Soggy....

.... a slow, steady, drizzle settled in here yesterday, and it's slated to be here for the next two..... I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm merely pointing it out..... rain has been lacking for the past few years, so this wintertime messiness is actually needed.... not enjoyed, per se, but definitely needed.....

..... as I type this most of my lawn's topsoil is slowly heading towards Conasauaga Creek - and eventually - somewhere in Ohio via Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky......

... what?... you don't believe me?..... well, just check out the view from Ye Olde Blogroom Window then....

.... hey, I'm all about the rain.... the life-giving moisture.... the gentle tap of droplets pinging the leaves & guttering..... hey, I love wetness..... but that right there is just plain soggy.....

Handwriting.....

..... I'm absolutely and completely ready for springtime to come..... in fact, I remembered today a post that I quite literally "penned" nearly two years ago...... and since I plan on watching The Game tonight until time for bed - and there will not be any posting tonight - I thought a refresher might be in order.......

.... so here's one from late-March of 2007.....

... as for the game, I don't have a dog IN this race..... but it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out.......

... oh, and the original scribbling that I nabbed that photo off of is here.......

Body.....

.... damn, I'm tired...... a bit out-of-sorts, too, now that I think about it..... I need a roadtrip & a hotdog with chili, cheese, and diced onions...

.... then again, maybe I just need to get in some quality range-time..... make small holes and lots of noise..... God knows all of these push-ups I've been doing for the past three days havent helped much.....

.... this time of year just makes me a bit testy, I guess.....

..... but enough of all that......

... in a hopeful bid to ward off the lurking demons, I've spent a bit of time this morning combing through my Whitman - and I found a true beauty.....

.... check this out, boys & girls..... the last stanza of I Sing the Body Electric...... behold a thing of amazement......

"O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!"

Walt Whitman

...... amazing....

Hank....

..... I'm off to whip up some Mexican food.....

.... damn, but I do love that song......

Renewing......

.... goodnight, all....... I wish you all the best in the coming New Year....... and although I know that to discerning ears, Lombardi misses the cue in a few places, he will still always be the BEST in my mind when it comes to the old Burns classic........ so, enjoy........

..... Happy New Year, everyone!....... may this one be twice as nice as the one that has just passed....... peace to you all....... and may you all get everything that you wish for.......

.... hey, Vanderbilt did..... and if it is OK for them, then why not for us?!.......

Clinton....

.... Clinton, Tennessee is the county seat of Anderson County..... snuggled in between the western edge of the Appalachians and the eastern fringe of the Cumberland Plateau, it's a kind of natural crossroads....

.... it's a small place, in the Great Scheme of Things.... and with a population of just under 10,000, it literally dwarfs the small town where I grew up - Clinton's population density being nearly 10 times larger than my little hometown.... but it still feels like a small, cozy, friendly town....

..... the Clinch River flows through Clinton.... further to the east, the Holston and French Broad rivers conflue at Knoxville to produce the Tennessee River... and the Clinch eventually flows into the Tennessee further to the southwest at Kingston....

.... in days gone by, my Father often found himself using the small railroad yard there as a daily base of operations for his welding crew.... traveling out with his two-ton truck each morning to repair various points along the great Southern Railway as it snaked through the mountains towards Virginia....

.... and on one such occasion, I made the trip with him......

.... I was a tall, scrawny 15-year old red-head with seventeen billion freckles who probably weighed 150lbs soaking wet.... he was the same height as I, but you could hardly tell that we were related.... broad, straight, and with a bone-deep suntan & a shock of golden-blonde hair, he looked like he should be heading ashore to sack York with the rest of his Viking mates instead of frying eggs for me before heading off to work....

... it was late July, if I remember correctly... in any case, that date sticks in my mind.... mainly because one of the tasks that I had been given to accomplish while he was off railroading (and I was wandering around Clinton exploring) was to find a Tennessee pearl ring for my Mother's birthday..... that area of northeastern Tennessee having been famous for their freshwater pearls.... (and her birthday being in July...) ...

