Of Buried Tales

For some reason last night, I dreamed that I was going to give a speech some time later, and as part of it, I wanted to recite the opening of the Canterbury Tales. I believe my intent was to denote that the beauty of the prose can only be truly conveyed with proper pronunciation of the Middle English that has essentially been lost to time with the evolution of the language. And that we can progress with our lives and produce works just as aesthetic which will be similarly tied to our times and regions, but no less impactful.

Of course, I woke up to use the restroom and promptly forgot half of the lines even though I’ve basically known them since my Sophomore History teacher made us learn from a taped pronunciation guide in 1994, and had no trouble in the dream. For the curious, I looked through a bunch of recitations online, and most are awful. The closest one I could fined was this one:

The only difference I could see was that we were taught to pronounce “night” more as “nikt” by putting more emphasis on the “gh” portion, but it’s been nearly 30 years so it’s possible I just learned that part wrong and have just been perpetuating it.

I cleaned the microwave this morning, as it desperately needed it. It probably shouldn’t have surprised me at just how stuck-on some of those spots were, but it did take a lot of scrubbing to dislodge everything. Thankfully it’s a rare necessity unless something happens to explode.

The cats have been scheduled for their yearly dental appointment, which is somewhat ironic because I’m nearly 2 years without an appointment since we moved and then Corona reared it’s ugly head. So not only is it necessary to find a new dentist, but I need to contend with doing so during a worldwide pandemic. Potentially overblown to a certain extent or not, it’s not exactly conducive to maintaining a biannual cleaning schedule.

I’ve also decided to write more often in blog form. I think part of the issue that kept me from posting here is that I thought I needed some kind of long-form article or idea to justify posting. But I started this site nearly 20 years ago to just post random stuff. It could be a rant, or an article, or news, creative writing of all description, etc. I think going back to that would give me more opportunity to get back into the practice. It’s a meaningful pursuit, I think, and one that better utilizes the infrastructure I’ve been maintaining all these years. I mean… it’s in the name after all: Web Log. It really doesn’t have to be any more than that.

Until Tomorrow