Just another relaxing afternoon on the deck
Next post: MIA: Remus and the Woodpile Report [Updated 2] [Bumped 2]
Previous post: Strange Daze
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Comments on this entry are closed.
could swear that at 00:14 there’s a giant fish flying out.
Could someone please explain…. WTF?
Somebody playing with detcord.
Pyrotechnics are your friend.
Look at all the crap coming up in the water. They’re blowing big snags to ease dredging, probably for flood control. Anon had it correct; detcord to ignite the charges set by divers.
det cord burns at 26,000 ft per sec
That’s a damn big beaver dam that got demolished. Too bad the guy who owned the deck wasn’t informed beforehand.
Or…mebbie it was his doing after all. Looks to me like the deck survived pretty much intact.
Wow. And people say 19th century trappers were hard on beavers…
I kind of miss the days when I could run down town & buy a few sticks of stumping dynamite.
That is a good one to binge watch!
June Cleaver: “Ward, weren’t you a little hard on the Beaver last night”
Ward Cleaver: “Now June.”
I stand corrected. Consulted (I sent the video) with the family demo expert, who said that the ignitior wasn’t detcord (not enough shockwave coming off it), but was “shocktube”, which he described as a flexible plastic tube coated on the inside with an aluminum based flash powder. Comes with a blasting cap in one end. Cut to length, insert cap into boom stuff. Insert the cut end into a device that holds the open end against a shotgun primer, with a sprung loaded striker hitting the primer when squeezed., Much safer than electrical blasting caps, especially near radios or static generated by helicopter blades (guess where he got his experience 🙂 ). He also said that the tube is translucent, so the flash was visible in dim light.
I remember that scene, Snipe. I think the whole conversation went like this
JUNE: Ward, werent you a little hard on the Beaver last night
WARD: Well June, there are times when the Beaver wants to slack off; then you need to ride the Beaver hard. You got to be firm. Ask Wally, he knows. After all, he sleeps with the Beaver
JUNE: But if you push too hard, the Beaver tends to clam up; and then its difficult to get the Beaver to open up again. I think you should try a softer approach