Archive for 2017
Summer dies. The long days wane away. The heat in the sky melts like lead to liquid pools. The hills beyond are baked as white as clay. Now creep in the gentle autumn ghouls Trailing their silken shawls of a Lethe- an mist. Shadows warp, gourds enlarge. And now what is always there but not […]
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Two minute energy facts about wind that you’ve never heard:
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Here’s how you create a setting: One hour before nightfall, on a pink-and-blue evening in the third week of August, 2011 … Here’s how you create a character: a solitary man traveling on foot … Here’s how you introduce a situation: entered the small, tree-shadowed town of Clifton — an isolated village around which many […]
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“Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Esthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful.” Stories and art are important because human beings are conceptual. This among other things means that humans survive by use of their reasoning brains. Humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws […]
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The following are five bullshit notions bartenders often hear that would kill the living beast in anyone: 1. You’re not smart enough Then educate yourself. As you know, it’s never been easier. Do you remember your ABC’s? A. Always B. Be C. Cogitating Always be cogitating. The truth is, it’s always, in principle, been simple […]
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You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star. Another nobody black boy raised in a fractured home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly care. Yet you were inherently happy. […]
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She works in a diner called the Desert Rose which sits along the northwestern edge of Colorado, near the Utah border. It’s a small and undistinguished affair, worn and weathered but always brightly lit and burning like a little beacon in that high American desert. Triangles of cherry pie sit bleeding in the pie case, […]
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Most people are boring. Not you. Why? Because you broke away from the pack a long time ago. You’re a different breed — a dog of a different color. You cultivated the black art of individuality, learned the art of personality. You became brilliant. People argue about your modesty. She does things differently, they say, […]
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On this day (April 23, 1564) was born the greatest poet the world has ever known. The following is a repost from an excellent question I once received: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that? — Slo Readuh Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more. It’s impossible to overstate […]
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For you, the secret was never a secret, quite, because for you it always seemed natural — not necessarily easy, of course, but obvious, and obviously right. It never mystified you, perhaps because you learned long ago that your body is a ship, your brain the pilot at the tip. Which is why everything you […]
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Ceasar: The ides of March are come. Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone. — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1. The word ides is derived from the ancient Roman calendar and comes from the Latin idus, which Oxford defines as “a day falling roughly in the middle of each month (the 15th day of March, May, […]
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Did you know that gin is flavored vodka? It’s a Dutch invention. The word itself comes from the Dutch word jenever, which in English is genever, in French genievre — all of which derive from the Latin juniperus — and this goes far in explaining why the predominant flavor of gin is juniper berry. The […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011