Bryan Strawser

You are here: Home / 2009 / Archives for March 2009

Archives for March 2009

Chuck loses his son

by ·

Chuck Butcher’s son took his own life this week – he has blogged about it here, written not long after the police informed he and his wife:

I choose to let the bad stuff fade and to keep alive pictures like the 4 year old lugging his toy gun throught the woods trying to sneak and still keep up with Dad on an elk hunt and his pride in learning woods craft and ability to spot animals no human should be have been able to. Squatting in the back yard catching for him in fear of being broken if a pitch got away and his absolute laughing pleasure when I had to pull the glove off and rub a badly stung hand.

My thoughts are with Chuck and his family.

Dear Dad, with love

by ·

Over at Science Blogs, Abel reflects on the 12th anniversary of his father’s death:

It was out there, in the darkness between Denver and Albuquerque, that I believe we had our last discussion, maybe a year after you died. I was camping alone, without a tent, in the cool dry Western night marveling at the stars of the Milky Way and a nebula I could see with your old hunting binoculars.

In a dream of myself lying there in my sleeping bag, my sister’s princess phone appeared suddenly on the arid grassland beside me – the very same one with the headset I cracked when a chair fell onto it while I was trying to make time with that postdoc from Edinburgh (that’s a story we’ll exchange offline). They call it a “landline” these days – we now have these wireless phones people carry around everywhere.

The phone rang – I looked around bewildered, but I answered. It was you. You said that you were sorry you couldn’t be there and wished you could be, but you were happy that I was enjoying what you wish you had done yourself.

And you said you missed me.

And I said I missed you, too.

Wrong

by ·

Depeche Mode – one of the bands of my youth.

When they want to bring it – Wow.. They can bring it.

Hesitancy

by ·

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”

– W.H. Murray, via svn.

Meditations in an Emergency

by ·

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me.

I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

– Frank O’Hara