My name is David, and I revel in sincerity. I'm a reforming prescriptivist whose humor nestles between the straight line and subsuming wit.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Fare thee well, Wolf, wherever your travels take you.
Cannot stop with Northstar. Since Christmas. Nothing but.
Make class optional in light of debate-circus-campus as I understand parking is terrible already and worse now. 7 and 3 students show up and get writerly advice. I think we all won. Except those students who can’t write well for the course, can’t admit this to themselves, and didn’t come.
From the Student Union FB page. Today is going to be chaotic!
Oh, that’s where all the giraffe are hiding. I always come in by Carpenter andonly see one very lonely looking CNN bus. I’ll have to trek over to 58 today for some look-see-feel.
Cosmic cashew spinach and chickpeas over quinoa. Vitamix meal 1.
2012 Alliance for Biking and Walking Benchmarking report
Florida and Jacksonville continue to hold down the bottom of the barrel as far as bike/pedestrian safety.
What safety.
Velocity coming to Jax
Don’t know how this went under my radar, but Velocity (rims) are in the middle of relocating their Australia shop to Jacksonville, at a location yet named (or that I’ve found). Pretty awesome.
And the debate invasion began with a bus.
Perched prone, lips pursed
by the kiss of a dying wish,
I had drawn heavily on an already
well-bled bank and left, by my account,
little more than flavorless marrow.
(Though I’ve known my grandmother
to make a young lamb stew from less-
the ribbed neck bones of
younger stock and a mirepoix
of dried root vegetables,
still sandy from a shallow soil;
she would joke that she had
brought it with her all the way
from Galway Bay.)
And with two rough-hewn coins to barter
for a second’s sight,
I noted the clock on the wall
as the braised flesh of my body
slid from one hand to the other.
The Caution Children - Meaningless Symbols Acquire Meaning Despite Themselves
If only for the song title (if not for everything else to like about the song).
Let’s open up this pit!
A little less H&M
A little more S&M.
I bought a sweater on discount at H&M Orlando a few weeks ago, and when I arrived home I realized that the counter clerk hadn’t removed its anti-theft sensor. As I’ve found out since, this kind of thing is commonplace at H&M, so much so that the company has a stock form for such occasions.
Uh, a ring-ring:
“Oh, were you [one of the one-in-four] today whose tags weren’t removed correctly at the store visit? Give us your email and we can send you a form for the tag-removal that you can box with the item and return to us so we can remove the label for you and send it back to you at no cost to you.”
“So, wait, you actually have a form for such occasions? Doesn’t that tell you that you have a problem with your in-store procedures?”
“We high have a purchase volume, so these things happen, you understand.”
“Enough that you need a form, obviously. And do you provide the box in which the item ships via email as well?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, along with not having my sensor removed that day, I think I might have been one of those few people who didn’t receive a ‘just-in-case-you-decide-to-return-it-via-the-post’ boxes, you know, in such events as this.”
“Oh. Well, you’ll need to provide your own box. But we will very gladly cover the costs of your shipping through FedEx and even provide you a label…”
“Oh, wow! Has FedEx changed its rules on allowable shipping containers?”
“What?”
“I didn’t know that you could just slap a label on a sweater and they would accept and ship it. Think of the possibilities, of all the cardboard and envelopes I can save in the futu…”
“Oh, no, I said you have to provide your own box and we…”
“Do you think I’m made of boxes?”
“Sir?”
“I mean, do you think you’re speaking with a creature made entirely out of corrugated cardboard boxes, large and small, into the shape of man? Because I promise you I’m made of flesh and bone, like you probably are. Wait. Are you made of cardboard boxes?”
“Sir, please.”
“No, all jokes aside. You’ll need to send a box, too, whichever box you have for such occasions as these. In fact, send three. I think I’m going to visit your store again next week and make the same mistake a couple more times.”
“Well, we definitely appreciate your business.”
And that’s definitely why I’m not going back to H&M anytime soon.
Or Orlando.
Because people terrify me.
Public School No. 4 in Jacksonville, Fla…currently burning to the ground. R.I.P.
For the uninitiated, School 4 was built in the 1910s to replace a nineteenth-century wooden schoolhouse. The school was in operation until the early 1960s, when declining enrollment and the construction of a highway overpass blocked traffic and prompted the school board to convert it to a storage and meeting facility. It closed permanently a few years later and was left to rot, with no kind of maintenance or oversight except the construction of a large fence around the lot. Various plans for restoration, demolition, and development for the site have come and gone over the years, the most recent being another plan for the building to be razed and condos built in its place. I doubt any of the development plans will ever actually go through; the overpass is no joke and completely restricts any kind of significant traffic to the area, to say nothing of the noise. The entire area surrounding it is blighted.
While the city hemmed and hawed over the fate of the lot, the school itself became a rite of passage for Jacksonville teens. Everybody I knew as a high-schooler at least talked about breaking in, and a pretty high percentage of us, myself included, did. Because stories of urban decay prompting population decline and highway overpasses restricting traffic flow are very boring, a whole mythology sprung up around the school and its closure. My personal favorite involved a crazed, sadistic janitor who murdered several students before he was caught, but there were also tales of persistent hauntings, lynchings, and tawdry affairs ending in murder. After a fire in the early 1990s left a gaping hole in the roof, stories of exploding boilers killing children and fires set by vengeful teachers became common. I don’t think anybody really believed these stories, but they were fun to tell and made the experience even scarier, which was delightful since frankly for a fifteen-year-old that place is already pretty damn scary. When I went over a decade ago you could still see student papers and furniture, which would bring terrible evil upon you if you removed them from the premises, and of course tons of graffiti, which brought no penalty from the supernatural world. You definitely couldn’t leave without making your mark, so of course we had Sharpies on us because SOMEONE who will remain nameless chickened out on buying spray-paint. Another someone did succeed in obtaining four cans of Bud Light from their garage, where they had simmered in 95F degree heat for several days, but beggars can’t be choosers.
My understanding is that security was tightened in recent years, making it very difficult to get in. I have no idea if this is true or not because I am no longer fifteen and therefore uninterested in telling ghost stories in an abandoned building (in related news, I have lost my soul, possibly because I took home an old spelling test). But even if the flow of terrified kids with flashlights and spray paint has been reduced to a trickle, I am still saddened by the building’s demise and would dearly love to punch whoever started that fire.
About to go for a run by the aftermath. I don’t know what to expect. Definitely explains all the sirens I heard passing by my apartment last night.
Took me two episodes to realize I wasn’t watching Jeremy Iron’s Borgias. But this series is grizzly, gritty, and all pretty great.
(Just saw two naked men hanged upside down and chopped in half with a lumberjack’s two-man handsaw. Ridiculous.)
That moment you realize you’ve confused your caffeine high with happiness. Succeeded by that moment you realize you don’t care. Still feels good.
