Swing Set

Ghost of the Korean War

Sunset at the Lincoln Memorial.

Why Does The Sun Shine?

Howdy. I’m sittin’ in the Holiday Inn in Culpeper, Virginia. Today was one of those days where the weather wasn’t good enough to fly but the forecast wasn’t bad enough totally blow off work. The end result was a day spent updating my logbook and goofing off in the Wal-Mart toy department with my crazy roommate Sam. We may go into DC for some culture if it rains tomorrow.

Update on the laptop situation: Toshiba still hasn’t sent the part. I bought a Gateway and plan on selling the Toshiba if I ever see it again. Bastards.

Here is something I wrote back in Athens, GA when I didn’t have a computer.

As I banked into my first turn to the East this morning, a mountain sat silhouetted in front of a lake infused with the hazy glow of morning sunlight. The beauty overtook me. I smiled.

I thought about Einstein and that equation of his and how the same energy that created the heaven below me is stored in every atom of every human being. I thought about mortality and immortality. For my part, I wished I could be a nuclear bomb detonated in space, all the matter of me turned into pure and beautiful light traveling through the universe for all of eternity. Life without end, Amen. Maybe later…

I saw the cars parked outside a church below. “Oh, yeah. Its Sunday” Would God rather see me down there listening to a sermon about the light of the world than up here witnessing it first hand?

I thought about “They Might Be Giants.”

“The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear (not nucular) furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees”

How beautiful is that? Two Hydrogen atoms caught up in the heat and pressure of it all become so close that they are one. And their love child is Light.

What else does a G need?

The Bayou Lafourche running into the Gulf of Mexico south of Galliano, LA.

I think we all know the feeling.

You probably thoght REM came up with the slogan on their own...

The members of this church went on to use other harder core churches...

to-SHEE-buh, Japanese, "We don't give a crap about our customers!"

Howdy. Yes Grandma (and other concerned parties), I’m still alive. The reason I haven’t written in the last month has nothing to do with your stance on beer. (Beer is “Anti-Grandma”) My absence from online life is actually due to a bad power supply on my Toshiba M35-X laptop. This part is evidently located on the main system board, which has been on back order for the last month. I wish I could say that Toshiba’s customer relations department has done everything possible to help me out and support their three-month-old product, but even online I’m a horrendous liar. They are worthless, incompetent saps! No one expressed any desire whatsoever to help in finding a temporary solution, and no one had any access to the parts people who could tell me when I might expect to have my computer back. After two weeks of daily calls to Toshiba and their authorized service center, I finally got through to someone who was able to tell me that the part was to be shipped on March 14, which happens to be tomorrow (and my birthday). We’ll see.

So, tonight finds me in the bayou. That’s right, Cajun country. The first night I was here, I ate two pounds of crawfish and a half-pound of shrimp. Beautiful. I’m staying in Galliano, Louisiana, a town situated on either side of a canal that runs 25 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. There are three North-South roads, one on the east of the canal, and two on the west. Every couple miles there is a drawbridge crossing the canal and linking one side of town to the other. People around here wait for barges and shrimp boats like people in Kansas wait for trains.

Flying around here is fascinating! On the way down from Athens, I filed my flight plan so as not to fly over the large lake north of New Orleans because I’d rather not over-fly large bodies of water if avoidable. The controllers asked why I was taking the route I had chosen, and when I told them, they all but laughed at me on the radio. After I passed New Orleans to the south, I saw all the swampland and realized that the whole place was water. Then I understood why the controllers had thought I was ridiculous. Even what looked like solid ground from the air was mostly just junk growing on top of the water.

The network of canals is laid out like a diabolical aquatic maze and somehow I doubt there are “road” signs out there. I found out from Jeff, the airport manager, that the reason there are so many dead ends has to do with the oil drilling that is so prevalent down here. I guess that when they cut through the swamp to drill a well, they leave a canal behind.

Occasionally, I see an isolated shack hidden deep in the bayou. My curiosity and imagination go wild! Who in the world lives there? Why? Is that the Toshiba Parts Department?

I’ve got to get the computer back to my boss now. I can’t wait to call Toshiba tomorrow and find out if the part actually shipped or if I’m going to have to buy a Dell and sell the lemon on E-Bay.