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Thursday, December 13, 2007 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL

Fungus, Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL, December 13, 2007
Fungus, Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL, December 13, 2007

Later: I got in a nice 2 hour hike and made it back to the RV just as it started to sprinkle. Good timing. Tomorrow I hope to hike a little farther down to the Lower Pool Park. I have a hunch one can get a view of the Demopolis Lake dam and lock from there.

Wood duck wonder

This afternoon, in a repeat of yesterdays observation, shortly after sundown, a pair of wood ducks paddled into the cove and just beyond my peninsula here at site 42 they dove, never to be seen again. Where did they go? How long can they stay submerged? Why did the swim all that way up the cove from the river when they could have flown. Doesn't it take more energy to paddle than to fly?

Night camp

Site 42 - Foscue Creek Campground, Demopolis AL

Beware of Hypnotic Media

To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

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