Tales of the Macabre...............

Draculoaf

Some time in early January of this year, I bought a loaf of bread. A commonplace enough occurance so as to go completely unheralded here or anywhere for that matter were it not for the fact that this was no commonplace loaf of bread.
It didn't look different than any other loaf of bread..........just your average, ordinary 2 pound loaf of multi-grain. Under normal circumstances, I would have consumed it in far less time than it would take it to develope mold or go stale. I like sandwiches and soup for lunch and eat them frequently.
As it turned out, I was spending afternoons at my daughter's at the time. I would meet my granddaughter at the bus stop and spend the evening with her while her Mom worked 2nd shift. More often than not, I made some sort of lunch out of the leftovers in Cassie's fridge.........while, at home, my bread went uneaten.
After a couple of weeks, it was obvious that I wasn't going to go through the bread at my usual pace, so after checking for mold and staleness I chucked it in the refrigerator..........and kind of forgot about it for a while. This was about mid-February.
Around the third week of March, I took notice of it while making a list of items to get at the grocery store, thinking surely that it would be getting stale or moldy by now and would need to be replaced. This loaf of bread is now 8 weeks old but still showing no signs of mold or staleness. I left it out on the counter, thinking that I would replace it with a fresh loaf and dry the old one out for use in stuffing........I had frozen some cranberries at Christmas and was planning a holiday style turkey dinner for a family get together somewhere in the midst of the welter of birthdays that fall between mid-March and the end of April.
Again........after a couple of weeks I went to open the bread and lay it out on the oven racks for drying. This is about the time I started to get pretty intrigued (nay, downright amazed) by the fact that there still was no sign of staleness or mold in this stuff.
The bread has now been opened, and either stored in my fridge or on the counter for 12 weeks since I bought it.
I decided to make a sandwich with it to see how it would taste..........
it was fine.
Somewhere in here, my idea for a turkey dinner got postponed, so I decided to see just how long that loaf of bread would last without molding or getting stale. I wasn't going to let it go to waste, mind you. I would either eat it (as long as I could) or dry it out for stuffing.
I made the last sandwich with that bread near the end of May.........over 4 months after I bought it.
True story........but you have only my word for its veracity.

Oh, I tried to document the story photographically..........
but then, everybody knows you can't take pictures of "the unbread".

The Mummy

I saw my first "Mummy" movie when I was about 5 years old.......it scared the living shit out of me. Of all the monsters, that was the scariest.
That fear passed with childhood.
I still like Mummy movies .........the new ones with Brendan Faser are good actioners..............the old ones are classic horror.
Let's face it though..........the idea that the dried up husk of a long-dead man could somehow be reanimated after thousands of years, stalk the earth preying upon innocent, beautiful young women, searching always for the reincarnation of his ancient true love is pretty hokey stuff.

Yep..........pretty fantastic.

Or is it...........?




They are out there

Quite a number of years ago the Viking fly by of Mars picked up an image on the red planet's surface that ignited a firestorm of speculation and reignited the belief that an ancient race of highly advanced beings had once populated our neighbor in space. That image is now famous..........



As much as I sincerely believe that we humans are not alone in this universe, I also highly doubted that the image was any more than a coincidence of light and shadow and perspective on a perfectly natural feature of topography..........

However, the other night as I passed the laundry room, that certainty was shaken to its core.
I leave it to you to conclude, as I have, that there now exists clear photographic evidence.
The face on Mars was real.......
They have been here before......
and they are still among us.



Happy Halloween.............

Thus endeth the entry............

Playing a ketchup game............or, not without a condiment.

Ketchup offends me. I don't know why. I don't regard it as declasse nor do I particularly dislike it's flavor. I use it in cooking, stock it as a staple and provide it for guests at home. I just don't want it on my table or near me on the counter when I am dining alone in public.

If I am eating with someone who uses it I don't have a problem with it.......there is ketchup on the table because they want it there and I am fine with that.

