Waiting to exhale...

...and start a new month. There is little that could happen tomorrow that will materially change the month's billings. The air is full of promises for March, so we'll see.

I spent the day reviewing grammar and vocabulary, ever amazed that I somehow managed to make it out of ninth grade without having a clear idea of what the subject of a sentence is, and being an odds-on favorite at failing to identify direct objects. I remember the English grammar book we used had a fairly hefty section devoted to diagramming sentences, and I lived in quaking fear of ever having to wade into that swamp. Silly me.

I also did some reading, and found a remarkably moving pair of lines in, of all places, Robert W. Service's The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill:

North, by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again

I will admit that I had to reread that second line to parse the words properly, but when the light came on, I was struck by their power and economy.

I ran across some Web references to the poem having been sung by Hank Snow, but was not able to chase down a sound track from a reliable source. In my search, I did find a few spoken renderings of the poem, including the one recorded by Jean Shepherd for an album of Service readings, a copy of which I bought some time ago. I listened to some of the others today and in one case, was struck (and not in a good way) with how the text had been changed (e.g., "good Alaska coin" instead of "good cheechako coin"), but in the end, I have to figure that kind of stuff is not my problem. ;^)

In other news, I exercised for the second day in a row, and felt pretty good doing it. Did some writing, too, but in the absence of a deadline, I did not achieve the level of polish that I had sought to achieve, but perhaps that'll end up being a plus, in the end (although the last time something like this happened, more then three decades passed before I got around to doing something about it).

I am also mulling over the idea of what it means to have fallen out of touch with someone. In the end, absent some kind of specific action or pathology, it occurs to me that losing touch is a two-way street.

Cheers...