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Zoolander Two

Zoolander Two

And tell to me of Zoo of Lander Two.
A richer tapestry of nonsense you
will never ever know oh youth ah bold!
full images concepts pop stars enfold
ing us we viewers, partakers who laugh.

I laughed so merry, felt just almost sure
that we’ll attain the best for all through fun.

Remember the thesis in “Cabaret”: that the Nazis took over because people were too busy with parties and general flippant living to pay attention to the looming disaster? But this silliness of Zoolander; it seemed serious. And it contemplated a lot of ideas–all with a kindness, a light touch, a generous and gentle hand. I liked it. A creative explosion of jokes, images, and references; likable characters; a frolicking deconstruction of pop culture from the worship of beauty to the glorification of sex to the dueling bumpersticker-logics to the obsession with political correctness, to celebrity worship. But most of all the fun! They were having fun goofing exploring in ideas, images, characters, worlds. It was fun without being mean; life can be fun without being terrible and that is wonderful–that is the antidote to the violent certainties that wall people and peoples off from one another. Let’s have fun, be open-minded, and work on the nuts and bolts of policy together–what if it were fun to think not about how X must be terrible because the evil party thought of it and Y must be great because the good party thought of it, but to think about policies together, about the details of how we can move real situations in better direction. What if experimenting in cautiously growing a better and better government was part of the fun of life? What if politics was a nice, fun project where we all work together to help us all win?

AMW/BW

A Name for Our Poetry Podcast

A Name for Our Poetry Podcast

A wolf howls in the night; your friends are gone and there’s bloody mud under your fingernails.
The coyotes shout the twisted moon; your love is gone and the trench is caving in.
Who will stop the evil?
Who will find the song to combine this troubled inland empire
into one spirit, one heart, one love, one calm and steady push
to a kinder, a gentler,
a more interesting, more creative, more joyful, more beautiful
life, land, world?

Poetry in the dark of night.
Poetry in the light of day.
Poetry in the heart of hearts.
The turning of the wheel.

Unstoppable Poetry:
Inevitable Poetry:
Relentless Poetry:
Bursting Poetry:
The kind that overtakes by sinking slender fingers deep down
into the place where the heart meets the mind meets the soul.

We Shall Know Commonwealth Again.
We’ll stand within ourselves straight and tall,
admitting the Truth of our common hold.

Some people, living large here in the freeworld,
say we’ve got to stop Trump,
keep the train upon the tracks.
Sure–but that’s not enough and if that is our sole goal we won’t even manage that.

When was it that the rich sat in their silverbirds,
looking down for the first scurries of the rebellion?

And how did the West avoid the Marx’s inevitable evolution?
Regulations contra world-shaking investments and other exploitations;
taxes that relieved the aristocracy of their excess and built roads, dams, parks,
schools, opportunities.
The GI bill.
Things like that; things we could do again.
But how? How to relax enough that we can all show up in the same room?
How to stop dreaming of perfect safeties, perfect securities, perfect attitudes, perfect victories;
and focus on the great progress readily available?

What do we agree on? We agree that, insofar as the economic and societal structures can with impunity allow it, we should all have the chance to unfold the Love within in a way that is great and glorious cool. We agree that, insofar as the economic and societal structures can with impunity allow it, people shouldn’t live in the chains of poverty, illness, ignorance. So then we just need to know: can we get away with both happiness and decency? Can we have a nation that is safe, secure, and full of beautiful possibilities for all of us? Actually, even before we answer that, we know we have to fight for that because unless we are clearly and solidly headed in that direction, the center fractures and people vote for salvations and condemnations: the panic wins and the train skips the tracks.

The thing I sense is that with steady hand, calm mind, and open heart, we can chart a course that is OK. But I worry that we will blow our hand because we lack the empathy-imagination to grasp that we are all in this together.

Possible names:
In this Together
Unstoppable Poetry
Bursting Poetry
We shall know Commonwealth
Tis not too Late
To Seek a Newer World

AMW/BW, the loneliest desperadoes ever to spin a six-shooter.
June 29, 2016

Afterward

Afterwards,
I settle down, hangdog.
Afterwards,
We call our wives, repentant.
Afterwards,
You bleed the hen, sickened.

It was some several months gone that I, having found a copy freebied along a Brooklyn road, read Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land”, a book-length essay about the West’s (well, US and Europe) current (published 2010) predicament, how we’d gotten there, and how we could get to a better place. Several thoughts jutted out, caught my sleeve, tore my shirt. The above essay mentioned two of them: styling the US an “inland empire”; and the hypothesis that the US and some of Europe had avoided the supposedly inevitable capsize of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat by democratically choosing to redistribute wealth. It yesterday occurred to me, while conversing with a slight-but-curvy, slope-button-nosed, lizard-eyed young beauty sitting post-art and thus spattered with oil-based paint, that some European countries had succumbed not to the violent disaster that Marx predicted and celebrated, but to other violent disasters, and that the tab of these violent disasters must to some degree fall to the excesses of bourgeoisie privilege. Wasn’t the Great Depression a critical ingredient in the mood that gave Hitler a crowd? And wasn’t the Great Depression to no small degree the result of unregulated financial markets, and wasn’t this lack of regulation part of a general profiteering: the wealthy investment class reaping private rewards while shunting the risk off onto the collective?

Two other thoughts of Judt’s deathsdoor effort (he, dead the same year it was published, was dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease when he wrote it) that stuck with me: philosophies of triumphant economic inevitability helped us dismantle the welfare state (this one I already know, Milton Friedman; it is what’s made me riff on Camus’s “the evil geniuses of our time are all philosophers” with “the evil geniuses of our time are all economists”; and, look here look here!, isn’t triumphant economic inevitablism ultimately the deadly trick within Marx’s philosophy: isn’t it that mixture of grandeur and certainty that makes Marxism into an intellectual religion disconnected from living breathing humans–and isn’t such folly just as much folly when it comes from the right as when it comes from the left?); and the 60s/70s focus on identity-politics, coupled with the lazy lux of growing up in a nice big safety-net and middle-class boom, took the youths’ eyes off economic justice and helped us dismantle the welfare state.

