Archibald McLees, Engraver:
New Spencerian compendium of penmanship, Part 2 (1879)

No Wonder Why
How curious that I seem to become most like the self I know when I'm away from home. It's almost as if when home, I need to keep up appearances, and when out and anonymous in the world, I can feel free to be whomever I feel moved to be. It might be that I feel more moved when traveling; the whole point of that activity being to move me. I see whatever I've seen before with fresh, if familiar, eyes and feel moved all over again by the flood of memories. The recounting of experiences on long-ago family vacations where we collected credibility measured in bumper stickers from Trees of Mystery and Sea Lion Caves, Marine World and Disneyland. The families with the greatest number of bumper stickers seemed the luckiest, though even my eight-year-old self wondered how those families managed to make any headway. Over the years, we collected our share and managed to experience almost every tourist trap between home and Los Angeles. Those were fine old days, a long time passing now, but I can remember myself as I was when traveling then and seem to come closer to him when traveling today. The Muse insists she travels with an eight-year-old driving, and I'm in no position to disagree, given that I hold so much responsibility to keep us both entertained. We agree that I become a dip, a dork, and a dweeb on the road. It's really no wonder why I cannot maintain those personna when home.

—

Weekly Writing Summary
This week’s first iAlogue discussed departures and their aftermaths, in which the surviving half engages in Halfsies, re-divvying up once tacitly shared responsibilities.

William Henry Fox Talbot: [Calotype negative]
Portrait of Talbot’s Wife (Constance) or Half-Sister (Caroline or Horatia) (c. 1842)
—
This writing week's second iAlogue considered one of the conditions capable of standing in the way of Toodling: threatening to be Blown off the road.

Johann Georg Wille: Gale (1777)
—
This week’s third iAlogue described taking a DayOff from vacation.

Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴: Poem (Mid 18th century)
—
This week’s fourth iAlogue recounted The Muse and my escape from The Great American Desert and our Reentry back into familiar again.

William Turner: Study of a Tree in Bloom (c. 1835)
—
This iAlogue spoke to injecting Inconsistencies into our Interstate Highway System, the true purpose of Toodling.

Donald J. Handel: Behold the World and realize
that nothing is so constant  and inconsistency. (20th century)
—
This last iAlogue of this writing week considered what seems to produce the highest quality kind of Toodles. It's the antithesis of process: QualityOfExperience.

Pietro della Vecchia: Experiment of the Bowl (c. 1640)
—
I primarily focused this week's writing on the fine art of Toodling, for The Muse and I spent this week returning from our brief excursion to Tucson and Spring. Our return was lengthened by weather, a tenacious Winter refusing to cede the Great Basin Country, so we Toodled the most extended imaginable way around. It was our only option. A friend made the trip we'd initially planned and reported that it was a "shit storm" the whole way. Our excursion could not have been more different. We began it with reflections on what we'd experienced during our brief visit in Halfsies, then felt as though we'd nearly been Blown off the road, so we decided to take a short vacation from our vacation and hold up someplace safe. We finally made good our escape from the Great American Desert and into a welcomed Reentry back into familiar territory. We reveled in the inconsistencies we felt moved to inject into our plans, reminding ourselves that we Toodle for the QualityOfExperience or do not really Toodle at all. Thank you for following along!

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz