18 November 2007 Some days, the cracks show more visibly than others. And some days, you see new ones in this wall that you realize is now beyond repair. Hoping desperately that it holds long enough for you to complete the new wall you're trying to build. Frantic like a pilot in an airplane that's falling out of the sky. Dropping the trowel and spilling the mortar, but somehow getting one brick on top of the other. Just not nearly as quickly as you'd like. You can scream all you like at the water on the other side, but it's just doing what water does. It's not the water's fault. It's yours. The shoddy workmanship and its headaches wear you down. But you keep going. Because living here is worth it, flood notwithstanding. At all costs, you need a wall that holds. You just need to figure out how to make one. Read Comments (1) | Add Comment

31 October 2007 Just tell me now: Anyone else want to take a shot at me? Go ahead, knuckle up. The line's over there, on the right, but there's really no need to wait your turn. No "one at a time" rules here. It's free to try, and fun, it seems. Don't delay, or you may miss a fresh and unbruised spot (space is limited). Just fucking get on with it. Read Comments (0) | Add Comment

9 October 2007 UNDER DARK SKIES Two nights ago I took the telescope out to the Blackfoot staging area, forty minutes outside of the city and away from all the lights. The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of visible stars, the stars themselves becoming the sky rather than punctuating it. Familiar constellations were nearly lost in the spectacle of it all, the gaps between the brighter points of light filled in with dozens, or hundreds, of dimmer ones. The next thing to strike me, almost immediately after the first, was the Milky Way, clearly discernible above, cutting a wide swath right from one horizon to the other. I do not remember ever seeing it before. Certainly, I have not seen it in my adult life, and only perhaps as a child. To see the arms of one's own galaxy is an awe-inspiring sight, and, like the effect of visualizing the plane of the solar system, gives one an impression of where he stands in the universe. Through the telescope, I found some of the sky's wonders that had, until now, eluded me. M81 and M82, a pair of galaxies in Ursa Major, surrendered themselves to the eyepiece readily that night, from twelve million light years away, the first a spiral and the second more oblong. The Andromeda Galaxy, which I had observed several times before, brought its friends along, two more fainter galaxies that I had never seen, these a mere three million light years from our own. And the sight of all of these little lights in the sky owed itself to the very absence of light. The city's lights, there to make plain as much as possible, drowning out the very lights you want to see. Darkness and a curved mirror, much like silence and carefully directed thought, reveals the immense realities that we could not have guessed, that need to be coaxed out of the black, pulled from the backdrop as though they were shy. I've benefited from both combinations lately. Read Comments (0) | Add Comment

4 October 2007 VENUS IN DAYLIGHT Yesterday, for the first time, I lined up Venus in my telescope. Somewhat of a challenge, since I was hunting for it in broad daylight. Point the scope at the sun, leaving the lens cap on and aligning the tube by its own shadow; thirteen degrees north, two hours and forty-five minutes west. Look along the tube to the patch of sky the scope is pointing at now. And there, apparent to my unaided eye, was the point of brilliant white light against the blue of the clear October sky. So bright you would wonder how you missed it. And yet, if you look away for more than a second or two, it vanishes. Lost in the backdrop, like it had sunk below the surface of the sky. It's only obvious when you know exactly where to look, and even then it takes a second. But once your eye has found it, it can hold on to it like it was a beacon. Certainly well enough to align the finderscope on it, and put the planet into the eyepiece. Through the eyepiece, it was a beautiful sight. The crescent shone with all the intensity of a welder's torch, the shape so distinct that your eye would almost convince you that you could see the rest of the sphere. To see it in phase like that, and to be able to see the sun at the same time, gives one a very literal sense of place. Venus reveals the plane of the solar system, the vague disk all of the planets orbit through. And looking up, I could see, in my mind's eye, the track our own planet would follow, far up into the sky, and inclined so sharply to the ground on which I was standing that I momentarily felt as though I were falling over. Like so many things difficult to perceive, upon finding them, you wonder what took you so long. Read Comments (0) | Add Comment