Let me look a scorched-earth second at this latter thought of the departing historian. He particularly bemoans the phenomenon of minorities (he particularly mentions blacks and Jews; he was Jewish) joining fraternities of others in their ethnic/racial groups and majoring in studies focused on the history of their ethnic/racial groups. College is for going beyond the narrow definitions of self provided by such tribalisms is my understanding of his discontent. And feminism is in there somewhere too. Look at me and you, we are the same thing; my politics is mistaken if it doesn’t see that, but it isn’t just the right that can fail to grasp the ultimate sameness of human stuff, and Judt was, per my memory of my understanding of his book, unhappy with what he saw as the tendency of the 60s/70s left and thus the youthful energy of the 60s/70s to think so much on social justice that they forgot about economic justice for all groups.

Not that social justice for all isn’t important, but that for the collective to prosper, social justice and concerns for minorities needs to be paired with physical and economic security for all. And identity politics is not really that great for anybody (here I may be adding details not found in this book read some months ago): a human’s politics need to remain grounded in the understanding that we are all essentially the same–otherwise the common cause and nobler path is lost to angry struts and narrow group-thinks, us-vs-themisms, and other kinds of boredom disguised as being-real: we are all in this together and while it is true that a sustainable success requires that black kids from poorer parts of rusting belt towns end up winning; it is equally true that that it also requires that white kids from bummed out veins of coal country end up winning; as well as all the other racial groups, ethnic backgrounds, economic spots.

None of us are perfect; none of us grasp with perfect empathy the struggles of others, but playing up those imperfections and the cracks in others they sometimes cause hides the more promising but also more demanding truth: we all have at least some inkling of and compassion for the straights of other people, and we both can and must care enough about our fellow citizens to accept them and their perspectives as fundamentally equal to us and our vantage points. With “fundamentally equal” I do not mean that everyone is as fit for every task or every decision as everyone else. I mean that we all come from the same place; we all have the same basic innerworld of these various human longings shot through with the bright-light sense that we creatures matter and what we say and do matters and this Love matters; and we all are headed to the same place (some theologians might disagree this final point, but let us all at least agree that we will someday die and that what comes next plays by rules where money, musculature, intelligence, personality, social circles, math skills, philosophical essay writing, and so on disappear and each of us is left with only what one’s really become at the point of our physical/intellectual/emotional dissolution). With “fundamental equals” I mean that we are enough alike and enough bound up with one another that we cannot do what is best for ourselves without helping others do what is best for them.

The nation will fracture into angry clumps to the degree the center does not look each of us in the eye, human-to-human.

I read with interest the day other an article by NY Times columnist David Brooks. In an earlier article, he’d said that he had allowed himself, ensconced in elitedom, to lose touch with the trials and tribulations of many US Americans, and so he and others like him were partially responsible for the Trump disaster; and so now he must dedicate himself to the task of reaching out to everyone in the country (Something like that anyway), which I feel is a good goal for a public intellectual. Anyway, his column of my yesterday was about how Trump is fundamentally realigning the political debate in the nation: before it was about the size of government, now it is about openness. He said that of course he thought we needed to side with openness and that globalization will help us all economically (he included a couple facts about how it had raised our incomes and how the currently pillared Pacific Trade Agreement would raise it more) as long as we find a way to equip the momentary losers in the evolving economy to succeed. Of course, of course! And even without a clear economic advantage to free trade, there’s the diplomatic benefits of hearty economic relations between lands. On the other hand, should we really be encouraging poorer nations to work their people 12 hours a day for low wages? But then maybe the wages are better and the hours the same as what they’d been doing way back when, so–. So lots of different things to talk about.

US business interests really both hoarded and at its cake for the longest time now. They got free trade without the redistribution necessary for it to actually benefit everyone. When the US found the New Deal–a great redistribution of wealth that built roads, educations, and ultimately lives–it was to some degree a decision by the elites to spread the wealth around and thus avoid the disaster of rebellion. Around the same time, Russia did fall from monarchial tyranny into communist tyranny; and Nazi Germany fell from a sputtering democracy into a totalitarian state whose appeal was pride in “the folk” and contempt for whoever didn’t make the count as “the folk”. Right now we have–at least in the US–apparently reached a tilting point reminiscent of the one that gave rise to the regulations and safety nets created in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and steadily dismantled starting in the 80s. Brooks supposes Trump’s lean towards xenophobia, misogyny, and racism will keep him from winning the race; but he warns that another will take Trump’s isolationism, his trade-hating, his border-shutting, his zero-sumism (as in “win win” is impossible–a ‘fraidy cat unimaginative helterskelter fantasy hiding place disguised as “realism”), trim a bit of the obvious meanness and dilettantism, and win. We in the US who can find it in our hearts to believe in the chance of a center, of togetherness, of imperfect but real progress for all of us–this is the time to shout out our faith and to demand that our government find a way to make the economic realities and possibilities of our day work for all of us.

Which brings us to the final piece of Judd’s dying words that extra-resonated with me: citizens in countries like the US and Great Britain (places where claiming the political process is completely hopeless requires a cynicism and flippancy so pouty and negligent that I think it appropriate to at least begin speaking of the real evil of being a big baby) can work together to change their country’s trajectory and they have a duty a duty a duty to do so. And the way to do that is to embrace the political process and accept the challenge of discussing the nuts and bolts of policy decisions. Babies! A bunch of squabbling, he-hit-me-first-no-he-hit-me-first babies! Agghh! You drive me crazy!

Simmer down. OK. OK. We need the better elements within ourselves to enjoy politics again–instead of just our get-offs on fighting and crushing and strutting and lamenting to enjoy politics. And we need to stop letting the political process live in the side-track of mindlessly repeated talking-points and mindless screaming side-taking. But that’s OK, because there’s a way to correct both those errors at once: we need to start making a safe and fun space for people to talk about the details of policy decisions. Not these stupid roundtable argument where everyone goes home believing in the same preconceived notions they came with. And not quite these political comedy shows tuned in by one side or the other and also putting everyone to bed with the comfy certainty that, though our country is doomed, it is fault of the “other side” (Note: some of these political comedy shows are more helpful than others; more helpful is honest playful discussion; much less helpful and indeed part of the evil downhill rolling snowball is standard mockery). A place to have fun with the nuts and bolts of policy ideas; of budgets; of trade-offs. We cannot continue to hide behind the “experts” of our choosing–the “other side” just chooses different experts: perhaps those experts are baloney, but we cannot rightly say that without taking some time to understand the topic.

