:: Monday 3 September 01
Quick news bulletin: Zen and nancy's ISP access is no longer working, so they can't get/send e-mail or upload anything to the web. (I have a sneaking suspicion their ISP is in financial straits and is pulling plugs.) Anyway, if you really need to get a message to them, write me and I'll give them a call.
Sunday was a marvelous day. After many hours spent Saturday wrestling with balky web pages and trying to teach myself CGI scripting in One! Quick E-Z Lesson!, I actually got away from the computer, and went trail-riding with Deb, out at a big state park near where she boards her horses.
Splendid late-summer weather, enormous blue sky, hot but not oppressive sun, fields full of goldenrod and black-eyed susans. We spent a couple of hours meandering around on the trails; Deb was on Kowboy, who was very charmingly full of himself, and I got to ride Gala, who's rock-solid and sensible and smooth-gaited and responsive. We rode, we chatted, we paused in the shadow of an aspen grove, after Kowboy had been spooked by the Horse-Eating Water-Running Culvert of Doom, to dismount and smoke and stretch and feel sweat drying in the breeze, listen to horses munching grass, watch the wind shiver the aspen leaves.
Every so often I'm reminded forcibly, as with a 2x4 between the eyes, that it is a good thing to get the hell away from the hypnotic glow of the monitor and reconnect with the sensory world. Once we were done and had turned the horses out to the pasture and gotten back in the van to drive home, I felt gloriously rubbery in all my joints, physical and mental--loose, spacious, fluid, random, spent the way one is after good sex. 99% of the time I live wholly in my head, but when you're on a horse, out in open country, you just can't do that, the immediacy of it shuts down all the cerebral jitter, and I was deeply enough into physical reality that the one time Gala did shy--startled by a bicyclist on the nearby road--I was right with her, and managed to do the right things and was in no danger of falling off.
And it was wonderfully restorative to spend time with Deb. The best companions, for me, are those people with whom I'm equally comfortable talking and being silent, and Deb is on that short list.
Plus, she's so intrepid! She posted in her journal about the great War of the Wasps, and I will add that she was the one climbing into the hot dusty horse trailer and whacking the wasp nests with a manure fork, while I stood at a safe distance, making ineffectual encouraging gestures and leaping backwards every time a wasp flew my way.
Today it's back into computerland, and tomorrow the semester begins and the students will throng my office in their multitudes, bless their confused little 18-year-old hearts. Vacation's over, dammit. But I do hope to get at least one more ride in before the snow flies.
fandom journals
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other sites I visit
Bad Hair Days | Barbelith| Hissyfit | Iain | kottke.org | lileks | memepool | Mighty Big TV | Pop Culture Junk Mail | plaintive wail | Tomato Nation
"Our vocation is not a sphinx's riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish. Some people find, in the end, that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way."
--Thomas Merton