With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2002-01-15 - 12:59 a.m.
This is my second update today. Those of you who don't want to miss a single installment in the exciting serial that is my life check out my last one before reading this. If you don't it's OK, it just means that you don't love me.
After updating today I went to see Dave's True Story. I just checked I haven't seen them in almost a year. Most years I see them ten times. That is what comes of my getting sick and their pregnancy hiatus. They were playing at the Screening room, which isn't one of my favorite venues. They play up in the balcony and I have to sit down below at the bar. It was so good to see them though. I am their oldest fan it seems and we've grown very friendly over the years. They started a bit early and Kelly was just beginning the first song as I came in. She waved to me as soon as she saw me. Her and her husband Jeff, the bass player always make me feel good. They are genuinely glad to see me and always give me a big smile.
It was a nice long show. They did three sets, I only stayed for the first two, it's a long trip home from there. After the first set I went up say hi and they came down to have dinner and invited me to join them. I had eaten but I sat with them and talked. I knew they were friends with Christine Lavin but I didn't know how close. They are going to be opening as many shows as they can for her including the show I'm going to at the Gordon Center. It isn't definite but they want to do. They will be playing at Iota as long as they are down there too.
I asked them about FRFF. They had played there once at went over well but were never asked back. I am going to make sure and request them this year. They belong there.
I mentioned the pregnancy; 5 months ago Kelly and Jeff had a son. Four acts that I have seen many times had pregnancy breaks this year, EFO, DTS, Ruth Gerson , and The Nields.
I had to miss DTS the last time they played here because it was the night of the WFUV party. Da Vinci's Notebook was playing the same night. They told me they are going to be at the Bitter End the same night as DVN is playing Makor later this month. I'm seeing DVN but I'll see them at the Turning Point a few days later.
It always feels good to get back to my old traditions like seeing DTS. I can't wait for Ruth to start playing again.
I'm not going to give my weight again but I have read some more LOTR. I'm up to Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit. When I was young I found books IV and VI very disturbing. I still do but now I think of that as a virtue. Those are the books that deal with Frodo and Sam's efforts to reach Mordor and destroy the Ring. Books III and V tell the adventures of the rest of the Fellowship. They are filled with the usual elements of an adventure story, battles, fighting monsters, heroics. The story of Frodo and Sam is mainly a story of their increased sufferings, especially Frodo's. Today's quote is a description of what they saw and how it affected them.
Frodo looked round in horror. Dreadful as the dead Marshes have been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.
They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing = unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. 'I feel sick,' said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
For a while they stood there, like men o n the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning thought the shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up walking among clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits had no welcome for that light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them n their helplessness - little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2002-01-15
