A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

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Scooter
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Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

When he went home for Christmas, his loins were black with vermin.
The great body of the State lay like a barren giant below the
leaden reek of the skies. The train roared on across the vast lift
of the Piedmont: at night, as he lay in his berth, in a diseased
coma, it crawled up into the great fortress of the hills. Dimly,
he saw their wintry bulk, with its bleak foresting. Below a
trestle, silent as a dream, a white rope of water coiled between
its frozen banks. His sick heart lifted in the haunting eternity
of the hills. He was hillborn. But at dawn, as he came from the
cars with the band of returning students, his depression revived.
The huddle of cheap buildings at the station seemed meaner and
meaner than ever before. The hills, above the station flats, with
their cheap propped houses, had the unnatural closeness of a
vision. The silent Square seemed to have rushed together during
his absence, and as he left the car and descended the street to
Dixieland, it was as if he devoured toy-town distances with a
giant's stride.

The Christmas was gray and chill. Helen was not there to give it
warmth. Gant and Eliza felt the depression of her absence. Ben
came and went like a ghost. Luke was not coming home. And he
himself was sick with shame and loss.

He did not know where to turn. He paced his chill room at night,
muttering, until Eliza's troubled face appeared above her wrapper.
His father was gentler, older than he had ever seen him; his pain
had returned on him. He was absent and sorrowful. He talked
perfunctorily with his son about college. Speech choked in
Eugene's throat. He stammered a few answers and fled from the
house and the vacant fear in Gant's eyes. He walked prodigiously,
day and night, in an effort to command his own fear. He believed
himself to be rotting with a leprosy. And there was nothing to do
but rot. There was no cure. For such had been the instruction of
the moralists of his youth.

He walked with aimless desperation, unable to quiet for a moment
his restless limbs. He went up on the eastern hills that rose
behind Niggertown. A winter's sun labored through the mist. Low
on the meadows, and high on the hills, the sunlight lay on the
earth like milk.

He stood looking. A shaft of hope cut through the blackness of his
spirit. I will go to my brother, he thought.

He found Ben still in bed at Woodson Street, smoking. He closed
the door, then spun wildly about as if caged.

"In God's name!" Ben cried angrily. "Have you gone crazy? What's
wrong with you?"

"I'm--I'm sick!" he gasped.

"What's the matter? Where've you been?" asked Ben sharply. He sat
up in bed.

"I've been with a woman," said Eugene.

"Sit down, 'Gene," said Ben quietly, after a moment. "Don't be a
little idiot. You're not going to die, you know. When did this
happen?"

The boy blurted out his confession.

Ben got up and put on his clothes.

"Come on," said he, "we'll go to see McGuire."

As they walked townward, he tried to talk, explaining himself in
babbling incoherent spurts.

"It was like this," he began, "if I had known, but at that time I
didn't--of course I know it was my own fault for--"

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben impatiently. "Dry up! I don't want
to hear about it. I'm not your damned Guardian Angel."

The news was comforting. So many people, after our fall from
grace, are.

They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the Doctors' and
Surgeons', with its sharp excitement of medical smells. McGuire's
anteroom was empty. Ben rapped at the inner door. McGuire opened
it: he pulled away the wet cigarette that was plastered on his
heavy lip, to greet them.

"Hello, Ben. Hello, son!" he barked, seeing Eugene. "When'd you
get back?"

"He thinks he's dying of galloping consumption, McGuire," said Ben,
with a jerk of the head. "You may be able to do something to
prolong his life."

"What's the matter, son?" said McGuire.

Eugene gulped dryly, craning his livid face.

"If you don't mind," he croaked. "See you alone." He turned
desperately upon his brother. "You stay here. Don't want you with
me."

"I don't want to go with you," said Ben surlily. "I've got
troubles enough of my own."

Eugene followed McGuire's burly figure into the office; McGuire
closed the door, and sat down heavily at his littered desk.

"Sit down, son," he commanded, "and tell me about it." He lit a
cigarette and stuck it deftly on his sag wet lip. He glanced
keenly at the boy, noting his contorted face.

"Take your time, son," he said kindly, "and control yourself.
Whatever it is, it's probably not as bad as you think."

"It was this way," Eugene began in a low voice. "I've made a
mistake. I know that. I'm willing to take my medicine. I'm not
making any excuses for what has happened," his voice rose sharply;
he got half-way out of his chair, and began to pound fiercely upon
the untidy desk. "I'm putting the blame on no one. Do you
understand that?"

