Author Archives: oinsketta

Marketing 101

Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing.  Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.

For example, which would you rather find on your plate?

a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or

b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow

Only a fool would try to market the product as (b).  Word to the wise, yo.

A Man Without A Smiling Face Should Not Open A Shop

Famous, and wise, Chinese proverb: a man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  It is very true, few people will continue to come into the shop of someone who is depressed or hostile.  Having nothing much to do with anything, I once had a less well-known piece of advice in a fortune cookie, perhaps no less profound:  laff alla time people think you crazy.

The mystery to me is how one keeps the smile on the face when the proverbial wolf is at the door, his cheeks full, ready to huff and puff and blow the whole thing to little pieces in the stink of wolf’s breath.

“My father had a great sense of humor, but he was such an unhappy man,” is something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. feared his children might say about him at the end.   Happiness is a talent like any other, I suppose, some people are good at it, some people not so good.  It is something worth cultivating– being grateful, and full of wonder, and optimistic.  Enjoying and appreciating the things and people you love.  There is a predisposition to melancholy, or pessimism, but happiness is probably like a muscle you can develop by constant use.   Let’s assume that happiness can be cultivated, for the moment. 

There are innate talents, sure, but the most exciting demonstrations of talent are given by those who love what they do and spend hours and hours doing it until they do it well.  Their love for the thing is expressed in the way they do it, and it’s an inspiring thing to see.  Many people have more innate drawing talent than I had as a boy, than I have now.  Few people, I think, love to draw as much as I always have.  Doing anything endlessly will make you better at it.  Not to say that some ability is not also involved, but the perpetual doing of a thing you love will make you better at it than someone who is able but doesn’t care.

“Oh, no,” you will say, “that’s not true.  There are geniuses who can do with little practice what a less talented person could not do in a lifetime.”    Well, let me entertain that dispiriting cavil for a second, before I get back to practicing my fucking shopkeeper’s smile in the mirror.

I met one person in my life who is, without any doubt or qualification, a genius.  We went to high school together, this very bright and original kid and I, and his musical talent was off the charts.  So much so that his destiny seemed clear at 15.  I could tell you a couple of great stories about this kid’s talent, and what he grew to compose, arrange, improvise, perform, the many instruments he plays virtuosically, but there could be no question, comparing him even to other great musicians, that his talent is of another level.  Frank Burrows is the guy’s name, you can look him up on youTube.

We had another friend, a prodigiously talented musician who, like Frank, played for hours a day and lived to play music.   These guys played together in bands, prodded each other’s musical growth and invention.  Both have their eccentricities, to be sure, and both endured traumatic childhoods.  As brilliant as David was, Frank was in an otherworldly category in terms of the grace with which he assimilated musical ideas that inspired him.  I have the feeling it always embarrassed Frank when I singled him out as a genius.  No offense intended, my man.

David taught me most of what I know of music theory and chord voicings on guitar.  He was an often brutal master, hard on himself and just as hard on me, though I had a small fraction of his talent.  There are some who consider me a decent musician now, but I am nowhere near being able, after playing for more than 40 years, to do what either of these guys was able to do in high school.  Anyway, David’s main pedagogic tools were derision, scorn, sarcasm and a certain ruthless pursuit of perfection that’s hard to describe.   I took abuse from him while I was learning, eventually learned that it is never a good idea to take abuse from anyone, no matter what else might come along with it.

I recall, years later, trying to fake some jazz with David who responded in his inimitable withering way that I would never be more than a journeyman.   I’d heard an echo of this comment from a keyboard player friend of mine who disparagingly told me “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a keyboard player.”  There are people I could fool in that regard, but apparently this chap is not among them.  I’m no virtuoso, but I can play a little piano when I need to.

Anyway, we fast forward a few decades.  I record a catchy little piano and acoustic guitar vamp, leaving lots of space.  I send it to Frank and to another fantastically talented musician friend and ask each of them to overdub some parts on it for a friend who is dying.   (I have another track to make for a friend who is currently dying of a rare and relentless disease, but that time the dying friend was a composite of people I’d lost, was losing and part of myself).  My friend Paul played a haunting and beautiful fretless guitar improvisation over the top, I can hear it in my head now as I type.  

Frank, to my great surprise and delight, spent probably forty hours producing a symphonic masterpiece out of the track.  He added a dozen or more parts, harmonized it in ten different ways, on twenty instruments, wrote a brilliant intro and an unforgettable outtro.  I told you above, the man is a genius, was born that way, but he’s also spent well beyond the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell prescribed for becoming a master.  To this day, I still can’t get over what Frank was able to create out of that simple two chord vamp.

