They crave death, they crave sorrow. They fear the future, they fear the past, they fear time. A world that has already ended cannot change; a world that does not change cannot end. Their eternity is that of the flash. Statis, the instant, and eternity — they see these three as the same thing, and they see them as the ideal. Ideals. Ideas without bodies. They fear bodies and they crave living forever solely in ideas. They love ideas because they think ideas don’t change, and they fear bodies because bodies do nothing but change. The petulant glee in their actions. They are driven by a manic fear. They fear lines, they fear circles, and they especially fear spirals. To be starved for certainty but to never have it. To live with certainty always almost within reach but always just beyond your grasp.

Last, next.

91: Snowy Evening (15,902)
92: Kraft (graph)

Last, next.

90: Pitch Black (lined)
91: Snowy Evening (15,902)

Last, next.

89: Great Lakes (Michigan)
90: Pitch Black (lined)

I found this in a used book I bought recently. The bookstore is still around.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

I was just remembering a funny dream I had some time ago.

I was in a room in my house (both house and room were not known to me in waking life, but it was clearly where I lived). The room was full of beautiful acoustic guitars, and they belonged to me. They were all fabulously expensive. Some were unique and custom-built, others simply rare or antique. Some were opulent, with exquisite inlays and carvings, others elegantly plain and clean. I wandered through this room, hushed and awestruck, thinking, “I can’t believe these are all mine!”

I picked one up, and tenderly began to play. I formed an open G chord, and then moved that chord form up and down the neck. It was the only chord I knew.

I was strumming a creditable 4/4 rhythm, but I couldn’t think of even one other single chord. “Hmm, I really thought I knew a few chords besides this one. Let’s see…uh…” I would contort my hand into what seemed like a “typical” chord configuration. Nope, I just kept making that same chord.

“Maybe if I try a different guitar?…” No luck. Still G.

The funny thing about the dream was that instead of finding it nightmarish, I was, even as I dreamed, amused at my sudden and nearly complete amnesia.

Many years ago, an acquaintance of mine, C., died of brain cancer. Leading up to his death, they performed a number of surgeries to try to remove the tumor. Because it was malignant there was, of course, no way to remove only the tumor. After awakening from one operation, he discovered quickly that he was no longer fluent in Mandarin. Gone, completely. This wasn’t like your high-school locker combination, or the procedure for transferring a call at a job you haven’t worked at for a decade. This was a language he’d studied for years; he’d travelled extensively in China, and had even lived there for a time. He laughed about it, eventually spinning a whole Pythonesque routine around it.

An entire, complex skill-set quite literally cut out of you. Can you imagine? I couldn’t either, until I had this dream. I only hope that if such a fate awaits me, I will face it as C. did (and as I apparently did in the dreamtime): with equanimity and humor.

This just turned up in an old book.

Later replaced by Borders, which also closed (sometime in the aughts?) and Kitchen Window expanded into the space. Kitchen Window, in turn, didn’t survive the pandemic…

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Last, next.

88: Wednesday Blue
89: Great Lakes (Michigan)

Starting with Lake Michigan, since I was born about a thousand feet from its shore. I love Superior, but I’ve always thought of Michigan as “my” lake…

This just turned up in an old book. Long gone. The Aster Café is there now.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Last, next.

87: Nat’l Parks (Sequoia)
88: Wednesday Blue