ON WHAT MEAT 

 I had a long, entirely unnecessary call with a customer contact yesterday.

Because of the peculiar reason for the call and the fact she was very forthcoming about the obvious fact what we were discussing and the reasons she had requested the call were entirely irrelevant and uninteresting to her, we were on the phone far longer than either of us anticipated and discussed and shared matters completely irrelevant to our dubious and improbable relationship.

She told me about her adult son who has some undisclosed disability. Her relationship with him has defined her purpose in life and shapes her expectations, plans and fears.

Random fact: She stopped going to parent-teacher conferences when he was in second grade because it was too much. He is now twenty-five.

Another son also just had another grandchild. They just keep having babies, those two. This all takes place in Kansas.

Memory came up in context of what we were actually on the call to discuss. I mentioned that experience of going into another room and forgetting why.

She got excited and stated she was interested in studies of psychology and had learned that the physical boundaries like doorways were prompts for memory.

She didn't say it like that. I am interpreting. I of course then added to her superficial knowledge and my own by sharing the free energy principle and the idea our brains create models of the external world.

During the longer course of the conversation as I shared more and more stuff I have been cribbing, she asked a key question.

We learn these things and can repeat them, but does the information translate into anything useful we can act upon? Does learning influence behavior is another way of putting it.

She is a reactionary person, fascist adjacent if not openly fascist. I am interpreting again from my interactions. Only fifty-four, she seems much older.

I answered her question with an example in sports, testosterone's influence and how a coach, knowing how T causes overconfidence, undervaluing others' input and impulsivity, will use drills and rules to curb young players' behavior in the game.

It was not the best example but it was what I could come up with and factually on point.

What I want to highlight is her ambivalence to learning, to her own evinced interest and enthusiasm, and her skepticism of the value of knowledge and the implied doubt of her own interests in other respects.

Here we see in the wild the origin of doubting science, of devaluing learning altogether, and of how we can at times act against our own self-interest.

At one point in the conversation, without conscious intent, I brought up my education degree and how it had served me in contexts outside teaching.

She has an MBA. She had started the program dubious of its worth and of her own interest in it, but the studies had then gone on to define her life's passion.

These discussions did not come up as conscious rebuttals of her skepticism. The sequence was disjointed. Only this morning did I start to make connections.

Humans are fascinated by things, and curious. But then our biology and social relations retract for practical reasons from what seemed relevant and then later pales and stales in light of other priorities real and imaginary.

We descend the heights too quickly having enjoyed the view too briefly to understand coherently what we glimpsed and, all too often, fail to integrate the insights into who we are now and going forward.

The Dog of the Car That Caught You

 A new myth if it is to be grand enough to be the myth of the time and place must take in all the pieces and put them in place.

The universe, all that is, ever was, and ever and never will be, started and remained a singularity. There was a question that triggered infinite questions, a sound, a word, a note, a chord, etc.

In the parlance of our times, the Big Bang, let us humor the science, and, skipping over the distraction of opening credits, let's get to our entrance.

Why matter? Okay, then why life?

Things were clean without organic stuff all over them. From what we know now it is but a little spill. We keep looking for other possible patches but haven't found much yet.

All the energy was together. Then it spread and the energy levels went down in places to allow for our messiness. The early creeping gave rise to a more peripatetic process, an intentional tension of then and now, here and there, back and forth.

Now we look back to see the beginning, but why? The answer is here, in what we do.

It occurs to me even as it occurred in the first place.

Let us make a mirror of our minds and reflect back, from the beginning to now, and in so doing, we reverse engineer the processes which begat us (and everything else) here.

But now is also yet forever and never (is, was, will be). To do what we do we have to recreate the universe in our thoughts and in our little chatter. We even talk back to our beginning, in our thoughts and prayers.

In this sense, what we make of everything by our processes out of universal processes is the second coming.

