The Scotto Grotto (org)

Ok.. I like Charlton Heston well enough, but the photo of him there is scary and hilarious at the same time… In fact, I like it so much, I’m going to grab it, put it on my server, so when I look back in a year or three, I can tune in and laugh and shiver at the same time again.

Brother and I went to call my grandmother and wish her a happy 80th birthday, and she was out and about! Ah well, if at first you don’t succeed…[update, 8:15 – got through… she sounds quite well, though Ted seemed a little scattered… he’s a swell guy.. I hope he mends quickly.)

There’s a three-day week, and then a four-day weekend coming up. I’m glad of that… I’ll enjoy the breather. I will swing by on Friday, to get my pay paperwork, but I’ll be gone again before anyone can lasso me into any work. October seems to have just blipped on by.

I have an urge for potato skins, or something with pimento cheese… but will more likely have some sort of noodles for dindin, as I have the latter on premises.

The crisp, colorful prose of Susan Orlean, from The Orchid Thief, which I strongly recommend:

The state of Florida does incite people. It gives them big ideas. They don’t exactly drift there: They come on purpose–maybe to start a new life, because Florida seems like a fresh start, or to reward themselves for having had a hardworking life, because Florida seems plush and bountiful, or because they have some new notions and plans, and Florida seems like the kind of place where you can try anything, the kind of place that for centuries have made entrepreneur’s mouths water. It is moldable, reinventable. It has been added to, subtracted from, drained, ditched, paved, dredged, irrigated, cultivated, wrested from the wild, restored to the wild, flooded, patted, set on fire. Things are always being taken out of Florida or smuggled in. The flow in and out is so constant that what exactly the state consists of is different from day to day. It is a collision of things you would expect to find together in one place–condominiums and panthers and raw woods and hypermarkets and Monkey Jungles and strip malls and superhighways and groves of carnivorous plants and theme parks and royal palms and hibiscus trees and those hot swamps with acres and acres that no one has ever even seen–al toasting together under the same sunny vault of Florida sky. Even the orchids of Florida are here in extremes. The woods are filled with more native species of orchids than anywhere else in the country, but also there are scores of man-made jungles, the hothouses of Florida, full of astonishing flowers and that have been created in labs, grown in test tubes, and artificially multiplies to infinity. Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order of the universe, but then I find myself in Florida, swamped by incongruity and paradox, and I have to start all over again.

A chunky, satisfying paragraph that reinforces my desire to write.

What candy should I get for Halloween? I suspect that I won’t get many TorT folks again… The trick is to get a kind of candy that I can bring in to work, so I don’ t eat it all. If left to my own devices, I suspect almond joy will be the way I go. Yum.

speaking of Joy… Jacques Henri Lartigue: Imprints of Joy. at the Edwynn Houk Gallery. “…Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) took his first photograph in 1900, at the age of six. At seven, he acquired his first camera as a birthday gift. The young Jacques-Henri reveled in photography’s magic power to preserve everyday moments of joy so that they could be infinitely revived. He photographed obsessively, carefully keeping his pictures in diaries, alongside anecdotes and sketches, all meant, as he put it, to ‘trap’ the very ‘scent of happiness’.”