Splitting Wood Quotes

I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up

How is the birdhouse coming along, Charlie Brown?" "Well, I'm a lousy carpenter, I can't nail straight, I can't saw straight and I always split the wood... I'm nervous, I lack confidence, I'm stupid, I have poor taste and absolutely no sense of design... So, all things considered, it's coming along okay!

The joke's on them. One little hypodermic wont' be enough. Split a piece of wood, and they'll find me. Lift up a stone, and they'll find me. Look in the mirror, and they'll find me...If you really want to know what makes someone a killer, ask yourself what would make you do it.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

I can never say what I want to say, it's been like this for a while now. I try to say something but all I get are wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this can't catch her.

A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them. But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of.

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room. But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves.

There’s nothing to be scared of.” Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse – there was really no point – he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how the ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing ‘Come Fly with Me’ from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes.

Suddenly the door crashed into the room in a cacophony of shattered, splintered wood, revealing Emil standing in the frame, his small beady eyes fixed on Peter. A satisfied smile split his fat face, his lips peeled away from a mouthful of neglected, black teeth. In his right hand was a half empty bottle of vodka, in his left hand was Elena.

Oh no. I split my time between Paris and New York. They're the only places to really live.

As soon as he had disappeared Deborah made for the trees fringing the lawn, and once in the shrouded wood felt herself safe. She walked softly along the alleyway to the pool. The late sun sent shafts of light between the trees and onto the alleyway, and a myriad insects webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. But were they insects, wondered Deborah, or particles of dust, or even split fragments of light itself, beaten out and scattered by the sun? It was very quiet. The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognise her as the garden did. ("The Pool")

Sing like you've got no audience, sing like you don't know what a critic is, sing about your hometown, sing about your prom, sing about deer, sing about the seasons, sing about your mother, sing about chainsaws, sing about the thaw, sing about the rivers, sing about forests, sing about the prairies. But whatever you do, start singing early in the morning, if only just to keep warm. And if you happen to live in a warm beautiful place … Move to Wisconsin. Buy a wood stove, and spend a week splitting wood. It worked for me.

I'm in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I've been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private.

It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self - love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Betta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation - are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode.

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far away over wood and water poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.

He caught the first man in the back of the knee before they even knew he was there, and the heavy axehead split flesh and bone like rotten wood. Logs that bleed, Tyrion thought inanely as the second man came for him. Tyrion ducked under his sword, lashed out with the axe, the man reeled backward... and Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and galloped off suddenly.

Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom.

huge wolf stood before her. An ear-splitting scream preceded her dash for the door. As she crossed the lawn, skirting the woods, she heard Simon curse in her mind. Shit, I’m such a dumbass. I should’ve thought that through.

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull — no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.

Van Uoc felt the stab of a sad truth: she and her mother would never be as close as her mother and grandmother had been. Her mother got up, stretched her tidy, graceful frame and headed for the kitchen. Van Uoc wanted to be able to offer her some comfort, but what could she say? Her mother was right. The two of them represented an irreconcilable cultural split. Distance between them was inevitable.

A split second later, Jacks had her pinned against the closest tree. Her back hit the wood, his fevered chest pressed to hers, and his hands went for her throat, burning fire hot against her skin. 'Jacks,' Evangeline gasped. 'Let me go.' He moved away as quickly as he'd grabbed her. She slumped against the tree from the force of his release. When she righted herself, he was talking toward the crypt.

Simple things, simple pleasures, cutting and splitting wood, a love of the country they wanted to see more of, memories of softball fields and a girl named Amanda. There are such women as Theresa "Sam" Fitzgerald who love their men. Are content with their lives together.

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter—were later used by a neighbour or someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonika. Whether they were ripped from their dining-room tables or hospital beds or from the forest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but—were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed? I couldn't turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness. But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.

It’s why I like needlework,” she added. Fenris lifted an eyebrow. “Like splitting wood. Like you said. Embroidery doesn’t do anything. It isn’t anything but what it is, and I don’t have to worry that I’ve done something terribly wrong and my tutors will get sent away or that I slighted someone important and they’ll want to close down trade with my kingdom. I can just make pictures and patterns, and if I make a mistake, I can tear it out again and no one dies.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter that I’m a princess. The thread doesn’t care.

Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and it would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning his head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-All-Mighty or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods.

Storm H. D., 1886 - 1961 You crash over the trees, you crack the live branch— the branch is white, the green crushed, each leaf is rent like split wood. You burden the trees with black drops, you swirl and crash— you have broken off a weighted leaf in the wind, it is hurled out, whirls up and sinks, a green stone.

It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her.

How the hell can I say, 'Hey, we ought to split up. I don't like you any more?

Can a split quill write fair script? Can a blunt axe cut wood for the fire? Can a cripple please a lady?

But my head is splitting in two!" "It's doing a remarkably neat job since I can't see so much as a seam.

Well, I’ve upped your doses. Just stay in bed, don’t get kidnapped this time, and you’ll make a full recovery. That’s a promise.

Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.

XXIV. And more than that - a furlong on - why, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood - Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when - In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den. XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, - Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!' XXXIII. Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers - How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for stargazing. Often he bid me come and have a look Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, At a star quaking in the other end. I recollect a night of broken clouds And underfoot snow melted down to ice, And melting further in the wind to mud. Bradford and I had out the telescope. We spread our two legs as it spread its three, Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, And standing at our leisure till the day broke, Said some of the best things we ever said. That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter, Because it didn't do a thing but split A star in two or three the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the middle. It's a star-splitter if there ever was one, And ought to do some good if splitting stars 'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

If we now take a Kaluza-Klein theory defined in 4+N dimensions and then curl up N dimensions, we will find that the equations split into two pieces. The first piece is Einstein's usual equations, which we retrieve as expected. But the second piece will not be the theory of Maxwell. We find that the remainder is precisely the Yang-Mills theory, which forms the basis of all subatomic physics! This is the key to turning the symmetries of wood into the symmetries of marble.

