Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind . . .

It was, I believe, in sixth grade that the class took a daylong trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. This was the biggest field trip we had ever taken and it required signed permission slips and packed lunches. It was also, if memory serves, the first time I ever actually rode a school bus. I was a town kid, and had always walked to school or had been driven by Mom in our third-hand Plymouth the half mile or so when something was bleeding.

No colors anymore . . .

What does practically every rock 'n roll performer; whiny, little emo-brat; anime otaku; younger comedian; self-declared "sexy" woman; "dangerous" (again, a self-declared state) cowboy; neo-Nazi; acutely sensitive poet; "serious" writer, businessperson, baby-sitter, etc, etc have in common?

They all think wearing black makes a statement other than, "I'm boring."

Fight on fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight . . .

At the top of the stairs going down to the Athletic Field on the nights we had a home game, one of the local farmers would sell cartons of freshly pressed apple cider. Rumor had it that occasionally some of the cartons would be left-overs from the last home game, and had turned hard in the interim. That none of the cider ever was hard did nothing to diminish the feeling that perhaps this carton was the one. Hard or not, the taste of fresh apple cider on a crisp autumn evening was unforgettable.

At that time football was, for me, a few classmates in uniforms and helmets throwing themselves against other uniforms and helmets under some garish lights on an Friday evening. More important to me was the taste of that cider, the warmth of my band uniform, and the way my date's hand felt in a wool mitten. Otherwise it was just a game whose objective made very little sense to me. I had spent a lot of time in hospitals, and purposefully doing things that could very easily put you, or the other guy, in the hospital was, in my opinion, not the hallmarks of a reasonable, or even fun, sport.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . . 11番

One of the more popular plot lines in science fiction involves the hero going back in time, and preventing something from happening so that in the future they came from some, even more terrible, thing will not happen. For some reason, probably one best explored while watching the currents created by the ice melting in a glass of scotch, the even more terrible thing very often is the birth of some individual. The argument goes something like this: the world, as we know it, is crap. The reason it is crap can be traced directly back to this exact person. Therefore, if that exact person is never born then, ipso facto, the world will not be crap.

I love to get a chance to play—and sing it . . .

This has been bouncing around the inside of my head—the relatively uncluttered area I hear most people use to hold a functioning brain—like the lyrics of a song you hate for sometime now, and I'm hoping that by putting it into actual words it will do what most of my thoughts do when I try to formalize them into a coherent bit of writing, and evaporate into nothingness. When I worked I would often have this problem. For hours, or days and far too many nights, I would have a thought or image hovering in my consciousness just in front of the stuff I really needed or wanted to think about. Back then these interloping thoughts were usually snatches of conversations some secret part of me wished to have with either faculty—especially department chairs—or upper management or both.

Granted the current recurring thought has nothing to do with most faculties' lack of awareness of how modern business must, by necessity, operate or how books are actually printed and distributed. ("Yes, I imagine that book would be perfect for your class. But it is published by a small monastery in Tibet that only has contact with the outside one day a week and demands unblemished, black goats for payment. I can assure you we won't be able to have it here next week for the first day of class.") Nor does have to do with being given two completely contradictory, mutually inoperable directives within the space of two sentences. ("Um, let me get this right. You want me to hire three more people, and lower my payroll by 15%. Are you even aware of what you are saying?" "I didn't say it would be easy.")

There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby . . .

Several years ago my assistant and I were talking during a slow afternoon at work. I have completely forgotten whatever it was we were discussing, and it's totally irrelevant anyway, but I remember saying at one point something like, "Well, that's why I'm a Pagan."

She kind of smiled and said, "You don't believe in enough to be a Pagan."

She was right, of course.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . . 10番

The afternoon had been even less fun than Thomas had anticipated, and after a lifetime spent in the madcap world of academic administration his standards were pretty low. As a reward to himself for having endured two rather accurate samplings of hell he skipped the buffet and dance being held that evening, and was walking along the edge of the beach watching the surf and an occasional surfer. He brushed the sand off a bit of the wall that separated the beach from the man made parts of town, and sat down staring out at the waves, but naturally what he was really looking at was his seemingly empty past and an equally meaningless future as it seemed to be shaping up at the moment.