Sunday...

I know Saturday is great, but for me, Sunday morning/afternoon is one of the best parts of the week. I usually get up between 8:30 and 9 AM, which for me is sleeping in. It is a time that I dedicate to relaxation and doing exactly what I feel like. If that means sitting around in my underwear under a blanket on the couch and watching worthless Sunday morning talk (The McLaughlin Group is on in the background right now) while looking at the intronets, so be it. I am committed to enjoying it guilt-free.

There wasn't much on earlier. I started watching "Hollywoodland" on cable. It looked like it could be a good movie, but I guess I just wasn't in the mood for it. Maybe some other time...

I then felt the urge to put something on the internet, so I am typing now. I now have the Packer/Viking game on, but I'm not really paying attention to it. I like the soothing sound of football play-by-play. Since I didn't really have an idea what to write about, I went and looked through the books in our little library for some inspiration.

I noticed a book someone once gave me as a gift. Unfortunately they didn't write their name in it, so I don't know who it's from. The title is "The Most Brilliant Thoughts Of All Time (In Two Lines Or Less)". I think it was one of those gifts that I thought was cool when I got it, but I never really looked at it. I decided to flip to a random page and see if there was a quote I could write about. After seeing a few of them, it was clear that calling them "The Most Brilliant" might be overstating things.

One of the quotes on the page interested me. It was by Carl Sandburg. It goes:

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

It wasn't so much the quote that caught my eye, but who said it. I was familiar with Carl Sandburg. He had lived in my hometown of Elmhurst at one time. My junior high was named after him. It was the same junior high bloggers Grant, Geo, Dave, and Phil went to. I Googled it to get the picture above. I looked at the staff list to see if there were any teachers still there that I remembered. Mrs. Beck, my old social studies teacher was the only one.

Back to the quote. At first glance, it seemed to me sort of cynical. It makes it seem like the past is useless - that it has no value. I wondered if I had the whole context, so I did another search. Sure enough, there is more to it:

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, not just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

In its full context, I can appreciate the quote more. I like the idea living in the here and now. I think part of the fun of these blogs is their "here-and-nowness". Even if we write about something from the past, it's something we we're thinking about now and wanting to share with others now. It's such a cool new form of prose. There are no rules. You don't have to organize things by chapters or stick to a single subject. You can write what you want when you want and it can be as long or as short as you want. It could just be a picture or some video. I could be hilarious one post and deadly serious the next. And anyone, anywhere in the world has as much access to it as any book ever published. I think that's neat.

I hope you all enjoy your Sundays. I think I'll go check what y'all are up to.