a man leans against the brick wall
of parking lot number 5
on the main street
he is Worn
his face, jacket, soul
asking every passing stranger
the same question
i shake my head and speak
no extra change for your sandwich
the bag of quarters
that i just counted
is not extra
six dollars
enough for cigarettes and large coffee
and almost an hour away from The Desk
now i am broke
the way back i am a stranger again
same question
head shakes, no words this time
back to work
for both of us
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Tea is a Hell of a Drug
I regularly find myself sitting at work compulsively clicking the Stumble Button while some poorly-written VBA script cranks through an assload of data. Normally I just let it roll until something catches my eye, I become amused for 5-10 seconds, and I move on. But this...What you see above is part of the pathway to a tea house at the top of a mountain in China. That's right. Unlike us lazy Americans who just pop into the nearest Starbucks and order a tall double iced wallet-raper with reduced calorie whipped topping, people in China are really buying into that "it's not the destination it's the journey" mumbo-jumbo. Re-markable.
More pictures of this insanity.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Origin of Dilly
When I meet new people the topic of my nickname usually comes up. Apparently there are not too many folks wandering around under the moniker of "Dilly."
The obvious: my last name is Dillard, no relation to the department store. Chop off the last three letters, add a "y" and viola. Of course there were other variations my early peers found delightful, from "dill pickle" to "dildo" (at a time when I doubt many of us even knew what a dildo was.) I wish I could claim that my extensive vocabulary collided with my hyper-inflated sense of adolescent self-worth and I tagged myself, but that is not the case.
Credit lies with a short, bespectacled gentleman by the name of Mick Connolly. He was the varsity soccer coach at Concord High School my first three years there. I never got to play for Mick (three years on the JV and he retired before my senior year go figure) , but I certainly got to train under him. I don't remember about anyone else on the teams, but he called my buddy Chris Greene "Greeny" and called me "Dilly." Not terribly clever in hindsight, but both names stuck well beyond high school.
The "sooper" part came from an intentional misspelling. I had been doodling superman logos on my notes in class, and wanted my AIM screenname to be "superdilly." Well that was taken. Thankfully, because after ten years, "superdilly" just looks dumb.
The obvious: my last name is Dillard, no relation to the department store. Chop off the last three letters, add a "y" and viola. Of course there were other variations my early peers found delightful, from "dill pickle" to "dildo" (at a time when I doubt many of us even knew what a dildo was.) I wish I could claim that my extensive vocabulary collided with my hyper-inflated sense of adolescent self-worth and I tagged myself, but that is not the case.
Credit lies with a short, bespectacled gentleman by the name of Mick Connolly. He was the varsity soccer coach at Concord High School my first three years there. I never got to play for Mick (three years on the JV and he retired before my senior year go figure) , but I certainly got to train under him. I don't remember about anyone else on the teams, but he called my buddy Chris Greene "Greeny" and called me "Dilly." Not terribly clever in hindsight, but both names stuck well beyond high school.
The "sooper" part came from an intentional misspelling. I had been doodling superman logos on my notes in class, and wanted my AIM screenname to be "superdilly." Well that was taken. Thankfully, because after ten years, "superdilly" just looks dumb.
Friday, October 17, 2008
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