I sent it to David, who was impressed with the composition.  And this brilliant composer and harsh teacher– and this is why I have rolled out this long, tedious story– emailed me to say he was unable to tell which of us, the genius or the journeyman, had played which of the several guitar or keyboard parts.  A moment of great, long-delayed satisfaction was had.

So the point is, even a hack, with enough love of something and enough dedication to practicing it, may eventually play a few notes that will be indistinguishable from notes struck by a genius.  

Similarly, this strained, cracking smile I am practicing now can be molded, with enough true desire to do so, into a sincere and radiant grin that will attract customers to my cobwebbed shop.   I am betting the shop on it, my friends.

Support Our Troops

Once in a while I get an email from an old friend, a patriotic and conservative woman, that shows some aspect of the military and asks people to forward it to support our troops.   We have, after a rancorous period, agreed to avoid discussion of politics, but once in a while she sends me one that provokes a response, which I try to make as measured and non-argumentative as possible.

The other day it was an email with three photos.  A small group of Marines in full dress uniform,  in the open cargo hold of a commercial airliner, draping an immaculate American flag over a coffin.  Above them were passengers looking out the windows.  The narration stated that they watched this in silent respect and waited for the coffin to be removed, showing respect for the troops in a long moment that none of them will ever forget.   It’s unclear from the photo how the passengers above could have possibly had a view of something that was happening inside a hatch in the round bottom of the plane while their small windows looked out on to the tarmac.

The second photo was of a woman on a mattress in front of the flag draped coffin of another Marine, her dead husband.  Her face was illuminated by a laptop that was playing her husband’s favorite music the night before his funeral.  The Marine honor guard standing at attention by the coffin stayed through the night, at the woman’s request, watching her sleep as the Marines honored their fallen comrade.

The third photo showed a military man pinning something to the tiny chest of a young boy who had recently lost his father in war.  Under that was a long piece about the majority of Americans silently supporting our troops and wearing blue every Friday to quietly and firmly show that support.  God was also brought in, and our faith in God and our love and respect for the young men who give their lives in defense of our liberty.

My first thought was to let it pass, just an email.  Then I wrote and sent this:

Sure, I’ll wear blue every Friday, but I’ve got to say, there’s something here that mystifies me.  These brave young men who are sent to fight and die in wars politicians cannot explain— how do we support them by honoring them in death exactly?

 
Are we to ask no questions about why they are placed in harm’s way in the first place?  Isn’t truly supporting our troops first and foremost  a matter of only asking them to sacrifice life and limb in defense of our country?  I realize some Americans made billions on the war in Iraq, and I suppose nobody can discount that, but how do we support our troops by sending them to die, suffer traumatic brain injuries, amputations, dozens of plastic surgeries to reconstruct destroyed faces, in aggressive “pre-emptive” wars of choice waged for dubious reasons at best?  Was a single American death in Vietnam justified?  In Iraq?
 
I really don’t get it.  How God could possibly be involved in this ritual sacrifice of honest American boys mystifies me too.  I wonder if “support our troops” would be the patriotic mantra if Obama sent some of America’s most idealistic and bravest young people to die somewhere for reasons he could not explain, beyond slogans like “freedom is on the march” or “smoke them out” or based on what turned out to be misinformation, cynical distortions of shaky intelligence or outright lies.  WMD?  uh, no.  Ties to Bin Laden?  uh, not really.   Freedom!
 
I hate Woodrow Wilson for drumming up American enthusiasm for the senseless slaughter that was WW I.   Beyond the fact that American bankers would have lost the equivalent of billions in today’s dollars had Germany won, no explanation for America’s entry to that war makes the slightest sense.  Do we honor the thousands slaughtered in that war by draping their coffins with flags and saying they died heroically defending American freedom?   Or do we honor our troops by making sure they never are called on to spill every drop of their blood defending the profits of banks, oil companies or defense contractors?  I vote for the latter way of supporting and honoring them.

The Unexpected Reward for Mild Sincerity

I have been running an animation workshop for children ages 7 to 11.   My plan, without any business experience, has been to scale up this successful experiment into a small but expanding business.  A modest income for me and a fair wage for a few assistants who I would groom to replace me as the business grows.  When adults see the workshop in action they are often amazed– the children are working independently and with great focus on any number of their own projects, a couple work at the computer editing, a few more wear headphones and record parts of the soundtrack.  Other kids collaborate at the camera stand, lighting and moving things that will become animation.  A couple of adults are casually interacting with the kids, but nobody seems to be in charge. “I love the way it challenges hierarchy,” commented one parent, an architect, a man more insightful than most.