You Had to Have Been There

I was hungry at work so I went

Across the street to the

Sandwich place there and

Got a six-inch cold cut on flat bread and

Didn't want it heated but the person said

It's really stiff without heating so I

Got it heated and

Had American Cheese and

Black olives, lettuce, onions, mayo and

The rest of the process at Subway and then I

Walked back across the street and

Saw Sam my coworker smoking

At the place everyone's supposed to

Smoke and

I walked up and asked for

Some secondhand smoke and

Started eating my sandwich while

He smoked and we

Talked and

He made some kind of joke mentioning something which

I can't recall but I do

Recall saying it's a

Poem I'll write on Facebook later and

Now I can't remember what the thing

Was but I remember every other thing.

KLK

7/30/14

Not Letting This One Get Away

I think it was my friend the comedian TK who first brought this to my attention. In the movie To Have and Have Not, loosely based on the Hemingway long short story with the same title and pretty much nothing else in common, the piano player character Cricket played by Hoagie Carmichael not to be confused with Stokely Carmichael warrants more attention than most including me are wont to give. He has for black and white film the peacock flair in his haberdashery and his mannerisms and almost mystical intuition about the other characters to make him a veritable chick magnet in the real world if not in the childish world of film's conception.

Now there are some who object to using words like chick or bird or broad for women, and others who might ask, Why wouldn't Old Hoagie be attractive to men also? Wasn't it a man who pointed all this out to you? I don't know a lot about the man Hoagie Carmichael, and next to Bogie and Bacall, I have to confess I hadn't noticed him consciously until he was pointed out to me in detail, the striped shirt and arm garters, the subtle smirks and soft-spoken Jedi spiel. Who was he to Hecuba, and Slim to none?

Nevertheless he was a chick magnet, and when I think about it, he improves other films. The Kirk Douglas movie Young Man With His Horn is certainly a film worth watching much because of his, Hoagie's, presence. But getting back to the whole inappropriateness of some words and behaviors, I just want to add I have never been able to forgive the fact Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens did not appreciate, no, hated the novel Pride and Prejudice. What kind of human doesn't get that Jane Austen is likely the greatest genius in literature and Pride and Prejudice bears evidence to the subconscious miracles of human creativity and insight into human nature? How can anyone not find and follow that?

The evidence is also there in the song featured in To Have and Have Not, a song, I believe written both tune and words, by Hoagie, Am I Blue, which starts apparently in a heterosexual world from a woman's persona and then presumably switches to a man's: "...if each plan with your man done fell through" to "Now she's gone away, rooo! baby, am I blue!" Some day I shall sing this for you, and you will be impressed because I do a beautiful rendition.

But frankly I would like for Mark Twain aka Sam C. to be alive so I could tell him what I think and then slap him not unlike my older nephew's longing for dinosaurs to be alive so he could hunt them, though less lethal. Neither of these desires in any way undercuts the excellence of either the dinosaurs or Twain. I feel having violent ideations towards extinct creatures is permissible. It is not only possible but demonstrably so that a person, moi-meme aussi (or is it Aussie?), can admire what is noble and great while also decrying and even in petty moments belittling what is not so great in anything including a person or a species. In fact, as was so well put by another, The good men do is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Shakespeare.

I have lost track of where I was going with this but I do hope it encourages others including those reading now to look in your library and write. That is, get thee to a repository of information and review or see for the first time firsthand things I have referenced here likely beyond your ken and draw your own conclusions and come to other notions of your own, and if I had my druthers, I be there looking over your shoulder figuratively the whole time until you felt inclined to slap or even hunt me, living or extinct. I'll put another shrimp on the barbie and slip into something more comfortable like a carb coma while I wait somewhere stopping for you if my present gift is not fetching enough for your coming attractions.

El Gato Negro

 

 

Young crows appear invalid, even mangy,

Strutting their stuff into the street,

Just like a couple of cowpokes, rangy

With stilted steps, as they gawk for tidbits to eat.

