Recipe: Two parts experience to one part education, a dash of bitters muddled with sugar. Serve on the rocks or blended according to taste and tolerance.

Mostly when I sit down to write I have something in mind to write about, current events in my life if nothing else, but this week since my return from St. Paul I have been feeling kind of blank. Exhausted is really the term. Just enough energy to make it through my workday and that’s about it, I’ve also been too busy to blog at work as I am trying to get that promised October raise in place. Well, “current events” is at least a place to start.

Tuesday night Paul and I took the land yacht over to Mary’s to meet her sister, her daughter (both visiting from California), and to have Paul see all Mary’s unpacked finery. Have we talked about Mary’s collectables? Bob summed up her overall theme best as forties nostalgia for the twenties. I hesitate to engage in further description, as it really deserves a focused effort with photographs etc. I think I’ll wait until Mary has a house warming party and the pictures from that will serve double duty – drunken follies overlaid on a background of delicate and not so delicate Kitsch.

I did drink a few small glasses of Makers Mark with a Sam Adams back (I shouted Eureka when the addition of an ice cube did not cause the glass to overflow (that’s a little history of science “determine mass through liquid displacement” humor there for you)), and even threw down a shot of tequila or two as sister Margaret had boosted the percent alcohol of Mary’s home bar by significant percentage points. Brad & Beth joined us for our drink and think, they now live a stones throw from Mary, and we all went out to sit in the van, contemplating the road trips to come. Contemplating the future is what I’ve been up to. My brother Phil self describes as being very future focused. He’s considered getting a degree in future studies, a field that the University of Minnesota has pioneered.

The Tao Te Ching advises that the future is as empty as the past, and hope is as hollow as fear. But even still, admitting as tacit the ecclesiastical psalmists assertion that there is and can be nothing new “under the sun” while also giving ear to Ezra Pound’s asylum dictum “Make it new”, we must accept that a change of semantic circumstance does us all good from time to time. I am sure all my friends and readers would agree that this papa needs a new pair of shoes (How many metaphors can this mixologist blend into one psychic cocktail?). So to quote from William Burroughs, “Let us all scan the horizons of depravity. This is the space age and we are here to go!” To the stacks good readers, we will sip of The Futurist Manifesto and ponder the lunacy of youth (Marinetti is awfully close to Marionette).