Gobbling for the Second Year

I sally forth, cheesier than a Wisconsin quesadilla, with the big list of Thanks on this, my first (second) Chronicled Turkey Day:

Family first, as they say, and I am overflowing with gratitude for HH6 and the RTO, the latter of which has done more to make a man out of me in a scant 8 months than anyone else could have done in 8 decades. She has trumped my haughty self-assurance by first pointing the way for me to point the way for her. If she doesn't stop challenging my atheism like that, we're going to have problems.

HH6 just seems to keep effortlessly catching everything I drop before it can hit the ground, most importantly my self-confidence. She's everything corny and trite that you can say about the perfect woman, friend, and companion, and she's clueless to that fact. That, friends, is the stuff of protracted epiphany.

To highlight HH6's ability to fill in my gaps, she got up last weekend before I did and anonymously took my sunrise pictures for me. For you:



And of course, the parents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, cats and dogs. Endless thanks to all of you. Let's keep taking care of each other as well as we have been so far.


Friends come next when they don't come first, and a couple of years ago I lost a good one to the bad guys in Afghanistan, specifically because he NEVER put himself first, but lived, and ultimately died, for his troops. Thank you, Jared:



Thanks also to the rest of you for the rest you bring me from the rest of it whenever I need it.

To the people on my little blogroll over there, and also to my half dozen or so regular readers: Screw you. I am already tired of the responsibility I feel I have to keep you happy. Punks, losers, and hangers-on, each and every one of you. As a token of my disapproval, I bring you more sunrise, these pics from this morning, as fine a one as we have had all year:





Finally, I get the feeling that I am just hours away from being extremely thankful for gravy.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Update 9:40 AM: Given how thankful I am for beer, and the fact that this blog is called The Dipso Chronicles, after all, I will have me-self a nice, early Newcastle Brown Ale to wash down the the biscuits and gravy. Give thanks, indeed.

Faugh A Ballagh!

Infamous among college football fans for not finishing things, Notre Dame ain't much for starting them, either. Meet the original Fighting Irish



Come all you gallant heroes, And along with me combined
I'll sing a song, it won't take long, Of the Fighting Sixty Ninth
They're a band of men brave, stout and bold, From Ireland they came
And they hailed a leader to the fore, And Cocoran was his name

It was in the month of April, When the boys they sailed away
And they made a sight so glorious, As they marched along Broadway
They marched right down Broadway, me boys, Until they reached the shore
And from there they went to Washington, And straight unto the war

Chorus: So we gave them hearty cheers, me boys, which was greeted with a smile
Singing here's to the boys that fear no noise, We're the Fighting Sixty Ninth

And when the war is said and done, May heaven spare our lives
For its only then that we can return, To our loved ones and our wives
We'll take them in our arms, me boys, For a long night and a day
And we'll hope that war will come no more, To sweet America

Chorus:

So farewell unto you dear New York, Will I e'er see you once more
For it fills my heart with sorrow, To leave your sovereign shore
But the country now it is calling us, And we must hasten fore
So here's to the stars and stripes, me boys, And to Ireland's lovely shore

And here's to Murphy and Devine, Of honor and renown
Who did escort our heroes, Unto the battle ground
And said unto our colonel, We must fight hand to hand
Until we plant the stars and stripes, Way down in Dixieland

Lyrics from here

Your Morning Coffee

Admin Note

Had to enable some word verification - the spam was starting to roll in. I'll kill it again soon.

This Heart's a Sherman

Bear with me, people. I think I may be a week or more without posting anything. I'll leave you with the standard re-issue, this time of something lengthy and self-indulgent, that some of my newer readers may not have seen yet. I apologize for denying you the privilege of missing this one forever. The disclaimer right down there also came with this when I first posted it, and still holds true:

The disclaimer comes first: I actually posted the first paragraph of this little ditty somewhere on this blog a while back. Written a few years ago, for no particular reason. Read nothing into it, just read it. I was not, am not, and never have been suicidal. Having said that...

