Joe Chung

2020-2022: “We're in this…”

Side Projects

Quotes

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving

“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’” – Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451.”

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” – Woody Allen

”… When we are bonded to a team of men playing a child's game, it is far more than just a game. It is the memory of our childhood and everything sweet and wonderful that filled it – days when there were only endless tomorrows to come. It is not the taste of the berries which we remember as being so sweet, but the sweetness of our childhood and our never-to-return youth that we savor. This is the magic that we are trying to catch as we root on the Sox. Win or lose, they are part of us.”

Harvey Jack Schiller
Chicago
October 2005 - The Chicago White Sox have just won the World Series.

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed – while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” – H. Melville, “Moby Dick”

The sandbox is below:

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Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

- T. S. Eliot

August 1968

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

- W.H. Auden

It is the great dry.
Beautiful, yet desolate.
Be my oasis.

Strange bird perched on my
fence, silhouetted against
a fallout sunset. 

Flown (alternate title: “Little Birds”)

Little birds,
Little surprises,
Where did you come from?
I wasn’t ready.
You didn’t care.
You don’t care.
You sing, you cry,
I can’t stop listening.
So little,
You pull me with you.
Don’t ever let me go.
I grow so old.
Time for you to go.
(Don’t leave me.)
Sit on my shoulders,
Perch in my arms,
Sing in my ears,
Play with my glasses.
Let’s meet again
When this winter passes.

Your do-while loops do not impress me: