After Combat

From Sunday Times, a piece by James Dao:

Specialist Hayes, undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, visited his platoon mates at Fort Drum.  To celebrate, they drank Guinness from his prosthetic leg.

Interview with David Sedaris

I did not conduct the interview.
I read it.
Sarah Lyall writes:

Mr. Sedaris has no cellphone; his land line does not have call waiting. (“Nobody ever calls me,” he said at the end of the afternoon. “The phone hasn’t rung once,” which was true.) He neither has nor wants an e-mail address.

He stays away from the Internet — “You’ll lose a whole year on the Internet, just in terms of looking things up,” he warned — and was unnerved when he once idly typed in the name of the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross, and a bunch of critical commentary came up. “I don’t even want to know what anybody thinks about Terry Gross,” he said.

In Paris, he said, he has just two friends — one is a journalist, the other a tour guide from Alabama — but he doesn’t mind: “Hugh has a lot of friends, and I can sometimes use his friends.”

Found

A pink post-it fell out of a newly purchased book.
In blue ink, it read:

You are wonderful.

You are beautiful.

You are smart, funny, and unique.

And you have great hair.

for some reason

The Life of a Day  

 Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

---Tom Hennen