At times singing bursts out, one kid starts singing some idiotic ditty and others chime in.  It sets my nerves on edge, sometimes, but I resist stifling them.  They are singing because they are happy, free, nobody is telling them to shut up.   They take me aside to tell me inappropriate jokes, on the sly, because I never act offended.  I don’t laugh, I nod and I agree with them that the joke is inappropriate, but I don’t censure or censor them.  They understand I will nix such things in the animation they produce, but my theory is to leave them as free to express themselves as possible in the workshop.  Creativity demands no less.

From time to time they’re wild.  Part of this is my fault– in my excitement over how quickly they took over the various tasks of the workshop I neglected to install the crucial shut-off switch that is necessary for every teaching situation with young students.  This switch is needed when they are wild– the reminder that they have to stop and calm down or there will be consequences they won’t like.  It’s a trade off, freedom and order, and without the line they cannot cross being firmly etched, things will sometimes tip over into chaos.

As they did the last few weeks.  Last week my strongest, most street-wise and no nonsense assistant was out.  I was left with only my young, sweet, talented, easily manipulated assistant. Things got out of hand.  Kids were yelling, running with scissors, calling out for me to press the TIME TO STOP AND CALM DOWN button, but it hadn’t been installed properly.  Idle threats and the sense that no adult is really in control make them even more wild in  pushing the limits.  The thing it took me a while to realize, when I was teaching a few decades back, is that children need this control from an adult when they are unable to control themselves.  They will push for it far beyond the limits of reason by acting nuts.  Nothing they were doing the other day succeeded in actually bringing things to a boil, though.   Eventually a seven year-old leaped at me from the chair at the camera stand, throwing his arms around my neck.  I turned to catch him as he launched himself.

Unbeknownst to me, and probably to him, he was clutching a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil, point up, as he flew at me.  The pencil’s sharp metal tip (which I later showed the kid is retractable and should be pulled in when not drawing with it) went into the skin of my neck and ripped a short tear upwards as I caught the kid in midair.  There wasn’t much blood, but enough to smear my fingers with, show the kid as I took him with my other hand and guided him into a corner.

“When you act like an out of control baby you get treated like one.  You have time out.  Do not move from this chair.”  I left my young assistant as the only adult in the room and walked down the hall to the sink where I washed off the gash and threw some cold water on my face for good measure.  The kid hadn’t moved from the chair, but he was fidgeting with some blocks that were nearby.

“Time out means no playing,” I said, pushing the box of blocks out of his reach.  I reminded him that there is something you say to someone after you accidentally hurt them.  He managed a sheepish, insincere apology, accompanied by a variation on the simian fear grin.  A few minutes later I set him to work cleaning up, and he did so without complaint.  When his mother came to pick him up and expressed horror at what he’d done, he was defiant, hit her and shoved past her.   I was too tired and disgusted to intervene, beyond calling after him with a rhetorical question as he rushed out the door: “You hit your mother?”

The whole incident left me in a foul mood.   There was absolutely no pain from the scratch and within a couple of days it healed without a trace.  But the incident left me with a certain bitterness.  The reward for my inexhaustible patience and this innovative program that allows kids to grow their little wings and fly is a kid slashing my neck?  Fuck this, fuck them, I thought.  The email from a parent who runs the program that was waiting for me when I got home did little to change my feelings.  She asked for an incident report and it was followed by a lecture about consequences for misbehaving children, like my tiny assailant, who has apparently been out of control in every one of the other after-school groups he attends.  Inquiring as to how I was after the slashing would have been a nice touch, regrettably it was neglected.

“Fuck her,” I recall thinking.  The next day I wrote her an email describing the chaotic situation her own son had done so much to foster with his surliness, uncooperative attitude and racing around after the other seven year-old who provided a bit of my blood for the actual “incident”.  I never heard back from her.

I did hear back from a woman who runs a summer day camp for an organization that has a number of after-school programs for the fall.  She was interested in having the animation workshop at the camp.  She asked me to prepare a bid, a detailed proposal laying out all kinds of things.  She needed it immediately, although she could offer no guidelines for what they pay, I would have to include the price in my proposal.  I spent the last twelve hours of my birthday and the first few of the next day writing a proposal and reaching out for advice on pricing.  I got several pieces of wildly divergent, mostly passionately stated, opinion.  I gave the most weight to the advice of a self-made millionaire businessman friend of mine, and an even older friend who has been in high end sales for years, and made my proposal.  I noticed an increasing flow of stomach acid and distress as the process wore on.

