McGuffey Lane.........................the First Album
Saturday, June 20, 2026
the submicroscopic............
The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments...
-Don DeLillo, from here
writing.....................
If you have any doubt, default to writing. It scales better, respects people’s time, and produces better thinking. Writing forces you to define the problem and to admit whether calling the meeting was simply delaying the decision.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
cultivating..........................
Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.
On beauty........
This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's suffering or their liberty. The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains free-lance. The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood. Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone. And for thousands of years, every day, at every seond, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture "Create Dangerously"
time to fly......................
"Are you happy here?"
I looked out of the window and took a breath. I couldn't lie to him.
"I'm happy here, but I also want to grow more. I want more things for myself. I am trying to sort it all out.
Then we were silent.
A few days later, he asked me to meet him at the office on the following Saturday morning. As soon as I walked in the door and saw his face, I knew what was coming.
"This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you," he began. He fired me, then said, "It's time for you to fly."
After six years at the 55 Restaurant Group, I walked out of that office for the last time.
-Cameron Mitchell, Yes Is the Answer. What Is the Question?: How Faith in People and a Culture of Hospitality Built a Modern American Restaurant Company
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Any Major Dude With Half a Heart...........
.................celebrates the World Cup by offering 48 songs, one from each of the countries playing in the on-going tournament.
Might quicken me.................
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
-Seamus Heaney, "Oysters"
patience...................
Youth walked before me and I followed him until we came to a distant field. There he stopped, and gazed at the clouds that drifted over the horizon like a flock of white lambs. Then he looked at the trees whose naked branches pointed toward the sky as if praying to Heaven for the return of their foliage.
And I said, "Where are we now, Youth?
And he replied, "We are in the field of Bewilderment. Take heed."
And I said, "Let us go back at once, for this desolate place affrights me, and the sight of the clouds and the naked trees saddens me."
And he replied, "Be patient. Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Voice of The Master
It is what we allow it to be...............
Although we cannot dictate all the circumstances around us, there is no excuse for being unprepared or irresponsible. All too often we disregard our ability to influence the outcome because we see a situation as beyond our control. We casually dismiss our responsibility with the refrain, "It is what it is."
We need to lead. Even when circumstances feel completely beyond our control, we must still act. Only then will we be positioned to exert our influence, which will drive us closer to determining the outcome. By leading, we can overcome the feeling of victimization and, instead, understand the range of options within our power.
By taking control of our preparation, reaction, and response to problems, we become leaders. When we reframe our mindset and see situations through the lens of leadership, we understand that things don't have to remain as they are.
-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge
Sunday, June 14, 2026
memories.....................
The truth is that memory and forgetting are forever entwined. . . .
Neurobiologists learn a great deal about memory by studying forgetting. To forget something means we had to have known it at some point, and that's different than never having known it in the first place. And even when we think we know something, memory is fallible in two different ways. First, we can lose things in our memory banks, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for a lifetime. Second, when we do locate and retrieve a memory, it can be fantastically distorted without our realizing it.
The truth is we have false memories every day, lots of them. We just don't know it because we're not often challenged.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
ought to be adjusted.................
Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'
-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative
how long is an era...................?
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala
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