Sound bite for KJHK FM id check this morning.
Mom: What happens if I listen to jazz in the car?
Toddler: I will turn into an old man.
Ouch.
As the ice builds up on my windows this morning, I’m enjoying this beautiful recording. A gem you may have missed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FqKjk7ZLio
Between here and her are rolling hills where
wind-weathered peoples once cornered game.
They walked and hunted and walked and lived.
You can save money crossing those hills if you have a K-Tag on your windshield.
Then great flats we only desire to know
as vectors of acceleration over time, sit upon
the largest unbroken tectonic plate in the world.
“This was once under a vast inland sea,” she said. “More than once.” he replied.
Between here and her is a massive orogenic phantasm.
Buried to its shoulder in its own eroded silt, still it looms.
Cloaked in a shroud of green, it is the preferred home
of the larger, more secretive mammals.
“A full-grown grizzly can stand as tall as a…”
Then desert, where they built a city to accelerate
the process of gaining and losing riches.
Beyond the light and noise of it, slow, ancient processes unfold.
The birth and death of that city will be an unnoticed flicker in time.
“If you have seventeen showing, it’s usually best to stick.”
Between here and her is
everything seen and everything hidden,
everything learned and forgotten,
everything created and destroyed
and it’s all just so damned beautiful and mysterious.
My arms would gauge the weight of her mysteries too,
If I could get from here to her.
—dj. 2020-12-03
Butterflies. Kyra Mills, 2020, watercolor.
This site would be a whole lot bleaker/blander without the colorful paintings my friend Kyra Mills occasionally shares with me.
Here in the Midwest, our memory of Summery things can fade quickly, so dose yourself up with some butterflies!
You can see more of Kyra’s paintings if you scroll through the posts on this page.
To quote Patrick Rhone, “Maybe what we need most is to have our minds blown.”
You seen any chickens?
On the way home from rowing practice this morning I came across a pair of foxes. They wouldn’t stand together for a photo, but they seemed to be having a good time.
KU Crew dock. Burcham Park, Lawrence KS. My office.
On a recent Facebook post, one of my friends made the comment “Crew coaches have the nicest offices.”
Here’s what mine looked like at 6 am this morning. It was 21º but you can’t ignore water like that. We launched a novice eight and had a great session to finish off the week.
Photo by Tegan Mierle.
This time Big D doesn’t stand for Dan, it stands for the other thing.
Blue Diamonds – The Long Winters
The way it works is all the cool kids know about it before it’s even released…
Then everybody else finds out about it. Then there is the cool kid backlash because it’s old news. Then seven years later I trip over it because I’m looking for some geeky code snippet or something.
Here’s “Blue Diamonds” by The Long Winters.
Get it here:
When I Pretend to Fall
Living as a bachelor, I’ve tried to make an effort not to engage in those stereotypical behaviors that make it so clear why one might…deserve to be a bachelor. Like never cleaning the bathroom.