The price I quoted them was based on the value of this innovative program and also on what this group can afford, based on the tuition that kids are paying.  I quoted a fair price, much higher than they probably want to pay, and more than twice what the PTA pays for the current program, but not inflated to leave room for much negotiation.  The floor and ceiling price are fairly close to each other.  If they won’t meet the floor price I have to walk away, since I didn’t quote them an arbitrary price but one based on my actual expenses, the value of the program and their ability to pay.  But so far, no reply at all.  The only urgency, apparently, was an immediate price quote from me.

As I made my way to the workshop yesterday it was with great reluctance.  Usually I look forward to it, for the first time yesterday I’d rather have not gone.  I gathered the kids and reminded them how fortunate it had been that I was the one whose neck had been gouged the previous session, rather than one of them.  They would have been very upset, and their parents would have been very upset.  I pointed to where the metal tipped pencil had gone into my neck and showed them that one inch over it would have gone into a major artery, and that my blood would have sprayed into the air, my hand traced the spurt so they could picture it, and I’d have had to go to the hospital, in a hurry.  Or, a few inches higher and the pencil would have gone into my eyeball, and I’d be in the hospital with the possibility of losing my right eye, depending on how the pencil went in.   This is what can happen when people are out of control, I pointed out. They were uncharacteristically pensive after this little speech.

“Would you sue Max?” a kid asked a couple of times.  I turned to him and said if I lost an eye I’d have to sue Max’s parents.  “If I sued Max what could I get?  His backpack?”  The kids agreed I’d have a better shot suing the parents.  I reminded the group that anyone who was wild and could not calm down would be escorted out, that there was no room for wildness in the animation workshop.  Then I told them to get busy.

They did, and there was no wildness.  

The times that try men’s souls

These are them.  But I’ll take just one small immediate snap shot, since I don’t have much time, trying though what little time I have at the moment may be.

If you find yourself waking up as a slave, having slept poorly, dreading the wake-up hours too early, stomach filled with acid, do not despair.  You will be tempted, as I am, having slept poorly, needing a few hours more sleep, alternating coffee to wake up and Tums for the acid, to cry out.   No need for that.  It won’t help you anyway.  This is a day you have to remember that your soul is no slave, and your dream of freedom will keep you moving forward, that an isolated trying day does not a trying lot make.  Even a string of such days does not mean the end of your dreams.

Sure as this drenching thunderstorm that is hovering over the area for the next 48 hours, sure as the wildly unreasonable  demands you will be asked to meet as soon as you arrive soaked and shivering, doubled over, trying to catch your breath.  Take it to the bank that today’s beating will end, you will recover, things will be fine and your food will taste good again and the sloshing of acid in your nervous stomach will be a distant memory, if that. 

Do not worry about any of this.  Do you see me worrying?

TEST

This post is only a test.  In the event of an actual post, there might have been some actual content here.  But this is only a test.  I accidentally subscribed to this blahg while mucking around on the company iPad, I want to see what happens when a person becomes his own follower.

In the empty stadium

The pitcher winds up, back to the batter, corkscrews around whipping a 96 mph heater toward the plate with tremendous movement on it.  He sprints in a flash to home plate, grabbing a bat in one motion swinging and sending it to the deepest part of the park, on a high arc into the seats.  But racing to the 410 sign, slipping on a glove as he does, he is able to time his leap perfectly and, reaching 18 inches over the wall, pluck the ball out of the air before it can descend into the stands.   Falling to the ground after slamming into the wall he manages to stay on his feet, takes a stride and throws a strike back to the first baseman, on a fly, and doubles up the runner who had taken off at the crack of the bat.  Double play!  He makes it half way down the first base line where he kicks the dirt, the bat again in his hand, and curses the fucking centerfielder, who a second ago was him.

All this drama is watched impassively by 50,000 empty seats.  The seats, truly, could not give less of a shit about heroics on the baseball field.

Torture– drop the word casually, it means little

People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.” 

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

Want to Feel Sick?

Here’s a cued up portion (9:00 for mac users) of one of the videos Bradley Manning is on trial for turning over to Wikileaks.  He’s already been locked up since May 26, 2010, his right to a speedy trial notwithstanding, facing a death sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act.   My father is shaking his head in his grave, uttering his famous “doesn’t it make you glad to be an American?”

Collateral Murder