Around the corner on a slab of concrete lies

A form epitomizing night

Until it unfolds itself gazing with a guise

That shows surprising poise and light.

But it is all a ruse arousing only passing

Attendance from pedestrian

Neighbors whose ignorant ways

Miss the details of what is too familiar in

The furniture of their perambulant daze.

Yet these set pieces failed escape of glassing,

Although contorted by the lens of borrowed stays.

 

KLK

8/22/20

Star Trek Reflections, Warp One

Mr. Spock, Get Us Out of Here!

Even as a child I could see problems with the original Star Trek, particularly in terms of social and psychological concepts not only in the characters but also in the narratives and assumptions about progress. Technology had made amazing breakthroughs. Social relationships were, however, more than stagnant. They seemed to have gone backwards.

Hierarchy was the most obvious example. Why were there still ranks and titles and some above others, others expected to be subservient? Sex roles also seemed set in Victorian stone. The 1920's had more aggressive exploration of gender than any of the worlds, let alone the star ship milieu. Even in episodes in which these relationships and identities were questioned, the questions were posed less aggressively than, far short of, the questions being posed by people in the streets of the real world. What could have happened in the time between to humans and extraterrestrials to make them less assertive of equality than the real world of the 20th century? Why were they less aware of identity and how arbitrary definitions do not always allow individuals to express who they genuinely feel themselves to be?

A far more disturbing quandary for my child mind came up, and it still persists to irk like an irritant grain in my sensitive craw to this day, inspiring me at last to write these things out. I am partly ashamed of my fellow human beings for not having more sense. I was reflecting on how unbearable most TV shows and movies are and wondering why anyone watches them, let alone loves and extols these ill-conceived representations. There are sufficient good examples to raise the question, Why not more like that? But the disturbing question, although it might have been about the lack of intelligence and discernment being brought to bear on what serves as entertainment and particularly creative, fictional fare, was actually focused on the character Spock and further implications about the human mind.

Spock is half Vulcan and half human. He is the offspring of an Earth woman and a Vulcan man. The extraterrestrials in the original and even subsequent Star Trek series and movies are almost all merely shifted representations of human racial and ethnic groupings. Indeed, the races and nationalities represented by the crew of the Enterprise are only slightly removed from 20th century stereotypes. The presence of a black woman whose original language is Swahili, a Russian man as part of the Federation, not a Cold War adversary, and a Japanese man, a Scotsman with a pronounced accent as if we are to believe the noticeable impact of broadcasts on language would not persist in the future to eliminate such superficial and readily changed features of speech. In the central cast of characters, Spock is the lone non-human. He stands as prominent in casting as Cosby did in I Spy, a ground-breaking role for an African-American. Spock fits right in, and he was accepted by the audience including myself as a wonderful second fiddle to Kirk's prima donna. He's always still a likely target of the humans' amusement, the way WASP-minded Americans still often look at other ethnic, religious, or racial groups. Think of the typical ethnic joke (if you are of an age and can recall them). That's the attitude embodied in Spock's relationship with the wholly human characters. His quirky logical limitations - Oh, those Vulcans! So much like slavishly overly seriously adolescents! - serve as the focus of this bemused secret superiority all the humans feel about his alienness, despite the display of his enormous advantages, physical and mental, over the dominant Earth humanoid group members.

But that was less apparent to me as a child and less questionable than this: How could Spock be half human and half Vulcan, the progeny of an Earth woman and a Vulcan male if these two groups were not the same biological species? Even as a child I understood the fundamentals of evolutionary biology. Apparently the writers on the show did not. Leaving out the expressed differences in actual biology - organ placement and blood composition - the idea that different creatures could breed together is something out of a previous time, but not surprising, really, that it was there, like a sore thumb, on this innovative, sci-fi show. Science fiction is always actually about the present. How could it be otherwise? It is a projection of now onto an imaginary future which is really just the present revealed, stripped of illusions and apologies for its failure to live up to potential. Technology and other changes, whether utopian or dystopian, are comment on the present state of things. Why don't we have cars that fly and women who are still sexy to a 14-year-old boy but also nerdy smart and lethal?