I don’t know how to do this. Suggesting it makes me think of various blowhard fools I’ve encountered reading articles by thinkers who agree with them and going on about how we all need to do the research and think for themselves like they do. Ah well, we can but try: despairing in the supposed impossibility of good conduct and/or good outcomes is ultimately just as counterproductive (read: evil) as pouting over the supposed impossibility of good conduct and/or good outcomes. We can try to talk for real with one another.

How to do it? You can’t let just anybody say anything. That view of what is required for a free exchange of ideas just ends up filling the air with loud certainties. Oh thick, un-breathe-able, immobile, useless humidity!: an infiniti of options equals, for finite creaturethings, no options. You can’t let your prejudices oversway you, but you can’t let other people’s prejudices oversway you either. How do we do this? And remember: it has to be fun for everybody–overseriousness will make the participants lose sight of the relative nature of their knowledge and wisdom and it will also similarly lame the excellence of the audience. But note also the necessity of some seriousness and some type of elitism: while one cannot have any useful knowledge or real wisdom without insight into the limits of those goods, some ideas, attitudes, and feelings are better than others, which is to say: degrees of knowledge and wisdom exist and are very important.

There are no white people and no black people, no Asians, no Indian Indians, and no American Indians. We all slide together in personalities, temperaments, types and degrees of intelligents–all that stuff is varied within races, not across races. Who knew? The only way you really learn it is by interacting with a bunch of people with different skin colors and facial features; over time it just sinks in undeniably deep that you see patterns in thought and emotion in human beings within and not between races.

There is here in the world no good guy, no bad guy; no hero and no villain. There are some bad ideas, some bad feelings–some bad strands within the flowing togetherness that is the Reality of the human experience.

Whatever. The thing that here must happen is social justice and economic justice together. We must have both the right attitude and the right management. It is terrifying evil for human organizations to slide into chaos, which is another word for death to society, to rights, to chances. We must maintain calm and dignity and work for steady progress on all fronts. The danger of youth is to throw it all away for swelling heroisms and dreams of victory. The danger of old age is to throw it all away for grand pouts and dreams of escape. We must come together and ask together for the Truth. We already know the Truth; the Truth is we’re all in this together and we can manage ourselves more or less wisely and the decisive aspect is how much space we allow for within each individual: we all need enough security, calmness, time, patience, energy, love to live for real–we all need to learn, work, think, grow, have fun, take ourselves and others seriously.

Give me a poetry that tears the walls down. Give me a poetry that frees our minds and hearts by melting lies and exploding Truth. POW! The Power of the Word.

Give me a poetry podcast that contemplates the power of the word for good and for evil. Give me a poetry podcast that dances, that is fun, that plays, that thinks and feels together, that knows we are all in this together and that seeks for the words that stop the evil and embolden the Good.

AMW/BW, the one from small Midwestern town Pennsylvania, the other from all across the possibilities; the one suntanned, the other transparent.
God forgive them, God help them, God explode them and gather the pieces to God’s bosom, where this begins, where this must end.

The Theory of Poetry Podcasts

The Theory of Poetry Podcasts

A theoretical problem, a math problem:

Suppose one were to gather together a few strands of the unruly information age and knit them together into a poetry podcast, taped and broadcast once per lunar month. Is it possible to configure this enterprise in a way that is particularly worthwhile?

It was Kwizsler who provided the first solution to this problem. The world would have to wait another 3.45928 centuries for Kamarati’s proof that there were in fact infinite solutions to the problem, and that each problem was a fractal petal off of the Kwizsler’s original, old-fashioned, antiquated, dusty, backroom solution.

But what happens when we add the following detail:

The founders must be two different people–one who’s first suggestion is that the poetry club get cohesiveness by cleaving to poems involving New York City; and one who’s first instinct is to leap atop the long, beerhall-style oak table and, after summarily–with his arms up like bat wings and his lips disdainfully curled and eyes painfully scrunched like a valley girl inching past a homeless person–pushes everyones’ food and drink onto the floor with the tip of his beige, sneaker-shaped walking shoes, declare:

New York City has enough memorabilia, enough fanware, enough paraphernalia!

In this world evil lurks among us. The devil dog runs amok. With foam swilled over yellow jag-snag teeth, it haunts the edges of each human twist and turn! Aye, it dogs us!; it sneaks into each every crevice of our individual and collective thought, perverting, dragging down, making sick, puking raw right through!

And you’d speak of pleasant clubs with tame, gentle edifications! The aircraft carrier’s hook catches the landing jet–time is short. For as long as I’ve been sort of paying attention (which is usually all I’ve been able to stomach), I’ve watched flailing, violent, dyspeptic, ulcerated chaos advance. I’ve watched my world become more and more a dying giant squid, robbed of its water and its depth; its great yellow mirror-eye cracked with hopeless choked-out panic; its unweildy red, flabby-flapping tentacles–with their poignant rose-bud tips–lashing out every which way frantic and pathetic.

And I’ve thought that I should do something about this! But what? About what? What is going on? Why do I feel so queasy every time I turn on the TV? Is it really any worse than before? Isn’t this actually going pretty well? Order’s maintained pretty solidly and you’re allowed to say things–no matter how insightful or idiotic–about the government and society. So it’s basically OK, right? And what, I mean, what is it supposed to look like? What can it look like? But–well, I just can’t shake the sense that we are focusing on spectacle instead of substance, and I cannot help but recall ‘Cabaret’s’ thesis that it was such hiding in spectacle that allowed the Germans to slide themselves down the gullet of Naziism. Not that we’re necessarily going to start rounding up and exterminating millions, but that we’re going in the wrong direction and at some point you’ve slid so far down the wrong way that you can’t get back to decent. Also, I think that we as a nation actually could talk and come up with workable policies, but we’ve decided it feels safer to cocoon ourselves into little group-think echo chambers–complete with comedians who are much better at seeing the ridiculousness of the other side than of our milky-gauzy home. Well, there’s that general critique, and then there’s my own partisanship: I cannot fathom Republicans anymore.

The club I dream of will help me get some purchase on this sorrow–some way to push against the evil in me and in the collective; some way to get not some set of pre-cherished ideas and attitudes to win, but to get good ideas and real kindness to more and more guide myself and the collective. The more corrupt a place is, the easier it is to be cruel and selfish and hard-hearted and close-minded, and the harder it is to be kind and generous and gentle-hearted and open-minded. The more corruption in an individual, the more easily those soul-ignoring ignobilities can squeeze internal awareness and honesty out; and the harder it is for the easy-flowing joy to take back conscious territory. Likewise in a society/government–the more corrupt a society/government is, the easier it is to live happy and comfortable there while being indecent; and the harder it is to live happy, comfortable, and decent. The more corrupt a society/government is, the more it forces you to choose between happiness and decency. But be careful young rebel!: one of the show-off motor’s favorite tricks is to pretend that your setting is more corrupt than it is. Sit back, relax, pull back your shoulders, open your chest: helping begins with an honest critique, which includes admitting what is good that you already have and shouldn’t toss out–there’s nothing heroic about pouting and praying for chaos: chaos is not a safe place to unfold your heart and mind and body; chaos is a brutal massacre.

