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the long journey

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

St. Catharines, 2011.07.01

Today we celebrated the anniversary of our nation's creation by sitting in traffic for three and a half hours.

And that was just to get from Toronto to St. Catharines. It seems that given the long rainy Spring we've had, everyone was just itching to get away from the city when we hit three days of forecast sunshine during a long weekend. We spent quite a bit of time on the highway, until I could take no more and started an overland route (by which I mean taking normal streets, a process that greatly sped things up).

And so it goes. Kenny loves being down at Grandma's house, and he spent the entire afternoon running around, yelling about stuff, and generally being three. It was great.

Not sure which of us was asleep first, but the day ended with me reading a story to him about Babar the elephant. In this story, Babar is taken prisoner by some other elephants (they with striped ears, who live in a volcanic crater) and fed drugs that kept his natural fight-or-flight response suppressed. Given that Babar is actually King of his city, that would seem to make the story the detailing of the outset of war between the city folk and the crater people. That part of the trouble isn't explicitly told.

rand()m quote

The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.

—Richard Feynman