O wind, songs have ye in her name? Plucked her did ye from midnight blasted millyard winds and made her renown ring in stone and brick and ice? Hard implacable bridges of iron cross her milk of brows? God bent from his steel arc welded her a hammer of honey and of balm? The rutted mud of hardrock Time . . . was it wetted, springified, greened, blossomied for me to grow in nameless bloodied lutey naming of her? Wood on cold trees would her coffin bare? Keys of stone rippled by icy streaks would ope my needy warm interiors and make her eat the soft sin of me? No iron bend or melt to make my rocky travail ease--I was all alone, my fate was banged behind an iron door, I'd come like butter looking for Hot Metals to love, I'd raise my feeble orgone bones and let them be rove and split the half and goop the big sad eyes to see it and say nothing. The laurel wreath is made of iron, and thorns of nails; acid spit, impossible mountains, and incomprehensible satires of blank humanity--congeal, cark, sink and seal my blood--

Gavin's reply was almost too soft to be heard. "That's a crime." "Pardon? What is?" "That you don't get to handle wood as often as you'd like." "Sorry?" Derrick blinked in confusion, missing the innuendo entirely for a split second before his brain made the connection.

I promise that I did not bring you along to make you split firewood,” said Marra. Fenris laughed. The two older women had gone inside to sleep, and it was only the two of them and a very small fire, well away from the barn. “It’s alright,” he said. “I’ve done many things that were terribly important, lives hanging in the balance and so forth. There is something pleasant about chopping wood. If I miss a stroke, nothing awful happens. If a piece of wood is not quite right, it will still burn. If I stack it and it isn’t perfect, clans will not fall.

But that is just half the story. The Gospel of Thomas has what I take to be the full text. The Kingdom of God is within you and all around you. Split a piece of wood. I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there. The holiest thing then, the Kingdom, is inside, the observing consciousness, the deep core of being, and outside, the Brown Thrasher, the little girl skipping over the squares of the sidewalk, the universe itself that, so far as we know is unlimited. It would be best here to start singing and dancing for the spacious joy of inside and outside.

There was a slashing, new, impossibly loud crack as lightning seemed to hit the shelter itself and Brian saw the top of the pine next to the opening suddenly explode and felt/saw the bolt come roaring down the tree, burning and splitting and splintering the wood and bark, and he saw it hit Derek.

There's this feeling that comes over you when you're in the woods, like you're part of it. Caught in the inhale and exhale of life everlasting, a split second in the eternal life cycle of being. You get to thinking you're entwined in it when you spend so much time growing and killing and watching things give birth.

Still keeping a tight grip on my neck, Darren dragged me back into the woods, and I knew instantly he was taking me past the perimeter. I fought and kicked against him, but I had already tired myself out from the chase. Once I felt the sharp tick at the back of my head, I could tell Darren had felt it, too, and then he threw me as hard as he could into the woods, and I stumbled and rolled on the ground. I knew I only had about five seconds, and Darren wasn’t going to let me back into the safe zone. I stayed low on the ground, knowing once the volts hit me I was going to crash. Better to already be low than to fall from standing up. And then I felt it. The sharp current cut through my veins like shards of glass, and I screamed in total agony as it felt like my body was being ripped apart. I writhed in pain, thinking that my head was going to split open as my muscles and limbs convulsed under the current. It was, without a doubt, the most painful thing I had ever experienced, and my body quickly shut down, needing only a few seconds to welcome the numb blackness that claimed me.

At the Sea of Galilee,I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water and I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of the rise. I heard it ring just as its head hit the sky, and in silence, it hit the wood. Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure was clobbering the heavens. I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?

The house lies on the outskirts of the desert community, lone and isolated. A strong wind blows over the surrounding land, swirling dust demons across the darkness of the fields. In the black of sky, a million stars tremble around the full moon. In the split rail fence encircling the large yard, the front gate stands open; as the wind moves it, the wood seems to be alive, shivering. He

We mark the days by chores that need to be done, the way farm families have always done. Al feeds the hens and horses and pigs, splits wood in the fall, slaughters a pig when the weather turns cold, cuts ice in the winter. I collect eggs from the laying hens and Al drives me into town to sell them. He times the planting so that by the Fourth of July we'll have new peas and by September there's a whole field of corn. Gulls lunge for a feast, ravaging the crop, so Al kills a few and hangs them from poles as warning. During haying season in midsummer, I see him from the dining room window in his visored cap, scything the hay by hand with six hired men walking abreast, forking the newly mown hay onto the hayrack. They haul the hay to the barn, where a block-and-tackle hoist lifts it into the mow.

Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari’s pentathlon, his “winterthon.” “The first event,” Dan Needham said, “is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood—points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and—carrying your ax—swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo—to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs—from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo—to rest.” “THAT’S SIX EVENTS,” Owen said. “A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE.” “So forget the second igloo,” Dan Needham said. “I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE,” Owen said. “Carrot juice,” Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. “Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice.

can never say what I want to say,” continued Naoko. “It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words—the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.

Royce found Hadrian splitting logs near the stockade gate. He was naked to the waist except for the small silver medallion that dangled from his neck as he bent forward to place another wedge. He had a solid sweat worked up along with a sizable pile of wood. “Been meddling, have you?” Royce asked, looking around at the hive of activity. “You must admit they didn’t have much in the way of a defense plan,” Hadrian said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Royce smiled at him. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” “And you? Did you find the doorknob?” Hadrian picked up a jug and downed several swallows, drinking so quickly some of the water dripped down his chin. He poured some in his palm and rinsed his face, running his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t even get close enough to see a door.” “Well, look on the bright side”—Hadrian smiled—“at least you weren’t captured and condemned to death this time.” “That’s the bright side?” “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.” There he is,” Russell Bothwick shouted, pointing. “That’s Royce over there.” “What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior. “I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? They were coming to lynch you?” He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a glass-half-empty kinda guy.” “Half empty?” Hadrian chuckled. “Was there ever any drink in that glass?

