Praxis as a Concept and Lifestyle

So, I tried to do a kind of semantic clarification in which praxis -- if not on the thither side of this divide -- was perhaps somehow between the theoretical and the practical as they are generally understood, and particularly as they are understood in modern philosophy.

Praxis as the manner in which we are engaged in the world and with others. It has its own insight or understanding prior to any explicit formulation of that understanding . . . Of course, it must be understood that praxis, as I understand it, is always entwined with communication.

                                                                                          -- Calvin O. Schrag

While praxis commonly refers to the process of putting theoretical knowledge into practice, the strategic and socio-political usage of the word emphasizes the need for a constant cycle of conceptualizing the meanings of what can be learned from experience in order to re-frame practical and operational models.

Trayvon: Send Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

Young man, African-American, in a dark hoodie sweatshirt. Very suspicious? A specter demanding self-defense?

Barack Obama said Friday that "every aspect" of the death of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot in Florida last month, must be investigated.

"My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin: if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," Obama said. "I think that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we're going to get to the bottom of what happened . . . Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids."

Meanwhile, on Friday, students at several South Florida high schools, near the Martin household, staged walkouts in protest since there have been no arrests in the case.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in humankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

                --  John Donne, 1624 c.e.

No matter what more transpires, there will be no satisfying outcome to this episode. The travesties of racial divides and barely unfettered gun violence have struck again -- and will go on. For some reason, I am reminded of the Casey and Caylee Anthony case this morning. Florida, Orlando area, power confronts naivete. Is it true, what Donne also said?

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

@@@@@@@@@@@



"Estamos bien en el refugio," Los 33

Los 33 de Copiano

       Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
       And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

                                             --  John Milton, Lycidas


One of the great stories of perseverance, hope, and transcendence during our era. It's just that the full story of what happened . . . and what goes on still . . . has never really been explained.

###############

Lorcan's Heavy Heart

Alas, you poor and foolish people, what will you do now?
I have given you my heart. Who will now take care of 
you in your times of trouble? Who will come to help you?"

                                     --  Lorcan Ua Tuathail,  c.e. 1180


  A Landing at Normandy Cove 

Laurence (Lorcan) O'Toole's saintly heart was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in the Diocese of Dublin on March 3, 2012.

The Dean of the Cathedral, the Reverend Dermot Dunne, said: "I am devastated that one of the treasured artifacts (the preserved heart of Lorcan) of the church has been stolen. It has no economic value, but it is a priceless treasure that links our present foundation to its founding father."

Ua Tuathail (Laurence O'Toole) was well-known as an ascetic. Legends say that he wore a hair shirt, never ate meat, and fasted every Friday on bread and water. In contrast to this, it is said that when he entertained his guests lacked for nothing while he drank water coloured to look like wine so as not to spoil the feast. It is also said that each Lent he returned to Glendalough to make a forty-days retreat in a rough cave on a precipice of Lugduff Mountain above a scenic lake.

Due to the miracles soon attributed to Laurence either at his tomb or through his intercession after his death, he was canonized only forty-five years after his death.

St Laurence's skull was brought to England in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish who had fought at Agincourt. The bones were interred at a parish in Chorley, now named St. Laurence Church. The bones disappeared under Henry VIII's rule. Traditionally, English Christians have believed that Laurence's heart has been preserved at the Irish Christ Church Cathedral since the 13th century -- that is, until March 2012.

To Be Continued

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Disagreement, But Not Disagreeable

Time has come today young hearts can go their way
   can't put it off another day
I don't care what others say they say
  We don't listen anyway
Time has come today, hey

The room has changed today I have no place to stay
I'm thinking about the subway
   my love has blown away
My tears have come and gone -- O, Lord I got to run
   I got no home no, I have no home

Now the time has come
  nowhere (place) to run
Might get burned up by the sun but
  I'll have my fun
I've been loved, pushed (put) aside
I've been crushed by tumbling tide
  and my soul has been psychedelicized
Now the time has come and there are things to realize
Time has come today
Time has come today
Time

          "Time (Has Come Today)," The Chambers Brothers

The Ballad of Casey and Caylee: A Rough Cut for Justice

First Note:

Caylee Marie Anthony was born on August 9, 2005 in Orlando, Florida. Her mother was Casey Anthony. Caylee Marie disappeared during mid-June 2008. Her desperate situation and her family members attracted widespread mass-media attention, about one month later, when it became apparent that the mother, Casey, had not officially reported that her child was missing. . On December 11, 2008, Caylee's skeletal remains were found in a patch of swamp near the Anthony family's house in central Florida.

