Burp.

Retailers love three-day weekends. And remembering is easier than decorating. That's why we have Memorial Day. When there was Decoration Day, every May 30^th people would make time no matter what day of the week it was to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. The holiday was initiated about a century and a half ago by northerners and freedmen to commemorate the Union dead fallen in the war against slavery. There are people, credentialed and tenured, who will tell you the Civil War wasn't about freeing the slaves. These people are full of shit. That's exactly what is was about.

Mouth of the Root

Tell you what pal you get up at 4:30 a.m. in the morning go to the airport fly to O’Hare catch a shuttle to Racine Wisconsin and have a buffet lunch at the Iron Skillet and a meeting about tractor videos at a little table in the hotel lobby then take a walk around an American city where your close study of the signs along Main Street suggests that the remaining citizens support themselves entirely by selling each other tattoos and soy dirty chais you try that just once yourself pal then come back here and complain about late rants.

A way to feel useful.

I'm very fond of amphibians. Frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, efts. They're a charming evolutionary dead end. I almost forgot caecilians, an “order of limbless vertebrates with rudimentary eyes, whose vision is limited to dark-light perception and whose anatomy is highly adapted for a burrowing lifestyle.” Lifestyle. Like condo living? Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that amphibian populations are dropping precipitously worldwide and they eat mosquitoes, so an itchy mosquito bite can serve the valuable secondary function of feeding not only the offending insect but also maybe a fat toad, giving meaning and purpose to your blood sacrifice.

Mongolian Gerbils

Our perception of pitch and harmony is dictated by the geometry of our cochlea, the little spiral that does our hearing for us. That's why some musical ideas remain, even after decades, as popular as a cuisine based on steel wool and chlorine. As if a seamstress, tiring of shirts, skirts, pants, had invented a new garment for a body part that simply did not exist. Doesn't the term avant-garde imply that somebody is being led somewhere? It seems if you claim to be a leader you'd occasionally look over your shoulder to see if there was anybody back there.

Must I explain everything?

Recently I made reference to the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” and was shocked to meet with glassy-eyed stares of total incomprehension from a small group of otherwise intelligent and well-educated individuals who had no idea I was referring to Luis Firpo, the guy in the purple trunks knocking Jack Dempsey out of the ring and into the laps of a bunch of reporters in a pretty dang famous painting by George Bellows famous himself as a member of the Ashcan School and though the art of conversation may not be dead pal it is certainly circling the drain.

My pot boileth over.

It is unlikely you would ever happen to read “The Valiants of Virginia” by Hallie Ermine Rives, although in 1913 it was a bestseller. Here's how it begins:

“'Failed!' ejaculated John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright. 'The Corporation – failed!'”

Seriously. And the hilarity continues. So here's a note to anyone who thinks writing is getting worse: Literature is like houses. It might seem they built them better 100 years ago. But, see, after a century only the best ones are still standing.

Skepticism is to cynicism as doubt is to...?

Truth is to fact as faith is to knowledge as hope is to optimism. You can know a fact; you can only glimpse a truth. A fact is like a stick of lumber. Complete, nailed down, utilitarian. You can turn it over and pass it around and examine it from every angle. But a truth is alive, a cool toad between cupped palms. You just barely get to peek at it through a gap between your fingers. Open too wide and it’s gone. Squeeze too tight and you kill it. And it will more than likely pee in your hand.