yours to keep

I find your horribleness somewhat disturbing, and sticky.  I will do my best to leave it with you.

Alone in the Community

I am pretty sure my fingerprint is not unique.  I look at it, and it looks generic to me, like a placeholder until they were ready to give me the real one.  The rest of me seems unique (and large).  It's just this dang fingerprint that has me feeling so darn commonplace.  Oh well, I'm sure that I am not the only one who has had to endure this apparent oversight.

The Creation Story, as told to me - an allegory, probably not blasphemy

God pulled out a single piece of paper from the pack.  It turned out to be magic.  Everything God wrote on that paper was brilliant.  He filled it with two sides of magnificent prose.  He squeezed in all that would fit on that paper. He pulled out the next new blank sheet from the pack.  God wrote, and thought, and wrote, wrote, wrote, but on this new page, all expression was now without charm. God did not want to believe the one unique page of paper was the catalyst. He wanted to know the beauty of those words emanated from inside of him, but that proof did not come. He tried another sheet, and then another, but no words, no thoughts, no explorations, no characters, no thing was as delightful, nor as poetic, as it was on that original miracle page. Eventually he gave in.  God went back to the magic page and crammed in a little more glorious exposition, and forced in a few more grand words, and more, and still more, until the paper was so full, on both sides, that it could no longer be read.  The words were gone, blurred into one full continuous panel of ink filling two sides and all edges.  No longer literature;  now a painting.  And God leaned back to fully take-in what he had created, and said (because he had no appropriately sublime place to write it down), "this is good shit."

3 photos

Happy Thanksgiving

I
am
grateful.
Thank
you.

Bill

Stella (the dog) is watching Bill (the person) walk away.  Bill is our neighbor, but we don't see him very often.  He is probably about 70 years old.  We happened to meet him in the park last night.  Bill had open heart surgery almost exactly one year ago today.  He walks for exercise.  Also, when his family asks him if he remembers stuff they all experienced, he tells them, "yes, I remember"...but he confides to me that he really doesn't remember.  I appreciated him sharing that with me, but I can't help but know something else he doesn't.  Stella knows too.

Memory

Nostalgia.  The tube socks on the professional basketball stars of my childhood were the same type my dad wore when I was a kid.  Two or three bold color rings at the top of the long white stretch cotton.  My dad had a sweet hook shot.  He grew up on paved Chicago basketball courts, but I remember seeing his hook shot on the dirt and gravel driveway hoop at our house.  And I remember him showing me that hook shot.  And I practiced it.  And I learned it.  And I still use it.  We have always been very close, my dad and me.  And my dad is much older now.  And now my dad doesn't remember me. 

author! author!

We are all given the same sky.

Privileged

I rode my bicycle in circles.  Around and around in tighter and tighter circles, arcing a suburban parking lot. I had made it, from my home, with my friends, to that local shopping center for the first time.  My first time away from my parents, by my own power and will.  There was a grocery store, a hardware store, the dime store (now a dollar store), a drug store, and a laundromat.  You couldn't possibly need anything else in that town, and I no longer needed my parents to get there.
I rode my bike with my friends, in that parking lot.  Around that parking lot.
And I found a reason to swear.
"Hell", I said. And I felt strong.
"Hell", I said.  And I knew I earned it.
And because my parents are good, and strong, and would disapprove of my language,
I knew it was wrong, but without them, there would have been nothing to embrace.
"Hell", I said.

I am concerned about the rotation of the earth

7:30 am - I feel out of place
7:56 am - I am in this place, with the rest of you.
8:45 am - I am trying. to stay.
8:48 am - I don't mean I'm going to leave.  I'm just trying to stay.  I can't leave.  I don't want to leave. 

I just feel out of place.

ahem - part II

The way my foot looks in a clean sock is breathtaking.  Sensual, powerful, sleek, elusive but approachable.  Daring, subversive, and mysterious.  And ladies...I have two of them.

ahem

I am over here licking my wounds, literally, and it feels pretty good.  

"Bits of Patriotism" - my review

"Bits" is a good onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is not a good onomatopoeia...is that irony? I believe it is ironic, but irony IS the last refuge of a scoundrel...or is that sarcasm?  Or my basement?

(apologies to Samuel Johnson)

Selfish eulogy for my friend Razzle

He was soft and gentle and forgiving.
and he was
strong, resolute,
and
precise.
precisely
perfect.

I miss him.

(photo stolen from Trinity's files)

wondrous

What if I really am different than the rest of you?
It seems so unlikely, yet so obvious.
It has to make you smile.
What a brilliant world.
A beautiful life.
A wonderous world.
An imperceptible, unperceivable, improbable, glorious God.
You and I are not so different.
Different enough to be the same.
One.
One me.
One you.
One.

My contribution

If I gave 110% effort toward creating a humidifier that would produce 110% humidity, I think I would end up creating 121% humidity...or the end of math and science.

What's really important

The deer tried to jump over my moving car but misjudged her landing. The front corner of my car clipped a leg and hoof which twisted the torso of the deer into the driver's side door, hard.  I was going 55 mph on a rural highway. The side impact force sent me, my passenger, and our car into an uncontrolled spin toward the ditch on the other side of the road. And that event, which probably took one or two seconds of measurable time, was my slow motion moment.  "Slow down!" I heard Darrell (my passenger) shout. With that comment, my concept of time stopped. It happened to be during the backward portion of the uncontrolled spinout.  I turned my gaze from the retreating road and my attention from my grip on the steering wheel and moved my gaze and attention toward him.  I looked, even stared, at the side of his head as he was seated in my passenger seat, and I thought, "Look at you; what in the hell do you think that I am trying to do?"  Now, I recognize that compound sentence of thought alone would take more than two seconds, but as I said, rational time stopped.  Rather than think about my passenger's safety, correcting my course, or about the totality of my life, the potential of my death, the deer, or about traffic, I was simply aghast at being criticized with such an infantile level of demonstrable nonsense. Clearly, his was not a helpful comment.  It still stands, now years later, as a uniquely illustrative, and possibly defining, moment about me.  Which makes it important.  Clearly.

Hi!

My little finger smiled at me today.
I'm glad I noticed,
because he told me it's all okay.
Just like it has always been,
it will always be,
now. You're okay.

mirror

There is an axiom in the forest, among the trees, that paper is the work of the devil;  and that the devil himself, carries a pen.

Nobel?

Referencing obscure pre-industrial poetry is pretentious, but it does seem to enable that esoteric feeling some crave, so here goes, a quote from the 13th century...

me thinks thou doest reek,
like the fish from a sea of death...
reeketh

-Heraculates  1211 A.D.


I read her that poem, written far away and long ago, while she lit a burner on her electric stove.

But she still didn't get the message.

Hmmmm, what's this?

I would like to mail you a butterfly.  To arrive in your mailbox.  A symbol of love, freedom, and the ephemeral nature of beauty.  But, I am afraid it would not survive the heat or cold of the closed mailbox awaiting your retrieval upon delivery. And, upon you opening the mailbox to find a dead butterfly, you may misinterpret my gesture as a threat, or unkind message, or simply as a bad idea, poorly executed, that ended sadly, almost tragic.

So I won't.

And that should be the end of this story. But it isn't, because this story is a metaphor for living life...and if I don't tell you that, you'll miss it. 

Just like I did.