Christ Jesus, how do I drag myself out of this? Just the vaguest depression. Just low, cold blood. I am too full of time, too empty of enterprise, and not nearly driven or organized enough to duck from the myriad assailants of a wasted life. I went to the auto show thinking I would see some friends, but of course I have none. Life doesn’t work like the movies, where strangers bond with the loner because he looks like one of them. Come alone, leave alone; it is the system. And in this system I flounder. My only direction is the one I take in my Dodge, the one with the industry behind it and the death out front. Every time I leave this house I drive a short stretch of road that shows me the ocean, and then I turn left into the fetid quagmire of everyday. One of these times I am shutting down, I swear it. Shutting down and going straight until the water. I don’t know if the road goes all the way to the edge, I haven’t driven that far yet. I want it all to be a surprise; I just don’t want to find out that there is some wall between me and my goal. And no, that is not a metaphor. I really do not want to be stopped before I slide into the ocean. It should be like a movie: all the noises stop and I go loose and calm. Somehow my rig learns its purpose and finds me to the water. Everything works and I sink cleanly down in the only coffin I want to have. Of course, if there is a wall, I guess that would do just fine, too. A divinely muted catastrophe where metal comes to mortar and I am left no time to wonder. But for now it has to be ok that I just long for it. I have to be comfortable waiting for the right time to fuck it all off.

I looked at her picture today. That’s one more day that I won’t do it.

It’s not all a big heap of pain and the dark confusion. There is she, and the fact that as long as nobody knows what you are up to, they are usually pretty pleasant. It is purpose and intent that makes a person leery of another. The nagging concern that you are after something that he hasn’t thought of, and yours might be better. Even with suicide. There is a selfish hesitation that arises in a person who finds out that you mean to kill yourself. He doesn’t have to get all worked up over the question of missing you because he knows he won’t. He does have to worry that he will be forgotten about when everyone starts to curse and blame you, and then he has to get furious wondering if you knew something that he will never find out. Those are the ill-motivated little concerns that place us in each other’s lives and tell us who to stand behind when the bullets start to fly. It is the real Global Positioning System, and it is all the space and time we need in order to stay alive much too long.

In my Dodge I have space and time. I have definition; I have options. It is heavy enough that it can take me to some places that I could not go alone. I can drive, behind this machine, to more lively venues. I can ride on the birthright of the American genius to new ends or beginnings. At my disposal I have both the cliché of the sunrise on the highway and the epiphany of a turn taken too fast on the coastline. There is nothing I can’t do as long as I can buy or beg a little gas. Fuel for the journey. It is simple mechanics. The other, the impetus, is not so simple. Even with all this derision and fear it can be hard to sustain motivation. It isn’t quite enough that I have to hate what I have to do everyday, that I have to see it before it happens and I have to let it happen anyway. That has become too common to drive any real rivets into my walking spite machine. It is just dull now and uninteresting to note that I am going to wander through another miserable stain of a day with no expectation of exaltation, no hope, no determination, no fuel for my tank. It just isn’t enough. The only thing that knowledge does to me anymore is to make me sad and slow, like some old Sherman that’s thrown a track. And as I drag my sorry ass through the streets I can almost hear my knees and ankles making that high, heavy chinking noise that movies have made us come to expect from a tank. Ominous and terrifying, until it rounds the bend and you see it for what it is: something that is obsolete, broken and out of ammunition. Still, the city will mass its legions against me once more – a battery of armor, squadrons of Warthogs and a few B-1’s for Reagan’s sweet legacy. Overkill, and they have come for nothing, for I am not in a fight. I conceded years ago and am really just waiting to die. All I ask of the other side as they continue their themeless campaign is that they leave me a few pretty things to look at through my windshield when I roll to the sea.

Then there is she, with her sterling naiveté about all things war, and even Reagan thank Christ. A sweet little thing who, with each numb frustration over something banal yet fun proves to me that somebody really is enjoying something about all of this. Somebody is taking it seriously and putting in the effort to see it all end well. I have her to thank for the fact that searing pain is not the order of the day, every day. When she laughs or cries she means every bit of it, there is no cheap showmanship in it, and even though to see it really just sends me farther away, it also gives me something to think about missing. That’s the hang-up, really, missing something. If she can cry with sincerity then I have already missed something. I keep missing something, I am missing something.