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In the Dark, (Un)Watching the Watcher
[Image: The Night Watch, by Rembrandt van Rijn. Click the photo for a larger view. For more information about the painting, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: Desert Places Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost [...]
In the Water
[For information about this photo, called "Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida," see the Note at the bottom of this post.] From whiskey river: Adrift Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake loose. Let me be drowned, baptized, in the light given me. Day comes around, night, fall, winter, spring, summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot. Waves arrive, buffets from [...]
Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic
On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie. Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm [...]
How It Was: Deck the Halls
The time: late fall, 1990. The place: Ashland, Virginia. A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book. And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility [...]
Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich
When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches. But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, [...]
How It Was: Rake’s Progress
The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.” With [...]
Paying Attention to History
If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]
While on the Subject of Bad Memory…
…as I was earlier: In this case, however, the subject isn’t “bad memory” in the sense of “Huh? Did I just say something?” It’s more along the lines of, “Holy sh!t. Did I actually live through that?!?” Via the MAD about Words blog (discovered, in turn, via DCWYTBMA), we have word of a definitive list [...]
The Boy Hears Himself (Part 1)
During an… odd few years in my younger life, my friend Dean and I became absorbed in experiments involving a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name which Dean and I both “owned,” in those days when electronics were still manufactured domestically, was “Recordio.” (And yes, all right: we didn’t own them; our fathers did.) What [...]
Boomer Memory
The New York Times reported the other day on the frenzied efforts among Boomers to sharpen their minds — particularly the parts of their minds involving memory. When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a [...]
