When I resumed blog activity approximately five years ago, I quickly started following a few blogs, like I presume we all do. Perhaps some follow more than others. I have limited bandwidth (and frankly, interest) in following droves of authors. I’ve followed the blog of a close friend for about 15 years, but in this iteration, I think I started with a half dozen. One, a semi-professional photographer appeared to stop publishing, and though I liked his work, easy come/easy go. One, a recovering alcoholic (or addict) became too clever, contrived, wordy, and sporadic. I held on until a few months ago then killed it. Another, a seeming polymath scientist, engineer, programmer, and author of fiction and poems, now posts but every few months (inconstant light). Two remain constant, Bridgette Tales and Ephemeral Elegies, with the latter resuming publishing exquisite poems recently after a long hiatus.
But there are the heart-wrenching ones. As 2025 ended Ouch! I just confirmed it was 2024. Wow, that’s difficult to comprehend. In Neil I learned from a compatriot of the ether, and an old man like myself. His blog is still being maintained by the Bridgette referenced above.
And now I find that another First Followed Blog has gone silent, CIMPLE, and I fear the worse. She was battling a vicious, aggressive cancer. She hasn’t posted in 2026. Her once-daily posts had become erratic. I hope she has recovered and decided other things are more important, but…. Here’s to you, CIMPLE. Thanks for the beautiful posts and the photos from Michigan. I miss them.
Today I found a little spreadsheet app continued to refer to a data range with slightly different cell references. It presented itself when weekly choir music listings all showed the same exact output. Finding first one, than two, and finally four different range references, I converted them to be the same. This was made laborious because I had changed the references in mid-stream, so to speak: when I found the formula didn’t reference enough rows, I just increased the reference then and there without changing the historical references.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Referring not to slavish grip nor saying we should never slip, he minds we should not fail to see facts which die to constancy. Today I killed both birds ('tis true!), when facts revealed I'd misconstrued: my references to data needed rigid names. If I had heeded, this past hour would not have passed with pressure rising, with teethes quite gnashed. Tomorrow I shall run to ground All data I can find unsound.
Failure, horticultural-style. Every spray of green you see is a crape myrtle. The tallest one which grazes the top of the photo, is over five feet tall. Other than the columbine you see in the extreme lower right, and the yellow tassels of goldenrod peeking through the crape myrtle, everything you see in the foreground is a crape myrtle. We paid last October to have the one crape myrtle which grew here removed. August 2026.
In some ways that’s a pretty cheap get I’ve put up there, but here’s what’s been playing on my mind:
Recently I’ve been attempting to not over-plan my days and then just hope I make good in-roads on completing some of them, nibbling at some others, and just feeling crummy about all the important ones that didn’t see a bit of my attention. “Wow,” I’ll say to my wife, “I really need to get to [insert important item].” I’ve found I use it as subterfuge. I’ll plan 6-10 tasks, a good handful of them all-day-and-more projects, then I’ll cherry pick the ones I want to work on. That one I’ve “really got to get to” becomes the sacrifice day after day. Plus, if you condition yourself to not getting things done, you begin to feel only superficially guilty about not doing them. Instead, the past two weeks I’ve estimated the amount of time certain tasks will take, generally held to that regardless of them getting completed, and planned no more of them than there is time in my day. I try to learn where I need to get more accurate on projecting how long a task will take. And just to keep it real, I plan 90 minutes called “personal time/time sucks” to acknowledge there are just unavoidable interruptions in everyone’s day. Thus, I’ve been failing because I’ve attempted to over-succeed.
In a larger sense, it’s difficult these days to go more than a month or two without encountering “you’ve got to fail to succeed,” spouted by some motivational type of person. (Gah! I thought I would get away from cheerleaders when I got out of school!) While I can quibble a bit with the mentality—I can point to many people, many situations where they will continue to fail, never experiencing success—it’s true right down in the gut that quitting because you’ve failed once isn’t a very good strategy. Date someone and they break up with you? I guess you’re not cut out for love! Put all your money on red and it comes up black? “I guess I’ll never win at roulette.” Or how about, “I could never make myself write. I guess I’m just not a writer.” Now look at the boy. Shooting for success almost always guarantees encountering some failure.
And last week I read “These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures” an article about a very short poem by Ezra Pound. (I hope that link gets you behind the paywall. I’ve never tried to share an article to the entire world before.) Let’s dispense with the fact Pound collaborated with the fascist regime in Italy in WWII. Ernest Hemingway seems to have been a pretty good male chauvinist, and Michael Jackson, well, where do I start? All have undeniable artistic talent. Coming back to the poem and the article, I realized poetry takes a multiplicity of forms. As a writing friend told me a month ago, “It’s a poem if you say it’s a poem.” I hope the person saying it’s a poem (me) has enough artistic integrity to adhere to his idea of poetry. I think 25-40% of my poems have not been very good in this 100-poems-in-100-days thing. Poems condense meaning. They are to literature what a fine spirit is to alcoholic beverages. They seek not the pretty good word, but the right word, the best word. One doesn’t find the jigsaw piece which closely fits and just hammer it into the puzzle. One seeks for that piece which perfectly fits the hole. I’m going to continue to attempt to write successful poems. I will fail…but maybe not all of the time.
