Back on the Steinbeck Highway

Hemorrhoids - The Grapes of Wrath.

While you lot are mostly tucked up in bed, my day is just starting. Leaf raking is on the list. A lovely sunny day is forecast, I might just bin the list & go for a drive. Maybe a pub lunch, but easy on the beer/wine. Drifts of damp fallen leaves make great skid-pans. Whoopeee!

HAZEL:  Just at the Computer to dump all the junk ... Not working till after Sundown Saturday, but don't want all twenty-two Accounts clogged up ... I get about fifteen thousand E-Mails a day ... mostly repetitive Sales crap ... but I hafta go in and weed it all out, to save the ones I will need to Respond to ... Right Now, I am returning to Old Movies ... Coldbeer in hand, and a Grocery Bag fulla Fresh, Hot Popcorn, with a dose of Chili Powder all over the copious Melted Butter !!!
 
Enjoy your day, and I will see y'all later .......

IVAN~ What would happen if you highlighted the whole lot & pressed the delete button? You could blame it on the dog or something. Get some better anti-junk software! Have a good Sabbath. X

I love Steinbeck, although "upbeat" is the last thing you could call "The Grapes of Wrath," or for that matter other novels. The man got you inside the skins of the protagonists, and up close & personal with the period of history and what life like that did to individuals & families.

Like Steinbeck, I can not separate what I observe from how I feel at the moment. He wrote in his great travelogue that "external reality has
a way of being not so external after all. This monster of a land, this mightiest of
nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm
me."  As a reader of Pogo as a kid, Steinbeck's "We have overcome all enemies but ourselves." was summed up by those lovable swamp dwellers- WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US " It was a finger of speech--I apologize! I do find both Mr. Steinbeck and Mr Walt Kelly "incredibobble" and "hysteriwockle" and it makes me think of driving around in my van with my yellow lab just whistlin'. 

Haze, you paint an appealing portrait of autumn that I like. Thanks.

Yes, Hazel, you have now taken on "bad influence " status from the other side of the globe. But I mean that in a good way...my lovely bride and I set our sails to yardwork this morning, but after reading your commentary, we decided to seek out an alternative path for this beautiful day.

Today is a good day to enjoy grapes without a side of wrath (with apologies to Mr. Steinbeck). I hope it is as beautiful where you are as it is where I am.

notary sojac.   .   That came from Smokey Stover, (and is dispenseiwocle)a newspaper cartoon that I read voraciously, along with POGO. (who was humorificus)  .   Those both added to my creative humor.   Steinbeck lives vicariously thru my travels in the RoadYacht...and I will endeavor to write my memories....It was indeed this village,that I began writing to,on my journey with Pinky to forever.....

RY- Keep on truckin' in your Rocinante. I speak to kids groups all the time and I always tell them how critical a journal is to enjoying life. As you look back and think about what you onetime thought, you will come to realize what a great trip it has been. 

Travels with Charley is a really good read.

It is impossible to say that Travels With Charlie was the reason that we bought a big pick-up and a small but suitable slide-in camper but it figured into the decision.
The thousands of miles of epic family journeys are memorable mostly for the times it was necessary to ask my wife to remind our daughters, no more than two of whom could get along at one time, that they really did not want me to: "Pull this thing over."
So many times, it came into play as a midday refuge after a morning of fishing or hunting: a place to dry out, warm up, enjoy a bowl of chili and a beer.
Even Thad "Three Words" Thayer, was moved to set a conversational record when settling in for for a cool post lunch nap, he observed: "This is deluxe... just deluxe."
It was important, when setting out with the camper, to select for stoutness in playmates. The last thing you wanted to hear was: "Oh, I have to be back by five," or back at all because the real beauty of the deal was if you were somewhere at the close of day wondering what it would be like in the morning, you could just stay and find out. We often did.
The proof that it was a valued privilege was that the guys always cleaned up after themselves and each other and chipped in for gas.

As for my interest in some guy setting out with no dog and no camper to second guess and nitpick where Steinbeck might actually have been as opposed to where he said he was, it is equal to or less than that of the late great George S. Kauffman's in the pathetic plight of the then young Eddie Fisher-- to wit:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/the-titan-and-the-pfc/

After a morning vet visit, the dog and I stopped out at the county facility where my wife's mom lives to pick up the MBWITW and head over for flu shots.
The dog, on a shoelace of a show lead, and I strolled around a bit shuffling among the fallen crimson and gold maple leaves.
Out of nowhere, appeared a uniformed county functionary whose role, I am sure is meant to be more custodial than authoritative, to block our path.
With thumbs hooked in belt deputy-style, he looked askance and mumbled these words as though it were the ten-thousandth time he had been forced to do so today: "No surprise, I'll be needing some ID."
As we side-stepped him and continued on our way, one of us was heard to say: "The surprise is that you've gotten by so long without any."