I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her.

I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her.

I can never say what I want to say. It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her. Does this make any sense to you?

As he rowed the launch toward Wensan’s ship, which was Herrani-made and studded with Valorian cannon, Arin remembered the exhaustion of that work, but also how it had corded his muscles until the ache in his arms became stone. He was grateful to the Valorians for having made him strong. If he was strong enough, he might live through this night. If he lived, he could reclaim the shreds of who he had been, and explain himself to Kestrel in a way she would understand. She sat silent next to him in the launch. The other Herrani at the oars watched as she lifted her bound hands to tug at the black cloth covering her hair. It was an awkard business. It was also necessary, since a new twist in the plan called for Kestrel to be seen and recognized. The Herrani watched her struggle. They watched Arin drop an oar in its lock to offer a hand. She flinched hard enough that her shifted weight shook the boat It was only a slight tremor along wood, but they all felt it. Shame ate into his gut. Kestrel pulled the cloth from her head. Even though clouds swelled in the sky, swallowing the moon and deepening the dark around them, Kestrel’s hair and pale skin seemed to glow. It looked like she was lit from within. It wasn’t something Arin could bear to see. He returned to the oars and rowed. Arin knew, far better than any of the ten Herrani in the launch, that Kestrel could be devious. That he shouldn’t trust her plan any more than he should have fallen for her ploys at Bite and Sting, or followed her blindly into the trap she had set and sprung for him the morning of the duel. Her plan to seize the ship was sound. Their best option. Still, he kept examining it like he might a horse’s hoof, tapping the surface for a flaw, a dangerous split. He couldn’t see it. He thought that there must be one, then realized that the flaw he sensed lay inside him. Tonight had cracked Arin open. It had brought the battle inside him to a boiling war. Of course he was certain that something was wrong. Impossible. It was impossible to love a Valorian and also love his people. Arin was the flaw.

What is a spirit? Is it a thing, like a glass that can crack or a cord of wood that can be split? There is no real explanation for what a spirit is, just a sense of it, but I know that a spirit cannot be broken any more than water can be broken, or any more than air can be split apart. It can only be perceived as broken. And believing that we are broken is the same as being broken. It means we experience ourselves that way. That perception shapes our reality. It is an illusion we must strive to avoid, as great misery comes from such a belief.

The despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if they were decent men, he would have to guard against himself; just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself. Such are his archers, his guards, his halberdiers; not that they do not suffer occasionally at his hands, but this riff-raff, abandoned alike by God and man, can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit, but are helpless.

I can never say what I want to say,” continued Naoko. “It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words – the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.” She raised her face and looked into my eyes. “Does this make any sense to you?

She squints into the shadows between the trees, but there is no shape, no god to be found—only that voice, close as a breath against her cheek. “Adeline, Adeline,” it says, mocking, “… they are calling for you.” She turns again, finding nothing but deep shadow. “Show yourself,” she orders, her own voice sharp and brittle as a stick. Something brushes her shoulder, grazes her wrist, drapes itself around her like a lover. Adeline swallows. “What are you?” The shadow’s touch withdraws. “What am I?” it asks, an edge of humor in that velvet tone. “That depends on what you believe.” The voice splits, doubles, rattling through tree limbs and snaking over moss, folding over on itself until it is everywhere. “So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…” The shadows in the woods begin to pull together, drawn like storm clouds. But when they settle, the edges are no longer wisps of smoke, but hard lines, the shape of a man, made firm by the light of the village lanterns at his back. “Or am I this?” The voice spills from a perfect pair of lips, a shadow revealing emerald eyes that dance below black brows, black hair that curls across his forehead, framing a face Adeline knows too well. One that she has conjured up a thousand times, in pencil and charcoal and dream. It is the stranger. Her stranger. She knows it is a trick, a shadow parading as a man, but the sight of him still robs her breath. The darkness looks down at his shape, seeing himself as if for the first time, and seems to approve. “Ah, so the girl believes in something after all.” Those green eyes lift. “Well now,” he says, “you have called, and I have come.” Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

Surely an instrument is neither male nor female—they’re just things that make sound—strings and bows, brass and wood, mallets and cymbals and drumskins and little metal triangles. And yet all you have to do is look around at these musicians to see the way that even sound is gendered. In the middle of the orchestra is the brass section—tubas, trombones, trumpets, French horn, every last one of them played by boys. It’s not all that different in the woodwinds—where the boys play bassoons and clarinets, but all the flutes are played by girls. The strings are even more ridiculous—the deeper the instrument, the more likely it is to be played by a boy. So all the basses? Boys. Most of the cellos? Boys. The violas split half and half. All but one of the violins? Girls. Then there’s the harp, which I guess federal law requires be played by a girl. And the percussion and kettle drums, which are usually played by boys. How weird is this? Most of us decided to play our instruments in third grade, a bunch of little kids who made our choices without even thinking about them. But even at eight years old, we were already running the gender maze that the world had set for us, without even realizing it.

Once I made weapons carved from stone, I tied the weight to a wooden handle, a club to break the bones of my enemy. Then I became wiser... and sharpened the stone to a point and then fastened it to a stick; my arrow. I bent wood and hitched string to it; my bow. I kill my enemy with skill Then I became wiser... and made weapons forged from steel and took care to sharpen the blade of my sword. I kill my enemy with a stroke. Then I became wiser... and made the rifle that would, by exploding gunpowder, shoot balls of lead faster than the eye could see. I kill my enemy with but the pull of a trigger. Then I became wiser... and I built flying machine that could transport bombs to drop over the homes of my enemy. I kill my enemy from the sky. Then I became wiser... and created the drone, now I can guide a plane by remote control from one country and kill my enemy in another. I am a proficient killer Then I became wiser...  and I found a way to split the atom and found the power of God hidden within. I kill the ground, scorch the sky, pollute the wind and kill my enemy with the push of a button. Then I became wiser... And I found that there is nothing more foolish than a "Wise Man of War

So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, wood-peckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. he knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.

