"The Time Has Come," The Walrus Said...

Lewis Carroll's 1872 children's book Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There contains a poem called "The Walrus and the Carpenter", and there's a stanza from it that runs through my head every so often ...usually at the strangest times:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
     "To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax --
     Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot,
     And whether pigs have wings."

Maybe it's just a infinitesimally small bit of lysergic acid diethylamide still whirling about deep in the temporal lobe of my cerebrum; a leftover from those reckless and irresponsible days nearly five decades ago, but if - after checking in the mirror - I can see my face isn't melting off of my skull I can breathe a sigh of relief and recognize it's merely a time for a break, and my mind is just a few steps ahead of me.

When I've worked stressful jobs in the past it was more of a regular occurrence,  but now it just pops up on an irregular basis, and I'm kind of glad it does: it's a gift to have gentle reminders to look up from life and note not only the passage of time, but what's out there we might be missing.

I've been with and seen far more than my share of people passing on to wherever they go after leaving their human shells here on earth to those of us left behind, and not a one of them has shared how they wished they'd have spent more time at work.

My own father told me one of the few regrets he had was that he didn't travel more. "Go while you're younger," he told me "before you need a walker!"

With that in mind, I'm putting Bao-Bao's blog into lower gear for just a short bit.  All of us have friends, and I'm going to hit the road and visit some of mine.

"So?" you might ask "Why not just post from the road?"  Well, I probably will... but not as often as usual, and certainly not five days a week. I'm going to visit friends and see places and do things that just don't jive with time in front of my travel laptop.

I write everything I post here - nothing is submitted by kind readers - and I was raised it's not fair to lift things from other sites and publish them as my own.  A friend who teaches in Korea jokes about telling their students "if you can find it online, odds are I can, too", and I get a laugh out of that. I simply don't have time to stockpile "filler" posts, nor would I want to foist them off on you.

Second, since I do my level best not to fall back on posts a mile off the topic of Thailand or other Asian countries I can't do posts about, say, the U.S. elections or the World Series... that just seems silly to me, and messages I've received have backed me up on that.

At least 98% of the 3,000+ photos posted here have been my own, and that also takes some time and thought. There are already plenty of web sites and bloggers that scour the internet for the images others post (probably without the intent of seeing them end up on a stranger's site) and run them as their own, but that's not me.

So... "The time has come".  I'll be around, and I hope you'll still check in when you can. You can always contact me through the email on the site here, and I'll post as time allows over the next month.

Stay healthy, stay safe, and stay in touch!