What Is Within You

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you;
if you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

-- The Gospel of Thomas

Nick Tosches uses this quote for an epigraph that begins “Me and the Devil”, and you can see how it is a great prompt for a writer, or the would-be writer. If you cannot bring it all out, you may as well flip burgers or get a job at the video store and just keep a blog.

five o'clock mornings...

One of those old five o'clock mornings...

I went to bed early, and not unbegrudgingly, since this meant having to give up "The Devil and Me". But I plunged into blissful sleep amost immediately. Which is what I hoped and wanted.

The problem: when I got up at four for a bathroom run and let the cats out, I could not fall back asleep. I tried for more than an hour but gave up.

I don't feel particularly bad. Five good hours of sleep is nothing to wave away as a joke. I feel good and fairly refreshed. It's just that I know another hour would have made it perfect.

Last Written Words of Anne Frank

My Funny Valentine

Pessoa

“Retaining from science only its fundamental precept - that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions - and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavours, and we hunch over the ‘book of sensations’ like scrupulous scholars of feeling.”

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

The 'we' being, I guess, the ones who are not constrained to work in the salt mines but who are not entitled to the pleasures of higher living (the life of money and promiscuous sex, the fast life) nor the grander pursuits (seeking a cure for cancer or writing the great American novel). We have only a little means but a lot of time and a moderate intelligence (not too smart but not too dumb neither). And we just marvel over this existence, this world, and can hardly believe it.

NFL playoff games

Pop has claimed the big room to watch one of the NFL playoff games. I'm not surprised, even though the Cowboys are done for the season. Considering Pop's carefree attitude over the fiasco of the soaked mail, maybe I should consider it a fair deal of sorts. And I did just enjoy having the house to myself for two days and two nights. At least there are no guests, for now.

Unfortunately, it is too late to take Tosches's novel on a walk, even though the sun is shining brilliantly like an early spring afternoon.

Daily Fun

Soaked Little Fox by *thrumyeye

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