McGuire turned a bloated bewildered face slowly upon his patient.
His wet cigarette sagged comically from his half-opened mouth.

"Do I understand what?" he said. "See here, 'Gene: what the hell
are you driving at? I'm no Sherlock Holmes, you know. I'm your
doctor. Spit it out."

"What I've done," he said dramatically, "thousands have done. Oh,
I know they may pretend not to. But they do! You're a doctor--you
know that. People high-up in society, too. I'm one of the unlucky
ones. I got caught. Why am I any worse than they are? Why--" he
continued rhetorically.

"I think I catch your drift," said McGuire dryly. "Let's have a
look, son."

Eugene obeyed feverishly, still declaiming.

"Why should I bear the stigma for what others get away with?
Hypocrites--a crowd of damned, dirty, whining hypocrites, that's
what they are. The Double-Standard! Hah! Where's the justice,
where's the honor of that? Why should I be blamed for what people
in High Society--"

McGuire lifted his big head from its critical stare, and barked
comically.

"Who's blaming you? You don't think you're the first one who ever
had this sort of trouble, do you? There's nothing wrong with you,
anyway."

"Can--can you cure me?" Eugene asked.

"No. You're incurable, son!" said McGuire. He scrawled a few
hieroglyphics on a prescription pad. "Give this to the druggist,"
he said, "and be a little more careful hereafter of the company you
keep. People in High Society, eh?" he grinned. "So that's where
you've been?"

The great weight of blood and tears had lifted completely out of
the boy's heart, leaving him dizzily buoyant, wild, half-conscious
only of his rushing words.

He opened the door and went into the outer room. Ben got up
quickly and nervously.

"Well," he said, "how much longer has he got to live?" Seriously,
in a low voice, he added: "There's nothing wrong with him, is
there?"

"No," said McGuire, "I think he's a little off his nut. But, then,
you all are."
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

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Scooter
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Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

When they came out on the street again, Ben said:

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"No," said Eugene.

"When did you eat last?"

"Some time yesterday," said Eugene. "I don't remember."

"You damned fool!" Ben muttered. "Come on--let's eat."

The idea became very attractive. The world was washed pleasantly
in the milky winter sunshine. The town, under the stimulus of the
holidays and the returning students, had wakened momentarily from
its winter torpor: warm brisk currents of life seethed over the
pavements. He walked along at Ben's side with a great bounding
stride, unable to govern the expanding joy that rose yeastily in
him. Finally, as he turned in on the busy avenue, he could
restrain himself no longer: he leaped high in the air, with a yelp
of ecstasy:

"Squee-ee!"

"You little idiot!" Ben cried sharply. "Are you crazy!"

He scowled fiercely, then turned to the roaring passersby, with a
thin smile.

"Hang on to him, Ben!" yelled Jim Pollock. He was a deadly little
man, waxen and smiling under a black mustache, the chief
compositor, a Socialist.

"If you cut off his damned big feet," said Ben, "he'd go up like a
balloon."

They went into the big new lunch-room and sat at one of the tables.

"What's yours?" said the waiter.

"A cup of coffee and a piece of mince pie," said Ben.

"I'll take the same," said Eugene.

"Eat!" said Ben fiercely. "Eat!"

Eugene studied the card thoughtfully.

"Bring me some veal cutlets breaded with tomato sauce," he said,
"with a side-order of hash-brown potatoes, a dish of creamed
carrots and peas, and a plate of hot biscuits. Also a cup of
coffee."
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

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Scooter
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Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

Eugene got back his heart again. He got it back fiercely and
carelessly, with an eldritch wildness. During the remainder of his
holiday, he plunged recklessly through the lively crowds, looking
boldly but without insolence at the women and young girls. They
grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter like splendid
flowers. He was eager and alone. Fear is a dragon that lives
among crowds--and in armies. It lives hardly with men who are
alone. He felt released--beyond the last hedge of desperation.

Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment at all the
possessed and possessing world about him. Life hung for his
picking fingers like a strange and bitter fruit. THEY--the great
clan huddled there behind the stockade for warmth and safety--could
hunt him down some day and put him to death: he thought they would.

But he was not now afraid--he was content, if only the struggle
might be fruitful. He looked among the crowds printed with the
mark of his danger, seeking that which he might desire and take.



He went back to the university sealed up against the taunts of the
young men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about him with
thronging jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he met
them, with constraint.

There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested
in the hard insolence of money. He was followed by his court
jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.

"Hello, Gant," said Tom French harshly. "Been to Exeter lately?"
Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.

