New Camera Love

More photos to come, as soon as I get them, from the birthday celebration. I think everyone's a bit too hungover to send them today. :)

The Bengals SUCK.

The Reds SUCK.

I feel like I'm living in the Cleveland area again, and must now adjust to accepting the heartbreak of an ill sports city.

The Bengals are so clueless in their drafting that they have now resigned the drug-using thug that barely played a game last year. How hard can it be for you to settle down and just play the game when you're making millions of dollars?

Thank God for Ohio State football. With half of the team returning for another year, we're bound to see another run for the BCS Championship Game. Let's just hope they can win it this time....


Now, it's been suggested, by me, that we should form another team. One that allows sex, whisky and poetry incorporated into the game calling. Who's with me??? Any suggestions for a team name??? Come on.. make me laugh. I know you can do it.

Ah... the first pages of the novel are written, with more words flowing down to the paper. It's a lovely feeling.

Unfortunately our weekend travel plans to Wooster fell through, but it was a relaxing weekend nevertheless. We plan to go after Labor Day weekend, which will be spent at the cottage in northern Michigan, canoeing and swimming in store (along with the opening game of The Ohio State football team... ironic that we shall watch it in Michigan...). But first, I must get through the drunken endevour of the big 3-0 day. As carefully planned, the party location is within walking distance. One does get smarter about their drinking as they get older, eh?

Night out at Zip's! YUMMY.

The Secret Garden of Ault Park

One should not dwell too long in the words of Nietzsche, lest one becomes blurry and must retreat to eating icecream.

Perhaps the last words spoken by one character in the novel:

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if though gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." (Beyond Good and Evil)

The hateful heat wave has now passed and left us our reward for survival: the romantically breezy days of summer.

The heat has a murderous effect on this city, where people are already too uptight. They become vengeful, like a psychopath ready to jump out of their own skin. The smiles are melted off their faces and the heat becomes the fault not of Nature, but of everyone around them.

Tempers rage at children, who don't yet feel the affect of heat, they rather enjoy it as they splash around in swimming pools and run through backyard sprinklers. Tempers rage at husbands and wives who already hate each other. The heat makes them think of murder. Tempers rage at other drivers on the road, who likewise are only trying to get home and into the comfort of central air and out of the smoggy humidity-filled passage of the highway.

They cannot control their tempers in this heat. To them, the haze of humidity penetrates their lungs, giving their speech only bouts of comments, the fewer words the better. It penetrates their skin so that they recoil away from the loving touch of others. It penetrates their skin and goes into the blood stream such that it boils with anger and infects their logic and reason.

Thankfully, the heat wave only lasted a week. Any longer and their might have been a jump in the homicide rate.

The haze has now lifted and one can see the blue skies again. The trees oblige with cool wisps of air, felt through open windows and doors, a glorious dance of acceptance of Nature's change of plans. The chirping of birds now sounds of a welcoming song to enjoy the day.

And now the people of this city relax and ease their temperament. The husband kisses the wife in the morning on his way out the door, knowing of the pleasantness outside. People smile at each other once again.

Ovid's The Metamorphoses has provided quite a bit of good reading in relation to the novel I'm writing. A brief description of the novel in Ovid's tonuge:

"I swear by all the rivers
Of deepest Hell my best is done to conquer
Human Ill: the best is not enough; taint
Must be cut from flesh as with a cleansing
Knife the body cured."
(Book I, Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron)

Her words in tears: "How can I desecrate
My mother's spirit? O forgive me, Goddess."
(Book I, Deucalion and Pyrrha)

"One day - and that was very long ago -
We lived within the womb of our first mother,
And we were scarcely more than hopes of men,
Seeds of the first beginning, till Nature's hands
(How artfully she worked to suit her purpose!)
Gave us our destiny to live beyond
distending walls which held us coiled in darkness,
So from that home we fell to worldy being.
...
Time wears away the engery, the vigour
Of earlier years within the wasting body."

And the most important one...

"Nothing retains the shape of what it was,
And Nature, always making old things new,
Proves nothing dies within the universe,
But takes another being in new forms.
What is called birth is change from what we were,
And death the shape of being left behind.
Though all things melt or grow from here to there,
Yet the same balance of the world remains."
(Book XV, The Philosopher)

Absolutely disgusting outside. You can feel the humidity the moment you step outside, and it's haze permiates everything, including your skin and lungs. The heat isn't too bad. I've lived in hotter weather in Phoenix in the summer. And there, it doesn't really matter if it is dry or humid, 115 is still 115. But this... blah. It's been threatening to rain all week, but no relief is to be found apparently for the moment.