The mid-twentieth century existed culturally and intellectually as a holdover hybrid of Victorian and medieval ideas. Concepts of race and sex were still patriarchal and Caucasian Eurocentric; battles for changing mores and struggles for equality were being waged on a 19th century battlefield along lines defined in the late 1800's at best. The 20th century arguably began in the 1980's, when certain understanding and awareness translated into actual behavioral changes and a shift of values, and consequently resulted in a resurgent backlash against those changes. I'm limiting this to the United States, although arguably the rest of the world was and is still behind, whether we like to accept that or not, in these attitudes.

But getting back to poor Mr. Spock, consider his character and unscientific origin. Is it not just a transfiguration of the dominant human attitude toward the familiar other? Spock isn't an Asian. He's not a Jew or a black fellow. He is like and unlike us. We like him because he's our Vulcan, almost like a pet. We can unleash his amazing capabilities, the nerve pinch, the mind meld, his savant-like abilities to calculate and draw conclusions and also build things on the spot from flotsam and jetsam and wee bit of otherly magic. It's just amazing what those folks can do with stuff!

All of that occurred to me as a child but it did not broach my sense of indignity until later. My incredulity that the creators of the show could miss the specifics of biological accuracy, and also could have technological vision without concomitant social change, dominated my childish impressions. I was just stuck on the fact that hierarchy is portrayed as immutable. Antagonism of groups based on physical and cultural difference, as well as rival power structures seeking to be the top dog, remains inevitable. Well, perhaps you have to address the audience where it is first in order to get them to move somewhere further along. Sure, and shucks, let's all be morons, which, of course, apparently when it comes to this stuff, we are. And yet the examples also remain, the great works that almost by magic flash insight about human nature in the way the characters in full human dimension leap off the page or screen. How can we be blind to those stark contrasts, or do we just set aside the memory of better fare because we are so hungry for anything at all, something novel, that we settle for a quick fix after the indignities of our day?

I don't have an explanation for why most of us, if not all of us, do not see the obvious and make constant leaps of innovation in our own lives, let alone why we watch these horrible and depressing shadow plays, the food for our own hypotheses and frames, our lenses on ourselves, others, and the universe. These obvious distortions in fictional characterization and narratives are in a sense mirrors for our own idiocy. Like the ideas we embrace and reject in our actual lives and choices, in our attitudes and behaviors, what piques our interest and tickles our fancy in entertainment reveals what's genuinely going on in our minds and helps delineate our active psychology.

Finally, I think of Spock making a radio out of junk and being able with the touch of a hand on the face and head to get into the mind of another. That's a metaphor, a magic moment of imagination, for this whole meditation. Why can't we be more like Spock not only in the choices we make for entertainment, but also in our lives and the way we go about understanding the actual world in our own creation of reality that serves as our vision of now and what we can be? I still prefer Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice remains the greatest miracle of human character presented on the page, with all its limitations. Too bad perhaps the author did not have a more fantastical inclination. But we have to meet our authors and the audience at the place they are, even if we might imagine further along where they, and we, could be.

KLK

7/18/20  

Live long and prosper...

THE RED WHEELBARROW VARIATIONS

The Red Wheelbarrow

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens.

 

Variation I

by Careless Carol Walloons, Waitress

so much depends

on a plain

 

omelet no potatoes

on the plate

 

chicken salad san sans

butter and mayo

 

bread toasted and

chicken held between your knees.

 

Variation II

by Carla Willis Collins

 

nothing really depends

on anything

 

because without

anything

 

everything would be

nothing

 

beside itself about

the lack of chickens

Buick is a Bird

We never do outdistance childish egocentrism,

Never do permanently...
Tired moments catch up with us,
Experience not strictly physical,
Based in the senses, depth of life
Returning in tired moments, and we see
Again, as we did as a child.

A flower among the garbage may
Bring vastly differing reactions out
Presented to a crowd, white Styrofoam evoking various responses,
Bright petals offer contrast for the eye,
And so a moment differs as we differ over a lifetime;
Details of cans or candy wrappers cause
A different response, a rippling in the breeze
Moves us in different ways at one time,
Another very differently.

Frames. We frame everything with or without:
He had been previously a wedding photographer
And aspirant key grip which is why
We trust his eye.
One snatch of how the projects had a look
Of an upscale tract, palm tree framed
Conveniently, luxurious, excluding squalor,
Shoes over telephone lines nowhere in the photo.

All you need is good luck, luck and a bag of chips,
Then you have everything, and a bag of chips.
Moments like fluttering bright petals
Among white Styrofoam and bottles, candy wrappers, paper scraps
Stirred by a breeze,
Images juxtaposed without a cause,
Just sounds articulated lacking context.

That, and a bag of chips.
Enter the seagulls, this feast for the eye
Without explanation or a reason why.
We never permanently distance ourselves in
The moments we find randomly when
Luck strikes, luck and a bag of chips.
A bag of chips strikes like a seagull digging in a bag of chips
Among the garbage, petals of a flower fluttering,
That and a bag of chips.

KLK
7-2-14

Objects Appear

Sleep is not always sleep, the difference

In the way we slip into dreams, and that

Creates a different experience.

Sometimes one says I cannot sleep and will

Just rest and wait for dawn; but then one slips

Into a state of odd impressions still.

The mind has moved unwittingly per chance

To gain advantage over its own lack

Of effort to lose headway and advance.

The mirror magnifies those things we saw

Some other time and places them too near

For deep reflection ever to be clear.

It is a place one oddly wants to stay

Because it is disconnected from the day.

KLK

3/3/20

All Calls Are Recorded for Quality

The call fell out of queue and the agent answered with, “This is…, and how can I help you?”

“That’s one of my favorite names.”

She laughed.

“What information do you need for your process?”

“Your details are already on my screen. What do you need help with?”

“I see my deductibles have been reached but when I view this latest set of claims, it says You Pay all these dollars. I want to understand this. Can you help with that?”

“Yes, I can help.”

“Great. What I want to understand is this. Are these charges outside the deductibles? If I’ve met my deductible but still each month, I’m going to be paying thousands of dollars, I might just kill myself because it’s not worth it.”

She laughed again not nervously, unreservedly.

“Let me take a look. What’s the dollar amount, the total charges, you’re seeing?”

She was able to pull up the records on her side and mumbled as she read the notes.

“See, I have to plan for payments like this.”

“It looks like we’re waiting for more information from your provider. These charges are pending.”

“So, does that mean I’ll have to pay them eventually? I have to plan in advance: How many liquorstores I need to rob and how many little old ladies’ purses I need to grab.”

She laughed again.

“It’s just the way the charges appear at this point. Since you’ve met the deductible, we’ll cover the charges.”

“Great. Don’t worry I was only kidding. About suicide. The liquor stores and purse snatching, I’d appreciate if you keep that to yourself.”

    

KLK

3/1/20

Hungry Gorge

HUNGRY GORGE

"That's what you think." A disapproval stated
As indirect as it can be equated
With secret failure and a secret sorrow
We know and don't; tomorrow and tomorrow,
A parent oddly states a contradiction
When you expected accolades, prediction
Of something more, a history unspoken
Of expectations, and great promise broken.
It says directly you have missed your place
But indirectly you're a great disgrace.
Context abandoned, this is straight emotion
From some strange and familiar devotion
Missed in the moment of reactions of
Mystification with the ones we love.

