Second Thoughts

Penny was the one who first noticed the water dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls surrounding us.

The cave had been dry when we first went in. Now all of a sudden it was wet. Or this part of it was wet, anyway.

“Hey, do you think this means we are under the river?” Penny asked.

I frowned. We hadn’t really been inside the tunnel all that long. I knew, from all my years of Girl Scout hiking, that it always seemed like you had gone miles and miles and miles and then the trail markers would tell you that you had only gone like a quarter mile or something.

I didn’t think we had really gone all that far yet.

In fact, I hadn’t really thought about how long it might take us to work our way just from the cave entrance to the river, let alone all the way under the river. And I realized that we only had one flashlight and no extra batteries. Ben’s flashlight was an old Halloween one with an orange plastic pumpkin covering the bulb, and it had died about five minutes after we had entered the cave.

“Ewwwww!” Penny shrieked and jumped back.

“What?”

“Spiders!” She pointed. Sure enough the wall in front of us was teeming with all sorts of ugly black and brown spiders.

“They’re just spiders,” Ben said, but his voice sounded kind of strange and hesitant.

“Don’t even tell me you weenies are afraid of silly old spiders,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I didn’t particularly like them. I mean, I had no desire to wade through a wall of them or anything.

“Oh, gross!” Penny wailed.

“Now what?” I whirled around.

“It’s all muddy in here from the water. Look at my hands! Look at my jeans! Look at my shoes!”

“Oh, for crissakes!” Ben grunted. “We are cave explorers. What did you expect?”

“Ohhhhh,” Penny started to sob. “Mom is gonna kill us!”

“Oh, she won’t even have to know,” I said. “We can wash all our clothes as soon as we get back, and she won’t have to know.”

“But I don’t know how to wash clothes,” Penny whined.

“Well, I do, so don’t worry about it. I’ll even wash yours, Ben,” I said.

“Uh-oh.” Ben stopped in front of me.

“What?”

“Look!” He moved to the side and pointed ahead of him.

Shining my light into the darkness I suddenly saw what he saw: the tunnel in front of us suddenly split into a very distinct V shape.

“Ohhhhh,” Penny whimpered. “How are we supposed to know which way to go?”

How, indeed?

I considered this dilemma and the fact that we were down to only one flashlight and Penny was getting tired and whiny (and muddy) and we really had not come prepared for serious spelunking.

I was starting to think that maybe we needed to regroup.

Maybe this could be our initial reconnoiter. And we could then plan a real, serious expedition for another day. We definitely needed more flashlights. And heavy duty ones! And extra batteries. And some rope. Or a ball of string or something. And a watch that glowed in the dark. And some water and snacks. And maybe a first aid kit. And a compass. (Did compasses even work underground?)

“You know what, guys?” I tried to sound official, like I really knew what I was doing.

“What?”

“I think we have made an amazing first go in the tunnel. But this whole V thing means we need to do some more serious preparation. I mean, we don’t want to get lost or anything.”

“Get l-l-lost!” Penny stammered. “I thought we were just going to go under the river. Do you mean, we could really get lost in here?!?”

“Wellll, no,” I lied. “Of course not. All we have to do is backtrack and find our way out. But I don’t think we should go any further today with – uhhh -- just one flashlight.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I think we each should have a flashlight. Er, I mean, a flashlight that works.”

“I wanna go hooooooome!” Penny wailed.

“All right, bratty! That’s what we are going to do. I just said that. So take a chill pill, will ya?”

We turned around and started working our way back out of the tunnel. It was far more twisty and turny than I remembered it. And a lot colder. But maybe that was because my clothes were now so wet and muddy. Penny kept sobbing under her breath, and Ben finally grabbed her hand.

“It’s OK, Penny. Just hold on to me.”

Right. Like Ben was going to be able to do anything. But it did seem to calm Penny down a bit. Maybe next time we wouldn’t bring Penny. She was too little to go on a real adventure.

I wished Nick had been allowed to come.

All of a sudden my flashlight started to waver and then dim. I shook it and banged it on my free hand. It got brighter for a moment, and then it started wavering again.

And then, boom, just like that, it went out.

And Penny let out one of the most blood curling screams I have ever heard.

Mem'ries

“Mem’ries! All alone in the mooooonlight....”

Penny’s singing, which might more accurately be described as shrieking, reverberated off the rock walls of the cave.