When dining alone and the wait-person puts it in front of me without asking I will ask that it be taken away. If it is not removed I will hide it on the chair next to me or put it on the floor......................or slide it far away from me if I am at a counter.

I don't feel or behave that way toward any other condiment.

Thus endeth the entry..........

From pillow to post.........

At some point in the past few weeks, it seems my body may have finally gotten the hint that I wasn't going to cave on the sleep thing............
I don't think the trip had any causal effect per se. It could be that a wee break coupled with the gradual lessening of some of the stress issues may have been contributory though.

In keeping with my one-step-at-a-time plan, I've had some success with reading lately as well.

To put it in perspective, in the first 5 months of 2004, I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 books. (To use the common definition of the word "book" as: a written or printed work on sheets bound together.) It was somewhere in here that I fell into the whole insomnia, narcolepsy thing. It took me most of 2005 to read "Huckleberry Finn"...........though I've read it nearly 25 times (honestly).

Earlier this year, I spent over two months re-reading "Another Roadside Attraction".........in the meantime, I keep acquiring books to read.

Apparently the body and the gel-pak are trading information and coming to grips with the inevitable, to wit: I will have back sovereignty over my own mechanicals.

Over the past three and a half weeks, I've finished 6 books. I also stayed awake through all 9 parts of Ken Burns' PBS "Civil War" documentary (to be fair, it was one episode a night). I'll grant you I wasn't struggling with "great works" or anything..............two of the most recently released "Dune" prequels written by Frank Herbert's son Brian with Kevin Anderson (Frank's brain is in the story, but his soul and mind are sadly lacking from the writing.......still must-reads for the "Dune" fan), two histories; "1776" by McCullough and "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman, "Illusions" by Richard Bach, and a book about National Parks in the Appalachian Mountains.

In the summer of my second grade year, I took to reading the "classics" that Mom had accumulated........."Moby Dick", "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Lorna Doone", "Jane Eyre", "Treasure Island", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn".........you get the idea. Most days would find me perched on a limb about 15 feet off the ground in the Norway maple tree in the front yard...........rainy days in the back seat of the car.........with a book, an apple or two to sustain me, and after a few trips up and down I finally started lugging the 20 lb. dictionary up in the tree with me. I think I got my own dictionary as a Christmas present that year, albeit a smaller and more wieldy version.......(this isn't a digression, it really is going somewhere).

Back to school that fall, I read the kids books (60 pages, huge lettering, every other page an illustration) to some extent, but I'd gotten an appetite for more.
The problem arose when it came time to recognize the "readers" in the class with certificates for the number of books read, passed out in awards ceremonies held at regular intervals, some of which were attended by parents and the public. Here I was, at nine, reading Hugo, Dumas, Welles, Stevenson, Bronte...etc. and turning in reports on ten or fifteen books a month and getting smoked by kids who were reading "Suzie Creamcheese Stubs her Toe" and "Triple Trouble for Rupert" to the tune of a hundred books a month..........some of the stuff they read wouldn't have amounted to a respectable comic book.

So, I complained. I reasoned that something like "The Count of Monte Cristo" at 1100 plus pages, small print, and no pictures ought to count as the equivalent of at least 25 or maybe even thirty of the kiddie books. To give them credit, my teacher and the principal acknowledged the soundness of my reasoning, but said that any attempt to establish an equivalency would be arbitrary, and difficult to implement. In short; "You're absolutely right, but that's not the way we're going to do it."

It wasn't fair. In essence I was being told to read shorter books. This was one of those seminal moments of clarity and insight in my life.....perhaps even the very first....... that eventually added up to the radicalizing of my way of looking at and thinking about things. There were to be many more.

Which brings us back to books..........

I was careful to indicate before that I would, for now, abide by the common definition of the word "book".

Here is the "Bozean" breakdown:

Book.....between 800 and 1100 pages
Booklet..between 500 and 800 pages
Magazine....between 350 and 500 pages
Short story, essay.....between 200 and 350 pages
Article or anecdote....between 100 and 200 pages
Tracts, brochures, pamphlets, and fliers....anything less than 100 pages

So..........strictly speaking, I read two booklets, a magazine, an essay, an anecdote and an article...........still not bad.

