j. steinbeck

4.17.12

My newest addition to my library. I came across a reference to Travels with Charley while planning our trip to Maine - coming this summer - which I am gloriously looking forward to. Last night I began reading and in the first two pages I knew, this was the perfect book to wet my appetite for our trip. Hopefully the rest of the book meets my expectations. Here are a few of my favorite sections:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy sured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fity-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult he has a built in garden of reasons to choose from.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

4.18.12

John is 5S-ing my pantry. It's an engineer thing.