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| Photo by me, August 2024. |
Sometimes you have to stop when out for a walk and enjoy the view. That was what I did this past Sunday while on a six mile walk as the sweat soaked through my clothes and dripped from my hair. The sun was setting behind the clouds and hills and turning the landscape golden. It was late enough that no one else was around as the breeze cooled me off on an August evening.
It was a slow and gentle moment and there have been few of those this summer. I have spent too much time on the road going from here to there and back again. I love the road, but I love it less than I once did. Charles Kuralt in a Winnebago I am not. The hotel coffee, miles of traffic and the dependency on internet reviews of restaurants to find good food that often turn out to be anything but good wears me down after an extended period of it. I swear some people have questionable taste or low expectations when it comes to what is a decent meal. Years ago on a trip I learned to never eat Thai food in Amarillo and I was recently reminded again in another small city to stay away from Thai food in places where there is not a sizable Thai population.
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| Homeward bound. Photo by me July 2024. |
The road is not done with me this year, I will be back on it soon enough. I have considered writing a book that is set on the road as I entertain ideas for the next novel. The romance of the road is something I have seem to have lost between the rest areas and the mileposts. Or it could be that I do not enjoy summer travel all that much anymore.
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| A butterfly bush that I planted this year blooms. Photo by me, August 2024. |
I am ready for summer to be over, my tan to fade, to put the shorts away for a few months and for the humidity to cease making the outdoors into a sauna. The flowers in my garden have been wonderful this year, but I am ready to do some work in them that requires cooler weather. Outdoor work around here never stops, there is always something to plant, trim, mulch or redesign. I am as an attentive gardener here as I was growing up at my childhood home in the country. I will miss the adorable hummingbirds that have been here all summer enjoying the lavender, zinnias, roses and other plants.
Terrible news out of New York as the legendary WCBS 880 is being flipped to sports talk. As if the world needs another place for mostly men to call in and bloviate about sports and worship overpaid sports stars. Of all my work in broadcasting I was never more proud of the work I did in the early 2000s on-air at WCBS 880. It was reaching the pinnacle in the industry to have been associated with that station. I thought the writing may have been on the wall for WCBS when recently there was significant breaking news and I tuned in. The station made no mention of the news for some time and in the past they would have been all over it and the anchoring sounded small market and not ready for the big leagues.
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| Photo by me, August 2024. |
A couple of weeks ago I stopped in a "vintage" shop in Athens. It was the kind the of place where the merchandise was twice as old as the staff and the majority of the customers. I have been looking for a barn jacket from the nineties like I wore back then. I found several in this shop in okay, but not great, shape and at outrageous prices. They were charging three times the going price and this was a place where broke college students were the primary customers. Maybe college students are not broke these days or the ones who go to UGA aren't? If only I had kept the barn jacket I had as it would still fit today. I did think the above photo of the guy in a mask with a chain was curious and unexpected, but then again it was Athens so it was not all that weird.
Additional reading worth considering: How The Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way in The Atlantic.
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