I made it when I was young, by my standards, after years of playing on various harps. I shaped its pieces out of Ymris oak beside night fires in far, lonely places where I heard no man’s voice but my own. I carved on each piece the shapes of leaves, flowers, birds I saw in my wanderings. In An, I searched three months for strings for it. I found them finally; sold my horse for them. They were strung to the broken harp of Ustin of Aum, who died of sorrow over the conquering of Aum. Its strings were tuned to his sorrow, and its wood was split like his heart. I strung my harp with them, matching note for note in the restringing. And then I returned them to my joy.” Morgon

Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn't shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn't stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.

Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved. Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep. Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women. Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched. Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.

The English took their anti-Catholicism seriously. Catholics kept sneaking back onto the throne, so they passed laws that the monarch could not “professe the Popish religion” or “marry a Papist”. In Ireland, Catholics were barred from holding public office and fined for not attending Anglican services. Irish Catholics could not own firearms or horses worth more than £5 and were forbidden from taking custody of orphans, to protect vulnerable youth from the taint of Papism. When a Protestant landowner died, his land passed to his eldest son: when a Catholic died, the Popery Act required his land to be split among his sons, breaking up the great Catholic estates. The law also required that Catholic churches be made from wood, so that they could be burned down more easily when the local Catholics misbehaved.

As the tree matures, the older vessels become plugged with crystalline structures called tyloses, and as a result, the center of the tree—the heartwood—doesn’t conduct water at all, making it well suited for use as a watertight barrel. American oaks are particularly rich in tylose as compared to European oaks. In fact, the European trees have to be carefully split along the grain, rather than cut, in order to avoid rupturing vessels and creating a leaky barrel. The trees also happen to produce an astonishing array of flavor compounds that break free from the wood in the presence of alcohol. European oak, Quercus robur in particular, is high in tannins, which give wine a certain roundness and full-bodied quality. American white oak, on the other hand, releases the same flavor molecules found in vanilla, coconut, peach, apricot, and cloves.

Night shift. Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised. He smiles, with thousands of teeth. Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts becomes smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use. He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn't let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he's in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift.

Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand - a thousand thousand - green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twigs and out through their waving tips, while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down.

One never knows the idyllic charm of our northern woods who has not seen them in April, when it is all a feast of birds and buds and waking life. Midsummer does not compare with this. This month belongs to the birds and flowers; but most of all to the robin. I cannot tell this story without giving the robins the place which I know they must have had in it, — great husky fellows, as red as blood in the lifting between showers that made a golden sunset, sitting high in the treetops and splitting their throats with their rain-carol, singing in jubilance at being back again, glad to find once more the corner of the earth that they were born in, and trolling forth such lusty music that all their pertness and swagger and pilfering of a later date is forgiven in advance. Of all the birds of springtime, I would like best to be the robin just getting back to his old home; for it is brave and blithe and bonny that he is, and he is April to all of us in the far north.

The sap mounts in the stems, the buds burst with faint sound, and the darkness is full of the noises of growth. There is night in the room, and the moon. There is life in the room. It creaks in the furniture, the table cracks and the wardrobe also. Many years ago some one felled these and split them, planed them and worked them into things of utility, into chairs and beds - but each springtime, in the darkness of the sap, it stirs and reverberates in them again; they waken, they stretch themselves, they are mere objects of use no longer, no longer chairs for a purpose; once again they have part in a the streaming and flowing outside. The boards under my feet creak and move of themselves, the wood of the window still cracks under my hands, and in front of the door even the splintered, decaying trunk of a lime tree by the roadside is thrusting out fat brown buds. In a few weeks it too will have little silken green leaves, as surely s the wide-spreading branches of the plane tree overshadowing it.

By the time Bond had taken in these details, he had come to within fifty yards of the two men. He was reflecting on the ranges of various types of weapon and the possibilities of cover when an extraordinary and terrible scene was enacted. Red-man seemed to give a short nod to Blue-man. With a quick movement Blue-man unslung his blue camera case. Blue-man, and Bond could not see exactly as the trunk of a plane-tree beside him just then intervened to obscure his vision, bent forward and seemed to fiddle with the case. Then with a blinding flash of white light there was the ear-splitting crack of a monstrous explosion and Bond, despite the protection of the tree-trunk, was slammed down to the pavement by a solid bolt of hot air which dented his cheeks and stomach as if they had been made of paper. He lay, gazing up at the sun, while the air (or so it seemed to him) went on twanging with the explosion as if someone had hit the bass register of a piano with a sledgehammer. When, dazed and half-conscious, he raised himself on one knee, a ghastly rain of pieces of flesh and shreds of blood-soaked clothing fell on him and around him, mingled with branches and gravel. Then a shower of small twigs and leaves. From all sides came the sharp tinkle of falling glass. Above in the sky hung a mushroom of black smoke which rose and dissolved as he drunkenly watched it. There was an obscene smell of high explosive, of burning wood, and of, yes, that was it – roast mutton. For fifty yards down the boulevard the trees were leafless and charred. Opposite, two of them had snapped off near the base and lay drunkenly across the road. Between them there was a still smoking crater. Of the two men in straw hats, there remained absolutely nothing. But there were red traces on the road, and on the pavements and against the trunks of the trees, and there were glittering shreds high up in the branches. Bond felt himself starting to vomit. It was Mathis who got to him first, and by that time Bond was standing with his arm round the tree which had saved his life.

