I’ve seen a lot of these on cars in various states:

If you want peace,
work for justice.

I always want to add a postscript:

If you want justice,
you may have to go to war.

Three weeks into my lease, I have finally finished moving all my stuff to Raleigh, though there’s plenty of unpacking still to do. At the worst of it, when I had hastily unloaded three truckloads and unpacked very little, the place felt rather like the burrow of a gopher or groundhog: completely full of furniture and stacks of boxes, with meandering paths, just wide enough for me to squeeze through, connecting the front door to the kitchen, the armchair, the table with the laptop, the bathroom, and the corner of the bedroom with the futon in it. As I get the books out of boxes and into the bookshelves and then flatten the boxes, it’s starting to clear out a bit and look fit for human habitation.

Following up on the last part of my previous post, not only is there a Powhite (Po’ White?) Parkway in Richmond, there’s a Pohick (Po’ Hick?) Road ninety miles further north near Alexandria. There’s also a Po River in between which does not seem to have anything to do with the Italian Po. It is one of the three tributaries of the Mattaponi, and the other two are (can you guess?) the Matta and the Ni. It’s fortunate that whoever named the rivers — presumably the local Indians — did not take their agglutinative naming convention to the next level, or the river into which the Mattaponi flows would be the Mattaponipamunkey or the Pamunkeymattaponi, after its two principal tributaries. Then again, perhaps they did, giving the colonists all the more reason to rename it the York River.

More substantive posts on politics and literature should follow shortly.