BLAZE

That terrible, terrible time of year

I know I owe many people letters, or at least notes, if not phone calls and visits. I'm sorry to be so pokey lately. I will try to write or call you soon! I promise!

In the meantime, here's something to provoke comments, perhaps, or at least amuse you. Have you been watching the storm between Naomi Klein and the US administration in the Guardian? Wowsers!


All those with agency are confronted by a choice. We can use that agency to secure for ourselves a safe and comfortable existence. We can use our life, that one unrepeatable product of four billion years of serendipity and evolution, to earn a little more, to save a little more, to win the approval of our bosses and the envy of our neighbours. We can place upon our walls those tombstones which the living erect to themselves: the framed certificates of their acceptance into what Erich Fromm has called the 'necrophiliac' world of wealth and power. We can, quite rationally, subordinate our desire for liberty to our desire for security.
Or we can use our agency to change the world, and, in changing it, to change ourselves. We will die and be forgotten with no less certainty than those who sought to fend off death by enhancing their material presence on the earth, but will live before we die through the extremes of feeling which comfort would deny us. — George Monbiot


Please forgive me my lapses! Surely you know by now they're always mindless and never mindful. Or something like that... Anyway ... Must go "attack a stack" now.

Flitting around the stars,
L

PS: And lest you think B is the only one to comment on climbing, I will chime in that 1) I was surprised we passed our lead checks, given that we both had to fall off the wall AGAIN and neither of us wanted to (somehow I doubt it was a good idea to re-read "Saturday Climbing" before taking my lead test); and 2) B placed third in the Novice category at the Rip and Grip on Friday, which was only his second time taking part in the event (I didn't actually place at all, but I was feeling wispy, etc.). So congratulate the man with the rippling shoulders and massive biceps when next you see him!

PPS: Oh ya — EARL! That's KATE BUSH, not PG, singing the "jeux sans frontiéres" BV on "Games Without Frontiers."

PPPS: Check out the iTunes store!!! Click here and then follow the "Download Here" link. I've already spent much more money than is seemly to disclose, almost all of it on eighties hits... Yes, there were hits in the eighties ... though you probably don't remember most of them ... How about "Geronimo's Cadillac" by Modern Talking? I bet I'm the only one among us who remembered that particular gem ... probably with good reason ... bear in mind my penchant for both sarcasm and cheez ...

PPPPS: Being unreasonably indulgent tonight ... Remind me to tell you my thoughts about pie.