Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Hey, ya made it! Welcome, traveler - lots of good stuff here. Still feeling the aftershocks of October 7, but things are starting to move forward. Nice to see you here!

I just got in from a follow-up tramp! At one of the spots I stopped to soak in the ambience I was surrounded by chickadees, almost certainly checking me out. Like you, I caught only an occasional glimpse - just a flash of motion now & then from one hiding spot to another. But they were talking up a ...

Beautiful! I've seen glimpses of them, but I'm more apt to hear than to see them. Their characteristic call is a kind of twanging, loose-banjo-string note: "chip-BOINNGG".

Hey Steve, thanks for coming along on this jaunt. I've taken lots of pictures of wolf trees along the way, and hunted down a few of my favorites in anticipation of this write. I didn't actually clear the trail from my stone wall to the staging area - just marked the way with bits of forestry ribbon....

  IMG_20201108_21291.jpg   Ever since I was a boy, misshapen, gnarly old trees - white pines especially - have excited a resonant frequency inside me. There's just something about them - something that speaks to me. “I am the Wood,” they seem to say – not with boastfulness, not with bravado, nor ste...

I'm trying to kick my outrage-porn habit, but having only limited success. At least I realize when I'm binging on it, and know that even the viewpoints I agree with are more than a little skewed. But it's a powerful drug, and I can't seem to get enough of that angry rush of self-righteous contempt i...

"Portrait of the Artist" !

dusty books
rearranged on shelves
for... what?

ancient bibles
"First-Year Quantum Theory"
long forgotten

trophies perhaps
from when I was young
when they mattered

And who might have lit the tapers in that sinister tower?

"I have given you the room in the tower..." - from the narrator's recurring nightmare in E.F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower" (a story that scared me silly when I was 10 or 11)

yup - always listened to the wrong music - never interested in sports - actually liked math, & did well in it (matrix theory excepted) - always too odd to be an insider - being outside suits me

Thanks Doreen! Been thinking about it since Steve commented, and I'm starting to realize that most of those little snapshots of family life probably didn't happen that night - but they did happen. Brian insists he was finishing his final year at UNH at the time - and if so, Betty wasn't yet pregnant...

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!"

winter short days, long nights cold and wet gloom and desperation the arctic wind claws at the cabin finding its way in through the cracks - so throw another log on the fire another loaf on the table refill your goblets and hoist them in remembrance of those who once sat at our table now their chair...

Thank you, Steve - stories keep the elders alive - my dad's gone, my mom is all but gone, my wife (now ex) is very ill - but they all live & thrive somewhere in the past. Someday we'll all be dirt - if we can only leave something behind, something that says not just "this was me" but "this is how it...

I like this - very noir. Can hear the rain pattering on the pavement, and somewhere a mournful sax