another day at the lake, and this time i got the park-diagonal sign, and had boys with me, who snapped the corn as we drove by but this wasn't as good as getting out and getting a still picture. it was father's day, and here i had all the boys, older and younger, out there with the turtle and the sun and this big old tree that eventually i snapped a picture of. you have these experiences with wildlife - the turtle ambles over to check you out, a bug on the tree is exactly the same color as the tree itself, a deer on the road stops two cars, going different directions, for a shared moment in time; this is something that i'd probably forget, except that i record it right here in this blog. but even the blog, well, it buries stuff like this by time, and unless you happened to remember that it happened in june 2012, you'll forget that too. or maybe you link to it and mark it, the post where i talk about chance encounters. one time i was relatively inspired, and wrote a very simple piece about my dreams, and about how many of them would never come to pass, but i harbored them anyway, kept them alive deep inside myself, just in case there would be an opportunity someday. and i named some of them, unrealistic as they are. traveling through africa, scandinavia, or maybe the buddhist temples of myanmar; the south pacific; a linguistics book, a novel, that kind of stuff. well it so happened that somebody happened along this blog and it really touched her (?) and she (he) even wrote something to that effect. now for the most part this blog is boring drivel, unless you know me well, in which case it's still boring drivel, though you might get some of my jokes. but i practice my writing here, and every once in a while there's an intersection of something serious, or even meaningful, and somebody who happens to read it. i suppose it happens every once in a while. more cleaning out of the office; papers that go back eighteen years, magnetic poetry that is homemade out of old nasty political memos from the nineties. i oughta go into the magnetic poetry business, but i can't imagine it will ever come back into style, or that the right combination of words will ever be found, with which to make the perfect poetry. a combination of the alcoholics anonymous (words like Friend of Bill) and these nasty old memos got me through for a few years. there were some other ones that were basically bugs, or beetles, on magnets. they would occasionally fall and get vacuumed up i assume on weekends or whenever they do that. lately the jackhammers have reached a feverish pitch, getting louder as the day goes by and even at its loudest when it was almost five and they should be letting up for gods sake. couldn't clean out the old files because the ten-year-old was up there using the computer. he of course thinks the office is a wonderland of cool things to see and do, he generally gets a free treat in the deal. his summer has become making origamis, making origami movies, and following us up to the office to play on computers. life could be worse. late at night, i park in my favorite chair under a large fan and, cool and rested, jump stuff onto facebook, onto these blogs, onto whatever. my little phone makes half-pop arts and i end up with some junk on the phone, because i never delete much and sometimes i even upload it twice. but sometimes i lose it, on the phone or the computer, unable to remember where it gets uploaded to or how to find it. i go back looking for it and find all kinds of stuff. it's kind of like when you're stopped by a train, and these old cars come by with weird names or canadian names or better yet, canadien, in french, then an old boxcar comes by and it's tagged with this wild message, who knows what it says, it's from a completely different world though it may only be in a single color or maybe two. and this completely different world is a peek into some city kid's view, deep in the yards in the middle of the night, little did he know that the car he was tagging would be heading down the cornfields, along the river, down to new orleans and back maybe, crossing lazily the main street of some small town where people are stopped, or may not even be paying attention. but if they see it, they could read just about anything into it, not knowing the tagger's code, or or anything else, even the fact that one boxcar is in french, totally beyond them. the sun shines off the bare steel rail where someone crushed a dime a little while back, and pretty soon the train is gone and life goes back to normal, or at least, what folks considered normal. nobody asked the bystander. drive safe, i'd tell ya. drive safe, but park diagonal.