C.B. Potts's Blog, page 49

Why, Hello, Friday!

It has been a week. We've replaced a sump pump and the starter in the van. The school did vision testing, and tonight we're off to get Nadia glasses. It's a busy week at work, and then Steve Jobs died, which is not the type of thing that you think would throw you for a loop, but it did rather. Over the years, without an ounce of exaggeration, I have probably written about Steve Jobs & Apple close to a hundred times. Especially in retail - Apple Stores are the go-to example when you want to...

Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine

Three days the fog came. Came and stayed, laying over the ground like a spent lover, wet and weeping. Three days of gray, three days of rain, three days of reality bounded by milk gauze walls that promise to hold all mystery yet instead offers up slow moving tractors entirely devoid of lights.

Which may be mystery sufficient, all things considered.

It's a slow moving morning. It's hard not to be distracted by the asparagus out front; all the fronds are draped with cold raindrops, hanging, pois...

Sunday Morning

It's cold and foggy. Everyone's still sleeping. I'm not sure yet what today is going to hold - laundry, definitely, and football - but mostly what I want it to be is a day of Happy Be With - happy with the kids, happy with Tim, happy with the larger world. That's the goal, and anything that doesn't contribute to that is not going to be; I am sure there will be time later this week for things that aren't Happy Be With.

Yesterday Tim built the frame for our new couch! It's all rough cut pine,...

My Favorite Headline of ALL DAY LONG

It's The Little Things, You Know?

Synesthetic You?

Quick: what does love smell like?

For me, it's not too far off from rosemary. Maybe it's piney resin. That sort of thing. What's the scent/smell you associate with love?

Bear Witness

Fourteen different references to the phrase 'bear witness' between dawn and this time I sit down to spend with you. On the TV news, sprawled across the internet, in the songs on the radio, a bumper sticker that just went by. It must mean something. Open source augury: what message is the world trying to send?

Bear witness. Which means what, exactly? To stand and see; there's one definition and a passing powerful one at that. There are things that people do not do when they can be seen; the g...

Wednesday Morning, Vaguely

Rainy, rainy Wednesday. Sky is gray, carbon, steel, slate, white. A band of trees goes green, orange, burgundy, yellow, repeat: beadwork rooted on the shoreline. The big tree kitty corner to my window has gone all golden on the edges; last gasp orange on the very tips yet green and vibrant near the trunk.

And that's the kind of tree that is there to be a metaphor, you know? I'm not sure exactly what it would be a metaphor for - that's part of the game, to puzzle it all out, because it can't j...

Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking

Okay, Cowboy Nation. Let's take a collective deep breath now. Your guys won, I get it. But now I want to talk about Tony Romo and the mixed messaging we're sending to America's Youth and Anyone Else Watching the Game.


If you haven't been following football, you may not know that this year, a new emphasis has been placed on head injury prevention. There have been many cases where players who have had multiple concussions later went on to have significant health problems - sometimes even year...

Good Morning, My Freaky Darlings!

Do you know what the purpose of imagination is? Not to go all evo-psych on you, but let's take it as a working premise that every aspect of our existence has some reason for being, some benefit, obvious or otherwise, that somehow contributes to our ability to chalk down another day in the "Holy Shit Made It Through" column. We devalue imagination, we devalue it greatly, when we confine it to the creative arts (qualifying statement: creative arts are of course to be held most dear.)

Imaginati...

For Bill

I don't know if you're on Facebook, but I read this and thought of you:

"Atheists are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-litera...