How can we move towards less individual and collective corruption? No, but for real!

This must be the quest of our joint venture. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What is a good poem? What is it’s relationship to Truth = Beauty = Goodness = Justice? What are the poems that will help as individuals and as groups to grow in wisdom–to shake off the stupid-jeer and the pouty-swarm, to circle round again and dip back into love? What poems can we as a nation use to start moving together towards the common reality?

I think our quest should be poems that help us as individuals and groups live more fully and well, more joyfully, more honestly, more life-overflowingly. What poems do that? Why? How? And how to get them out so that, like love bombs, they do the maximum damage to wrongheadness within ourselves and our shared dreaming space?

AMW/BW

What can be done?

What can be done?

Clinton’s email fiasco that may or may not turn into a criminal charge. And the arrogance and lack of judgement that the incident demonstrates.

Sander’s longshot campaign, his lack of foreign policy experience, and does he understand how dangerous terrorism has become? A handful of crazy people could nuke a city, or poison its water, or a mall’s ventilation system–or do that to several cities at once. Or they could blow up the House while most everyone in the Federal government is present (suggested solution: most people can send representatives while watching it on TV in someplace dignified–for example, their state’s capitol). Can he handle this? Privacy is important but so is keeping New York City from evaporating (actually, any city dweller with any imagination will notice that evaporation is about the best option for dying in a terrorist strike).

Trump’s insane ideas: building walls across Mexico that the Mexican government will pay for; stopping all Muslims from entering the country; using his magical bartering abilities to turn the world’s governments into rival businesses that he strong-arms and outmaneuvers. And then also the usual (for a couple generations anyway) bank-breaking Republican fiscal policies that make the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, the government unable to fund necessary services (D+ on our last infrastructure report) and the economy stay unstable. Oh and then there’s the narcissism, flagrant misogyny, and general Nietzschian conception of “might-makes-right or at least it wins and winning’s the thing”. Except that doesn’t even win: when you reduce all to power plays, you are the ones that become Nazi Germany, and someone else must give the King’s Speech and say that might doesn’t make right, that there is more to life than power and money, and that government’s are responsible to those human values first: to creating and maintaining places where people can be both physically OK and morally decent. That is the vision that allows for the mutual trust and support necessary for collective success!

So what can be done?

Because Elizabeth Warren isn’t running and so I’m thinking we won’t unite: we’ll all stay alone in this giant, ill-conceived, incoherent mosaic.

What can be done?

Why would it have been different with Elizabeth Warren running? Because she can explain the necessity of financial regulations, the compatibility of healthy capitalism and taxation and even some redistribution. She can explain that ad-money linked to a candidate’s ear is corrupting our democracy, and she can help us think through our way back to the steering wheel–or at least the brakes: in a representative democracy the primary responsibility of the electorate is to serve as a final check against excessive corruptions and flagrant madnesses of the political class, a duty we’ve largely traded-in for teatime with pundits and rabble-rousers where we pretend we’re all political geniuses and/or that the other side’s too perverted to talk to.

What is different about Elizabeth Warren? Well, she’s not hated by the right like Clinton is, and she lacks Clinton’s email problem. The left acts like it’s the Republicans fault that Clinton is hated: that’s somewhat true, they’ve spent 30 years maligning the Clintons. But is the point here who’s fault it is? And isn’t the email mess more than just Republican headhunting? Wasn’t that at best really stupid? The nation desperately needs someone who can unite us, and it is hard to see how that person could be a Clinton, and easy to see how it could be that sunny, sweet, irresistible, and so very accurate without being pretentious or impractical Elizabeth Warren, who, I regret to say, is not running for President.

Bernie Sanders still is running for president, but he’s excessive: we could make college an affordable part of life without mandating that it be free; we could improve the health care reforms we’ve started without demanding that we jump straight to single-payer; we could regulate the financial sector without acting like they’re all a bunch of crooks; we could move slowly but surely towards a better society–and cranky perfectionism is not the way to do that.

The Republican party is hopeless because their budget ideas are all based on fanatical magicalism, and they flip constantly between hating and trying to dismantle government and pretending they want to and can govern–and even keep social security going. Donald Trump is an arrogant fool with no experience governing and even supposing he is a good businessman and not more like a good self-promoter and con-man, the country is not a business–it is a country, and the bottom-line is not the annual profit report: it is justice, freedom, liberty, safety, and the tools and space for everyone here to become their best so that we as a nation can become our best: yes, staying safe and financially healthy, but most fundamentally becoming kinder, more just, wiser, more fun, more creative, more human–living out our inner landscapes more completely: that is the path to sustainable collective success, and anything else is the Titanic.

What can be done? What has gone wrong? Why can’t we even unite around no-brainers like stopping banks from using publicly-insured money to fund risky investments, taking back the political process from the “ad money + lobbyists = you listen to me” political investors, and improving our D+ infrastructure? Look–the sickness is most pronounced in the Republican party because they’ve given themselves most completely over to the myth that money is the point and justifies everything else. It is that ugly truth that makes bipartisanship tricky. The Democrats are not perfect, but the Republicans have lost their minds. And yet this exact same position in reverse is held by the majority of Republicans. How can I see with their mind/hearts enough to find a common ground? It is painful for me to try. I am so baffled by them. And yet no progress will come to the land that now slouches with flat heavy feet down the rocky ravine–just asking for the decisive tumble into the abyss–unless we can find a common reality.

AMW and BW, worried on of a Sunday morn in the year 2016.

I want to quit

I want to quit

I’d give up, but that seems futile.

I’m getting older without a cause. That’s the problem.

If Elizabeth Warren would’ve run for president, all would be well. I could relax while she unified the nation around sensibleness. But that didn’t happen.

