You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
When I was growing up, it meant something of a Mount Olympus quality.
Not some kind of norm but an aspiration – a better person and society in the end.
Back before the very culture clash between the two concepts.
Now we add to that the concept of supremacy, not just white but European. Or perhaps, grudgingly, Chinese.
The question remains: How do we encourage excellence?
And what do we name it?
Remembering gazing forlornly at LS, the cheerleader of the mysterious olive skin, and dark brown eyes etc.
Jenny, a year older, at the other end of our street, too.
The ache … tongue-tied, like facing a childhood hero or famous actor or scientist …
A shadow of that looking at prime foliage.
It’s been a month of “last” tomato sandwiches, each day a surprise blessing.
There have even been at least two “final” rounds with a lawn mower, not that I’m complaining.
And now I’m out on the last cruise of the schooner season.
I’ve already mentioned telephone books.
And rotary telephones.
And now phonebooths and pay phones in general.
It’s largely gone over to donations, too, which typically prefer online credit card entries rather than paper checks. Try finding the address to send that check when you’re searching their website, perhaps on your smart phone.
For that matter, handling cash in general is overshadowed by those plastic cards.
Parking kiosks that demand credit cards do upset me, though.
I know I’m overlooking a lot more. Care to add to the list?
When she said she wasn’t good enough for me, it turned out she was right.
Oh, my, the things I uncovered later.
I really was so green.
Others can say the same of me.
Contrary to widespread opinion, hell is air-conditioned, though prone to frequent power outages. This is crucial, according to the dream, since hades exists largely as something akin to cyberspace – that is, its endlessly interlocked and hushed interiors are covered with wall-to-wall carpeting and bathed in recessed fluorescent lighting, each room assigned to a particular array of deceased souls. There, they may be called up on large-screen, high-definition television screens, although addressing them is an experience akin to conversing with an advanced Alzheimer’s patient. Unlike most funeral homes, these room contain is little furniture and no flowers.
The experience of hell is not fire, as commonly thought, but rather that there’s nothing to do. The result is endless boredom, with only the memories of a single lifetime to reflect on. There’s no music, neither harp nor lyre, and singing never emerges from the throat. Here, insanity is not an option. Escape is impossible from the utter silence. This is solitary confinement amplified, without even periodic meals for variation. The basis of humanity is awareness. In damnation, the awareness is amplified – awareness of nothingness.
Visitors to this realm must be careful not to be separated when a power outage strikes. Do not go to the bathroom alone or attempt to double your productivity by working multiple rooms at the same time. Should two members of a family obtain an unequal knowledge of the deceased – information gleaned separately during their quest to better know the departed, but not yet shared with each other – they may be told they cannot leave hell, but must themselves join its ranks. This is, of course, a bald lie, but getting through its sales pitch is emotionally exhausting.
The power outages occur to reinforce the awareness of eternity. That is, they retain a rhythm of time within timelessness.
Dante, we should note, wrote of inferno before electricity became part of human life. Had it been, he may have placed the worst offenders in electrical chairs, with continuous executions. It’s possible that happens in the deepest recesses, contributing to the power outages. I report only on what I’ve seen, briefly. I remember nothing of our guide, other than his dark, single-color suit and highly polished shoes leading us down a set of three steps into our last room.
~*~
My, I don’t quite know now where that originated in my mind. But there it is, from some deep past.
An alternative way of knowing Christ. Not just about him – or it or they.
And definitely not just by the Book.
Who am I, really? What do I want to be remembered for?
Raccoon as a Trickster, a local Native twist.
Why be clever?
“The distance I felt came not from the country or the people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”— narrator in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood set in Montana
A viral carousel.
Quaker by degrees. Turn up the heat?
Quaker vagabonds were Dharma bums, too. The itinerant ministry proffers its own humor.
Things I learned in two years of college French? Le is pronounced luh.
As a youth, I admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was my favorite.
I never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence my poetry as much as my college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction, especially.
When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget your or I as the psalmist is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”
I’m past the bitterness, the years – all the lost potential.
Upon graduation from college, in my social-activist period, I wondered how American society could possibly afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness – in every ghetto, the ghetto-blasters and Playboy, spreads, graffiti and blues bands. To say nothing of the influence of professional sport, to which nearly every ghetto youth seems to aspire. (And more than a few others.)
So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my vision. Extravagant expenditures in those realms are overshadowed by big-league athletics sports for similar reasons and then by military budgets across much of the globe.
See how much each person needs to reach into the realms of thought and imagination – the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.
So I noted.
By the way, Versailles still offends me.
Jnana's Red Barn 