When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write. Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother [...]

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From whiskey river: I remember the word and forget the word                    although the word Hovers in flame around me. Summer hovers in flame around me. The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge. A loneliness west of solitude Splinters into the landscape                [...]

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I’m a godawful blogger in at least one sense: I don’t do much to promote RAMH, other than to visit sites I like — visit them regularly, for the most part — and just let this site be discovered, if the reader should choose, by (a) following the link to it from the “JES” in [...]

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Recognize the handsome guy at left? Neither did I. Then I read Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, by Harry Lee Poe (a distant cousin of its subject). Turns out that this painting, by Samuel Stillman Osgood, was rendered in about 1845 — four years before EAP’s death. Right: he had [...]

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He: So what kind of car did she get? She: I don’t know, I forget. It starts with an “E.” Some kind of American car. He: [...prolonged thoughtful silence...] [time passes] She: I wish I could remember what kind of car it was. He: Well, the only kind I could think of that started with [...]

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One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was [...]

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[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off... digging out the draft of a post I'd meant to put up some time ago...] If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark [...]

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From whiskey river: Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon. (William Least Heat-Moon) Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems): I Am Too Near I am too near to be dreamt of by him. I do [...]

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[With a cat -- Dilly, I'm told, but to me the stripes rather say, Nameless -- sometime in 1993.] Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together. As with her predecessor, Nameless, [...]

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This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy. When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems [...]

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