“FR:Cycle the Erie Canal Tour: Severe weather is predicted 2-5pm, w/ worst expected 3-4. If near camp, please come in ASAP Seek shelter as needed Stay safe.”
“I’ve covered thousands of foot-miles in my memory, because when — as most nights — I find myself insomniac, I send my mind out to re-walk paths I’ve followed, and in this way can sometimes pace myself into sleep.”
— Robert MacFarlane / The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
“Our relationship with death profoundly changes our relationship with life. It’s all too easy to live a long, unhealthy life without having ever felt truly alive … What will happen between this present moment and having my bones licked clean by a ravenous wild animal? As I say, I don’t know, as I’m no longer blessed with the certainties of youth. The more I explore, the less I seem to know, and I’m starting to like it that way. If someone comes along and convinces me that all of the impedimenta of contemporary society — the screens, the engines, the switches — are actually life-enriching, life-affirming, life-giving, then I’ll change tack and start sailing towards that shore, to see if they’re onto something. But for now, I’m going to try to stay in the only place that makes sense to me: the bloody, sublime, mucky, sweaty, breathtaking world of life.”
— Mark Boyle / Long Way Home: Tales from a life without technology
“When I think of / I.C.E. I think of brown / skin, that looks just like mine, trying / to make it in America. / Am I American if neo-Nazis are / running America?”
— Viktoria Valenzuela / “Oh Say Can You See”
“If you’re traveling and away from your local library this summer, no problem: Try some library tourism! Even if you don’t plan a whole trip around them, libraries are excellent spots for weary travelers: free, quiet, cool, full of locals, and staffed by people whose job is to help any visitors who walk in the door.”
— Austin Kleon / “A Newsletter from the Desk of Austin Kleon”
“The only conclusion I can draw is this: a person who walks slowly must have a much richer inner life than a person who runs as fast as their legs can carry them.”
— Torbjørn Ekelund / In Praise of Paths
“The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive, otherwise it’s hokum…”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
What I’m Listening To:
“I’ve got an old mule and her name is Sal, Fifteen years on the Erie Canal. She’s a good old worker and a good old pal, Fifteen years on the Erie Canal. We’ve hauled some barges in our day, Filled with lumber, coal and hay, And ev’ry inch of the way I know, From Albany to Buffalo.”
Out of the netherworld through an oppressively humid haze I materialize at a shore front — the city behind me a stony sentinel silent and shimmering in the vapor. I turn from the city and there, where the lake meets a path line, stands a weatherworn black bicycle with butterfly handlebars.
I intuit that this is my way back home to Boston. The mushroom hiss haze fades away as the sun zeppelins its own path out of the clouds. There is only one direction home and it unspools out to the northwest and I intuit, again, that it will turn sharply east and I’ll be home again.
Just pump the pedals — grind away through the hottest days in recorded human history — and all will be well.
Well. Well. Well.
What I’m Reading:
“For untold thousands of years we travelled … over rough paths not simply as peddlers or commuters or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were.”
— Robert MacFarlane / The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
I punctured the left rear tire on the road from Boston to Buffalo … When the tire tech at Tanguy’s Tire Emporium tried to plug the hole all manner of cavorting beasties escaped from that dark tube: elephantine glass eels, striped paramecium jaggerheads, speckled leather fromooshikns — they swirled up like a drunken twister and sucked the tech up into its vortex.
There were no more soft monsters left in the universe.
I walked the rest of the way here — to this netherworld, and frankly and crankily — I’m too tired to write.
What awaits tomorrow?
What I’m Reading:
“When I think of America, my body / aches / for something more protective than / skin. Skin is only skin deep.”
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and kipper rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
“Up the street, two apes argued. “You don’t affirm me anymore!” shouted the girl. “You don’t affirm me anymore!” shouted the boy. Their taxi arrived and took them home to their capsuled fear.”
thee istsfor manity reader 