KLK
9/13/19

Russian Dolls and Mirrors Facing Mirrors

  I used to live in an apartment with one bathroom that had two mirrors opposite each other. A friend pointed out how this created an infinity of mirror images. I had not noticed it until he pointed it out to me. He was a refugee from Latvia, from the former Soviet Union, and had come to the United States under the asylum process with his family. Some other time perhaps I could write about him, his daughter, his wife, either as straight reporting or as a fictionalized version. Maybe I could do both. Both or either would have a rhetorical purpose.

  I have this set of ideas. I could write a story about a person who writes a story about a person who has tools for detecting radioactivity and, in the wake of a nuclear war, warns others not to eat the canned food because of high levels of strontium ninety. The others ignore the warning and eat the canned food and die. The one who warned them takes bitter satisfaction, having been right and having been ignored, having tools that go beyond what others can detect, and the person in my story who wrote the story would be supremely satisfied, thinking about the others in the world who ignore insights, who lack the tools so to speak.

  I have written a description of story and about an actual situation. It is about an aspect of actual story. I am not satisfied with it or with its echoes of ideas because I lack confidence that anyone including myself has the tools for measuring the levels. Think of stories with unreliable narrators. What is really going on with those? For instance, that story by Thomas Mann about the train wreck. Does it really work on reflection? Who really writes a story? Who is the author of meanings and interpretations? Is the writer hiding behind a conceived author? Are the readers putting up an author of their own imagining between themselves and the author’s idea of the writer, between themselves and the text, between themselves and themselves reading the text?

 

I have this set of ideas which reminded me of many other things. If only I had more face to shave. That place with the mirrors is not remote. It is just down the street and owned by the same partnership that owns the building I now live in and have lived in for eighteen years. What is strontium ninety? Why did I include that specificity? Is that detail a source of satisfaction to the imagined author, the writer you imagine?

Let No One Put Asunder

Years, decades ago, when the board of Santa Monica schools and the college split, my father considered running for the college board. My mom had been on the combined boards for some time. My dad had attended meetings because even after working a full day he loved to spend time with my mom, driving all the way into Santa Monica with her. He learned what the boards did and thought he could do a good job.

He went to one forum about running for the college board. At that meeting, a woman said to him, "Why don't you go back where you came from?" He was stunned. He replied he lived here now and his wife was on the board and running for re-election on the school board. The woman said it was good about my mom being on the board. She was going to vote for her.

After that my dad decided not to run. It wasn't worth it, dealing with someone like that. Dealing with that kind of obvious bigotry and subhuman hatred just takes the humanity out of everyone. My emotional response even now, as I talked to my dad on the phone about it, dehumanizes that woman. I'd kill her. I'd kill her children and put them in a cage. Right? No. I wouldn't. But that's the emotional response. And some weak-minded people, as well as the demagogues like Trump, fall victim to their own unexamined emotions and imaginary scenarios of difference and division.

That's not America. If we can claim any kind of greatness it is this: The value of all human beings is what we stand for and, in the immortal words of our founders, yes, for all their flaws and failings, We the people hold these truths to be self-evident, that all of us are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There was no footnote with exceptions. There was no appendix with a hierarchy or a table with relative valuation of life and rights based on country of origin, sex, or religion, sexual orientation or any other false delineation used to dehumanize one group or individual. All of us created equal with equal rights is what the founders established in order to create a more perfect union.

E Pluribus Unum. From the many one is the familiar Latin phrase in our national parlance. Let us now add this: From Difference, Community. From Diversity, UNITY. Like the thin straws easily broken if separated but when held together unbreakable let us understand once and for all time that what has made this country exceptional is inclusiveness, and what makes us stronger is understanding of what we share matters more than what divides. That is our great common heritage, regardless of our origins and, yes, even of our differences. The differences are small when we understand them in the light of what share, what we have in common. We are all dedicated to the aspiration that our founders set forth on this continent. Let us continue in that common endeavor together. What our founders and their successors down to us have brought together let no one put asunder.

