Tunes of July

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"Do you really think you can just put it in a safe behind a painting, lock it up and leave?"

The National

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"And the truth is I've been dreaming of some tired, tranquil place where the weather won't get trapped inside my bones. And if all the years of searching find one sympathetic face, then it's there I will plant these seeds and make my home."

Bright Eyes

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"Your flavor in my mind, swings back and forth between sweeter than any wine, and as bitter as mustard greens. And it's light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread. The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead. Go plow some other field and try and forget my name, We'll see what harvest yields, and, supposing I'd do the same. I planted rows of peas, but the first week of July -- they should have come up to my knees but they were maybe ankle high. Take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns, and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars. And the books are overdue and the goats are underfed... the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead."

mewithoutYou

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"Birds are in the sky, the land's been gone for days, and all you left was time to find a solid grave. Pirates never loved the way that I do. You never say enough to keep me next to you. Now I hold my poems for ladies unknown. Until my hands go weak, I'll be a ghost ship on the blue."

Dead Man's Bones

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"I dreamed you were a cosmonaut of the space between our chairs and I was a cartographer of the tangles in your hair. . . In time you need to learn to love, the ebb just like the flow."

Andrew Bird

After several weeks of stifling heat and sticky humidity that dampens your skin within minutes of being outside...it's finally raining. For a few days, it seemed like everyone was going about life as half-baked zombies. People lost their enthusiasm, moods shifted, and everyone moved slowly-like lions on the savannah searching for shady shelter. But the rain is acting as a sort of calming agent. Everything is quieter and I can tell that people are soaking it up, observing it, and sweetly welcoming it. 

It's strange how weather ties people together. Someone countries away can be feeling the effects of the same storm force or the same heat wave. Someone twenty states over may be experiencing the sort of weather that your area needs, and you know that they're looking at your state on the map and thinking about what it would be like to be where you are. Someone in your city may be walking in the same rainstorm or underneath the same shining sun. It's nice to think that weather is something that we all share. We all use the Earth. It's nice to embrace what it gives back to us.

I can't wait to share the glorious weather of autumn with all of you.

Salutations!

Happy birthday, E.B. White!

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“You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing...after all, what's a life anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die...By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” 

"Be bold. But not bold, be fucking bold."

James Frey

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"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

-Vladimir Nabokov

When I was ten, I stood in my mom's bathroom and ate these candies. For some reason, I didn't commit the name of the candy to memory, so that important tid-bit was lost forever.

All I knew was every detail.

"It comes in mini packages like War Heads."

"It's hard and sweet. Then it starts fizzing."

"The packages have little faces on them. There's a punk one, a movie star, one is wearing a hat...etc."

"The packages are brightly colored."

"They have names for the people on the packages. Like, Razzle Dazzle or something."

And these are the things I would tell people when I spent countless hours researching them, using only these details. Through my research I found that the manufacturer went out of business and that no one on the internet knew the name of this crazy candy. Ten years of failed searches.

Spring 2012, the candy resurfaced. Fate. An online search revealed that there is a man in Canada who makes vodka drinks using candies and one drink was made within the last year, using Bizzerks (THE candy). My eyes welled with tears and my face blushed the color of the red flavor 

"Strawberry Fizz"-- a cartoon pimp looking guy who looks mighty successful. 

Ten years later, after months of emailing the man from Canada, I am sitting on my couch and popping a Bizzerk into my mouth.

Elation.

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"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."

Joyas Voladoras.

-Brian Doyle