But I don’t really understand what is going on. Why are the Republicans so crazy? Why won’t they stop running for office if they hate government so much? Why won’t they admit that we need to build roads and that people on welfare is not what is breaking the budget and that of those the small percent that are gaming the system really are not what is breaking the budget? Why do they keep pretending that cutting taxes is a magical potion? Why have they trapped us all here in this hog pen while they whistle and rodeo us in the mud–pretending that we’re raging bulls and not puny brown-nosed piglets? I am so lonely here! And the weirdest part is that we all know that we need some mixture of free market, regulations, and safety net. We all know that the magical formulas that toss away any one of those is magical thinking. So how can it be that we let the Republicans act like two of those three economic pillars are evil treacheries and the other is God’s mighty hand in creation? And so we are scattered to the wind. Oh Israel! Oh Israel!

When we be a people? When will we share this land and this purpose? Don’t we have a purpose? Don’t we agree at least that the government should avoid making decisions just to appease people and organizations with money to burn? Why are people voting for Trump? What is going on? Will someone please get me out of this dank cellar?! Who locked the door? Who’s flooding the upstairs bathroom? Don’t they know I’m trapped down here? Don’t they care?

I can’t stop the evil. I can’t even figure out what is behind it, where it is, what it is. I feel helpless and stupid. What do I do? Who do I turn to?

AMW and BW, all upset with no place to go

A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 3: Some Tips for the geniuses

A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 3: Some Tips for the geniuses

[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

The wisdom meme must immediately compel all consciousnesses into full awareness of the Truth and bind them permanently to that wider perspective. Or, since permanence is not achievable in this flibertygibbetting realm, continuously reintroduce our consciousnesses to the Truth (create a pattern of continual expansion out into the Truth, contraction back into human thinking/feeling, expansion … ) .

We’ll leave the heavy lifting to our team of towering intellectual, emotional, and spiritual figures. However, the Proposal Committee (PC — an unintended acropun) feels both empowered and obligated to sketch out the obvious outlines of this, the most critical endeavor in human history (as it will decide whether human history ends soonish and horrifyingly or sprawls out into another million years of good, clean, wholesome fun in reasonably great and reasonably humble wisdom).

Basically, we want to make sure that everyone who hears the message is immediately and irrevocably enlightened — experiences and maintains a direct connection with the Truth so that their feelings, notions, and ideas cannot help but adequately interpret and follow the Truth. Also, we want to make sure that we find a way to write the message in a form (holy grail!) or forms (beggars can’t be choosers) that everyone on the planet can understand.

What is enlightenment? Completely knowing, understanding, and following the Truth. It is letting the Truth overtake your being, so that — devoid of the corruptions that flow from putting some mythic self ahead of the only aspect of your experience that actually knows what is going on and what matters (aka: the Truth shining through all things, including your own conscious moment) — you become a perfect conduit for the Truth and It flows through and completely captains your experiences, guiding you towards the best possible ways of feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.

Is enlightenment possible? Probably not, at least in this earthenware realm, as that final irrevocable perfection above described. However, enlightenment is possible as ever-increasing progress towards that goal.

[At this point, we sprawled out for a couple paragraphs working our “enlightenment in a calculus-sense” theory. The editor felt it best to send that song and dance across the deep blue sea: Outtakes!. (I don’t know why.) Ditto for the long AA speech that had me on my knees for a God of my understanding: Outtakes!. (Who knows why?! Editors have too much power. [Editor’s Note: No we don’t. We need more power and way more glory!])]

Provocation: There’s no proof adequate progress towards enlightenment is impossible, and many examples both within one’s conscious moment and demonstrated by others give us reason to believe that wisdom is real and possible. We all have some inborn sense that what is most real is an infinite all-pervading flawless loving kindness, and that we can, by following our inborn push for clear, honest, joyful exploration, creation, and sharing, grow this inborn knowledge. We cannot prove this sense of things false. And the testimony of many gentle and effective souls suggests that sense of things is onto something.

Cautionary: In order to head-off our human tendency to call every fool notion that whims its way into our minds a “great insight”, and listening not to me but to what is common to all, it is best we agree that wisdom is the opposite of dishonest, greedy, hateful, ignorant, confused, desperate, or incompetent: wisdom is generous, kind, knowing, clear-sighted, joyfully capable. While wisdom is to some degree an inner and thus invisible process, we can to an appreciable degree perceive the fruits of wisdom and folly: wisdom is kind, helpful, competent; it has space for gentleness, generosity, for other people, for clear honest conversation and action; folly is closed-off, shut-down, scared, desperate, greedy, angry, mean, confused and confusing.

Anyway: I think by now it’s clear to us all that we need to be ever-more overtaken by and constantly reimagined within the kind of wisdom that realizes “we are all in this together and should treat ourselves and others kindly” is a more fundamental Truth than all this loose talk we keep talking. And we need it fast.

Generally, seekers are counseled to keep working on whole-being-wisdom (organizing their ideas and feelings around the inner Light), using the standard means: meditating, praying, working alone and with others to better and better grasp and live/unpack the inner Light that Knows we are all in this together: to better and better keep the sense within that knows how life matters ahead of ideas and feelings about how life does or doesn’t matter. (Otherwise the longing to feel and think that one is living meaningfully often seduces one away from the source of meaning: that inner Light prior to all feelings and ideas; the Light Knows/Is what ideas and feelings can only have inklings of.)

We all are some degree mystical seekers. We are all trying to primarily follow not our ideas and feelings, which we know we don’t ever quite fathom or even care about, but to chase to the end that sense within that knows that some ways of thinking and acting are truly better than others. So the counsel “keep up the wisdom practice!” applies to all of us.

However, consequent the gargantuan of our weapons and fragility of our individual and collective existences, we can no longer afford to bumble along with our weak-kneed, half-ass, “I’m doing the best I can!; so busy!” spiritual efforts. Wisdom is needed now: the knowledge and understanding of the True Good must be shored up in each individual conscious experience ASAP! Otherwise, we’re going to break everything to pieces and so won’t be able to work effectively on any human project, including wisdom.

The wisdom meme must make our conscious experiences directly experience the True Good shining within and through, while still allowing our ideas and feelings to be present and to irrevocably learn the correct rhythm/sense-of-things/vision. Maybe a thunderclap jolt that silences all our ideas and feelings, setting us straight into awareness of what is leftover in our experience when ideas and feelings hush up — which we’re here assuming is the Truth — and then a gradual, controlled slide back into thinking with ideas and feelings. But once won’t be enough — not if we’re going to make the wisdom meme fool-proof. So let’s build a meme that constantly submerges each human conscious moment nakedly into the Truth, followed by a gradual, studious fade into more mundane thought, over and over again every day. It would be analogous to Plato’s philosopher kings and queens as they studied the Form of the Good and then translated their discoveries into practical thoughts. Only it would be the opposite of esoteric or elitist: the wisdom meme must be not only available for all, but blessedly unavoidable for all.