(from Lady of the Lake) The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o’er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west-wind’s summer sighs. Boon nature scattered, free and wild, Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child. Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cliff a narrow bower; Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft, the ash and warrior oak Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrowed sky. Highest of all, where white peaks glanced, Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced, The wanderer’s eye could barely view The summer heaven’s delicious blue; So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream. Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep A narrow inlet, still and deep, Affording scarce such breadth of brim As served the wild duck’s brood to swim. Lost for a space, through thickets veering, But broader when again appearing, Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face Could on the dark-blue mirror trace; And farther as the hunter strayed, Still broader sweep its channels made. The shaggy mounds no longer stood, Emerging from entangled wood, But, wave-encircled, seemed to float, Like castle girdled with its moat; Yet broader floods extending still Divide them from their parent hill, Till each, retiring, claims to be An islet in an inland sea. And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice A far projecting precipice. The broom’s tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mountains, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o’er His ruined sides and summit hoar, While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.

It was as Harry dodged another Bludger, which went spinning dangerously past his head, that it happened. His broom gave a sudden, frightening lurch. For a split second, he thought he was going to fall. He gripped the broom tightly with both his hands and knees. He’d never felt anything like that. It happened again. It was as though the broom was trying to buck him off. But Nimbus Two Thousands did not suddenly decide to buck their riders off. Harry tried to turn back toward the Gryffindor goalposts — he had half a mind to ask Wood to call time-out — and then he realized that his broom was completely out of his control. He couldn’t turn it. He couldn’t direct it at all. It was zigzagging through the air, and every now and then making violent swishing movements that almost unseated him. Lee was still commentating. “Slytherin in possession — Flint with the Quaffle — passes Spinnet — passes Bell — hit hard in the face by a Bludger, hope it broke his nose — only joking, Professor — Slytherins score — oh no . . .” The Slytherins were cheering. No one seemed to have noticed that Harry’s broom was behaving strangely. It was carrying him slowly higher, away from the game, jerking and twitching as it went.

how he would get to Tronjheim’s base—where the Urgals were breaking in. There was no time to climb down. He looked at the narrow trough to the right of the stairs, then grabbed one of the leather pads and threw himself down on it. The stone slide was smooth as lacquered wood. With the leather underneath him, he accelerated almost instantly to a frightening speed, the walls blurring and the curve of the slide pressing him high against the wall. Eragon lay completely flat so he would go faster. The air rushed past his helm, making it vibrate like a weather vane in a gale. The trough was too confined for him, and he was perilously close to flying out, but as long as he kept his arms and legs still, he was safe. It was a swift descent, but it still took him nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom. The slide leveled out at the end and sent him skidding halfway across the huge carnelian floor. When he finally came to a stop, he was too dizzy to walk. His first attempt to stand made him nauseated, so he curled up, head in his hands, and waited for things to stop spinning. When he felt better, he stood and warily looked around. The great chamber was completely deserted, the silence unsettling. Rosy light filtered down from Isidar Mithrim. He faltered—Where was he supposed to go?—and cast out his mind for the Twins. Nothing. He froze as loud knocking echoed through Tronjheim. An explosion split the air. A long slab of the chamber floor buckled and blew thirty feet up. Needles of rocks flew outward as it crashed down. Eragon stumbled back, stunned, groping for Zar’roc. The twisted shapes of Urgals clambered out of the hole in the floor. Eragon hesitated. Should he flee? Or should he stay and try to close the tunnel? Even if he managed to seal it before the Urgals attacked him, what if Tronjheim was already breached elsewhere? He could not find all the places in time to prevent the city-mountain from being captured. But if I run to one of Tronjheim’s gates and blast it open, the Varden could retake Tronjheim without having to siege it. Before he could decide, a tall man garbed entirely in black armor emerged from the tunnel and looked directly at him. It was Durza. The Shade carried his pale blade marked with the scratch from Ajihad. A black roundshield with a crimson ensign rested on his arm. His dark helmet was richly decorated, like a general’s, and a long snakeskin cloak billowed around him. Madness burned in his maroon eyes, the madness of one who enjoys power and finds himself in the position to use it.

Our father was a rumor, an echo, something only to be seen out of the corner of your eye. Our father was a woodsman, arms like tree limbs, beard as if born from bear, disappearing for days, for weeks, returning with so many things—tiny bird skulls, beads on a string, flowers for mother with purple blossoms and veiny leaves. The wood was stacked along one side of the cabin as high as it could go, the steady chop, the split of the timber, just part of the day, or so we were told. Our father was the cold creek that ran south of our home, filled with silver-backed fish with blood-orange meat, whispering every time we neared it, quenching our thirst, promises of sleepy peace if only we'd step a bit closer. Our father was the frosty moon that pasted the land with silence as our breath formed clouds of pain, feet bruised and bleeding, his laughter running over the mountain, guiding us down one ravine and up the other, wandering from hill to valley and back, some elusive destination always out of reach. Our father was time, stretched in every direction, elastic as a rubber band, as slow and anchored as a wall of granite, our eyes closing, waking up sore, grey where black had been. All lies. Everything she had ever told us was a lie. She never loved us, or it wouldn't be like this. (from "Asking for Forgiveness.")

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to “jump” it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth.