“Stop!” I shouted.

“Yeah, you might cause a cave in or something,” said Ben.

The three of us were working – more like, squeezing -- our way through a womb-like underground tunnel, in search of... the other side of the river.

“I can hear my ECHO, echo, echo, echo, echoooooooooo...” Penny persisted, switching from singing to simply making noise.

“Nuh-uh,” Ben nudged her. “You’re doing that on purpose. There is no echo in here.”

“Is, too. Is, too. Is, toooooo....”

Ben punched her in the arm.

“Ow! That hurt.”

“Serves you right. Serves you right. Serves you right...” I made fun of her.

Penny stuck her tongue out at me. I could barely make it out in the yellowish glow of my official Girl Scout flashlight.

“God, it’s a good thing Nick couldn’t come afterall,” Ben changed the subject.

“Whaddya mean?” Penny looked at him like he knew some top secret secret.

“I mean, numbnuts, he mighta got stuck in here!”

Ben was right. While Ben was taller than me, he was also pretty skinny. Nick, on the other hand, was a giant, built like a linebacker. He actually just might have gotten stuck in some of the parts of the tunnel we’d just been moving through.

But Nick hadn’t been allowed to come with us. He had told us his parents wouldn’t let him come.

Why he had told his parents what we were planning on doing this afternoon was beyond any of us, but his dad had gotten real mad at him and outright forbidden him to go inside any “stupid ass caves” (his dad’s words).

The rest of us, of course, were not stupid, and we hadn’t told our parents anything. We were just outside playing, riding bikes, hiking in the woods behind our house, as far as the parents were concerned. They wouldn’t expect us home until dinner.

And that’s the way we liked it.

I mean, c’mon. We were not dumb. Although we couldn’t articulate it at the time, we were all fans of the premise: “It is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.”

And we really wanted to go exploring and find a cave. The cave. THE tunnel.

We had heard for years, growing up in S-town, all about the tunnel that ran underneath the river. Indians had used it to go back and forth from one side to the other in the days long before there was any bridge.

Nobody seemed to know where the entrance to this tunnel was anymore, but it was a well-known fact that there were a whole series of caves and tunnels around the limestone cliffs between the town cemetery and the reservoir. Teenagers had been going there for years to drink beer and smoke dope and have sex and stuff. There was graffiti on the cliff walls, and remnants of bonfires scattered all around the base of the cliffs. There was also an old refrigerator, minus its door, of course, but we had no idea how it had gotten there.

All we knew was that we were men on a mission. To find THE cave. To find THE tunnel.

“I think Nick was just a fraidy cat,” Penny said, after a time, for no seeming reason.

I laughed at her. Nick was anything but a fraidy cat. He just had really strict parents.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Penny said. “It’s YOUR boyfriend who’s the fraidy cat!”

I glared at my little sister, would have socked her one, but she was too far away from me. Clear on the other side of Ben.

Nick was NOT my boyfriend. I did not need any freaking boyfriends! I only hung out with Nick because he liked the same things I did, which were pretty much the things that every other girl I knew didn’t like. And pee wee Miss Prissy Pants Penny was only along with me now because my parents were out and I had to watch her. ‘Cuz I was older. And like way more responsible.

As for Ben, he was just this neighborhood kid who never had anywhere to go or anyone else to hang out with. So, we put up with him. You know, just kinda cuz.

Cuz that’s the way it was.

But I knew, knew in my guts, in my core, that we were on the right track. This tunnel was gonna pan out. We were gonna emerge, in the not too distant future, into the sunlight again. And we would be… on the other side of the river.

Speaking of tunnels....

The other day my younger son asked me why we can’t remember being born.

I didn’t have a particularly good answer to that one, but we did spend some time talking about what our earliest memories were and reminiscing about his early childhood.

Ever since then, though, I keep having this Groundhog Day-esque dream where I am driving through the Armstrong Tunnel at night and I am just about to emerge from it and I have this incredibly strong feeling of impending… something.

Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Kind of like right before that final volley of fireworks goes off.

Or right before that head finally pops out after hours and hours and hours of hard labor and the rest of that slippery little body slides out and you hear a baby crying its lungs out and you feel such incredible joy and happiness and relief that you start crying, too.

Or right before other things that shall remain nameless that you were thinking of right off the bat.

The feeling in my dream is not the boom! My dream never goes that far.