27 September 2007 So what if this is the first real post in a very long time? Actually, that could be important. I'd like to say that I'll make no apologies, that I'll waste no time explaining. But it just so happens that the reasons, the circumstances that ultimately led to so long a silence, are precisely the things weighing in on me now. The lower priorities that are so important. The things you need to do, those integral self expressions, are the very things you'll dismiss. The phone will ring, your friends will ask what you're up to, and you'll say "Nothing," when in fact the truth is that you were doing one of the things that most makes you who you are. And after, those things will seem to you like the friend you didn't stick up for, the friend you cancelled on for some other "priority". The friend you realize, after a while, that you haven't seen in years. This will also be the same friend who teaches you the most about yourself, and the one you need more than any other. Why am I so abysmally bad at making time? Read Comments (0) | Add Comment

20 September 2007, later still I still can't figure out why Safari doesn't let me submit comments. Firefox works fine. Read Comments (1) | Add Comment

20 September 2007, but later What's going on with the submit button of the comments and Safari??? Read Comments (2) | Add Comment

20 September 2007 Come on... Read Comments (1) | Add Comment

19 April 2007 I swear I'm gonna figure this out. Read Comments (0) | Add Comment I still don't know what's wrong. Read Comments (0) | Add Comment I'm having some trouble with this now. Read Comments (3) | Add Comment It was six days ago, on the 13th, that David Turner McEnery was born. All babies kind of looked alike to me until then, when I had one of my own; now they all look markedly different. It is difficult, of course, to describe exactly how this feels. The nearest I can come is to say that there is an overflowing of sorts, like I'm full up to bursting. It's a love of a particular sort, one I hadn't yet experienced, and words would have been wasted had one tried to explain it to me before this. We all have love for people around us. The love a man feels for his wife is completely different from that which he feels for his sister or his father, and it can't be understood until he's there. And the same goes for this. Love itself is impossible enough to explain to one who has never experienced it, and it comes in many flavours, each as indescribable as the other. The thought that I am somebody's father is both insane and exhilarating, at once fraught with the fear of great responsibility and the pride of having a great honour bestowed upon me. And I do believe that both the responsibility and the honour were given. Read Comments (3) | Add Comment

8 April 2007 I've recently taken an interest in amateur astronomy. Up until a little while ago, looking at stars seemed as boring as, well, just looking at stars. But it's funny how a little familiarity with something makes it that much more interesting. On the very good advice of my wife, I spent only a little bit of money on a decent pair of binoculars instead of immediately rushing out to buy a telescope. I would be lost with a telescope right now. It's no good to you unless you have some idea where to find interesting things. And sometimes, looking up at these distant points of light, it's humbling in a funny kind of way. Not the way people always talk about, how you feel so small in the universe and so on. But rather, the feeling that strikes you when you realize that the light coming through the lenses and striking your eyes has been travelling, uninterrupted, through space, for millions of years, and only now, is meeting its first obtstacle: your retina. It kind of makes you feel like you should step aside and get out of the way or something. Read Comments (2) | Add Comment

3 January 2007 They say it comes to us all. It was three days ago now, on New Year's Eve, that Parker died. Old age, the entemologists had told me, was most likely the cause. The diagnosis came as no surprise; I'd watched her slowing down, not eating anymore, seeming to stumble when she walked despite having all eight legs. Like she was unable to keep the weight of her body up off the ground, her soft underbelly scraping the soil as she moved. She wasn't able to be a spider anymore. It took me a little bit of time to come to grips with the fact that it wasn't going to get any better, that she wouldn't be coming back from this. After eight and a half years of caring for her, this would ultimately be it, the finish, the end of the line. Thank you to my wife, who stood next to me as I put Parker, dying, into a small box and into the freezer, where her body temperature would simply and peacefully drop until the spark was gone. So long, old friend. Read Comments (1) | Add Comment