lifting an albatross

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

it's a magnificient and wonderous creature. a dynamically effective flyer with a tremendous wingspan -- the largest species can have a stretch of 11 feet tip-to-tip. a proficient hunter/forager that navigates well on land and has an unusually keen sense of smell for a bird. it sleeps on quieter tidal patterns, pair-bonds long-term and lives past 50. although centuries' extinct in my part of the world, and wholly terribly endangered everywhere else, many consider it the most noble of the feathered. (it's too late to indulge in much digression, so we'll not quibble about the american bald eagle or ben's favorite, our native wild turkey, ok?)

was coleridge indeed the first with the metaphor of nearly insurmountable guilt? since his "rime" was woven through with sailors' superstitions i suspect not, but nonetheless he seems credited with the incarnation. was he merely extrapolating the legend of the wandering jew, or truly inventing something new? like folklore, even the word itself - *albatross* - traveled from arabic, to english, to spanish, to portuguese (alcatraz, actually) and back to english.

no amount of grasping seems to clear the etymological fog, nor am i intending to channel attenborough...

it's been a few days short of a year that i've been carrying a tremendously and increasingly burdensome specimen around my thin and tired neck. these last few months have proven particularly harrowing. the chicken littles running around, heads nearly lopped off, smearing the market and scaring off potential buyers with their particular brand of alarmist guano, have rampaged from the ny times to forbes. it's been enough to make me wish one certain dead uncle would ouija board-message me with that contact who would torch a car for a small quiet fee...

in his new-found guise, the gentleman caller might take refuge in *karma* smacking me in the face for presuming to use booty from *that* to fund what *this* was to be. (or maybe my tinfoil hat is just too tight, because he was the architect pulled too early from the plan.) however, i'll leave aside the hoo-doo and the doo-doo flinging and remain quite pragmatic in believing my timing of the market just sucked. i bought high, way back then, and was forced to sell low now. no point crying over the spilled milk of all the crappy advice and passive selling tactics of my broker. let's just hope the deal is at last done.