Blog-azic

How do a few hundred people hold off an approaching storm? I wondered on it at Duke Garden's summer music series as the band began to play. We were off in the back and to the side (almost in the lily pond) with a blanket spread and a picnic basket of food and drinks. Down in the front, someone was blowing bubbles, and one got caught in the ominous breeze. It drifted upwards, soon rising above the stage. What a fragile little thing it is, I thought, gone in an instant. And soon it was. I found myself looking at empty sky before I even realized it had disappeared. I'm like that bubble, you know, floating around for an immeasurably short amount of time, popping, then being a diffuse smear of particles in the cosmic sky. However, physics tells us that the laws of the universe can run in both directions, to the future and also to the past. If I could only sit there long enough, I'd see that bubble pop back into existence. The thought gives a measure of hope to my life. So,

The cicadas this year are out in force - a seventeen year brood. An event like that reminds me that there is no better place to live than the present. I'm glad to hear it, and glad to catch up with family and old friends.

We took a long weekend to go back to Asheville and relive a trip we took some two years ago. Along the way, the wild flowers on the highway impressed me: pale yellow, burnished gold, IPA orange, sunset.  I think that I really am quite small and insignificant. I consider the expanses of space-time and the great masses and speeds out there. But then, I hear the voice of Carl Sagan from beyond the grave, and he says, "You're not insignificant. You're rare." Perhaps, I'm a beautiful quantum fluctuation, a pin prick of light, born of the vacuum, destined to annihilate.  Someday the energy of the universe will be so diluted across space that I will be indistinguishable from the vacuum's own energy. I will be - in some sense, I already am - the low hum of background radiation.  For now, I'm surfing a gravity wave over the mountains traveling back in time two years and beyond. 

The weather is hot of late: steamy heat with a fierce sun. It makes me feel the frantic passing of each little moment when I'm out of doors, as I imagine the time counting down before I burn. So, entranced by the lure of shade, I walked behind the bike store on Franklin (Back Alley Bikes). There is a cool spot: shaded by cedar and sweet gum, in the shadow of the hotel and parking deck. I don't imagine any sun can filter into it, except perhaps the early morning, horizontal rays.  Great eyes watch that place, tired, but never blinking. The real-life incarnation of T.J. Eckleburg, sprung from the pages of Gatsby. There are stunt ramps there, squeezed into the tiny space, newly finished we were told by the worker (owner?) inside. Just last week, in fact, FMX came down to do a show. I wished I could have seen it. I wished they were my eyes shining down. These are the nooks and crannies of the city that I want to know. Perhaps we can catch a future exhibition before we