Friday, November 15, 2013

# TODAY I AM THANKFUL FOR "EVERYTHING SUBTLE, COMPLEX, ABSTRACT, AND PROFOUND"

I am thankful for a thousand forgotten Thursdays. I am thankful for unobserved dew covered spider webs on spring mornings near dilapidated barns. I am thankful for routing tables, IP addresses, the unrecorded thoughts of Shakespearean characters, the question of existence vs. non-existence, and medieval drawings of imaginary creatures. I am thankful for unheard trees falling in remote forests. I am thankful for languages I won't know, religions I won't follow, and various kinds of welding. I am thankful for engineering and medicine. I am thankful for the violins in the song "Kashmir." I am thankful for the sighs of aging strangers on distant continents. Empty sunlit afternoon sidewalks. I am thankful for untaken photographs and the airy space in the lower boughs of well formed trees. The unspoken names of all the sparrows in the world. I am thankful that somewhere, someone is being born who I will never know, who will live out a complex, unique life and never know that you or I or anyone reading this ever existed. I am thankful for the smell of library books. I am thankful for weekday waves on deserted Caribbean beaches. I am thankful for questions about free will and determinism. I am thankful for the Latin terms for rare medical conditions. I am thankful for slide rules, multiplication tables, old tide charts, almanacs, and forgotten hand-silhouette turkeys in Big Chief tablets. I am thankful for the pretentious hackwork of listing unrelated things, and the calculated cowardice of false humility. I am thankful for half remembered phrases of classical music. I am thankful for the souls of forgotten spreadsheets and the sad memories of empty filing cabinets. I am thankful for dust motes in sunbeams in for-lease office spaces. I am thankful for the forgotten chance genius of drunks and stoners. I am thankful for solitary nuns in desolate suburban afternoon churches. I am thankful for thirty-year-old copies of TV Guide in abandoned Arizona desert doublewide trailers. I am thankful for the olfactory scheme of dogs, the Dewey Decimal System, and scientific discoveries that will happen a thousand years from today. I am thankful for comedy sketches yet unwritten. I am thankful for unwanted glass knick-knacks in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. I am thankful for new music I will never appreciate. I am thankful for changing fashion and geologic time. I am thankful for esoteric terms used by pompous wine tasters. I am thankful for Euclidean geometry and the Earth's rotation. I am thankful for tinnitus and the DNA damage theory of aging. I am thankful for the New York Stock Exchange, solar flares, and whatever is beyond observable space. I am thankful for the failures and achievements our 34th President. I am thankful for quiet moments of contemplation happening everywhere. I am thankful for "everything subtle, complex, abstract and profound." I am thankful for the countless things and unthings for which I am unaware that I should be thankful.
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Full disclosure: the phrase "everything subtle, complex, abstract and profound" is lifted directly from the Epilogue of a book:
Dobelli, Rolf. The Art of Thinking Clearly. New York, Harper Collins, 2013. Print 

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About Me

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I am the author of 5 books: Android Down, Firewood for Cannibals, The Cubicles of Madness, Robot Stories, and most recently, Various Meats and Cheeses. I live and write in Michigan. My website is at danmanning.com