le-Bigs

As I monotoned my way through a slew of scanning this morning - pottery drawings for a certain ceramically prolific excavation I work for - suddenly my music genome radio station was all silence.

and a pepper grinder.

and a base line.

and a conga.

Buenvenidos, Senor Santana. A which point I kicked the desk over, tore up the inked transparency paper, and began gyrating in a latin frenzy throughout the museum, knocking over, among others, a copper tablet from Nuzi, a few vintage field photographs (various archaeo-celebrities ho-humming about something on the ground, beyond the picture frame), and an egyptian doorjamb from the temple of Amun at Karnak (which required a particularly vigorous twist which seems to have thrown my hip out of socket again).
Then I decided mondays aren't always so bad.

The library feels empty again

There's nothing like a conversation with a loved one in which you cloak your actual cares and worries under a layer of babble about academic business. There's a rough form of hypocrisy to it that makes me a bit sick to my stomach.
Another cycle in life; as vulnerability and fragility develop, so too the deposits which bury the impulses best suited to resolve them. In this manner a healthy mind is dependent on a constant archaeological labor. Its absence results in the fossilization of these vulnerabilities (attractive to emotional miners of all sorts) or, in the best (albeit painful) instances, in regular seismic activity which forces such strata to the surface.

Doesn't it seem futile, then, to return to a treatise on settlement differentiation? Something about the moment makes me hope that, returning to the pages I left to write this, I will find in them overriding chaos. It seems unlikely, but I would find a strange relief in reading that, as the Capetian dynasty consolidated it's economic hegemony on feudal France, everything suddenly went terribly wrong and the West European countryside was devasted by a godzillic Auroch. Perhaps it could be the unthinkable offspring of a meteoric impact in the Atlas Mountains.