Laughing Out Loud at Airports

"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,--some of its virus mingled with my blood." -Henry David Thoreau

His argument? We should be good, not do good. 

p.s. I started reading a short story from my Nathaniel Hawthorne Anthology today and found that I couldn't continue. The first sentence began with Mr. Hawthorne comparing life to a funeral procession... he would. Sometimes I wish he'd surprise me and start a story with an emoticon or something. But I get it. He had daddy issues, grandaddy issues, great grandaddy issues, great great grandaddy issues...whew. Maybe we'll talk Hawthorne ancestry later this week. 

Artful Construction of Nothing

I often begin a writing project and end making faces at a blinking cursor.
For inspiration, I pull out the journal, the one with the gold-flecked trees, and stick a pencil behind my ear. Sometimes, I curl my hair around the pencil, and yes, the pencil-tight curls stay in place.
The next step -- run--I run. And if I begin a run, it's no less than 11 miles. I've been going 20, consistently, a couple times a week. Someday I'll construct a belt for the run-- one that will hold notebooks and pencils, because, often, while inspiration fills the brain during a run, a smoky form of amnesia pervades afterwards. I blink my eyes in time with the cursor.

I've been taking masters classes in business since January. After receiving an BA in English Literature, I am often tempted to imagine the business professors absent of an internal life. Satirical images ditty across tile floors. Business professors become thin as playing cards, the exterior matching the presumed interior. I scold myself as Thoreau applauds business,

"I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business... it offers advantages which        it may not be good policy to divulge."

Tomorrow I will buy some green coffee beans. I'll put them on the stove, turn up the heat as though boiling a frog, and stir the beans. After a few minutes they'll brown. They'll jump, sound like popcorn, the first crack. I'll lift the pan and throw the beans in the air as a dense fog of husks fills the kitchen. In Ethiopia they use these husks to make a drink called buno. In the United States, I take them outside and watch them float into the wind to speckle the surrounding snow.  Once again, a loud crack and I'll throw them onto a cookie sheet. They'll cool in the snow we raked off the roof.

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." -Thoreau