That is what the wisdom meme is to achieve.

Get to it team!

…..

But a wisdom meme is not possible! Not really. And so much trouble has been created by memes that pose as wisdom memes! So this joke is ill-advised? Oh, just let us make the occasional joke !

The Discouraged Signers (yes!, the same gawking gaggle who’d signed the first two sections of this capsized treaty with so much élan and optimism)

PS (they mumbled sleepily into the flat wooden desk that supports their forearms, which in turn support their foreheads):

What about finding some way to induce the enlightened state? And so we speak again of a sort of Pure Love inducing pill, machine, soundtrack, or etc.

What is the right balance between waiting to be wise before acting versus doing the best with what you can in order to help here and now and as part of the work of becoming wiser? What is the right balance between being fun and free and creative and living and doing and exploring and frolicking versus the discipline of spiritual practice?

Ah Bartleby, ah humanity!

….

You know what would be a step in the right direction?
A media campaign that taught critical thinking skills and stressed the importance of clarity, honesty, decency and kindness in thought and action. We could give people tools to push back on the constant flux of memes. We could make it a fun game we can all play all the time: always striving for more clarity, honesty, decency and kindness. It’s not a panacea, but it might help us as individuals, interwoven overlapping groups, and as a whole get more traction in our thoughts and actions.
…..

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And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.

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[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

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[Something Deeperism Institute]

[NYC Journal]

From Before:
Stop! I posted this Sunday April 10 and it is now a bit later on the same day and I am realizing it isn’t even close to readable. I’ll work on it tonight. Update at 6:46pm: Getting better. I’ll work on it tomorrow. Update: 3:22 on Monday: Maybe it is mostly readable now. I will work on it tonight or tomorrow.

From A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Part 2: The Proposal:

But how? How to come up with a phrase or sentence or two that cuts the reader or listener in half, slicing straight through all the blah blah blah and forcing their conscious mind to fully experience the Truth within–that deepest widest sense-of-things that lines the back of a person’s thought, gradually building up on the back of their thought like slowly developing film gathering more and more light. While most people do get wiser as they get older, we don’t tend to ever get nearly wise enough, and our youths are often full of dangerous folly. So we need something that works exceedingly fast. However, it must also be perfectly safe–a problem with quick revelations is that they may be partial but the violence of speedy insights tempts one to believe them complete, which can help unwise impulses do what they love to do: co-opt bits of goodness and wisdom, mix them up in a confusion cocktail, and use them to justify and aggrandize wrong-headedness. The wisdom meme must immediately compel consciousness’s into full awareness of the Truth in a way that binds them permanently to that wider perspective.

……

We’ll leave the heavy lifting to the hand-picked team of towering intellectual, emotional, and spiritual figures. However, the Proposal Committee (PC–an unintended acropun) feels both empowered and obligated to sketch out the obvious outlines of this, the most critical endeavor in human history (because it may decide whether human history ends soonish and horrifyingly or sprawls out into another million years of good, clean, wholesome fun in grand wisdom).

Basically, we want to make sure that everyone who hears the message is immediately and irrevocably enlightened–experiences and maintains a direct connection with the Truth so that their feelings, notions, and ideas cannot help but adequately interpret and follow the Truth. Also, we want to make sure that we find a way to write the message in a form (holy grail!) or forms (beggars can’t be choosers) that everyone on the planet can understand.

Beyond the obvious suggestion that the New Manhattan Project (NMP) hire linguistically and culturally sensitive translators, the Proposal Committee currently can’t think what to say about making a fool-proof wisdom-meme. But we can present a little philosophical background to give the geniuses an idea of what we’re looking for:

Something Deeperism is the philosophical attitude that there is a Truth deeper than ideas and feelings, so ideas and feelings cannot relate with scientific/literal-precision, -clarity, and -certainty to the Truth; but since the Truth is within each person’s conscious experience along with ideas and feelings the Truth can, under the right circumstances, explain Itself to her/his ideas and feelings well enough to allow her/his thought-as-a-whole to correctly believe that s/he is living in and through the Truth.

Something Deeperism avoids the extremes of systematic skepticism/sciencism (sciencism = believing that reality is nothing more than our current scientific hypothesis about the material world–a belief underpinned by skepticism) and of fundamentalist religions. Radical skepticism/sciencism is a self-refuting philosophy because there’s no point doubting anything unless some thought-paths should actually be preferred over others, and that implies that something actually matters and we can and should consciously work to think and act in accordance with that something. Fundamentalist religion is defined here as religious attitudes that put faith in dogmas/practices over faith in the sense of True Joy and Love that makes it clear that life is meaningful and that it matters what we do. That definition demonstrates both the difficulty of pinpointing exactly how fundamentalist someone is being (since we cannot see our own thoughts and feelings perfectly, and others even less well) and the self-refuting nature of fundamentalism (since it is counterproductive to follow ideas about why life is meaningful if those ideas are cutting you off from your deeper sense about how and why life is meaningful). Taken together, the black-box nature of individual spiritual lives and the self-defeat of fundamentalist thought add up to this conclusion: People of all faiths must constantly work to make sure their faith is not undermining itself; ie: that we are not putting more emphasis on ideas and feelings than on that deeper sense that informs us that clarity and honesty and decency in thought and feeling matter because what we think and do matters and because pushing for ever more clarity, honesty, and decency as well as that ineffable element within our sense of “life actually matters” will help us move towards better ways of thinking and acting (all this information is part of an inner sense of things that we cannot perfectly catch with words, but that words can still point towards; we claim here two things about this sense: experientially, we sense it as more true and fundamental than any doubts we might have about it; and logically if we don’t assume it, all our thoughts are self-defeating because our thought has no possible way to choose one thought over another unless it accepts this sense-of-things).

Of course, both systematic skepticism/sciencism and Something Deeperism are faiths (aka: irreducibles–general epistemological/metaphysical stances that cannot be justified in thought that is only intellectual and/or emotional). They are therefore liable to the same pitfalls of typical religions. While systematic sciencism seems a lost cause and Something Deeperism a possibility, Something Deeperists still face this problem, the problem of all faiths: people are more inclined to consider themselves wise than they are inclined to constantly push for inner honesty.