"Yes," said Eugene, "I've been there lately, and I'm on my way
there now. What's it to you, French?"

Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man's son drew back.

"We hear you're stepping out among them, 'Gene," said Roy Duncan,
cackling.

"Who's we?" said Eugene. "Who's them?"

"They say," said Tom French, "that you're as pure as the flowing
sewer."

"If I need cleaning," said Eugene, "I can always use the Gold Dust
Twins, can't I? French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins--who never
do any work."

The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who
had gathered about them on the seats back and front, laughed
loudly.

"That's right! That's right! Talk to them, 'Gene!" said Zeno
Cochran, softly. He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and
powerful, with the grace of a running horse. He had punted against
the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl. He was a handsome
fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the
athlete.

Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:

"Nobody has anything on me. I've been too slick for them. Nobody
knows anything about me."

"You mean," said Eugene, "that every one knows all about you, and
nobody wants to know anything about you."

The crowd laughed.

"Wow!" said Jimmy Revell.

"What about that, Tom?" he asked challengingly. He was very small
and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his
way through college by various schemes. He was a "kidder," an
egger-on, finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false
and loud good-humor.

Eugene turned quietly on Tom French. "Stop it!" he said. "Don't
go on because the others are listening. I don't think it's funny.
I don't like it. I don't like you. I want you to leave me alone
now. Do you hear?"

"Come on," said Roy Duncan, rising, "leave him alone, Tom. He
can't take a joke. He takes things too seriously."

They left him. Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward
the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip of winter.
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

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Scooter
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Location: Toronto, ON

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

Winter ended. The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw
and the rain. The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of
mud and slime. The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet
patches. He hurtled down the campus lanes, bounding like a
kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a budding twig
with his teeth. He cried loudly in his throat--a whinnying squeal--
the centaur-cry of man or beast, trying to unburden its overladen
heart in one blast of pain and joy and passion. At other times he
slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable burden of weariness and
dejection.

He lost count of the hours--he had no sense of time--no regular
periods for sleep, work, or recreation, although he attended his
classes faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by compulsion of
dining-hall or boarding-house schedules. The food was abundant,
coarse, greasily and badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the
college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the boarding-houses,
fifteen. He ate at the commons for a month: his interest in food
was too profound and too intelligent to stand it longer. The
commons was housed in a large bleak building of white brick. It
was called officially Stiggins Hall, but in the more descriptive
epithet of the students--The Sty.

He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. They lived
thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. It was a town
of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and
a capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. At the head
of the main street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered
building of lichened stone, was a cheap hotel--the largest and most
notorious brothel in town. There were also three denominational
colleges for young women.

The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on the street above
the Governor's Mansion. They lived in three or four rooms on the
ground floor.

It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man, from Baltimore,
on his slow drift to the South. It was in Sydney that he had first
started business for himself and conceived, from the loss of his
first investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that
he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular
spinstress who had died within two years of their marriage.

Their father's great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town,
above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us
away.

Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood
at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.

"This must be it," she said. "His shop stood here. It's gone
now."

She was silent a moment. "Poor old Papa." She turned her wet eyes
away.

There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines
grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was
buried--buried with a dead woman below the long gray tide of the
years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place,
waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief,
as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.



In April the nation declared war on Germany. Before the month was
out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible--those who
were twenty-one--were going into service. At the gymnasium he
watched the doctors examine them, envying the careless innocence
with which they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their
clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain,
before the doctors. They were clean-limbed, sound and white of
tooth, graceful and fast in their movements. The fraternity men
joined first--those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had
never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of
urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on
the wide verandas of their chapter houses--those temples where the
last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen
them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always
apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for
"black cows," at the drug-store. And, with a stab of failure, with
regret, with pain at his social deficiency, he had watched their
hot campaigns for the favor of some desirable freshman--some one
vastly more elegant than himself, some one with blood and with
money. They were only the sons of the little rich men, the lords
of the village and county, but as he saw them go so surely, with
such laughing unconstraint, in well-cut clothes, well-groomed,
well-brushed, among the crowd of humbler students, who stiffened
awkwardly with peasant hostility and constraint,--they were the
flower of chivalry, the sons of the mansion-house. They were
Sydney, Raleigh, Nash. And now, like gentlemen, they were going to
war.

The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men
coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with
opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding
shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix.

"Look!" said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. "Look at that,
will you!" He nodded toward a group of students ahead. "That
little Horse's Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus."

Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside
him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary
society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and bought two cheap
cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a
low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father
was foreman in a cotton mill.

"They're all Horse's Necks," he said. "They can go to hell before
I'll boot to get in."

"Yes," said Eugene.

But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He
wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He
wanted to go to war.

On the central campus, several students who had been approved by
the examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing
packed valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward
the village street. From time to time they threw up an arm in
farewell.

"So long, boys! See you in Berlin." The shining and dividing sea
was closer and not so wide.
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

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Scooter
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Location: Toronto, ON

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

He read a great deal--but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe,
Smollet, Stern, and Fielding--the fine salt of the English novel
lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of
tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that
remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson's
suggestion, he read Murray's Euripides (at the time he was reading
the Greek text of the Alcestis--noblest and loveliest of all the
myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus
fable--but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In
fact, Æschylus he found sublime--and dull: he could not understand
his great reputation. Rather--he could. He was Literature--a
writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero--
that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age
and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet--he spoke like God
among flashes of lightning: the Œdipus Rex is not only one of the
greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories.
This story--perfect, inevitable, and fabulous--wreaked upon him the
nightmare coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its
great snake-eye of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the
disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical
singers in all poetry.

He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse,
from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of
the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found
it, and for whatever purpose.

The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire
(as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle
art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese-
slaughterings of the present degenerate age. Great satire needs
the sustenance of great fable. Swift's power of invention is
incomparable: there's no better fabulist in the world.

He read Poe's stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of Lord Dunsany.
He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book of Tobit.
He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic.
He wanted old ghosts--not Indian ghosts, but ghosts in armor, the
spirit of old kings, and pillioned ladies with high coned hats.
Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt
on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides
there in the wilderness.

Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse
with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America--more land, more
wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading
Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating
fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts,
but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of
Hamlet's Father, in Connecticut.


". . . . . . I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine."


He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only
the earth endured--the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its
awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured--
this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged
in the desert, half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of
lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there
was no alabaster head of Akhnaton. Nothing had been done in stone.
Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read
Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its
plain he walked, alone, a stranger.

O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a
stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went
home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we
can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed
by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial
pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never
forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because
the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went
by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we
went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the
old hunger returned--the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts
and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers
wherever we go.



Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter,
sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by
the new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more
than she would confess. She missed the mountain town.

"What do you have to pay for this place?" said Eliza, looking
around critically.

"Fifty dollars a month," said Helen.

"Furnished?"

"No, we had to buy furniture."

"I tell you what, that's pretty high," said Eliza, "just for down
stairs. I believe rents are lower at home."

"Yes, I know it's high," said Helen. "But good heavens, mama! Do
you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town? We're only
two blocks from the Governor's Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is
no common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! No sir!" she
exclaimed, laughing. "She's a real swell--goes to all the big
functions and gets in the papers all the time. You know Hugh and I
have got to try to keep up appearances. He's a young man just
starting out here."

"Yes. I know," Eliza agreed thoughtfully. "How's he been doing?"

"O'Toole says he's the best agent he's got," said Helen. "Hugh's
all right. We could get along together anywhere, as long as
there's no damned family about. It makes me furious at times to
see him slaving to feather O'Toole's pockets. He works like a dog.
You know, O'Toole gets a commission on every sale he makes. And
Mrs. O'T. and those two girls ride around in a big car and never
turn their hands over. They're Catholics, you know, but they get
to go everywhere."

"I tell you what," said Eliza with a timid half-serious smile, "it
might not be a bad idea if Hugh became his own boss. There's no
use doing it all for the other fellow. Say, child!" she exclaimed,
"why wouldn't it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont
agency? I don't believe that fellow they've got is much account.
He could get it without trying."

There was a pause.

"We've been thinking of that," the girl admitted slowly. "Hugh has
written in to the main office. Anyway," she said a moment later,
"he'd be his own boss. That's something."

"Well," said Eliza slowly, "I don't know but what it'd be a good
idea. If he works hard there's no reason why he shouldn't build a
good business up. Your papa's been complaining here lately about
his trouble. He'd be glad to have you back." She shook her head
slowly for a moment. "Child! they didn't do him a bit of good, up
there. It's all come back."

They drove over to Pulpit Hill at Easter for a two days' visit.
Eliza took him to Exeter and bought him a suit of clothes.

"I don't like those skimpy trousers," she told the salesman. "I
want something that makes him look more of a man."

