Many paths up the mountain...: September 2026

!

You offer a sincere compliment on a great mustache and suddenly she's not your friend.

~ Marty Feldman

They don't write them like they used to...

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago...

~ William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 1948

Bleeding

They say love saves, but it is love that teaches man how deeply he can bleed without dying.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Soul killing

Nothing kills the human soul like being in the wrong place with the wrong people.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevski

Living carefully...

I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty, the audience never came.

~ Osamu Dazai

Relax

The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything. The better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.

~ Bill Murray