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Three days a week,
I wake up around 7 a.m., drink a glass of water, meditate on the good luck
and luxury of it. I feel it go down and into my stomach, then start diffusing
to all the thirsty cells in my body. It's like savoring a deep breath. I
like the way water fills the shape of the glass and wonder what shape it
takes when it joins me. Ahhh....
Then it's off to work, out the door at 7:45 by the oven clock, onto my bicycle
for the breakneck ride down 39th street to the
Burke-Gilman
Trail--Seattle's 17+mile lakeside bike path. It's an easy commute to
the RE Store
just 2 or 3 miles away. I read the sky to get a sense of the day's weather,
nod to passing cyclists, wonder if bird populations are really diminshing
or whether it's just me.
Today I got to
work,
put my steel-toe boots on, loaded my tools on the truck, then was told I
could go home to work on
www.re-store.org. (I didn't
design it but I do help keeping it current.) It was a nice ride back. The
sun was shining. I sat upright on the bike, hands in pockets, enjoying the
ride while it lasted. I stopped at the
PCC
for breakfast and other goodies, munched peanutbutter covered pretzels as
I pushed my bike up the hill--sometimes I prefer walking. |
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I paused to photograph this
graffiti on a sidewalk
electric box. Really fine art. The stencil with drop shadow is subtly done.
The laminated C-note might have been real--it would have been wrong to peel
it--but my guess is it's a printout or color copy. The days are numbered
text echoes the opening of Ayn Rand's
Atlas
Shrugged, but I'm guessing the philosophies behind the statements
are radically opposed.
While rerereading
Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, I came across a
mention of Clarence Day's
This Simian
World, so I used some of my quarterly
amazon.com kickback to order a
1936 cloth-bound edition from a dealer in Maryland for $1. It was so cheap
because it was a library copy stamped and discarded by the ARMED FORCES
INFORMATION SCHOOL LIBRARY. The GOVERNMENT/CANCELLED
stamp overlay seemed to echo the graffiti's prediction.
The book itself is a darkly humorous appraisal of the human race which acts
as a link between Mark Twain's later stories and Kurt Vonnegut's
anthropology-influenced novels
Galapagos and
Cat's Cradle. It's a tidy little book and I wonder
what those Information Officers in training got out of it. |
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