C.B. Potts's Blog, page 36

Thursday Morning

Superstition is to religion as astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother.

There are worse things one might do, when one is troubled, than turn to Voltaire.

The Sacred Texts of Self Preservation - I think we all have a shelf somewhere with the books we keep because they are restorative, because they keep us centered, because they help us remember who we are. Literature as life compass; we use the stories of others to keep ourselves pointed in the right general direction. An in...

This has been a long day

Sometimes you can work a lot of hours and accomplish not very much at all. Today has been one of those days. I'm not expressing things clearly today, which results in an old chronic ache; if only I could find the right words, things would work better. Tomorrow will be better, I hope.

Wednesday Morning

Many, many things on my mind this morning. GM has dropped its Facebook advertising, and that is highly relevant to my interests. I want to talk about this obnoxious, misogynistic editorial by Frank Bruni, especially as it pertains to the belief that we must meet a certain standard or set of qualifications before we're entitled to speak at all AND the nasty little bit Frank has in there about Bristol's decision to let the world (and by extension her child) know that the conception of this chil...

Monday Morning: Here We Go

Tea, made properly, is delightful. This morning's tea, however, is redolent of damp willow and long smoked cigarettes. Drinking it is not unlike making love to a fallen sprite; the verdant glen left far behind for the dusty resignation of a Heineken bottle. We are not all young ferocity here. There is a time for the old and tender habit.

Not all acquired tastes are good ones.

There's a lesson that was a long time coming, but I guess it would have to be that way. The birds are in an uproar this...

Sunday Night

It was a fabulous day. The girls made me beautiful cards, and later we went down to the Greenery and got a whole bunch of pansies, burgundy, yellow, and white. We put them in the front bed where last year we tried corn and sunflowers. It looks really cheerful. Tim cooked me an awesome steak dinner, with steaks for me lovely and rare. After dinner, Nadia and I watched some Phineas and Ferb and then part of an Imax movie entitled "Amazing Caves", which has some cave diving in it, which both fas...

Why Can't I Get Anything Done?

Talk about spilt milk!!! This is the view from my living room window.

Friday Morning

Understanding, I think, is much like asparagus. This came to me this morning as I looked out upon the garden bed. Yesterday there were wee purple points, struggling to push up through the soil. Today there are slender spears, six to eight inches tall, proud and fresh and newly formed. From potential to actuality overnight; this is no slow, steady process. Instead we have an explosive moment, a radical shift in being. Yesterday, the horizon was hidden by grass and sour dandelion leaves. Today,...

Thursday, Thus Far

People say they want to be happy, but mostly, they're not. And so they ask lots of questions about happiness - mostly "Why am I not happy?", with a lot of "Who are these people so determined to make me unhappy?" There's "When will I be happy?" and an awful lot of "What will make me happy?"

"How will I become happy?"

That's the question I'm interested in. I'm not alone in this. I think there's an almost universal longing for some set of instructions that will tell us how to live in order to rea...

May 8, 1944

My Father would be 68 years old today, had he lived this long - and now I find that when I hear of someone dying at 68 my response is, almost inevitably, "But that's so young!" 26 years ago he was younger yet. Youth is, it turns out, no defense against mortality, no matter how many times I invoke it.

On the day my Father was born, Eleanor Roosevelt threw pennies in a fountain, knowing they would someday be used for a memorial for all the Merchant Marines who died at sea. The Soviets are taking...

Look! It is Monday

It is amazing how there is a flagrantly inverse relationship between whatever I need to accomplish in any given day and how life events transpire to allow the accomplishment of said tasks. In other news, parents of young children, know that there comes a point where your kids who once needed you so much now prefer to handle things on their own, thank you, and while it is always bittersweet to see the fledgling try their wings, there's nothing sad about not needing to bear comforting witness t...