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, likely female, on Anise Hyssop. September 2026.
One of my new favorite plants is the anise hyssop. Anise hyssop grows to about four feet with long flower clusters at the end of each upward branch. These clusters each have what looks like about 100 flowers. The large one in the photo above has approximately 50 clusters. (I had to count them for a pollinator study I participated in.) The weight and height of the branches causes them to bend a bit, making them look like a flower arrangement to me. The flowers don’t bloom all at the same time, but over the past two seasons ours has peaked in late June through mid-July, after which some of the flowers begin to do whatever propagation chores the plant must do.
Same bee, different photo from July’s. Note more flower clusters in the background. July 2026.
The hyssop attracts many pollinators. I participated in the Great Southeastern Pollinator Count two weeks ago, choosing this plant because it had so many flowers. I counted mostly Eastern bumblebees and a little wasp about a half inch in length. Others included a very small bee, ants, another kind of insect I’ll just call a beetle, and the biggest dang wasp I’ve ever seen! I looked it up, and I’m sure I saw a Great Black Wasp. I’ve seen three different maximum lengths ranging from 1.4-2.0 inches. I swear it was about 2.0 inches in length. Absolutely huge.
Yesterday I saw our lone species of hummingbird here in the SE United States, a ruby-throated one, also checking out the hyssop. It seemed to prefer the similar-looking flowers of the obedient plant quite near me. And both yesterday and today the several hyssop plants in our yard have been caught the attention of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies.
When I began the census count, I lamented to my wife that most of flowers have long past their peak. I expected to find few pollinators compared to June-July. The purple coneflowers have lost all their petals; the spiky centers remains, attracting goldfinches to the seeds, not pollinators to the pollen. Similarly, the black-eyed Susans and Indian blanket flowers have mostly disappeared.
But strangely (to me), the hyssop seems to have popped out more flowers! Over the past three days bees, most of the Eastern carpenter variety, have been madly jumping on the hyssop flower clusters. From a distance they’re visible by watching the ends of the stalks bouncing up and down in a non-existent breeze. And then there’s the apparent delight some butterflies have taken in finding yet more flowers on the hyssops.
We need to keep trying, keep putting out those flowers of attraction. It makes a difference. Perhaps “carpenter bees” aren’t your thing. Perhaps you dislike benign-but-huge “wasps”. No matter. Our purpose is to flower. Let the rest take care of itself.
I recently revisited “How Dare You” by 10CC. What a great album for these times! Particularly “I Wanna Rule The World”. If you feel a bit disrupted by politics lately, give it a listen. Some of the tunes just say “wow, what a masterful control of the pop genre.” Others? A bit close to the bone in these times. Seems to me that the band anticipated the 1980s rather well.
I feel bad because I’m breaking the chain for real today. I had planned to write a poem as we flew eastward, but I chose to finish Hamnet instead… and sleep. Then I thought, “I’ll dash it off at home.” We walked into a house without air-conditioning! 😲😰 It was 60 degF as we walked to the Seattle airport. We dropped into 85 degrees with over 70% humidity here in Raleigh, NC… And the house was the same.
I love the East especially the southeast of North Carolina where we landed, but I was raised in Eastern Washington where hot days didn’t carry that humidity and were balanced by cool nights. This was reinforced by our recent visit there. (Of course all the smoke from fires and the dry, dessicated grasses reminded me why I like the East. )
In 2011 I had one of the most serendipitously good book-buying experiences of my life. Perhaps it was aided by occurring in the middle of a family vacation I had arranged. My little family (parents, brother, niece, and wife) had gathered in a vacation rental on a bluff just north of Newport, OR, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. On a typically rainy day in early October we trotted from shop to shop in the Nye Beach district. Seeing a quaint bookstore, I headed up the stairs.
Inside, a multi-leveled converted house crammed full of books greeted us. I purchased four wonderful books, used. For very little money I bought:
The Book of Bob, by Paul Chasman, easily the weakest book of the four, but highly enjoyable nevertheless. “In the beginning, Bob didn’t plan to start a religion; it just happened.” That’s the opening line. Written during the two George W. Bush administrations, it takes a swipe at them, but mostly it pokes fun at the craziness of American society and religion, of course.
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann. What a fantastic introduction to Thomas Mann! And fittingly, it was his first novel. Primarily chronicling the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family—images of which still reside in memory, popping out on occasion—it also gives a great portrait of the wealthy in Hamburg in the middle decades of the 1800’s. Though it was published 125 years ago, it reads “more modern” when compared to other authors publishing 1880-1925.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The translators won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for this work. Their comment was: “In their version, Anna Karenin becomes a surprising rediscovery…..Pevear and Volokhonsky may truly be said to be the reinventors of the classic Russian novel for out time.” Seeing this on the back cover and knowing it had received good press, when I saw it for ridiculously low price….
