What’s it mean, again, when you dream of being pinned down beneath a freight train, trying to burn it up with thermite packed around the wheels you are attempting to ignite with a wallet, but you can’t get the wallet lit, just the corners of the money sticking out, and Saddam Hussein and sons have surrounded you in Jeeps in which they are standing, shooting?

Sometimes I think I wish I wrote as well as EeksyPeeksy. Then I think if everyone wrote like that, no one would get anything done.

General: Corporal, what was that Dickenson poem? Something with, “The stillness round my form?”

Corporal: I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,–and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
General: Yeah, that one.

But, anyway, digging: it was one of those one-thing-leads-to-another jobs.

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If there’s anything better than driving to work in the rain on a Monday morning in a Dobl

Digging a hole. Not done yet.

Father: [Parks car in front of high school] Okay, have a good time on your overnight field trip.

Daughter: Thanks.

Father: Can I have a goodbye kiss?

Daughter: [Looks around at kids walking past] No way. [Kisses hand, pats father's cheek]

Father: What, that’s all? Give me a kiss on this cheek here or I’ll put you in a headlock and give you a kiss if I have to chase you around the car to do it.

Daughter: [Prepares to get out of car, kisses palm again and pats father's cheek again]

Father: [Puts daughter in headlock, kisses top of her head] There, I warned you. You had your chance.

Daughter: [Smiling] I didn’t realize you were serious.

As I was tinkering with the comment display template for this blog yesterday evening, there was a sound like a bomb going off as lightning struck quite near my office and turned off all the computers on my floor. Everyone wandered around the hallway for a couple minutes saying, “Gosh,” and I postponed my tinkering and watched the storm instead.

Growing up near the Pacific Coast, I don’t remember ever having any impressive hailstorms. Hanging around the field on summer nights watching heat lightning dance in the distance, okay. But we just didn’t have the right conditions to bounce the hailstones way back up into the sky until they were the size of tennis balls; the only hail I remember was the size of rock salt.

My car was parked under a tree yesterday, for which I was grateful hail-wise, although I did wonder what might happen should that tree decide to attract a bolt of lightning.

Driving home, some underpasses were impassable due to flooding. There were drifts of hail on the shoulders of the road. My youngest daughter used the thunderstorm exception to gain access to the big bed at night and the tortoise slept in the kitchen. I almost stepped on her in the morning when I went in to make breakfast. She stopped briefly to look at me, accusingly, before resuming her morning laps around the kitchen floor in what looked like grey socks (our cleaning lady has been on vacation).

The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism

[More on this at MeFi]