RY ~
Never forget to share and have you seen the national TV spot featuring an adorable pink haired girl entering an elevator? It stops me every time.

It's so long since I read anything by Steinbeck that I'm not fit to comment, except to say I remember being moved to tears by some of his powerful writing. God is good, mes enfants, I did start on the leaf-raking & half an hour into the chore, the rake handle broke. So I went out for a drive & stopped for lunch at an Inn by a lakeside, surrounded by mountains. It's been a very warm, sunny day, so I took a table outside. Five minutes later, friends I have not seen for years turned up, then some friends of theirs & their dog so it ended up a bit of a party, which included strangers at the next table whose small child wanted to play with the dog. So what was going to be a quiet lunch contemplating the autumn colours reflected in the lake was great fun. I won the pebble-skipping competition - 9 jumps!!!! I've had a lovely day. I think a lot of you are on the same-ish latitude, and autumn is here, so grab the good days. Playing around chucking pebbles into the lake with a borrowed child & borrowed dog was a real treat.

POLL
Not present today because:

O- The topic is a sleeping pill    
O- It is Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere
O- Still a little pissed about that snake

STONEY:
HA HA HA!!! About the snake.
It's a beautiful day here on the Delmarva Peninsula.
And when i go to DC on Monday I'll get to enjoy the leaves.

Steinbeck  to  literature  is  like  Wagner  to  classical  music,  in  that  both  treat  somewhat  morbid  themes,  and  man's  ongoing  crisis  in  coping..... Found  a  new  corrected  edition  of  William  Faulkner's  "The  Sound  &  The  Fury,"  corrected  meaning  both  the  holograph  transcript  and  the  carbon  transcript  have  been  reconciled,  to  secure  the  author's  true  intent.   Faulkner  thought  to  think  this  his  finest  work.  The  sad  news:  The  adjacent  county  put  the  hardbound  edition  (1st  edition,  1984)  in  the  "discard"  pile,  for  lack  of  interest.   Now  I  remember  why  Hemingway  dran

Steinbeck  to  literature  is  like  Wagner  to  classical  music,  in  that  both  treat  somewhat  morbid  themes,  and  man's  ongoing  crisis  in  coping..... Found  a  new  corrected  edition  of  William  Faulkner's  "The  Sound  &  The  Fury,"  corrected  meaning  both  the  holograph  transcript  and  the  carbon  transcript  have  been  reconciled,  to  secure  the  author's  true  intent.   Faulkner  thought  to  think  this  his  finest  work.  The  sad  news:  The  adjacent  county  put  the  hardbound  edition  (1st  edition,  1984)  in  the  "discard"  pile,  for  lack  of  interest.   Now  I  remember  why  Hemingway  drank.....

1 Vote for Autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Laughing about the snake...bebe probably is not....it's not a snoozer subject, it's just more fun to experience than write about.  Or maybe it is a sleeping pill, I don't know.  All I know is "life is good" today.  Hope it's good for all of you too.

Bert, Bert~ You still have an echo! No, Wagner is not music to cheer you up, but, as you indicate, that was not the intention.
The Ssssnake will be vanished tomorrow. I do feel for people who have acute phobias, but find them hard to understand. One of my son's former ladies, who he lived with for 7 years was spider phobic. I had to do serious house-cleaning if they were coming to visit. The young man who sometimes helps with my garden can't cope with frogs & toads. I have to be around to rush to to rescue if I hear an anguished scream - and he IS in genuine distress.
 
 
 
 
 

Snakes once gave me the creeps but then I volunteered at a living science center where children learned about all things that creep and crawl and chirp and scurry and as i watched the boys and girls ooohh and aahhh and pet and stroke the creatures of the great outdoors I came to appreciate them too.

Same thing with wasps. I would destroy their nests when i found them on my porch or in the hedges. But I learned to co-exist with them. Now they do their thing and I do mine and everything works out fine.

ROADYACHT:   POGO is my All Time Favorite Character !!!  Smokey Stover, who one need be at least sixty years old to remember, runs a very close Second ... Always got a kick out of the Cigar stuck his Fire Hat .......
 
BERT:  Steinbeck, Wagner. Faulkner, and Hemingway ... are all playing Poker together, somewhere ....... They are at least in Good Company ...

lotlot:  Wasps rarely sit on the Front Porch ... usually, they're out back on the verandah, and most of us have long since learned to co-exist with them .......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_%28comics%29    ; now, for some reason, I am imagining(and a little Trader Joe's chianti did not hurt)that if we had a 'theme' ball in the club car for Hallowen, and took characters from Pogo as our masques........