KLK
7/15/19

The Secret Life of Emotional Response

Walter Mitty Revisited

The original short story by Thurber does not lead to actual adventures in the main character's life. His fictional life remains ordinary. Unlike either the Danny Kaye or the Ben Stiller films, the story ends quite poignantly and defiantly delineating a permanent difference between the character's daydreams and his mundane days, filled with routine errands and awareness of his own short-comings; but his submissiveness to his wife and knowledge of his own lack of practical heroism or heroic capability are offset by his fantasies and a capacity to imagine himself heroic. His ultimate lapse shows he is a hero. His imagined defiance to the imaginary firing squad, as all his daydreams, is an emotional response. His final daydream is a metaphor for his defiance to his ineffectual and ordinary life.

This is the psychology most of us live with to some degree. Although we may not imagine ourselves doing grandiose things in battle, in the operating room, overcoming mechanical and natural challenges with aplomb while others watch in open admiration, we like to believe we are better than we are at what we do, and thought of more highly than we may actually be from moment to moment by our peers. We create these pockets of notions about ourselves moment to moment, and how we would like to be seen, in order to fend off the slights and errors of our ordinary life which seem outrageous to the ego and cause the id to writhe eloquent in emotional soliloquy.

On a further consideration, this psychological perspective is adolescent. That is, the desire to impress and be admired, the need to prove oneself and gain approval of others, ought to wane in adulthood and be eclipsed by a growing acceptance of actual limitations. As we age and mature, we learn to take satisfaction in what we can do. A mature person takes pleasure in the ordinary events of his or her life, and does not see them as something less than acts of physical bravery or publicly acknowledged excellence. Indeed, mediocrity replaces excellence easily in our minds, analogous to our pleasure with bad food over fine cuisine when we are truly hungry and happy to have something to eat at all. In the story, however, his wife's dominance and his submissiveness differentiate the character from most of us. The marital relationship indicates why the character has stagnated. He has a conflict in his choices, and his daydreams are paradoxically both a cause and a result.

Similar conflicts show up for most of us in how we respond to fiction. What stories grab our attention indicate what lapses into fantasy we use to contrast with our own limitations in order to bolster identity and stave off what we may believe subconsciously to be our short-comings. Movies, TV shows, books, songs, news reports, viral videos, and even a passing joke, can reveal what's going on under the surface. We all have a submissive marriage with reality and a secret life that keeps us going.  

This then is perhaps my secret life. As much made up of illusion as allusions, and of self-image imagined as of ideas expressed, I find satisfaction and comfort in putting words together in a way unique to me. This is a persona none may ever know or admire, but in my own mind I become the hero of my story. Whether it is good or bad does not matter in the end because I know the simple act of thinking makes it so.

MICHAEL CLAYTON | The Tortured Path to Redemption

Still Life in a Changing Seen

Lyft lost $911.3 million in 2018. Lyft's IPO last week was very successful in terms of an IPO. Something else is always going on. I think of Van Gogh. Others think of him, too. There are artists who imagine they Like Emily Dickinson are Doing something different that will someday be Appreciated, and there are artists who do Paintings for hotels and believe they are Contemporary Rembrandt Van R's. There are educated, discerning persons who Adore some little band playing a derivative Sort of music and then who also turn around and Hold forth in conversations about how the current Political situation parallels another time of empire. Then they are abruptly upset because their Omelet was not what they expected, all of them At once in different places, all having omelets. Perhaps their omelets differ, and their Expectations differ, and their omelets somehow Got mixed up when in a perfect world they would have Got matched perfectly with the omelet-eater’s Expectations for eggs. Do we know What Emily and Vincent thought of Voltaire, or how They liked their eggs? All kinds of things continue As previously happened and no one is Apparently the wiser or more aware than An unclothed creature rooting for Grubs and tubers as a pride of Lions stalked its illiterate tribe. The oral records now only are An imaginary memory. Can you see The wormhole in a sunflower? KLK 3/31/19