Later, Casey was charged with first degree murder, manslaughter, child neglect, and other legal counts. She maintained adamantly that she had nothing do with Caylee's death throughout her 2011 trial, which was held during Summer 2011.

                     The more I know, the less I understand, all the things I thought I'd figured out,
                          I have to learn again.
                     I've been tryin' to get down to the heart of the matter, 'cuz flesh will get weak
                         and the ashes will scatter.
                     But I think it's about forgiveness, forgiveness, even if, even if
                         you don't love me anymore.

                                                                                   Don Henley, "Heart of the Matter"

This day of decision (July 5, 2011) -- unlike the outrageous and ugly wrap-up of the O.J. Simpson Trial on TV during the 1990s -- has brought a regrettable closure to an infamous, capital murder trial in the state of Florida, one that has become truly hot-commodity reality television porn for a hungry American public of voyeurs over recent weeks, and more. Now, today, this is where the lurid pages of the script, about the shrouded passing of Caylee Marie Anthony, the little daughter of one young adult female, named Casey, fails to screech to a clear stop. Actually, it guns its engines anew and veers down a suddenly wild and winding route, since the weeks of courtroom interactions have been unsatisfyingly summed up in tearful disbelieving cries, widespread anger for millions, and ambiguous confusions. The sickening script en medias res thus provides us with a an uncertain roadmap that may soon voraciously choose to plunge all travelers down, head-first, into a mystical rabbit-hole that is choked with still-unknown and tragic implications. To tell the truth, this seems like no other legal drama that I have ever experienced. (And I have totally had my share of odd, jurisprudence dramas throughout my lengthy life.) Put more simply, at the heart of this matter, this murder mystery -- now that the main courtroom drama has been darkly curtained and no person involved has been called to accountability -- is morphing speedily into a body of questions quite tantalizing for the thoughtful person, especially the great storytellers among us, that should not be disregarded before a deep search for the truth and focused critical reflection can take shape. 

Here is the springboard for the gruesome tale. An apparently physically hale but emotionally whacky and deeply deceitful family clan, the Anthonys of Florida -- a collection of practiced obfuscaters, cheats, and perjurers at best, each individual member wounded and bleeding in psychic depths way too deep down, in their darkened hearts to behold, manage somehow (when coupled together) to stamp out every actual particle of the  f-u-n  in some monstrous interpersonal/family dysfunction. So, how does one talk to others, meaningfully, about the painful and yet-undone Anthony morality-play?


Today, the glaring TV lights in the cramped criminal courtroom have been switched to darkness, and a portfolio of indelible memories, in even the casual trial observer's mind, picturing a two-year-old's needless suffering and death: these linger and gnaw. Casey Anthony -- the notoriously accused felon-mother, now at 25 years of age, irrevocably labeled by a jury of her peers as not guilty as of this day -- will decide to do what in response?  (What will Casey do now?) As the jury spoke words of consolation to her, her practiced and icy facade cracked in noticeable relief, and she laughed and, suddenly energized, hugged others and cried big wet tears. Over time, as the weeks of her not guilty identity slide into ambivalent months and long years, maybe Casey will slink out of sight, with cold suspicion and burning anger eternally dangling down from her head like a granite necklace, and trudge lonely and "misunderstood" back to her unremarkable life, either inside or outside (likely outside for good!) of her parents' prosaic suburban household. In this scenario, Casey would become the sadder but wiser earthly pilgrim, as Samuel Coleridge might claim);. Or Casey might remain unspeakably delusional, clearly not innocent, believed guilty as sin by all who encounter her, her inner landscape and daily ruminations replete with imaginary friends and staff co-workers -- like Zenny, who was Caylee's never-there, disappearing nanny, and Casey's purely fictional work colleagues at Universal  Studios in Orlando. Perhaps Casey tearfully will re-unite, on a sentimental Geraldo hour special on Fox News Network, greeting at long last again her stressed and shamed (and lying) parents and older brother. Maybe Casey will once more take up her party hearty tendencies, a forest of Smartphone cameras extended on upraised arms, flashing brightly, documenting every smiling gesture and spontaneous twist of the hips by this pop culture aberration. Or, maybe, she will one day assume the role of earnest and 'you don't know me' interviewee throughout soft daytime media appearances, talking away on non-serious and touchy-feely fests like The View, Tyra Banks, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In fact, it's possible that Casey might breathlessly 'write' her definitive and tell-all autobiography, promising the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth at last (to which she would not dare to testify during her court proceedings -- her book ultimately judged a phony, tear-inducing bestseller that was luridly designed to peak in sales revenue during the merry Holiday Season of 2012). Or perhaps, and this will be hard to handle for legions of child-lovers, the Former Tot Mom may choose to marry (or simply co-habitate with a starfucking string of admirers) and, possibly with that, gasp, could it be so?, Casey might choose to conceive an adorable, flawless Caylee Marie copy -- a precious doppelganger standing in for the little one who was, somehow, horrifically, lost -- and then hurled over the edge.

