Raffle Country tomorrow!

Starts at 6pm, raffle at 8.  This 17 inch poster is up for grabs along with piles of Artifact glory baubels.

Limesprouts

It's been a long time since I left town.  So tonight it's Katelyn and I to Nashville to see Andrew Bird at the Ryman.  Not bad.  Spring head cleaning.  The sun is out, everybody at bike polo is white still.  Trees sprouting out everywhere - Nashville is in a bowl of limestone.   Been thinking of the Tsingy, where this vazaha (whitey) tree sprouts from the grikes and spears of limestone in Madagascar.

Sprang

Springtime is still sketchy.

Silver Bullet

"If silver bullet does not kill him, poison of American decadence will."

Fourth-Dimensional Motorcycle

It shouldn't surprise anyone that I like this book.  Nor that I pounce on any excuse to discuss time travel.  It should also not be surprising to get more than you bargained for with Wells.  Yeah, reading this book is like eating cookies.  But cookies rarely provoke existential quandary and uncommon kinds of social apocalypse.  Not to mention this reprint cover melding Steampunk and Psychadelica circa 1976.  Time is relative, man.

"So I came back.  For a long time, I must have been insensible upon the machine.  The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue... The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed.  The hands spun backward upon the dials...

"He, I know, thought cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.  If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.  But to me, the future is still black and blank - a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story..."

Axial Tilt

The feeling of an ill-timed or erratic season is very acute to me.  Growing up here in the halo of the Southern Appalachians, there is a lot of seasonal flux.  Axial flux.  All of the vibrance of the subtropics meets the temporal urgency of the further North.  Now more than ever, we are on the very edge of that 'Temperate' zone.  We're travelling South, all of us.  And not just for the Winter.  But climate fluctuations have immense seasons as well, measured out in geological time.  Imagine a planet with a straight axis and no seasons and no problems.  Planet Boring is what I'd call it.

Spring's joys are great, whenever they might come.  Katelyn and I went looking for singing frogs on Moccasin bend a few nights ago.  Though they were loud enough to force us to yell ten feet apart, the little guys were hard to find.  We wandered around with bare feet in swamp mud bothering amphibians in February.  Of course we literally stumbled on a wide snapping turtle, toes tapping shell in the murky night.  The tiny frog that presented himself to Katelyn didn't get a kiss, but then again, he was fast.

Orchard Knob

There's one good name for a small hill.  A small hill with such a commanding view of Chattanooga that it's full of monuments to Illinois.  You know the revolution is real when guys start doing parcourt off Civil War monuments.  Adam Monye was up there at sunset with some backflips.  Adam tells me he comes to practice now and then.  Every sun deserves a sendoff like this.