The game’s afoot!

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

-Walt Whitman

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious…

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

~Truman Capote

Finder’s Keeper’s…

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

-Thomas Jefferson

Now I see bees I won

We are not amused.
-Queen Victoria of Britain

Memento Mori

For three days after death...hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

- Johnny Carson

Musician...heal thyself!

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

- Aaron Copeland

Well, Excuuuuuse Meeee!

I've been on a calendar, but never on time.

-Marilyn Monroe

Potato...Po-Tah-Toe

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

- Douglas Adams

Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est…

Divide and rule...a sound motto. Unite and lead...a better one.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Beyond the Pale

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

- Mahatma Gandhi

The Final Frontier...

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

- Lucille Ball

Happy Birthday, America

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

-Josef Stalin

Ain’t worth a fit...

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

-Douglas Adams

Title Nein!

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

-Walt Whitman

Subtext...

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whipsnade…

It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts.
These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.

- George Washington Carver

Forward thinning ...

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Think Pink!

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

- Charles Dickens

And I smell like them, too.

What a drag it is getting old...

- The Rolling Stones

Senators say the darndest things...

The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia…

- Senator Robert Byrd, West Virginia

or

I should rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.

- Senator Robert Byrd, West Virginia

Et ceterra, et cettera, etc.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best freind. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx

In your face!

No more war! Never again war! … If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.

-Pope Paul VI

Ubi caritas et amor...

…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

-Hermann Goering

I Drink...Therefore I am...

One should drink little...but often.

-Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Deus Ex Machina...

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.

-Mother Teresa

Ode on a Grecian Hair Formula

The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.

-Jawaharlal Nehru

The Cup of Joe

Good coffee is like friendship: rich and warm and strong.

-Pan-American Coffee Bureau

Ich Bin Ein Geleebonbon.

Liebe amerikanische Landsleute, ich freue mich, Ihnen sagen zu können, dass ich ein Gesetz unterzeichnet habe, das Russland für immer für vogelfrei erklärt. Wir beginnen in fünf Minuten mit der Bombardierung.

-Ronald Reagan

The Pipes! The PIPES!

Le garçon d'Oh Danny, les pipes, les pipes appellent...

You can have no idea how much joy this brings me...

-Bob

Facts and figures…

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

- Woody Allen

Green with Envy…

God made the grass, the air and the rain; and the grass, the air and the rain made the Irish; and the Irish turned the grass, the air and the rain back into God.

-Seán O’Faoláin

You…out of the gene pool!

On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

-Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Pathos…

I hope we don’t lose in America this demand that those of us who want this office … must be prepared not to handle the 10-second gimmick that deals, say, with little things like war and peace.

-Walter F. Mondale

Dark Matter...

All I know is a door into the dark.

-Seamus Heaney

Whip it, whip it good.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

-Richard M. Nixon

A Note From Joe

I saw him yesterday, Bob, at the coffee shop. He hasn't been around for weeks. Since this blog was created. Where has he been?

To merely say that I'm worried about Bob, and the strange world in which he sets up residence, would be to understate my concern.

When I walked in, he pretended not to know me. He was scribbling something in one of his BOB'S WORLD spiral bound notebooks, the curious diaries we see but a glimpse of on this blog. He carefully hid the page from me.

"You'll never see what I just drew," he told me. "Nobody will ever see what I just drew."

He then spilled, in what I hope was an accident, some coffee over my hand.

That coffee was hot, and it burned.

Serpents among us…

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

-Adolf Hitler

Don’t be Hatin’

Hitler was an individual of great courage...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.

– Pat Buchanan

Whassu Talkin’ Bout Willis?

I like linebackers. I collect ’em. You can’t have too many good ones.

-Bill Parcells

Resplendent tragedy…

I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

-Flannery O’Connor

Tin Roof… Rusted!

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

- Mark Twain

The Real Dark Side of the Moon...

Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

-Woodrow Wilson

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons ...

I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a God-damn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.

- J.D. Salinger

A Note from Joe, and Questions

They number 14, in all. Fourteen spiral bound notebooks, full of pictures and drawings, marked simply in Magic Marker on the front: BOB'S WORLD.

Welcome to Bob's World. I am not its creator, only its facilitator, who met this odd human in a coffee shop five years ago last February.

So far, this uncomfortable man has felt comfortable only to post three drawings on this blog. Three drawings from the perhaps 1400 pages that comprise the Bob's World diaries.

Will Bob open up and let us in? Will he let us see the rest? Will he post more pictures?

Why is he driven to draw, to empty his soul onto 1400 spiral bound notebook pages, as he sips his coffee so deliberately, and chases away the curious?

One for the Road

The real war will never get in the books.

- Walt Whitman

Welcome to the working weak

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk ... they are sober.

- William Butler Yeats

Welcome to Bob's World

I am a simple man ...

Joe Discovers Genius

It must have been five years ago when we met. He was bearded and was
mumbling something to himself. He had been drinking the same cup of
coffee for what I could only imagine had been hours. Before him sat a
pile of neatly stacked spiral bound notebooks. On the cover of each,
written in Magic Marker, were the simple words: "Bob's World."

But what was inside?

I tried to get a glimpse, but it was hard. The man, whose name I would later learn was indeed Bob, was scribbling something, but what? His free hand covered the frantic hand that was scribbling and drawing ... something.

I finished my coffee. But I waited there. I had to find out what was in
the notebooks! What mysteries did they reveal? What insight or glimpse
would they give me into this strange man's soul?

Coffee shops all around the world are full of people like Bob, who sit drinking the
same cup of coffee for hours on end, mumbling to themselves, throwing an occasional odd glance at a fellow customer, a glance that sometimes would send a smile, and sometimes (more often than not) a chill.

For now, this is all I will say about Bob, and Bob's world, and how we came
to meet. In the coming weeks, you the reader will be getting a glimpse
of just what his odd man was scribbling in those notebooks.

I only ask you one favor: Please do not ever ask me what his drawings mean. I ask this in part (and mostly because) I truly fear the answer.