I'm seriously considering not saying 'dude' anymore.

Today @ Lands End

On a crowded tram the other day I listened to a couple of young white women talking next to me, sounding, frankly, like idiots. Which is to say, they sounded quite a lot like me. So many superlatives and hyperboles, as if every feeling were the most important thing ever to happen.

I used to embrace my righteous roots in Southern California idiom, but I just don't know anymore. It's like the time in the 7th grade when I started hanging a silver heart from one of my hoop earrings, and within months around Davis Middle School there was nary an earring without a heart dangling from it. Admittedly, these kind of trend setting events have been infrequent in my life. Still, fifty percent of current Wichita bankers are reported to have accents with origins on surfboards in Newport Beach. Thanks, Hollywood.

But wait a second. Does my way of speaking derive entirely from Southern California, circa 1976? Might I myself have parroted some of it from The Simpsons and South Park? Still, maybe I'll see if it's possible to stop exaggerating and saying like, just one day at a time...

I'm not saying any of this has anything to do with cancer, and I'm not saying it doesn't. However, as even John Muir would have to agree, When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

And from Susan Moon:

"I think I've earned the right to break free from the imprisonment of sequential thinking."