I should have a pen and paper next to me every time I decide to travel seriously into the Interweb. I always end up finding excellent websites and excellent leads for information and research. But then I make the most tenuous notes. Scattered scraps of notes that just go a-fluttering away. Or I decide that I will remember what led me to where. But then I remember something else or something else catches my eye and the original path that led me to that most wonderful vista is lost or left behind or simply forgotten.

Oh, Interweb. Who knows how much longer I will be able to roam through your ecosystems before they clear-cut you and make you safe for Steve Jobs and his horror show.

Work is a slow climb out of a deep ditch; methodical, irksome, tiresome, and always checking your footing. You slip a lot. You do a lot of standing at the bottom with your arms crossed in front of you looking at the rim while silently planning your ascent. You get slightly frustrated with yourself because it really isn't that great of a climb, and yet it completely stifles you. Eventually, you will get out of there with one furious burst of energy. It will almost be an explosion.

Today is another day at the bottom of that ditch. It comes on the heels of a rather pleasant weekend. At least, I believe it was pleasant. Any time spent away from home is good - for the most part. And any time spent in the out-of-doors is time well spent. I don't believe the the climate or the weather mar the experience, really. It can be cold and raining and it is still usually a good experience when you are outside. I tend to believe that the air's fragrance takes on new and wondrous aspects: wet leaves, damp moss, soaked twigs and branches, moist earth, the humus, the god-knows-what, and the this-and-that all adds their odor. Do I want to use the word 'odor'? No. I want the word 'scent.' That has a more benign essence. Or do I want 'essence'? Difficult. English is a wonderful language, sometimes...though, it can hold you up and deter you from finding easy meaning. Either way, a rainy day is as wonderful a day as any.

There was a lot I wanted to write today. Now it leaks out of my mind like water in an old cooper's barrel.

Perhaps I wanted to mention Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester with its nearly ancient cobbled paths and crypts and the hillocks and the weird knolls? How it is this maze-like park with strange trees and greenery all over the place? A beautiful park studded with tombstones aged well over 150 years? It is strange...because of their age, it is OK to walk over them and pay them little mind. It is high Victoriana. The crypts and mausoleums and decorated stones. The gated family plots and the stairways curling around knolls. The paths are more like deep-rutted holloways.

It is hard for me to believe that this was the first time I had ever been to this place.
More later.

I've failed to record anything in here for almost one month. It seems like I am one day shy of a month from my last post. And all of this lapsed time even after I told myself that I would be using this as one of my methods for getting back into the habit and practice of writing. Something written everyday just to get my mind running and moving in those directions. But didn't do that at all. And I really don't have a good reason.

Maybe there is a reason and it has to do with the catapulting of messages into the ether. I've been packing words like gunpowder into big drums and ramming them into the bottom of a 17 inch Howitzer...and then blasting them out into the distance. They fall like terrifying shrapnel on yonder entrenchments. No. Nothing destructive. It is all very productive. The words are being mined from the cavernous reaches of my mind like ore-slag and refined in blast-furnaces until a perfect iron-clad is removed from the fires to cool. Pig iron sent across from the frontier reaches and into the densely populated regions for some proper smithing. Or something like that. Something good is happening and I am writing - but like anything...like always...as always...I wonder if it is going anywhere other than toward the perpetual exchange of e-mails. Like post-modern pen pals or something. But I am gearing myself into the same rut I always gear myself into in these situations. I write, write, write myself into an open field after several days of rain and then try to hurry up and accelerate out of there.

[Can I mention that I hate sitting here at work and having to listen to the ninnies in the office? I despise them and their despicable lives. I hate their bitching, their shallow criticisms, and their all-around busy-body presence.]

So my writing gets sent off into the silicon ether in an attempt to further the slow movement toward...