But rather that feeling right before the boom.

That impending, built up, suspenseful feeling.

With no boom, no release, no fireworks, no relief, no crying baby.

It gets kind of disturbing after a while.

And I do not think that I am – or can! -- remember my birth.

I am not sure why we remember what we remember.

Or how we remember.

Or why we forget certain things.

Or how.

Or why an old photo or a smell or a song can suddenly bring a long forgotten memory to the startling forefront.

I just know that they do.

I have this theory, though.

(Which is completely unscientific and not based on anything in particular but my own thoughts.)

I have this theory that we actually have the memories of everything that ever happened to us stored inside our brains. Somewhere. We can’t always remember them, but they are there. And sometimes, since they are there all along, something will happen to trigger us to find them again, even if only briefly or fleetingly.

I think that we have inside of us far more than we are actually capable of remembering.

That every thing we have ever seen, heard, said, thought, or read is in there, somewhere, but that our computer software is incapable of dealing with or processing or using it all because we would just be totally and completely overwhelmed.

But, theoretically, we could be hypnotized (or something) and a scene could be related in extreme detail, in far more detail than we could ever really consciously remember or recount.

And I think all this… stuff… or a lot of it… ends up in our dreams.

I am always astounded at the degree of detail in my dreams. Sometimes it is like watching a really suspenseful movie. Other times it is very detailed and seems quite real while I am dreaming it, but then later, looking back, it makes no sense at all. I mean, logically or realistically or plot-wise.

I guess it is my poor, tired, stressed-out mind trying to solve some problem or another, or deal with some issue, or just blow off steam or something. But clearly the brain has to draw from somewhere to create these dreams… these movies.

Of course, when I was a little kid, I also thought that all of our memories were put in folders and then into filing cabinets in our brains. And there were tons of filing cabinets with folders spilling out and stacks of folders in corners, etc., in room after room inside our brains. And the reason we couldn’t remember everything was because 1) we didn’t have a proper system for filing them, 2) we didn’t remember the system we used to file them, or 3) we couldn’t figure out the system we had originally used.

Do you ever have someone’s name or a certain word “on the tip of your tongue”?

You can feel it, sense it, you almost, almost have it.

It’s coming, it’s coming.

It is almost there.

And then, all of a sudden, sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days or weeks later, it finally comes.

How does that work exactly?

What processes are going on in your brain?

What does it mean if you are “trying to remember something”?

What is actually going on inside your head, in that organ with all those little wrinkles and folds?

Where exactly are these memories stored? And what are memories?

How are you trying to find them?

And what does it mean if you “feel” like you are almost remembering something?

It is “coming to you”?

It is “almost there”?

And then – poof! – it is there.

Last summer while on vacation with friends I have known since elementary and middle school, I was trying to remember the title and author of a book we had read in a high school English course. I could tell them what the book was about – a brother and sister who had an incredibly unhealthy relationship -- and that it was by a French author. I could envision the cover of the book in my head. I could picture the entire book in my mind and the simple line drawing illustrations. I could remember our English teacher telling us that we probably shouldn’t leave the book lying around the house because our parents might find it and think it was… inappropriate. But for the life of me, I could not remember either the title of the book or the author’s name.

My friends had not been in the same class and had not read the same book, but they kept trying to help me figure out what the title and author were. We were on an island in the middle of a bay in Canada, without Internet, so we could not simply Google and figure out the book’s title that way.

Which would have been very simple indeed.

And which made me realize how much I rely on Google to figure things out and remember words and how to spell them, etc.

Anyway, I forgot all about this book until one day just recently I was walking through the stacks of the library on my way to yet another meeting, and the title of one of the books on the shelf happened to catch my eye. I cannot tell you why this one book leapt out at me from the midst of all the others.

All I know is that all of a sudden I saw the title: “The Holy Terrors.”

And it clicked.

That was it!

That was the book we had read in high school English.

The Holy Terrors.

Les Enfant Terribles.

By Jean Cocteau.

It was as clear as a bell.

A quick check on Google confirmed this.

In fact, the cover illustration on Amazon.com was the same exact black and white line drawing cover that I had so well remembered in my mind’s eye.

So, why was I unable to remember the title and author of the book, but pretty much everything else about it?

