Sunday

Sunday

Somewhere on the list of the little things I like in life, somewhere up kinda high, you'll find quiet Sunday mornings. Nobody else is up and out. Especially none of the fools. Makes me feel like the world is mine.

Of course, we all know that the Second National Bank of Butte, Montana technically holds the note on the World. But I'm making regular payments. By 2042, it will be all mine.

I usually get up early to do a little writing. I like the quiet. Got asked at work why I get up so early to do it. I get up early because my head isn't cluttered up with the junk of the day. I'm the type that's got a hard time letting go if something from the day's bothering me. Usually sleep will wash it away. After I've slept, and before I've had to go out and deal with more of the worldly mess (and before anybody's up to bother me with it), I write. The stuff I write later in a day...it's more robotic and doesn't have any life to it.

I say all that, and now I feel like a bit of an ass for wasting the prospect. I didn't write this morning. I tried, but nothing came out. Some of you know how that works. Kinda like that rhyme for what is something of a similar process...here I sit all broken hearted, tried to crap but only farted...

It's part of why I keep the blog. I figure if I can just sit and write something, it'll get the pump primed, and stuff'll come spilling out on the other end. Don't know if this morning's the morning. We'll just have to double up tomorrow.

I read this morning. Finished Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker. I enjoy the language in a Robbins book more than I do anything else. Woodpecker's no different.

A couple of my favorite passages:

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is cuased by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

I like simile. After a bombing at a conference:

With Pioneer Inn's meeting hall in bad state of repair, with cops, newsppeople, and curiosity-seekers milling around the place like bargain-minded lemmings at a suicide sale....

And a phrase that I ended up writing on a note card:

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.

I liked that last one a lot.

Anyway. Oscars are tonight. I've seen only a few of the films and performances nominated this year. Moving out into the woods, where the nearest decent movie theater's a 30 minute drive away, makes it a little troublesome sometimes. A couple of opinions....

Million Dollar Baby's easily one of the best movies I've seen in a while. I don't know that anybody could argue with giving it best picture, and giving Clint Best Director. It'll be interesting seeing how the Best Director race turns out. There seems to be a big push (at least from the media I'm reading) to give Scorcese the Oscar. The Aviator's a fine film. But not his best, in my mind. Still, I wouldn't have any bitch about Scorcese getting the trophy.

That's the only race I have a real interest in. Haven't seen enough of the performances in any category to love or loathe any one in particular. But I'll probably watch with half an eye, anyway.

Well. That's my Sunday thoughts. Let's go wander off into the world.