--CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

 

…It’s a gun metal gray day and I’m feeling a little random.

…After the bombing in Chelsea yesterday, I woke up thinking about 9/11.  I actually think about it quite often—how bizarre and surreal it was, how if it had been a movie no one would have believed the story.

I remember driving to work for a week afterward and the sky was empty.  In Seattle, there are always planes in the sky, headed to or from SeaTac, or else float planes landing on Union Bay.
I remember when flight resumed and seeing a plane for the first time toggling between buildings downtown and how frightening that image was, a sight that would have been ordinary any time before 9/11/2001.
I also recall seeing hundreds and hundreds of flags, some large, some small stuck like fence lats in yards.  My kids and I would count them as we drove home.  The stock market tanked and a lot of businesses skidded or went out of business, but the flag making companies thrived.  They sold out of all their stock.  Such a sickening and enormous loss of life had bonded Americans and patriotism was at its zenith.  Now, with the election less than two months away, it feels like the schism dividing us is as wide as ever and that’s a little depressing to me.

…So changing gears…

…When it’s your birthday, people pretty much write the same thing on your Facebook page and something is better than nothing, of course.

It was my birthday three months ago and someone wrote this, which I thought was great, not just because it was for me, but because it’s a cool thing:

your Birth changed the World;
your Matter matters to all
whose lives your life’s touched.

a Birth-day Haiku
to wish you much Peace,
Love, and Happiness

…I told you I was feeling random.

…Here are some things to ponder at the start of the week:

-“Doing the impossible is quite fun.” Walt Disney

-“Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers.” Charles Bukowski

-“There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen

-“You have to be really disciplined and you have to really want it.  No matter what.” Caroline Leavill

-“I’m just a person.  I don’t protect myself from it.  You just get on with your day with hurt feelings or not.” Rene Zellweger

-“The secret to a kiss is you only go ninety percent of the way.”  Hitch

-“I love books.  I love that moment when you open one up and sink into it.  You can escape into a world, a story that’s more interesting than yours will ever be.” Elizabeth Scott

- “The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era.  Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.” Abraham Joshua Heschel

-“Stop thinking about shit that ain’t happenin’.” Rob Bell