71.

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

if on a winter's night a traveler

i've been absent from this here blog for a while. me and technology; we've got quite a strange relationship. sometimes i feel like i'd like to move out into the country where cell phones don't zap emails into your back pocket and the only type of communities that exist are the ones you create with handshakes and evening lemonades. i had a bit of that this weekend - bathing in the lake, sleeping outside, and burning marshmallows in between hands of texas hold'em. with that said, i've had it up to my eyebrows with technology and they ways it has changed our living lately so i've been sticking to books and paper bound journals, and although i haven't been blogging, i've been doing plenty of thinking.

unemployment has my head full up all the time with possibilities, reflections of past lives i've lived, and adventurous routes i may undertake now. an impending move out of a house that has become quite a home for me has me all shook up and feeling squirrelly. life has other tricks up her sleeve lately - bits of magic, pools of mystery, and country miles of not-knowing. there is this saying in Maine that i've come to consider pretty dern applicable to my journey these days. the folks there are known for declaring,"hard sayin, not knowin." and i guess that's where my words have been lately - in my head or my moleskin, where they are safer than on the world wide web.

i'm wrapping up Into the Wild tonight though and feel like i'll have a few things to say about it. maybe i'll even share with you guys some of the joy that reading Townes Van Zandt's biography has brought to me. this, however, is just a brief "hey y'all, i'm still kickin" post (for all my committed readers out there. by that i mean my grandad...only. hey Grampy!).