When he was newly dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and
said:

"Spruce up, boy! Throw your shoulders back! That's one thing
about your father--he carries himself straight as an arrow. If you
go all humped over like that, you'll have lung trouble before
you're twenty-five."

"I want you to meet my mother," he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph
Ballantyne, a smooth pink young man who had been elected president
of the Freshman class.

"You're a good smart-looking fellow," said Eliza smiling, "I'll
make a trade with you. If you drum up some boarders for me among
your friends here in this part of the State, I'll throw in your
board free. Here are some of my cards," she added, opening her
purse. "You might hand a few of them out, if you get a chance, and
say a good word for Dixieland in the Land of the Sky."

"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, "I
certainly will."

Eugene turned a hot distressed face toward Helen. She laughed
huskily, ironically, then turning to the boy, said:

"You're welcome at any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not.
We'll always find a place for you."

When they were alone, in answer to his stammering and confused
protests, she said with an annoyed grin:

"Yes, I know. It's pretty bad. But you're away from it most of
the time. You're the lucky one. You see what I've had to listen
to, the last week, don't you? You see, don't you?"
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

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Scooter
Posts: 16540
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 6:04 pm
Location: Toronto, ON

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Scooter »

When he went home at the end of the year, late in May, he found
that Helen and Hugh Barton had preceded him. They were living with
Gant, at Woodson Street. Hugh Barton had secured the Altamont
agency.

The town and the nation boiled with patriotic frenzy--violent, in a
chaotic sprawl, to little purpose. The spawn of Attila must be
crushed ("exterminated," said the Reverend Mr. Smallwood) by the
sons of freedom. There were loans, bond issues, speech-making, a
talk of drafts, and a thin trickle of Yankees into France.
Pershing arrived in Paris, and said, "Lafayette, we are here!", but
the French were still looking. Ben went up before the enlistment
board and was rejected. "Lungs--weak!" they said quite definitely.
"No--not tubercular. A tendency. Underweight." He cursed. His
face was a little more like a blade--thinner, grayer. The cleft of
his scowl was deeper. He seemed more alone.

Eugene came up into the hills again and found them in their rich
young summer glory. Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests.
More arrived.

Eugene was sixteen years old. He was a College Man. He walked
among the gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering
the hearty greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.

"They tell me you're batting a thousand down there, son," yelled
Mr. Wood, the plump young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at
all. "That's right, boy! Go get 'em." The man passed forward
cheerfully, up the prosperous glade of his store. Fans droned.

After all, Eugene thought, he had not done so badly. He had felt
his first wounds. He had not been broken. He had seen love's
bitter mystery. He had lived alone.
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

ex-khobar Andy
Posts: 5418
Joined: Sat Dec 19, 2015 4:16 am
Location: Louisville KY as of July 2018

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

Scooter wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 4:19 pm


"Can you conjugate?" gasped Mr. Avery. "Here's the way I learned:


"Amo, amas,
I love a lass.
Amat,
He loves her, too."
Amo
amas
amat
amamus
amatis
amant

Probably 58 years ago I first heard that and I am unable to dislodge it from my RAM. Meanwhile I have a doctor appointment tomorrow which was made a week ago and luckily I put it into my phone so I can remember it.

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Crackpot
Posts: 11265
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Location: Michigan

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Crackpot »

Meth is a composite of all of the worst traits I have encountered in engineers.

He definitely has the deadly trifecta:
Thinks he knows everything.
Won’t take advice given in good faith
Blames others for his failures
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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BoSoxGal
Posts: 18298
Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:36 pm
Location: The Heart of Red Sox Nation

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by BoSoxGal »

Scooter wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 4:03 pm
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL



PART ONE


. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door.
And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not
know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come
into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his
father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this
most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a
stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
Brilliant choice!
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Guinevere
Posts: 8989
Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2010 3:01 pm

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by Guinevere »

Crackpot wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 8:44 pm
Meth is a composite of all of the worst traits I have encountered in engineers.

He definitely has the deadly trifecta:
Thinks he knows everything.
Won’t take advice given in good faith
Blames others for his failures
Indeed.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

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dales
Posts: 10922
Joined: Sat Apr 17, 2010 5:13 am
Location: SF Bay Area - NORTH California - USA

Re: A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

Post by dales »

Crackpot wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 8:44 pm
Meth is a composite of all of the worst traits I have encountered in engineers.

He definitely has the deadly trifecta:
Thinks he knows everything.
Won’t take advice given in good faith
Blames others for his failures
Sounds like the asshole we have in the White House.

Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.


yrs,
rubato

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