The Sinkhole
And walking back towards Wayne from the Cemetery I take some precarious shortcuts over sandstone cliffs and ledges, 20, 30 feet above rocks, clinging to crumbly handholds, stepping cautiously onto tiny 6 inch ledges, over slouched, cracked overburden that hangs just waiting to fall, it's stupid, and so having made it across safely I resolve to take the road back...
Safely making my way to the road, a disused affair blocked off on both ends, from the cliffs I could see it was abandoned, obvious washouts and sinkholes, but it beats edging along cliff faces, and after that it seems a stroll down a country lane. And looking at the rocks along the cliff as I walk down, some good ironstone beddings that look promising for fossils when...!!!
...I come to, I've fallen into a sinkhole, walked straight in, a washout hole in the middle of the road, obvious, if you were looking, obviously I wasn't, lying down upon my back I've fallen 10 feet, 2 steel culverts on either side of me, broken, dark, and rolling over in pain I see that if I'd fallen just a bit further to my right the hole extends past the reach of sunlight...
Bruised, but nothing apparently broken I find leverage climbing on the culverts, scrambling and pulling out tufts of grass manage to haul myself to the ground, pain, my leg feels - well, not broken, but definitely torn and sprained, hobbling back down to the town...
2 days now, the right leg aching and unable to bend, extend, and only briefly walk upon it, the left leg is bruised, my shoulder slightly torn, nothing broken, but the other injuries now making themselves known, the pain of my right knee, flex, extend, contract, painful when moving, when doing nothing, but it really could have been a lot worse...
And i have to laugh, of all the places misfortune could so deservedly find me it's on the unexpected country road, the quiet and uneventful walk home...
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- Category: Miscellany
Force Majeure - Eddie Izzard
And so I've downloaded "Force Majeure", Eddie Izzard, which I believe to be a Danish film about a relationship that goes bad when the wife discovers proof of her husbands cowardice.
It opens in English, over-the-top graphics, a comedian on stage in London, Wembley Arena, charismatic, talking on stage to an overly amused audience. And I watch it for 10 minutes, it's not funny, the jokes, "intelligent", but not, obvious, peculiar, and I keep waiting for it to cut to the drama, the Avalanche, but it's not happening, and after 20 minutes I finally fast-forward through the rest of it to discover that in fact there is a real comedian by the name of Eddie Izzard and as over-the-top as I found the opening this is apparently a real video that people watch to be amused.
Perhaps it was the fact that I was expecting something else, something - well, brighter, with a little more depth, but I'm amazed that this passes for entertainment, that people buy into this, attend the shows, laugh, buy the DVD, I'm missing something, and while he's definitely not my cup of tea I learned something new, mainly, what other people like, and I wouldn't have believed it if you told me...
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- Category: Film
Cemetery at Wayne
And a break from the prospecting to wander up the hills to visit the cemetery in Wayne. Wayne, formerly a large coal town, now with a population of 33 and a cemetery filled with over 150, "Visitors Discouraged", a 15 or 20 minute walk to the top of the hill by the radio tower.
"Visitors Discouraged", the cemetery is now on private land, overgrown, forlorn, surrounded by barbed wire, thickets of bushes hide markers, what very few markers remain, for 150 graves I can find not even a dozen, the rest are marked by the cribbings poking through the soil, by the depressions of their having fallen in, the cemetery itself is death, no graves tended, 60 or 70 years since the last burial, and in another hundred erosion will be washing the coffins and bones out of the bluffs into the town, to be found with the dinosaurs...
The pictures are bad, I apologize, midday on the prairies, hot, bleached wood markers and crosses fallen into the hollows, I could have waited there for some color with the setting sun, but really, this, this is it: eternity under the stark prairie sky. Many of the graves of are of children taken at 1 or 2 years, Spanish Influenza, other diseases, I take my photos, disturb nothing but a deer who finds the thickets good cover, and when I leave it returns.
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- Category: Places
Leonardo Da Vinci on Work
“It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.”
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- Category: Quotes
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