For a split second, the space around Werner tears in half, as though the last molecules of oxygen have been ripped out of it. Then shards of stone and wood and metal streak past, ringing against his helmet, sizzling into the wall behind them, and Volkheimer’s barricade collapses, and everywhere in the darkness, things scuttle and slide, and he cannot find any air to breathe. But the detonation creates some tectonic shift in the building’s rubble, and there is a snap followed by multiple cascades in the darkness. When Werner stops coughing and pushes the debris off his chest, he finds Volkheimer staring up at a single sheared hole of purple light. Sky. Night sky. A shaft of starlight slices through the dust and drops along the edge of a mound of rubble to the floor. For a moment Werner inhales it. Then Volkheimer urges him back and climbs halfway up the ruined staircase and begins whaling away at the edges of the hole with a piece of rebar. The iron clangs and his hands lacerate and his six-day beard glows white with dust, but Werner can see that Volkheimer makes quick progress: the sliver of light becomes a violet wedge, wider across than two of Werner’s hands. With one more blow, Volkheimer manages to pulverize a big slab of debris, much of it crashing onto his helmet and shoulders, and then it is simply a matter of scrabbling and climbing. He squeezes his upper body through the hole, his shoulders scraping on the edges, his jacket tearing, hips twisting, and then he’s through.

Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido" After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing. 'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?' "And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits. "The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.

Warm hands held her firm as he settled between her legs. His warm, wet tongue drew lazy circles around her sensitive flesh, so gently at first, she hovered between pleasure and pain, and then harder, faster, until the ache inside her blossomed into edgy need. He slid one thick finger into her wet heat, and then another, a sensual intrusion that stole her breath. And then his lips closed around her aching nub. She cried out, throwing back her head, hands fisting his hair, pleasure cresting and flooding through her veins, trickling out to her fingers and toes. With a low growl, he pushed up and sheathed himself with a condom he pulled from his pocket. On instinct, she rolled her hips, wrapped her legs around his hips to pull him close. Liam grabbed the edge of her headboard with one strong arm and plunged inside her. She gasped at the exquisite sensation and tightened her legs around him. Need pulsed beneath her skin. "Move, Liam. Please. I won't break." Her body took over, hands gripping his thick biceps, hips rocking, taking him deeper. A strangled groan escaped his lips and he gripped her hip so hard she knew his fingers would leave bruises. Braced against her headboard, he pulled out and pushed in deep and hard, shoulders straining as he gave in to her demands, filling a need she didn't know had existed, taking her outside of herself, beyond control. The bed squeaked, swayed. The headboard hammered against the wall in time to the rhythm of his thrusts. Need coiled inside her, tighter and tighter, until finally she peaked. Her spine arched, her orgasm sweeping through her body in a tidal wave of pleasure, filling her with heat. Liam growled her name, corded throat tightening, muscles going rigid as he followed her into oblivion. The sound of wood splintering startled her, made her heart jump. Liam dropped down, covering her with his body as the headboard split in two and crashed down on top of them. "Oh my God." She panted beneath him. "We broke the bed. Are you okay?" Liam heaved the headboard up so she could slip out from underneath him. When she was safely away, he lifted it onto the floor and gave a satisfied growl. "Now, that was good sex.

When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme. Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk. And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet. Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him? Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly. He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them. Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive. From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet? In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing. Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room. And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.

Their eyes met. For a split second she caught a glimpse of heat in his eyes. Then Jake banked the flame and broke out of her embrace. Marnie felt a hot blush rise from her toes to her nose. It took a moment for her eyes to focus and her brain to function. Bewildered, she looked up to find him watching her. His heavy-lidded eyes held a strange desperation as he reached back and unhooked the vice of her ankles from around his wiast. Her legs dropped. Her heels thumped against the cabinet. Beneath his hawklike gaze she felt stripped bare and vulnerable. He studied her face, seeming to see more than her features. He seemed to delve into her mind, to touch things deep and frightening—parts of herself Marnie was still exploring. The muscles in his jaw knotted and unknotted. After a moment he stepped back and casually, but with difficulty, adjusted his jeans Heat flooded her cheeks. Legs splayed, nipples peaked to his clinical gaze, she’d never experienced such acute embarrassment in her life. Her breath hitched as she jumped off the counter, tugging her top down and her pants up. At a loss for hers, she half laughed. “I have absolutely no idea what to say.” Which was a reasonable start, she guessed. It was rare for her to be speechless. But then, this was a day of firsts. “I told you you weren’t my type.” The brass button on his jeans closed like the clasp of a miser’s purse. Other than a faint flush on the ridge of his cheekbones and what looked like a painful erection, he seemed totally unaffected by what had just happened. She stared at him. “Not your t—What do you call what just happened?” Marnie was confused. It was out of character for her to be sexually aggressive. But now that she’d done it, she wasn’t sorry. “What part of ‘I don’t want you’ didn’t you understand?” He’d wanted her. He might lie about it, but his body had been honest. He was as hard as petrified wood. “Then what”—she pointed—“is that?” He ignored the bulge in his jeans. “Just because I have it doesn’t mean I intend to use it.” Marnie stepped forward and touched his arm. He jerked away from her as if she’d used a cattle prod. “Was it something I said?” she asked quietly, dropping her hand to her side. “Look, I have a tendency to sort of speak without running the words through my brain first. But I know I didn’t give out mixed signals just now. I wanted to make love with you. It was very good. No, darn it, it was excellent. So if you have some sort of medical condition, let’s talk about i—” He moved backward, almost tripping over Duchess sprawled on the floor. The dog rose to hover anxiously between them. Jake’s eyes turned as he said, “I do not have a medical condition.” Marnie backed up—mentally as well as physically. Her hip bumped the counter. “Good.” He scowled and swore under his breath. “That is good, isn’t it?” she asked tentatively.