And why, months later, after I had completely forgotten about this book, did I suddenly spy the title in the middle of the library stacks, out of hundreds of thousands of other books, and instantaneously know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was, in fact, the title of that elusive book?

I do not know.

All I can say is that it happened.

Frankly, I think there was a tiny part of my brain that had continued to work on – had still been working on -- that book title and author. Even though, consciously, I had long ago forgotten that I wanted to know this and moved on.

There was a part of my brain that had kept figuring out the title of this long ago read book on a back burner, or a “to do” list of sorts. Part of my brain was still on the lookout for clues or signals. And that part of my brain noticed "The Holy Terrors" on the bookshelf, not coincidentally, but with cognition.

Or recognition.

And had then alerted the conscious me to take notice and… see.

And voilà!

I had not had to tunnel down into the depths of my brain to figure this book title out; the title had risen to the surface. Or popped out. Or, more accurately, appeared right there before my very eyes. The memory of the title was somewhere in my brain. And seeing the title spelled out in front of me, even randomly, was all that I needed to make the conscious connection.

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie....

I do not do desserts, either.

But I used to entertain a lot.

Which required producing homemade, yummy desserts. En masse.

This was one of my favorites.

One of my favorites because 1) it was INCREDIBLY simple to make, 2) it was INCREDIBLY delicious to eat, and 3) it was INCREDIBLY homemade.

Fudge Walnut Brownie Pie

Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup Hershey's cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup walnuts

Beat eggs. Stir in sugar, butter, and vanilla. Stir together cocoa, flour,and salt. Add to butter mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts. Pour into greased 9 " pie plate. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until set. Cool.

Fabulous with ice cream on top!

Humble pie

It's true, it's true.

I motivated Ms. Golf Sierra to post something worthwhile after a dry spell the length of the Sahara Desert.

But don't thank me.

It's OK.

I didn't do it for me.

I did it because I missed reading stuff on Gray that moved me and made me smile or laugh or cry.

Or, God forbid, think!

And I STILL want to tell you all about the tunnel.

Trust me, this is a story you all will want to hear!

And if I had a recipe for some pie you could make from scratch, I would post it.

But I don't bake pies.

Or much of anything from scratch.

But I am sure that soup Golf Sierra posted was really pretty darn good.

So if you do stuff like make soup out of giant gourd-like things, I would venture to guess that the Butternut Squash Soup is worth your while.

As for me, I will stick to more processed foods.

The easiser the better.

Oh. And the tunnel...........

P.S.

Soup was to die for!

I added a bit of balsamic vinegar and some heavy cream, so it was almost more like a bisque.

But it was heavenly!

And scarfed up by two teenaged boys, just as much as by the grownups.

Fall[en]

In yoga this morning, the instructor left us with a quote: “Everyone is the hero of his own life.”

It sounded profound at the time.

Of course, after an hour and a half of stretching, twisting, grunting, and breathing, just about anything sounds profound, in its own way.

At least for a few minutes.

And then we all roll up our mats, put on our shoes, don our jackets and dash out the door, grabbing for cell phones and car keys and planning what comes next in our busy weekend agendas.

Kind of defeats the purpose, I guess.

We are too busy being the heroes of our own lives to really stop and think about what that quote actually means.

Most of the time, I think we are all so incredibly self-absorbed with our own lives, why the hell would we need to think even more about ourselves?

But there is a difference between being self-absorbed and being reflective, or introspective.

While I think most Americans are self-absorbed, I think very few are reflective or introspective in any meaningful way.

I personally hate to rush around from here to there, constantly following a time table, a schedule, trying to meet the needs of my job, my kids, my home life, my community, and never having any time to… think.

Or breathe.

I joke that the main reason I do yoga on Saturday mornings is because it is the one time of the week I remember to breathe.

It is definitely the one time of the week where I think about breathing.

Something we do all day long, all night long, day in, day out until the day we die.

I do not like to operate in crisis mode, under pressure, whether it is a real crisis or the fake crisis modes that we, self-absorbed humans dream up for ourselves on a daily basis.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that if a real crisis arises, I can carry on and function and do what needs to be done. Or at least give it my best shot. But I loathe the fact that people around me seem determined to turn my place of work, my home life, my kids’ lives, into perpetual crises.

I think everyone needs to just take a great, big giant chill pill.

