The Desk.

I shall leave you with this poem entitled "Sometimes I prefer internal rhyme (like when I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had to write this down), but I always like enjambment."

Can I reach you if I teach you
Of the beauty and my duty
To uphold this sacred hol-
Y place, or just save face
By saving you gents the embarassment
Of not knowing what is glowing
In these hills and in my will
To carry on and hike till dawn?
Release the pain within my brain,
And just tell me if you can see
The glory of my story.
Will my review serve as preview
Well enough so that the rough
And rocky trail here in my tale
Fills you with thoughts of what my mind has fought
For years? You can see these tears,
Yet while I weep, you dig us deep-
Er into this business and this nonsense.
While the world is downward spiking, upward I'll be hiking;
I'll be happy as I roam because I'm going home.

See y'all in three weeks.

"Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of perception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite wonderful, really.
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is a boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. It a way, it would hardly matter.
At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don't think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don't think 'Hey, I did sixteen miles today,' any more than you think 'Hey, I took eight thousand breaths today.' It's just what you do"
- From Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods"

I'm so ashamed. I am the P. Diddy of the blogging world. But what am I to do? There's nothing I can say that hasn't been said. And since I don't have the eloquent genius of professional writers, I'll leave it to Bryson to tell you about it. I won't do this all the time, just whenever I read something I wish I had written. That won't happen often, I never read.

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. - Aristotle

I am now an Eagle Scout. I have received my documents back from the national and council board, and all that remains is to plan my ceremony. That is the technical aspect of the matter. But the truth of it is I have been an Eagle Scout for months. My work has been done or nearly so, and my documentation was complete. Various set-backs here and there prevented the official completion of my reception of the honor. I don't even want a ceremony anymore. What is that anyway? It is merely the presentation of a badge and a handshake. I'll get that badge in the mail; I got that handshake already. Some say that the ceremony is the culmination of the scout experience. Not for me. The culmination of my scout experience was my scout experience. I haven't spent the last eight years in search of Eagle, I've spent it backpacking, canoeing, and, more recently, teaching the children. I didn't do all that to get Eagle, I did it because it's what I live for. It just happens to be that Eagle is the name you get when you've done all of it. Eagle isn't the end, Eagle means nothing. These days kids come through, treat the troop like a factory and get it at 14. Others might be active for a few years, leave, and then come back and do all the requirements in a few months right before they turn 18. They're degrading the whole experience. That's why I'm not interested in Eagle. It shouldn't be something you get and then use to prove your worth, but rather it should be the thing for which you must prove your worth. Somewhere along the way that was lost.

Give me no badge to say I hiked a mountain, give me another mountain to hike. Give me no handshake for teaching a child, give me another child that I might teach him. The measure of a man is not what he has done, but rather what he may yet do.

Hello again, loyal readers and Uzma. I've been on holiday and it took longer than I expected. Shortly after I made the last post I left with J-Ken and went down to Sunset beach. Then on friday AA came down and brought me up to Wilmington for orientation, and after that I stayed on Wrightsville with mother and I got back this afternoon. However, I am glad to see that my blog has had some visits and somebody has something to say, even if it is Uzma.

Here's the deal. Although I say it oft, I shall repeat: I hate people. But I like to watch them. I do not wish to be rid of them because then I would have nothing to rant about. And my ranting is the key to my sexiness. Without ranting, I'm just a beautiful man with brains and charm. So you see, I wish to preserve the great traditions and cultures of the world, and study them because I am a student of history and an inhabitant of academia. But I do not wish to be part of it myself. It's a matter of respect more than anything. The knowledge that I am of the same blood that built the great monuments and wrote the great music of the world - that is what drives me. I see what men are capable of, and then I drive through Greensboro. What I describe here in the blog is the ideal - how things would be if nothing had ever happened the way it really does. I talk about the way I'd like things to be, but I keep in mind that society is a necessary evil, and without it, I would be a cave-man. Ah, the sweet life of a cave-man, with nothing to worry about but hunting, gathering, and fending off viscious bloodthirsty beasts. Wait, that sounds like my regular life, just change viscious bloodthirsty beasts to democrats. I live by my own rules, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten how I got here. Never let it bleed.