Long ago there was a little boy who lived in the wood with his father and his sister. One night, the three of them were out collecting firewood when they heard a low, delicate whimper. The father realised it was an injured animal and ordered the children to fetch water from the lake, whilst he followed the sound. Hours past but the father did not return. The children became fearful for their father’s safety and in their moment of fright, they disobeyed their father in order to find him. And find him they did. However, he was no longer the man he once was. Both his eyes were slit through their centre, oozing blood down the paleness of his face. His neck had been torn open. The entirety of his midsection was split but nothing, not one, single organ, seemed to be left within. Each limb still remained, however they had been dragged, with some exceptional force, in the opposite direction to which they were designed. The children screamed and ran, though the image of their father’s mangled corpse seemed to chase after them. They slept. Within the whisper of the wind came the sweet tune of a woman’s song. The little girl awoke to the feeling of happiness, security and motherly love that the song carried with it. She needed to find the woman it had come from. Leaving her brother, she took off into the wood to try and find the singer. The little boy quickly entered into a spit of panic when he found his sister missing. He didn’t know whether he should call out for her, look for her or wait. But waiting could mean the worst, he thought, and so he took off into the woods after her. He had searched everywhere, every dark corner and decrepit tree, before reaching the lake. The moon reflected off its black surface, which drew his attention to something bobbing within the ripples. It was a leg. When he caught sight of the foot, the boy fell to his knees. He recognised the shoe. It was his sister’s shoe; his sister’s leg. Soon enough, the other body parts came drifting to join the leg, forming a rough manifestation of what was once his sister’s living body. Firstly, there was a head facing down in the water, then arms seemingly blue under the moonlight, and lastly a torso coated in her favourite dress. He felt sick, lost, terrified to his very core. Just as thoughts of never being whole again began to pain his chest, the boy heard the snapping of a twig behind him. He dared to turn around but all he found was a small, black-furred wolf. The wolf approached him timidly, whining deep in its throat to say to the boy that he too was lonely and afraid. The boy put out his hand for the wolf to join him and they sat together. Perhaps he would be OK. Perhaps all that had happened had led to this; something new. He rustled the fur of his new friend, starting with its back then its ear before going under its snout. His hand touched something wet and sticky. He drew it from the wolf to get a better look, only to find a crimson substance now clinging to his small hands. Blood. The wolf turned on the boy as its eyes became a pale blue before thwack! He tore the boy’s face from his head…

I pictured myself sitting by the fire and knitting the Celtic mists and shadowy pools into my cloth. I pictured Jonathan getting up from his typewriter and going out to split wood like a man in Ingmar Bergman, and the child, with woollen mittens flapping at its cuffs, tottering after him.

Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

Outside, Ambo slogs through snow ankle-deep, making bloody tracks down the graded yard toward the box truck. Scanning the roundabout below, where the dirt utility road spills from the wood into the clearing. No movement. Nothing on approach. Only the snow that contours the turnabout, shaping itself against the trunks of the surrounding glade. Near the split-rail fence at the end of the back yard, Ambo stops and places the cooler at his feet. He lays the shotgun in a wide drift beside the last stile, working it in with his hands, using the snow to scour off the worst of the gore. The slush reddened like a confection. When he finishes, he puts the cooler under his arm, shoulders the weapon and continues the descent. His hands numb. The truck is ahead, blanketed from nose to tail, the drifts reaching halfway into the wheel wells. When Ambo reaches the cargo bay, he glances back over his shoulder. The red house, a cornice of snow gathered on the eaves. The red tracks—his own footprints—leading away. A red imprint roughed out in the shape of a gun on the side of the path.

All the colours in the rainbow don't compare, With one look in your impossible eyes, And I walked into the trap with my eyes wide shut, But I never knew what it would be like. All the plans were made, In the wooded glade, Where your body was split wide open, And I count to ten, As the race begins, Round your hairpin bends. Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Without you to hold me. I can't count the times I forgot my lines, And you pretended that you didn't know, Let me take you through each stage of the male mistake, And we'll adopt our natural roles. And I need you more, Than you need to be needed, So I sign my will one stab at a time, And I count to ten, As the race begins, Round your hairpin bends. Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Without you to hold me. Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Sometimes I feel I'll float away, Without you to hold me. Away, away, away, away ".

And this sharp intensity when he'd looked at me, like he could get to know me without asking questions, like he already knew too much. It had run me through like a bayonet, skewered me and split me open.

And sometimes, when I find that sweet solitude, I hear warnings about isolation. Some summers, when I was alone in the wilderness, content in my tiny trailer at the edge of the lake, I would not speak to or see another human being for weeks. There, I could slow it all down. I felt the power of life being lived around and within me. I became like a sun warmed rock in the centre of the stream. The water parted around me, eddied in spirals, and flowed on, gently wearing away all my sharp edges. Once, a man who is my lover and friend, I wanted to be more, came to see me there unexpectedly. I had just split an arm load of wood and was carrying it into the trailer as he appeared. He stayed only briefly. Later he told me, “When I came down the driveway and saw you standing there with the wood in your arms, your face glowing from the wind off the lake and the effort of chopping wood, I thought, ‘She belongs to this place. She’s at home here, alone in the bush. She’s not missing me, doesn’t need me here.’ I felt like an intruder.” His observation surprised me. I heard the voice of my mother warning, “You are too independent. Don’t get too good at being alone or you’ll end up by yourself. Everyone needs someone.” Her fear finds a small corner in me, but I resist the idea that I will be with another only to avoid being alone. Surely, the ability to truly be with myself does not exclude the willingness to fully be with another. I do not seek isolation. The longing for another remains even when I am able to be with myself, although it is smaller, a whisper that tugs at me gently. Even there, in my place of solitude in the wilderness, I found myself at moments wanting to turn to someone and share my awe at the brilliance of the full moon on the still water, the delight of watching otters playing at the edge of the stream. But the loneliness was bittersweet and bearable because I knew myself and the world in a way I sometimes do not when I let my life become too full of doing things that do not really need to be done.