Just because everyone is the hero of his own life does not mean we have to be the protagonists in “Bladerunner,” “The Bourne Identity,” or “D.O.A” (that movie where Dennis Quaid plays a washed up, middle aged college English professor who suddenly has to solve a bunch of murders and get it on with Meg Ryan but, oh, wait, he only has 24 hours to live because someone slipped him some poison).

Fall, a time of year of change: of late harvests, of coloring and dying leaves, of dropping temperatures, provides us with a prime opportunity for pausing and looking within.

I think we all need to do a reality check: take stock of what is truly important in our lives and live each day purposefully and passionately.

How much of our lives do we waste worrying?

On the cell phone whilst driving?

Fruitlessly trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously?

And for what?

We get so caught up in our day to day lives and with weird, distorted concepts of what we should be doing, of what we are supposed to be doing, of success.

Are we doing the right thing?

Are we making enough money?

Are we doing enough?

Are we making a difference in this world?

Are we…?

Are we…?

Are we…?

Am I…?

Am I…?

Am I…?

I, I, I, I, I, I.

I get sucked into worrying and fretting about the meaning of life, about the meaning of my life. And while I am so busy worrying about life and myself, it is life that is going on all around me. Life is what I am living.

Right now.

With this breath.

And the next and the next.

Whether I realize I am breathing or not.

Perhaps we would all do well to take the words of Ghandi to heart: “Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.”

I am taking a pause today, even though I should be grading the forty million student assignments I have to grade, doing the fifty tons of laundry I need to do, and paying the pile of bills I need to pay, to breathe and think and be grateful for what I am so blessed to have in my life.

And I will leave you with the recipe I am going to make for this evening’s meal. Because it is fall and I have a giant butternut squash and it is cold and damp outside and I want something warm and good to feed my family. And because I feel like this soup is quintessentially autumnal. Or fall[en]. As are we.

Classic Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2/3 cup diced carrot (about 1 (8-inch) large carrot)
1/2 cup diced celery (about 1 (11-inch) large stalk)
2/3 cup diced onion (about 1 medium onion)
4 cups cubed butternut squash (about 1 medium squash)
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
4 to 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
Sea salt and ground black pepper, to taste

Method
Heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Add carrot, celery and onion. Cook until vegetables have begun to soften and onion turns translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Add butternut squash and thyme. Stir to combine with vegetables. Stir in broth and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until squash is fork-tender, about 30 minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree soup. Alternatively, let the soup cool slightly and carefully puree in batches in a traditional blender.

Reply to [Aside]

ummmm.....

Yeah.

I am glad that my "ploy" is not working.

- E

[Aside]

Now I get it!

Now I understand why you are doing this on my blog. It is your goal to get me to post more often! You think that by posting totally preposterous stuff you will infuriate me enough to respond.

Well, that is so totally ridiculous!!!

It is not even funny.

Like I care if you are posting stories that have no historical continuity.

Or are told from the point of view of a four year old.

We won't even talk about political correctness!

Sheesh.

No! We will not.

I just hope I don't get sued by Native Americans, small white children, the National Spelunkers Association, the Mark Twain Fan Club, Wal-Mart, Costco, or Blogger.com.

That's all!

Reading your blog posting is like watching A Knight's Tale with my kids when they were five and six and they didn't GET that rock music did not exist back in the Middle Ages.

Your ploy is NOT going to work.

You are NOT going to get me to respond to your... your... frippery!

Now, where was I...?

They say there is a tunnel that runs under the Ohio River from S-town to, well, the other side of the river.

I have heard this urban legend, old wives' tale for years.

Most people, I am sure, would simply pooh-pooh it, or dismiss it out of hand. (Or is that the same thing?)

But, I ask you: what if it were true?

What if there really were, was, be’d a tunnel under that there river???

I certainly believed it whole-heartedly as a child growing up in S-town.

The story we were told was that a tunnel ran underneath the river and the local Indians used it to travel back and forth from one side to the other.

This made complete sense to me at the time. I was a savvy kid, too; smart enough to know there was no S-town Bridge back when the Indians lived in the area. And no ferry, either.

The Indians would have had to paddle their birch bark canoes back and forth, and that probably would have taken a long time as the river looked pretty darned wide to me as a little kid peering out across a stretch of the Mighty Ohio.

And even though the Indian braves were probably in really good shape from all of that hunting and canoeing and war-fighting stuff, it would have been kind of hard to paddle when the weather was bad and it was windy and the water choppy. Or if it was raining really hard, or winter and chunks of ice were barreling downstream like fat women in the middle of the aisle at K-Mart during a Blue Light Special.

And what about the squaws with papooses on their backs? And all their small Indian children? And all those elders who had to make deer skin soft by chewing on it with toothless gums? How would they ever have been able to paddle back and forth across the river in a canoe?

I was sure, as a kid, there must have been plenty of reasons for the Indians to want to cross back and forth across the river, even if there was no town over there then.

Or a mall.

Or a Wal-Mart or Costco.

(Although there was no Wal-Mart or Costco over there either when I was growing up, but you know what I mean.)

All the same, I am sure there were good berry patches or bigger deer. Or something enticing.

Other tribes wandering up from West Virginia or Ohio wanting to trade stuff like pemmican and baskets and raccoon pelts and whatnot. You know, there could have been any number of reasons for people to want to cross back and forth over/under the river.

My reasoning followed: If the Indians could have simply walked through a tunnel to cross the river, wouldn’t their lives have been much easier?

It made perfect sense to me.

Plus, it was a well-known fact that there were lots of caves up in the limestone cliffs between the S-town Cemetery and the town reservoir. It would make sense if one of those caves was really just a super long cave (or tunnel!) and that it ran all the way under the river.

Afterall, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher had gotten lost in a really long dark cave in Missourah with that mean Injun Joe guy after them. So, clearly Indians liked caves and knew their way around them much better than silly little white children who wandered off aimlessly from Sunday School picnics when they weren’t supposed to.

All my friends and I needed to do, when we were young ‘uns, was to find the entrance to this really long cave that no one knew the location of any longer, as the Indians were long gone, and then we could criss-cross the river simply by going under it.

Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

I mean, not only were we not allowed to cross the S-town Bridge by ourselves, we weren’t even allowed to cross the Boulevard that ran between S-town and the river because we might get run over by cars, buses, dump trucks, or eighteen wheelers.

Our parents would never need to know we were crossing the river. And we would be totally safe because we would be using a tunnel that Indians had used. Even the squaws and little children and old people had used the tunnel, so it had to be safe.

Right?

It sounded like a perfect plan to me....

En garde!

Delta,

You have thrown down your gauntlet and set out your ground rules.

I pick up your glove and accept!

Henceforth, I shall post...

in blue.

If it is in blue, it is me.

I will assume that if it is in... err, pardon!... GRAY... it is you.

Also, since you are Delta, you may call me... Epsilon.

May the games begin!

Sincerely yours,

E

Ground Rules

OK... I have heard from a few friends who are concerned about someone hacking into my blog.

I can assure all of you that I am fine with this! I know it is a bit odd and different, but I have no reason to believe that the hacker is a serial killer, or in any other way... dangerous.

And, quite frankly, I find it fairly interesting that someone would want to come on board in such an unusual way. And why. I mean, this person could have just started his or her own blog, right?

Answers to a few questions from my end:

No, I do not know exactly who the hacker is. But I have a few very good ideas.

Yes, I could change my blogger account password easily enough, something I do fairly often. But I am sure my hacker friend has ways of determining my log in no matter what.

Ground rules for the visiting author:

1) Please be respectful and do not use foul language, at least not very often.

2) Please figure out a way for readers to be able to (easily) tell the two of us apart.

3) Please come up with a pseudonym that I can use to address you.

4) Keep things interesting!

-- Delta

Tunneling to the truth

"And... if you know the tunnel under the river story, that kind of implies that you live in -- what did you call it? -- 'S-town' yourself."

Not necessarily, Delta. It means I know a lot about S-town. And its lore. To be honest and upfront, I was born in S-town and grew up there. That is all I will say for now.

And I do not have to believe in the tunnel under the river story to tell it. So, hold your horses!

But I still might believe in the tunnel.

And so might you.

After you hear what I have to say....

Time Out!

You can't tell me you really BELIEVE that tunnel under the river story?!?

I was sort of being patient, waiting to see what you were going to post on my blog, before I really made any comments. But this is kind of ludicrous!

And... if you know the tunnel under the river story, that kind of implies that you live in -- what did you call it? -- "S-town" yourself.

They say...

that there is a tunnel that runs under the river from S-town to, well, the other side of the river.

I have heard this urban legend, old wives' tale for years.

But what if...

it were true?