Generally, the Something Deeperist is counseled to just keep working on whole-being-wisdom (using the standard means: meditating, praying, working alone and with others to better and better grasp and live/unpack the insight that it actually matters what we say and do) and to keep asking him-/her-self if they are keeping their sense that life matters ahead of their attempt to live meaningfully. But some degree Something Deeperists (we all, when it comes right down to it, are trying to follow not our ideas and feelings, which we know we don’t ever quite fathom or even care about, but to chase to the end that sense within that knows that some ways of thinking and acting are better than others), so that counsel applies to all of us. But because of the grandeur of our weapons and the fragility of our individual and collective existences, I am not confident that we can afford to bumble along any longer. Wisdom is needed now–Something Deeperism in each individual conscious experience must be shored up ASAP!

The wisdom meme will have to get us to directly experience that aspect of thought that has direct contact with the Truth while still allowing our ideas and feelings to be present and to irrevocably learn the correct rhythm/sense-of-things/vision. Maybe a thunderclap jolt that silences all our ideas and feelings and sets us therefore straight into awareness of what is leftover in our experience when ideas and feelings hush up–which we’re assuming is the Truth–and then a gradual, controlled slide back to thinking with ideas and feelings. But once might not be enough–not if we’re going to make the wisdom meme fool-proof. So let’s have the meme make it so that one can’t help experiencing the Truth followed by a gradual, studious fade into more mundane thought over and over again every day. It would be analogous to Plato’s philosopher kings and queens as they studied the Form of the Good and then translated their discoveries into practical thoughts.

That is what the wisdom meme is to achieve, so get to it team!

[Note about a point bothering me from above: While an individual’s spiritual life is inner and thus a black-box, that doesn’t mean that other individuals can’t have insight into the spiritual attainment of others. We are all fundamentally the same (try to doubt that and see how much sense your thought makes to you–it was created by learning from others; I submit that the philosophical zombie puzzle is self-defeating because if other people are not basically like you are, your reality is so unlike anything you can fathom or care about that from a practical point of view the puzzle is just meaningless jabber jaw to you). And we learn to speak and think by interacting with others. We learn concepts like “ouch” and “pain” and “hooray” and “delight” through empathy with others–through assuming that they are like we are and feeling along with them while they use language. Therefore, just as we can to some degree understand what others are talking about when they talk about their feelings and we can, by becoming more self-aware and empathic get better at telling how well others are understanding and describing their own feelings; we should be able, through the same process plus spiritual growth, be able to get better and better at telling how well others are understanding and describing their own spiritual experiences. The point is just that we can’t say for sure. Also, since spiritual attainment is not objectively verifiable and misattributing spiritual attainment in oneself and others is a cause of terrible corruptions, it is best to do as we try to do with our US constitution and keep religion and government separate. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t vote their conscious or that their religious experiences shouldn’t influence their conscious. It just means that in government, we should remember that we should keep our eye on what the politicians are actually doing and proposing to do because those are things that we as a group can effectively monitor and discuss. We the people have a limited amount of time, energy, and focus; let’s keep our eye on the ball: acting as a last check against political corruption and idiocy. There is a parallel between effective Something Deeperism in an individual and effective group organization: in both cases the enemy is pretending to know more or less than you actually know: we know that analytical thought and science and math can help us to make better decisions in everything except the question of what truly matters, but we also know that what truly matters is respecting ourselves and others and this kindness within us that knows how to accomplish that.]
….

Or, you know what:

Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance

“Results Psilocybin [effective chemical in magic mushrooms] produced a range of acute perceptual
changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At 2 months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.”

So maybe we could just pay for everyone to do mushrooms in a controlled setting. Or perhaps instead of debating whether or not torturing terrorists is legitimate, we should turn our legal and moral attention to the question of whether or not we can force inmates to do mushrooms. OK, not mushrooms but this extract of their hallucinogenic compounds.

But no, that’s no kind of a plan! Oh dear oh dear, where are we going to get a good-enough wisdom meme?!?!

…..

But a wisdom meme is not possible! Not really. And so much trouble has been created by memes that pose as wisdom memes! So this joke is ill-advised? Oh, just let us make the occasional joke !

AMW / BW

….

What is this?
A three essay series called “A New, Improved Manhattan Project”
Part 1: Preliminary Worries
Pt. 2: The Proposal
Pt. 3: Some Tips for the Geniuses

Whatever happened to selling evolving ebooks on the world-wide web?
Well, nothing’s being posted, but the somewhat-begun books are still available:
Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Lover for sale here:
Buy the Books

We also are still selling cat totes and epistemologically controversial baby onsies:
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

But what are we really up to?
I dunno, Bartleby and Andy are writing something once in a while and then sometimes going back and editing things. I think they’ll go back to the ebooks before too long. We’ll see.

Was kann ich dafuer?

Was kann ich dafuer?

Ich kann nichts dafuer.
Ich kann nichts dagegen.
Es soll an mir nicht liegen.
Es ist nicht meine Schuld.
Ich habe es nicht getan,
wuerde sowas nie tun–
koennte es nicht einmal wollen.

Reiner Zufall, reiner Zufall,
dass das Schlimme und meine Taetigkeit
zusammen zu finden sind.

Es tut mir Leid,
echt Leid,
soviel Leid.

Man muss sich daran erinnern,
man muss zuruekdenken,
man muss nach der verschwundenen Zeit greifen,
um es zurueck zubekommen.
Auch wenn es zu spaet ist–
man weiss nie!–,
ist es vielleicht nicht zu spaet–
also wuerde ich erraten,
energisch danach zu ergreifen.

Naja.

Ich spazierte allein in Le Havre.
Nacht.
Hatte vor, das Englisch sprechende Ich
zu toeten.
Also fand ich mich in Le Havre
ganz allein,
spaziergehen im Stadtpark in der sommerlichen Daemmerung.

Auch ging ich–
am hellichten Tag–
schwimmen.
Ja!
In Le Havre.

Grosse Frachtschiffe rings herum;
und danach,
Kaltwasser tropfend,
Flying Saucer Rundsteine
unter meinen Fuessen,
ging ich an das Strandhaeuschenrestaurant
wo ich eine Pizza mit einem Spiegelei
bestellt und gegessesn habe.

