The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

The Lonely Adventurers

Little boys see danger
Where there is only a tree
Little boys see adventure
While escaping responsibility

Little boys grow up and make for great adventurers
But, have you ever stopped to wonder,
When they’re out shaking hands with death
If, when their body comes back, their heart’s all asunder

From Portugal to India, you opened the world, but,
Did you call out for your mama?
When on your death-bed with malaria,
Oh, explorer-great, Vasco de Gama?

You can circumnavigate with the best, Ferdinand Magellan
You sail with seemingly no hint of fear
But you couldn’t circumnavigate your need for a hug
As you died, pierced, by a bamboo spear

Here, fishy, fishy!, heeeere, fishy, fishy, fishy!
Where did you go, Jacques Cousteau?
And where are you now, exploring still?
Or are you cuddled up with a throw pillow?

Aging is terrible, said the fountain of youth, laughing
A quest to find it was the aim of Juan Ponce de Leon
He failed, dying of an arrow wound, and reconnecting with his youth:
The fetal position is great for when you’re poisoned and alone

Adventurers embrace risks and danger
They will go down in history’s annals
Often so close to their goals …
They only lacked stuffed animals

So … I really like this idea, but I don’t like this poem much. I’m throwing it out there with the best of intentions to re-write it at a future date. Really, being an explorer would be craaaaazy scary. And these guys (except Cousteau, the only modern one in this bunch) kept dying in foreign lands! (Not for no reason, they were often taking “unclaimed’ lands and killing or converting as they saw fit.)

Anywho, it’s “funny” (maybe interesting is a better word) to think of explorers dying, sad and lonely, in far-away places after living an incredibly tough-guy, amazing life.

Also I don’t like the concluding verse … But I chose to watch the basketball game rather than think about it. GO LOUISVILLE!

Feeling Lazy

Heya folks, I am feeling lazy today so I present you with … Pure evil! In the form of, a species-hating warmonger more commonly known as … The Chaquita Banana!

Don’t ask me to explain why she’s a warmonger, she just seems kind of evil.

Quotes of the Day!

All of these quotes come from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

 

evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.

 

and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don’t mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.

 

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations … I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.

 

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

 

I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a coupe of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, ‘I guess so.’

 

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.