Our displaced by fire, seething with grump, mile churning, bike with too much travel riding, tobacco chewing, born again redneck family man Mark Weir checked in Yesterday with a brief pair of emails:

Just had a malfunctioning fire alarm go off in our house we are staying in.

Talk about a heart stopper. 5am early bird special 7 fire alarms went off at the same time.

I was so disoriented that when I came out of the haze I was almost more pissed that there was no fire.

You should do yourself a favor and try it sometime.

Hating my new life.

Followed by:

Start drinking early today I think…

Ironically, minutes after receiving that email, this showed up from Chris Duncan:

We’ve got a lot of comments on our (albeit skeletal) support of Chris. Some are confused, some are hate filled. Some think we are really doing ourselves a lot of damage. And every time we spread any of his art (I like to think of it as art anyway. I mean, it’s not really marketing. And it is creative, and it does spark controversy, and provoke thought, so why the hell not?) out into the world, I get a barrage of phone calls and emails from Chris hisself. Truth be told, the dude makes me nervous, and I don’t always answer the phone. But I remain curiously fascinated with his efforts. Fascinated, but still sometimes totally confounded. As with the above video. So it is with art. My girlfriend likes to point out that I have “no emotional connection” to art. I prefer to think of it as a “limited emotional range,” usually wavering between confusion, joy and sorrow. Chris Duncan’s videos inspire all three limited emotions at once, speaking for myself.

Maybe it’s the limited emotional range that stunts me as a writer. I can spin a good yarn about bicycles, but I’m no Sy Safransky. Sy Safransky is the founder of a magazine called The Sun, which any word geek should be regularly ingesting, because it is always filled with words that make you think. And in my case, be confused, filled with joy, and saddened. Which are all good things. Here are a couple gems from his notebook in the January 2010 issue:

THE FIRST DECADE of the twenty-first century is nearly over. If I’d read that sentence fifty years ago, when I was a fourteen-year-old boy, I would have imagined atomic-powered flying cars and world government, not traffic jams and global warming, and not cities that looked more or less the same, and not people who still wear dresses and high heels (high heels!) and suits and ties. Ties! In 2009!

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY it took six months to cross the country by covered wagon. At the start of the twentieth century it took six days to make the trip by train. Yesterday I flew from North Carolina to California in a little more than six hours. The engineering marvel of a modern jetliner borders on the miraculous, yet how mundane flying has become. There I was, soaring through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, fulfilling one of humanity’s age-old dreams, and all I could think about was how little legroom I had and when the couple behind me was going to shut up.

IF I PRAY DURING TAKEOFF, why not pray at the start of each day? What distinction do I make between the gods of the earth and the gods of the sky?

Check the full notebook here, and spend some time reading some of his other columns, too. Then pick a back issue, and read some of them cover to cover. Good writing, lots of it, stuff that makes you think. Me? I’ve got my limited emotional range and my hamstrung, hamfisted way with words where even I can’t tell if the words and I are dancing or wrestling. At least I still gots my day job.