.... I spent the first few days wandering up and down Main Street looking in shop windows.... I'd find a place to have lunch by myself - usually a burger or a hotdog - and just generally watch the world go by until time for him to get off work..... but as I said, Clinton, while much larger than my old stomping grounds, still isn't exactly a metropolis.... and after two days of strolling, I had pretty much seen all that there was to see in the fine, old town of Clinton, Tennessee.....

.... and that's when I decided to explore the trains......

.... what is it that they say about "Idle hands being the Devil's playthings"?..... well, I suspect that there is more than a little truth in that old one-liner....

.... for verily, on the third day, I got into trouble.......

.... there were three or four sets of tracks laid out in neat rows just yards from my Dad's little trailer.... and after he had departed, I sat on the top step and watched the cars slowly being pushed around.... one boxcar switched to the left.... another - a tanker - switched to the right.... coal car after coal car clanged their way towards a newly-forming train..... the noise was terrific as each car slammed into its neighbor and the couplings caught..... I was fascinated.... being around such heavy, slow-moving pieces of equipment was like being a pygmy surrounded by elephants in some far off jungle..... curiosity and boredom finally got the best of me, though, and I crunched off through the gravel to get a closer look at the cars..... looking back, I suspect that any random jungle pygmy had a lot more common sense than I did at 15.....

.... to be continued tomorrow...... (and yes, I know that 'conflue' isn't a word..... but hey, it is now!.... )

Trains....

.... when I was fifteen years old I accompanied my Father to work one week..... he was foreman of a welding gang for Southern Railway, and his territory stretched from Bristol, TN in the north to Ooltewah, TN in the south..... quite a stretch of real estate, actually...... and as such, he usually spent most of every week away from home.....

... nowadays the railroad will put you up in a hotel room.... but back then, they'd provide their traveling gangs with a small trailer that slept 8 men..... his "gang" consisted of he & his assistant..... and since his assistant was from Strawberry Plains, he normally traveled to and from work each day from home..... this mean that - most of the time - my Dad was alone in the trailer after work....

..... I bring this up because I'm just back from having nipped into town for some light bulbs & laundry detergent.... and on the drive, I found myself stuck at a railroad crossing while one of CSX's finest slowly chugged its way southwards.... and as the boxcars rolled by, I noticed a gentleman laying inside one of the cars soundly asleep..... (at least I assume that he was asleep and not, well, dead...).....

.... anyway, I was a bit shocked to see someone "hobo'ing" these days..... with surveillance systems, barcodes, homeland security, etc, one would imagine that the railroad police would have a pretty firm grip on keeping people from hopping on a train just to see where it'd take them... I've seen people riding in boxcars before, though, so it must be quite common......

.... when I was growing up, I was surrounded by everything Train-related... my maternal grandfather used to regale me with tales of his own hobo-type adventures from when he was a young man during The Great Depression.... how he caught a train in Sweetwater that was headed north.... on to DC, Philly, and Boston.... west to Columbus, Chicago, and eventually the West Coast.... and finally back to Tennessee just before the beginning of WWII..... I remember thinking back on his stories as being so amazingly romantic.... an adventure born out of something other than what it really was - desperation.....

... and my Father, too..... he'd arrive home on the weekends and tell of far away places where he'd worked all week..... John Sevier Yard in Knoxville, Coster Shop, Lake City, Clinton, Jellico..... he'd give me timetable pamphlets that were tattered and covered in coal dust and I'd soak up each place name..... every town, siding, and yard seemed so exotic..... and my mind would take me there like an explorer.... again, never realizing just how hard of a job it was that he was doing..... how he was frozen in the winter, baked in the summertime, and soaked in the spring and fall.....

... and yet Trains have always been romantic to me..... even now....

.... there's a track near my house, and every time I hear the whistle go, it sparks my imagination.....

.... but seeing that fellow today also reminded me of the first (and only) time that I ever jumped on a train illegally..... I guess I should attempt to write it down..... I was nearly friggin' killed.....