Ich vermisse jeden Augenblick.

AMW / BW

Memo from the Otherside

Memo from the Otherside

What is it like to be dead?
Your body turned to wood then mush then bones then dust?
What is it like to be just a soul up in the great heaven?
It’s fine.
I was worried I wouldn’t have any thoughts or feelings because I’d be without my brain and my body. I’d thought that the brain/body did reasoning and feelings. So that left me with pure awareness. I thought maybe I’d have that, and I’d just be like a goldfish: always watching but not remembering anything, just watching but not holding any experiences. Or actually, worse than a goldfish–at least they get to see the watery wonderworld. Without senses and without ideas and feelings, I thought I’d be just watching emptiness. Doubtless–I figured–it would be great enlightenment because without all the distractions of ideas, feelings, and perceptions, I’d be constantly aware of what really is: that everything/nothing at the back of one’s conscious experience that–like water to an ocean-going goldfish–holds all experience and yet you can’t quite stand back and notice. I was worried–can you believe it!?–that it would be boring to sit all day in the bliss of pure awareness of the True Good that exists prior to all specifics, that creates them and shines through them and rescues them from themselves.
But it isn’t like that at all anyway.
I have no physical form, but there are other ways to think and feel, and my naked soul hooks easily into them. I am smarter, more deep-feelinged; gentler; calmer; more at ease as I drift through the years always still and yet casting my mind anywhere I please so long as it pleases God, who turns out to be rather lenient with us dead people.
Born again?
Into another body on the old world or a new one?
Well, yes–I’ve been putting off those offers for some time. I just can’t see the point.
Granted, it would allow me to work on faith better. Here it is obvious. Here I clearly perceive that honest joyful creative kindless is the only way to go. Once in possession of a body/brain that truism becomes less obvious, so you’re forced to either realize it deep within better and better each day, or slouch around town with a yucky taste in your mouth. Here it is I suppose a little too easy, a little too pleasant, a little too obvious. I guess I really should go to earth again. Hmmm, well–
I could just wait for the endtimes, when all souls melt back into God, which is a happy ending anyway. Of course, one endtimes just hiccups up into another reality, and in the deepest sense, there’s no time anyway and all happens at once. I’m pretty sure no matter what I do, all will be well with my soul and all other souls. Because God’s all set no matter what and just creates and sustains realities as a joyful little bonus. Not that God can choose to do otherwise; God must follow God’s way, which includes infinite creation and caring. But it also includes the knowledge that that’s just for fun, for delight, for the sparkle on the water mirrored in the gull’s eye.
Still, I should make the most out of my existence. I should push myself to become as wise and good as possible. That’s my calling, as a soul afloat in God, which of course I am with or without a body/brain.
Ah well, let it pass, let it pass; I’ll stop in on some old friends and talk about the good old days, maybe even remembering wine so well that we seem to have a couple glasses around an old oak table in a well-lit tavern a thousand years ago.

BW / AMW

On the couch

On the couch

My biggest problem?
It’s gotta be that I already have a girlfriend.
When a man–especially a relatively youngish-looking man with a tidy haircut and clothes that hang well–is single, he always has a brighter future to look forward to. Every time he sees an attractive young woman, he can feel like she just may be the girl for him, that he just may be about to land. A man–at least as far as I can tell–always feels like an old space ship that’s journeyed for a million years and is falling apart at the seams but that is desperately keeping it together to rattle just a little bit further so that it can finally reach its destination: a rich, lush, green, watery, fecund world where he can start fresh. The wager will have paid off! He gave up everything to hold the ship together and push it forward to the end; now he’s old and exhausted and he’s long been bored and depressed and disappointed and lonely and ashamed and confused; but it is all OK, because now he’s touching down and soon he’ll be the infinite expansion of joyful thriving that he always knew he should be, could be–if he could just settle himself into the right woman.
All well and good, all plausible enough: a likely enough story and a workable enough path to salvation–as long as you’re single. But the existence of a significant other seriously vexes the storyline. You see a pretty woman, and the hope-hope motor kicks in, but then you remember you’ve already got a girlfriend.
Do I love my girlfriend?
That’s beside the point.
The point is that I cannot be just about to find my girlfriend, and from this point of view my girlfriend–charming though she may be–has ruined my happiness. Though it would be reductionist and cruel to say she is nothing more than a reminder that I’m not about to enter into infinite pleasure and joy, nonetheless she is such a reminder, and that reminder is enough to shut my life down.

BW / AMW

Game Over?

Game Over?

Looking down at his thick gold, diamond-studded watch with tired eyes, he understands the silver hands and thinks patiently downward.
A man with no real chance–not really.
Thin, pale, 50, balding, unmarried, childless, partnerless, he keeps in touch with a few old friends and relatives, but his mouth is dry and head shrouded in a hazy thud. He smokes the same cigarettes that he set great hopes upon in his early twenties. Watch him shuffle aimless over to the tall windowframe and, entering into the chill near the pane, gaze–his green-tatooed arms crossed over the white V-neck T-shirt–down at the street.
He is tired. His life has been like one long day that gradually wears an energetic family man working man pub regular family man loverboy completely out. I can’t really hope for his future. The green-tinted visor of his hat obscures his eyes as it points down towards Columbus Circle fully occupied in the noonday summer sun.
They say that the trick of the wise is to really believe that other people experience reality from the inside-out just like you do. Perhaps he is trying to wrap his mind and heart around that insight, but mostly he just wishes vaguely for a cigarette and the health to enjoy it. Not that he’s sick–just tired, very tired, like a piece of chalk worn down to a tiny nub on the sidewalk so that the fingers holding it start to get a little sore with the drawing, which–for reasons unknown (it isn’t as if they are drawing anything memorable)–will not stop drawing.
He tries to rally: He thinks of a nice cool glass of fresh brewed iced tea with a full quarter lemon and the ice cubes clinking while the sun lights the whole cylinder to a nice bright redwood. In vain! In vain. The trick that he always figured he’d be catching hold of pretty soon, and which he’d use to vault himself over the grand canyon never showed. For thirty years now, he’s felt a slight confusion: where is the grandeur that he’s just about to grasp, the victory he’s felt prickling on his skin since as far as he can recall–all the way back to when he tramped through the dry leaves, beneath the dry, shaggy-barked pines, looking for fallen branches to stack together for a fort, a great fort, an awesome fort, a fort that surely would–. What was the fort supposed to do?

AMW / BW