It must be clearly understood that these are not assessments of the worth or value of a written work. It goes without saying that some authors can pack more into a single sentence than some others can in whole volumes of assembled verbiage.

.......and what, you may ask, lies above that 1100 page threshold?

That, would be a "work".........an "opus".......a "volume"......a "tome"..........a "real read"!

Thus endeth the entry.........

Take Me Home............

It has always been difficult to impress on people just how "country" the area of Southern Indiana where my Mother grew up really is.
When we visited there in my childhood I would come back with tales of kerosene lamps and outhouses and wood cookstoves...........of chopping wood and carrying water back to the house from "Uncle John's Spring" (I never did quite figure out whose Uncle, exactly, he was), of tobacco drying in the barn and coonskins and ginseng drying in the fur shed.
I'm not so sure the kids in my class didn't picture me as having spent two weeks at New Salem or someplace like that.
As I went through the pictures I took and mulled over what I was going to write, I understand that nothing is going to impact the mind with that sense of having stepped out of time short of going there and seeing for yourself.

Most of the roads are paved now,

but you still have to take it easy on the curves and hills and keep to your side of the road......and it is still like driving through a green tunnel most of the year.


..........and yes, there be some hills here. Most of the uphill portions of the road level off around mid-hill for about 20 ft or so and then continue upward. That is so you can give the horses a break before taking on the rest of the hill.

Wesley Chapel looks much the same.........

but it has a lady Pastor, indoor plumbing and central heat now.

New Amsterdam has a new town hall and a general store (where the cognoscenti gather for strong coffee in the morning) in the old Odd Fellows Lodge (seen here sporting the new paint job and looking quite spry for a century and a half........)

Grandma's house sits empty and Grandpa's fur shed is immortalized..............



The view down to the river from the side yard is pretty much unchanged.


As I drove into and around and by and through these familiar places, two songs came unbidden to my mind and echoed off and on through most of my stay. One was (irritatingly enough) John Denver's "Country Roads".......more oddly, the other was an old hymn that I probably haven't heard since I was a kid; "This is My Father's World". (These were joined by the fourth movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony and "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman" by Whistlin' Jack Smith.......but that is not so odd.) I am a slightly less than enthusiastic, "pick and choose" Denver fan and in no circumstances inclined to be churchy ..........but the two songs seemed to fit appropriately enough so I let them serve as my background "score".

Of all the Bus Stations....

A few days before I left for my trip, I stopped by the Mall for something or other (either gummi worms or flying spaghetti monsters.........don't ask) and spotted this......
(if you spot a flaw in pretty Ingrid's chin, it is my reflection in the glass getting a photo to post....this measures about 12 x 18)

Did I absolutely have to have it or what, eh?

Yeah...........I thought so too.

Thus endeth the entry............

The Woods are Lovely.........

I went to bed at 10:30 pm.........and for once went nearly immediately to sleep.

I woke at 1:30 am the first time........which, again, is pretty good. The first installment of sleep is usually only 1 hour and 15 or 20 minutes.

I dozed off for another hour (2:30 am) got up and took two more aspirin, shuffled about for a bit and then laid back down.........expecting to sleep for another hour and a half or two hours.

By 3:00 am I knew it wasn't going to happen............I am on tenter hooks. I had planned to leave for Southern Indiana at 5:00 am. It's the first time I've actually "gone someplace" since 2002.

I'm not going to leave earlier, but I do have some time now to take my ease about getting out of Dodge.

I can't wait to be there. Such a nice, quiet, cherished, "not here" place to be. It is my "Muhlenberg County", ('cept Mr. Peabody's Coal Train didn't haul it away, thank God)...... if you know what I mean. See John Prine if you don't.
The way I feel right now tells me how badly I need to be "not here" for a while.
I can only spare a couple of days.......this time.

......."I have promises to keep.
and miles to go before I sleep."

Thus endeth the entry........