There are two methods of delivering a blow. First is a boxing-like movement, and the second is the traditional karate strike. While equal in force, the boxing-style strike has a greater range and is easier to execute. The boxing-style strike uses gravity and shift of weight to support the strike, while the traditional karate-style strike uses a sudden tightening of your body’s muscles to deliver a short blow. The longer range of the boxing blow facilitates greater acceleration to a higher speed and is more efficient in creating a knockout effect. The traditional karate-style strike is more suitable for breaking boards of wood, but the composition of wood fibers is quite different from the human body's protective tissues. The traditional straight karate strike takes longer to execute and requires slight preparation. Since even a split second is of the essence and the force used is more efficient with the boxing style, it has won popularity in the martial arts field. From the split second you decide to move your body and deliver the strike, all you need is to aim at the opponent’s chin. You then need to accelerate your arm to maximum speed, and maintain that speed as your fist lodges in your opponent’s face. The opponent’s skull will then shake the brain and nerves to a concussion. The ancient Olympics had fighting sports. Sparta is believed to have had boxing around 500 BC. Spartans used boxing to strengthen their fighters’ resilience. Boxing matches were not held since Spartans feared that it would lead to internal competitions, which could reduce the morale of the losers. Sparta did not want low morale on the battlefield. For many years the question of Bodhidharma’s existence has been a matter of controversy among historians. A legend prevails that the evolution of karate began around 5 BC when Bodhidharma arrived to the Shaolin temple in China from India, and taught Zen Buddhism. He introduced a set of exercises designed to strengthen the mind and body. This marked the roots of Shaolin-style temple boxing. This type of Chinese boxing, also called kung fu, concentrates on full-body energy blows and improving acrobatic level. Indian breathing techniques are incorporated, providing control of the muscles of the whole body while striking. This promotes self-resistance that helps achieve balance and force when striking and kicking. Krav Maga shows that it is not the most efficient approach. It is certainly forceful, but cannot be mastered quickly enough, and also does not promote a natural and fast reach to the opponent's pressure points, nor does it adhere to the principle of reaction time.

But in spite of our alleged freedoms today, we cynical, postmodern subjects – finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence – compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the Other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the disintegration of symbolic order on some (religious, racial, ethnic) Other. This “postmodern racism” is inherent to the multiculturalist and (allegedly) tolerant reduction of the sphere of politics proper to the clash of cultures. When all conflicts are presupposed to arise from cultural or ethnic differences, we not only miss the true causes of the conflict. More seriously, the pre- supposition functions so as to depoliticize all problems: the result is a cynical subject. This is why the resigned, postmodern subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, as Žižek has argued in more recent writings, “the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.” In other words, democratic openness is based on exclusion, and right-wing populism and liberal tolerance are two sides of the same coin. This explains why there are forms of racism that involve a rejection of Muslims, for example, with the false claim that all Muslims are racist. This implicit moment of racism in liberal “tolerance” is also manifested in the way that the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim: “So the much-advertised liberal-democratic “right to difference” and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim – that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim – such another is promptly denounced as a “terrorist,” a “fundamentalist,” and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a “good” and a “bad” object – on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim – the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant … (Metastases, p. 215) All of this supports Žižek’s initial, provocative claim, which at first seemed so outrageous, that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations – such as the fantasy image of the victim – that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

Tricks with Mirrors i It's no coincidence this is a used furniture warehouse. I enter with you and become a mirror. Mirrors are the perfect lovers, that's it, carry me up the stairs by the edges, don't drop me, that would be back luck, throw me on the bed reflecting side up, fall into me, it will be your own mouth you hit, firm and glassy, your own eyes you find you are up against closed closed ii There is more to a mirror than you looking at your full-length body flawless but reversed, there is more than this dead blue oblong eye turned outwards to you. Think about the frame. The frame is carved, it is important, it exists, it does not reflect you, it does not recede and recede, it has limits and reflections of its own. There's a nail in the back to hang it with; there are several nails, think about the nails, pay attention to the nail marks in the wood, they are important too. iii Don't assume it is passive or easy, this clarity with which I give you yourself. Consider what restraint it takes: breath withheld, no anger or joy disturbing the surface of the ice. You are suspended in me beautiful and frozen, I preserve you, in me you are safe. It is not a trick either, it is a craft: mirrors are crafty. iv I wanted to stop this, this life flattened against the wall, mute and devoid of colour, built of pure light, this life of vision only, split and remote, a lucid impasse. I confess: this is not a mirror, it is a door I am trapped behind. I wanted you to see me here, say the releasing word, whatever that may be, open the wall. Instead you stand in front of me combing your hair. v You don't like these metaphors. All right: Perhaps I am not a mirror. Perhaps I am a pool. Think about pools.

Badrick lifted his size sixteen timberland boot and smashed it into the wood door, splitting and knocking it off the hinges.

It was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail; - thinking to deal with it roughly...

After four weeks of living in the cabin, two things surprised him. One, he actually enjoyed splitting wood. The physical activity took his mind off the situation and placed some muscle back in his body.

Baxter’s Excavation LLC and Tree removal services is located in Burlington WA 98233 that provides excavation services for both residential and commercial properties. There are so many factors involved in not just getting the job done right but doing it in timely and cost effective way while keeping the safety of people and property as a priority. At Baxter's Excavation & Tree removal we love giving back to the community. Sometimes depending on type of tree we can sell the wood from the trees we remove to local mills other times it just not desirable for processing so we just split it and stack it. During the winter months we offer truck loads of free firewood to deserving families throughout the community. We also sponsor a local race team! Come out to the races one of these day's at the Skagit Speedway.

Against my will, my eyes glide to the massive erection at my eye level. It points toward his navel and nearly pokes from the top of his boxer briefs, but the thickness is what holds my attention. Disgustingly thick. Horrifyingly big. Fuck an ax. He could probably chop wood with that thing. It would certainly split me in half, I think, and my cheeks blaze hot.

My mind was learning to work in different ways, becoming stronger. It felt the same way your body feels after a day splitting wood, or swimming, or sex. You feel exhausted, languorous, and almost Godlike.