Tuesday

Fox River View

While walking along the bicycle path on the Fox Rover in Geneva, I came upon this clean view of it heading off toward Batavia.

Sunday

Disturbed Down With The Sickness



And the real deal...Disturbed.  Everyone knows the Oo-ahahahah...so when the band plays live, they cut out suddenly just before it, and the whole audience does it Oo-ahahahah.  And then has a collective laugh!

Friday

Disturbed Drummer



Saw Disturbed live three times.  They're a hot metal band from Chicago.  This young lady nails the drums on Down With The Sickness.

Sophie

Wednesday

See You In My Dreams



One year ago today, I left for the WI Dells.

Tuesday

Matador Of The Ocean


The girl surfed the ultramarine curls, translucent and crashing, on her home coastline. A local surfer praised for her form and courage by retired longboarders watching the tides at the pier. The solitary girl rode the same giant waves that were lauded for sport by competitors arriving each December by plane, boat and helicopter from mainland corners afar. She sat in the reeds atop a dune and watched the professional surfers pose for magazine photographers with surfboards stuck upright in the sand . Then they rode their waxed boards—the best of their sponsor’s lot—and surfed a half dozen waves each, a ride never more than a handful of seconds, always ending with a plunge into the ocean and then rescue by jet skis. The beach, as familiar to the girl as the nicks on the underside of her surfboard, commandeered by the world every winter for the international tourney.

She arrived alone at dawn the next day, while the satellite trucks and cameras were idle, to the soft sand and the coral reef on her familiar windward shore. She paddled out and carved the towering waves. She imagined herself a bullfighter. The ocean was an arena in Madrid, the waves a series of charging bulls moving toward her red cape. Under a Spanish sun, the girl had spinner dolphins as her banderilleros, the gulls her picadors.  She paddled out and stood on her board.

In the sea mist of this biting morning, a rogue wave broke prematurely over the barrier reef. The girl fell, thrust headlong into the brine and struck her scalp on jagged underwater coral. Pain piercing. Lungs shallow of breath, barely enough to breach the surface, she then bobbed in the chop before swimming to her board in the wave’s foamy tail. She paddled on her belly to a thin sandy spit. The girl pulled herself off the surfboard onto the wet sand and laid on her back in the seaweed wrack. She squinted up into plum-red morning clouds through eyes like hazy tunnels, her head cut and weeping blood.

The surf competition finished a few days later and the television trucks and cameramen left little more than overflowing trash bins along the access roads. The girl returned to the beach, her head cleanly stitched and her mind liquid cross-currents, as if an estuary spilling freshwater into salt. She paddled out beyond the surf break and spotted a wave: a fluid siren that robbed both speed and size from the thousand-mile fetch since its genesis in the Aleutians. The girl turned her back against the water wall and stood on her longboard. Like the paunch of a pregnant earth, the wave swelled and lifted her surfboard to the apex of the curl as if it were light flotsam balsa. Her legs trembled from the natural force and yet she managed to carve directly into the wave. A penetrating wound under her fiberglass scalpel. The ocean crested and, to remain upright, the girl forced an obtuse angle from her board and drove the nose directly toward the sea bed. Her board chattered as it sliced down the water’s moving face. And with that, like a sneeze from the sea, she shot out of the tube’s rip. The curl folded, a defeated bull collapsing onto itself. The girl mimed the flamenco twist of a bullfighter’s red cape as she rode to the shoreline, still standing.

A matador of the ocean, the surfboard her sabre, a conquistador of watery bulls on a future day.

Monday

Story That Means Much To Me Because Aimee Had Brain Surgery And Is Brave




A story by Coolkayaker1 inspired by and written for Aimee.  A fellow writer who had brain surgery two years ago, and she was brave.  I wrote this small story as a guest blogger for her blog to inspire her.  The story is above.

                                                  ***

Friday

Is It Really Better Than Hearing The Squeal in Boiling H2O?


Naperville Ribfest 2012



I had a ticket to see Joe Walsh at Ribfest, and guess what?  My Avalanche leaves me on the side of the road like a two-bit ....

I cannot get that night back with Joe.

I dumped the Avalanche, though.

Monday

Cormac McCarthy from The Road

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.
He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa.
The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head down, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)



The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the single best book I have ever read.

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