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. It’s difficult to say how much this book has impacted me. I tumbled for Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard in the very early 1980’s, and when I read Killing Mr. Watson sometime in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s, I just got captured by this vague, tenuous storyline which fictionalizes a real historical event: the killing of Edgar “Bloody” Watson by a posse of his neighbors in 1910 in Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands. Imagine encountering this book and discovering two things: Matthiessen had actually written a trilogy about this event through the 90’s and then collected them into one volume, which he rewrote, condensing them to this one volume. I felt like I’d struck gold. In the second volume of the story, Watson’s son’s story is told from adulthood (with flashbacks) as he attempts to figure out his father’s tumultuous life which led to his death. In the final installment, Watson’s story is told from his point of view, childhood to his demise. With each volume we get a richer understanding of the conflicting points of view which collided there in southern Florida. The best fiction illuminates without overtly preaching, and this trilogy leaves us wondering how guilty Watson was, though understanding how he could have provoked his own killing. Unfortunately I did several things which led to me not having this book in my library anymore. I loaned the trilogy to a very good friend, but ve-e-e-r-r-ry slow reader. That was 11 years ago. Last year I donated the original book, Killing Mr. Watson to a local bookstore dealing in used books. Then, just three weeks ago, I visited my slow-reading friend who offered the book back to me (unread), but I mentally mistook this book for the one-volume story and told him to keep it. Oh well.
Five days after I mistakenly left a cherished book in another’s hands, I had the opportunity to revisit the Nye Beach Book House where I had bought these wonderfully received books. Sadly, I found it had closed only ten months before.
I know where all but the most outstanding independent booksellers are headed. Too much of what they offered can be easily handled online. I buy 95% of my books to be delivered to the Kindle app. I might be 72, but the ability to make the text bigger, to look up an unknown word just by highlighting it, and to mark passages and be able to find them again is just irresistible. Yes, there is an aesthetic plus to a physical book, but when I occasionally read them these days, I feel hampered by the inability to do those things an e-book can do. But…I thought a store like Nye Beach Book House would survive, especially given its touristy location in Newport, OR.
But readers like me, more than young readers, must shoulder the bulk of the blame. As I’ve just described, I have many positive reasons to read an e-book, and few to read a physical book. Physical books require light and that’s an issue when I’m sitting in bed trying to drag the bedside lamp ever-closer. I’ve tried those so-called ‘book lights’ and hated them all. Physical books require me to hold them. I currently have lifting restrictions on both arms due to break the radius in both of them. Minor things: it’s easier to lose your place in a physical book—whoops, the bookmark just fell out, or, I just dropped the book; I worry about bending the pages; some are printed poorly.
FWIW, my unread book status is just five books short of 400. But of those, we must note (with embarrassment) that only 262 are not “reference” books of which the vast majority are cookbooks. My library cataloging program, LibraryThing, has many strengths, but doing a complicated Boolean search doesn’t seem to be among them. We’ll have to take an educated guess and say that there are about 130 physical books I’ve tagged “to read” (or perhaps I’ve encountered and said, “nah’). Will I read these when e-books present so many positives? Yes. I just read Hamnet a physical book gifted to me by the same person who now holds my treasured Shadow Country. I’m reading a thick, thick Lord of the Rings which holds all six ‘books’ and which I’ve not read for over 40 years. I think the physical books I own will get read at a slow but steady pace, but I’m old enough to know there will be unread ones. I recently bought a book in physical form from a local arborist and native plant enthusiast. It looked too beautiful to encounter electronically.
And there’s where an e-library falls flat. I’ve purchased books which purport to reproduce the original’s photographs and illustrations, but it’s seldom if ever been as good as I know the physical book must have been. Additionally, how can I impress visitors with my vast and well-read habits! I submit:
The peak of my library. Many books were left behind, some of these have departed, and few have joined. July 2012.
Joh Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider sought to show a near-future version of what constant change would look like, basing this premise on Alvin Toffler’s non-fictional book, Future Shock. In the process, however, I’ve believed more and more that he foresaw what our society has turned into 50 years since the book was published.
You wrote of youths walking tightropes over alligator pits, spectators screaming, "Fall! Fall!" all for "fun," for 'cash considerations.'
Do you recognize us now, John?
Show after 'reality' show trumpets screaming contestants. We live through damaged people baring their emotional problems all for prize money, that get-out-of-jail-free excuse for any type of boorishness. Inevitably it creeps into our society where it's okay to scream at someone if it's justifiable. John, we discover in your story that everyone breaks down, no one has privacy, that drugs keep us happy, docile, that society breaks into cults curated for profit, that criminals run what seemed to be our government.
all the voices in my head 