Up My Arm

AI image © Critic Housewife

I could feel the current of his life flow into my fingers and up my arm and travel into the muscle of my heart. — Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Never Give Up

AI image © Critic Housewife

Don’t worry about the future, whether it be something good, or not so good, you’ll meet whatever happens in the same way you have before ~ you’ll wait, you’ll listen, you’ll think, you’ll learn, you’ll grow, but you’ll never give up! — Susan Branch

Winking Up

All along the lee shore
Shells lie scattered in the sand
Winking up like shining eyes at me
From the sea

Here is one like sunrise
It’s older than you know
It’s still just lying there, where some careless wave
Forgot it long ago

Song: Lee Shore by David Crosby

*Santa Barbara, I love you.*

Fills Me With Ease

Sunset Strip near Sweetzer, 1949.

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in a transit a seductive unconnectedness. — Joan Didion

Here is what I think about my drives through Los Angeles:

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets very meaningful to me. My drives in Los Angeles exhilarates me and fills me with ease. There is about these hours spent in a transit a seductive connectedness.

So Beautiful

Century Plant in Bloom, Carpenteria, California, circa 1910

The world can be so sad and you can be so shattered and so sad. But it can also be so beautiful. And the juxtaposition between the grief of the world and the beauty of the world is ecstatically agonizing.

Stephen Colbert on Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, Stephen Colbert: Grateful for Grief, September 21, 2022.

Relieves Me

“The best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”

Ann Patchett – This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage

Hollywood Waltz

Springtime, the acacias are blooming;
Southern California will see one more day.
Dreamland and business is booming;
The birds are a singing as I drift away.
She looks another year older
From too many lovers who used her and ran.
But some nights, oh she looks like an angel
And she’s always willing to hold you again.
So give her this dance, she can’t be forsaken;
Learn how to love her with all of her faults.
She gave more than she’s taken.
And I’ll go down doing the Hollywood Waltz.

I love the mood of this Eagles song. This song and many other Eagles songs remind me of living in Los Angeles, and hanging out in Topanga Canyon in my teens.

Song by The Eagles © 1975

*******Some info about Acacias.*******

From the LOS ANGELES TIMES BY LILI SINGER MARCH 4, 2004 12 AM PT

Australian plants showed up in California in the 1850s. Acacias were among the most versatile, with uses in perfume, for cutting and as ornamentals. They thrived in settings north to south. “In 1931,” writes the late Victoria Padilla in her book “Southern California Gardens,” “acacias constituted one-fifth of all the street tree plantings in Los Angeles.” Acacia leaf shapes are distinctive and run the gamut. The delightful blossoms, usually yellow and produced in awesome numbers, are either fuzzy little balls or held in rod-shaped clusters. Most are scented, a few more pleasantly than others.

Untrain Your Brain

“Untrain your brain by traveling.”  — Frank Hyman

Soon…soon…soon.

It’s Better Here

It’s better here than real life – you know, the sea is bluer.

— John Lennon

Personal Identity

Jobs provides a social outlet outside the immediate circles of family and neighbors; that it shows us the ways in which the collective can achieve more than the individual; and that it clarifies personal identity. 

— Katie Heaney

Incredible illustration by Constantin Alajálov

They Are Everywhere

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Ecstacy

There is ecstasy in paying attention.

— Anne Lamott

Two Happy Days

From Warren Buffett’s memoir: “When you own an overpriced sports car, you get two happy days: the day you buy it and the day you sell it.”

HA HA! I think this might be true.
Is this car is a Ferrari? Not sure.

Present Place

“For Africa to me…is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” — Maya Angelou

Unmoored

“When we take a real vacation – in the true sense of “holiday,” time marked by holiness, a sacred period of respite – our sense of time gets completely warped. Unmoored from work-time and set free, if temporarily, from the tyranny of schedules, we come to experience life exactly as it unfolds, with its full ebb and flow of dynamism – sometimes slow and silken.”

For Evelyn.

Photo by Arnold Genthe

Any Place

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.

— Beverly Sills

Pleasant Sensations

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.  You are surrounded by adventure.

– Freya Stark

Photo by Sid Grossman  San Gennaro Festival, New York City, 1948

Decotora Semi Trucks

I read this article on the Messy Nessy website about Japanese Truckers. There is a book about them too, called Decotora: 1998-2007 Japanese Art Truck Scene. I’m almost tempted to buy the book. I hope that semis in the United States start decorating their trucks. Perhaps this is already being done in the US, but I don’t see many fancy semis driving through Wisconsin.

When You Wanted

Remember when you wanted what you currently have.