Post-Pandemic Post

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not,
but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.
  -- Mark Twain

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To Huff, this transformation helped explain the resurgent nostalgia for the
Confederacy he sensed across the South, even among his mostly affluent
students.  "The South - the white South - has always had this powerful sense
of loss," he said, as we chatted in his office between classes.  First, it
was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of
Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian
society.  Now, with the region's new prosperity and clout, Southerners
wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they'd clung to
through generations of poverty and isolation."
  -- Confederates in the Attic

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The boy watched him. You aint got no business smokin them things, he said.

His father pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the table and looked
up.  When I come around askin you what I'm supposed to do you'll know you're
big enough to tell me, he said.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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Rawlins took a cigarette out of his shirtpocket and sat up and took a coal
from the fire and lit the cigarette.  He sat smoking.  I wouldnt let her get
the best of me, he said.  
He tipped the ash from the end of the cigarette against the heel of his boot.  
She aint worth it.  None of em are.
He didnt answer for a while. Then he said: Yes they are.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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I'm goin to tell you somethin, cousin.
John Grady leaned and spat. All right.
Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that
got me into it.  It was never the dumb thing.  It was always some
choice I'd made before it. You understand what I'm sayin?
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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In the Spaniard's heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A
great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance.
And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to
bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. When I look at my
grandniece I see a child.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
  
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He sat and smoked with them and told all that had happened. They were
concerned about Rawlins, more a friend to them than he. They were saddened
that he was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he
leaves his own country. They said it was no accident of circumstance that a
man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the
weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in
their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily
come by otherwise.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what
might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might
have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not
know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us.
What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and
this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems
powerless to change.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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He saw very clearly how all his life had led only to this moment and all
after led nowhere at all.  He felt something cold and soulless enter him
like another being and he imagined it smiled malignly and he had no reason
to believe it would ever leave.
  -- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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STRESS MANAGEMENT

Picture yourself near a stream.
Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air.
Nothing can bother you here.
No one knows this secret place.
You are in total seclusion from
that place called the world.
The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall
fills the air with a cascade of serenity.
The water is crystal clear.
You can easily make out the face of the person
whose head you're holding under the water.
                                          -- KevinT
                                          
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