm not so down like I was last blog post. I had 133 pictures on my digital camera that I downloaded just now. In a sense there's an advantage to working for a company that sucks if you own a bicycle and a digital camera. You have down time, and something to do in it. Problem with my down time is that I never know just how much I have though, so I can't relax as I might if I knew exatly when I could be goofing off and when I had to get back to work.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was at the little swift terminal in Avenel NJ which happens to be within bike distance of where my old girlfriend erica was from. The one who was killed in the car crash where my arm was broken. I stopped by her parents house but they weren't in, they do craft shows on the weekend. I went on down to the church garden where her ashes are buried, first time I'd gotten back there since the burial in 2004. I went over to Galloping hill, the hotdog stand near her house where they have the best hotdogs in Jersey. Union NJ is a very happy smiley benign looking town, sort of the ultimate american place to be from, you might say. It is odd to be 37 years old and to be able to see the town through so many lenses or filters if you will, of ways of knowing about it. I know about how hard people work to make the money that makes the existence of a town like that possible. I know about students from erica's school who died of drug overdoses. I know about summer camps where kids watch deer that are half tame and unafraid of people.
Since Erica was a teacher I tend to wander through the campuses schools as they remind me of her. There's this weird sort of disconnect between my buddhist perspective of impermanence, and the way in which minds like Erica's build this tremendously cohesive and powerful vision of the world and of the potential of persons and of the supportiveness and power of community, this being something a mind can take refuge in. Erica worked tremendously hard to make herself a part of the solid, stable, supportive and positive aspect of the world. She had a tremedous faith in herself and in me and in her pupils. I feel a terrible sense of the repudiation of who she was in her having died so young.
Well, after I was done wandering about Erica's hometown I headed back down through Rahway, and I was nosing around an ancient cemetery I found there, looking at a lot of gravestones of persons who had been killed in the revolutionary war, when a fellow colossal dork on a bicycle, who was from that area noticed me and gave me a tour of the cemetery, showing me where the african american Civil war veterans were buried, and where an unknown woman, a murder victim from 1885 was buried. The date was correct for her to be a possible victim of one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, but noone really knows.
This was on an old International Harvester Grave digging tractor I found in another old cemetery south of Boston.
Last week I was in Columbus Ohio for a couple of days while I was taking a couple of safety classes due to my accidents and my truck was in the shop not having its clutch problem fixed. Columbus is one of my favorite places to have some downtime, I could have stopped there today but I'm on my way home and I stretched my drive time today as far as it would go, as Columbus is at the very ragged edge of where it's possible to get home from in my legal 11 driving hours.
Both days I went down to the German Village, had great food at the Sausage Haus, and the first day I had great beer, but when I got the bill it was a six dollar beer so the next night I just had a coke. The first night I also hung out at a little coffee shop and watched a live band play, an intimate setting with perhaps a dozen people listening to the band out in the patio next to the coffee shop. The next night I went down to Schiller Park and watched the summer shakespeare folks do King Lear.
There was a "band" that played the Sausage Haus both nights, though one night It was called Scnickelfritz and the next night they called themselves Squeezin and Wheezin. They may have had slightly different lineups, I can only say the drummer was the same both nights, but the Accordion player was far away and behind a post the first night I was there. If you'll take a close look a this particular picture you'll notice that the drummer was making the audacious move of bongoing with his bare hands on his bald head. I talked to him and he was a pretty cool guy. First time I'd ever seen anyone wearing real lederhosen. At least that I remember.
I daresay people must have near infinite patience to do picture blogs, resizing everything and browsing them out of folders. Tonight I'm at a Pilot truck stop on I 71 in Ohio, where the plugs are curiously high up on the wall. I was nice enough, I daresay, to climb up on a chair to plug in a little chinese woman's laptop for her.
Also read the new Harry Potter. Trememdous. I can't imagine how they'd make a movie of it in which people would get what happens; it has a marvellous, intricate, complex plot.
Hopefully I'll make it home tomorrow, see the cats again. Be kind of a longish time to stay home through the weekend, but It would vex me to take just take till friday off and then have no freight to pull If I got on the truck on saturday or sunday. So maybe I'll say I'm taking just through saturday off and not bother getting back on the vehicle on sunday when noone's going to be in the office or have anything for me to do anyway.
I guess that's not all I could possibly write, but it's a blog. Be well, everyone.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
No sweat. So I have lots of time to kill today and I boogie on down to the Flying J on the 465 loop on the south side of Indy. But even though I'm just hanging around for most of today, I know EXACTLY what my plan is and how much time I have. I could sleep (except I had a good night's sleep already and don't really need it). If I had a bike with me I could spend the majority of the day just exploring around. Whatever... because they don't keep me in the dark.