Just brushing up slightly against the razor sharp emotions, and the hot and simmering frustrations, engendered by this nightmare of a tragedy, seems to nudge the truly compassionate person towards the crazy state. Justice has been dished out cold -- live, as it actually happened, on Headline News and Tru Television on cable. It turns out this bit of justice tastes bitter and dry (as in un-swallowable) to almost everyone -- even the quartet of of Tru's biggest luminaries, the sinking Anthony clan -- and it has been purchased with your personal taxpayer dollars, just as long ago John Jay and Thomas Jefferson imagined it should be. Dished out, then hurled down -- onto the coldstone floor of freedom. Once again.

As the courtroom lights are doused, the now-empty seats are straightened up, and the big wooden doors to the chamber are bolted and chained, I suddenly think this. This tragic storyline of the Anthony clan and their forever lost fifth cog, Caylee Marie, had to take shape in the American South. Had to. Absolutely. One simply cannot imagine this lingering, unsolved mystery issuing from anywhere else (well, okay, possibly it could have come from Shakespeare or a great writer of 19th Century, Russian literature). The ballad of Casey and Caylee is a tale completely ruined by human toxins, like a dinner soup that has been poisoned with diseased milk and unclean water. When the ballad is crafted into fiction, eventually, the lyrical account of Caylee, the offspring lost, and Casey, the mom unsteady, will emerge only from the subconscious of a fearless Southern teller of human tales. This awful story's defiant twists and legendary backflips will rivet ususpecting readers (as the moment by moment trial on Tru-TV has done), and it should cause them to ruminate on what issues from the abuse others, lying to beat all, cruel indifferences toward others, narcissism, and other pathologies -- all conveniently tossed together, under one family roof, or as if in a kitchen baggie, like salad makings, to be garnished later with spicy, crunch and munch ethical ambiguities. It should remind the avid readers of miserable (but fictional) family assemblages such as the Sutpens and the Compsons, key Faulknerian tribes who, flawed grievously, populated old Mississippi.



The epic of Casey and Caylee will likely haunt those who dwell on the in-court chapters of the tale. Some day that gifted storyteller, writing within a lonely chamber somewhere in the U.S. South, will draft an opening chapter. It will present the broad sweep of the Anthony family's tragic circumstances. During suceeding elements of the book, all of the key particles buried in the gruesome details of this passion play will be disclosed, page by page. A beautiful and charming innocent child of two, Casey's offspring, father unknown, so full of loving promise and spirit, will figurativel stare back at us, from playtimes past, with her oversized and perfectly clear brown eyes, from inside the novel. Words will say that she, Caylee Marie, inexplicably went missing during June 15 or 16 of 2008, and then turned up dead in December, 'drowned' (in one manner way or another), forever breathless and still, victim of some faceless cruel fate. In the book, the child's body is monstrously concealed (by the little girl's scared-secretive and neurotic family members) within her own home, until its decaying mass begins to make silent demands and its unmistakable odors prove too much to bear. In time, the tiny and decomposing lump of  Caylee is furtively secured, by someone, in a crude canvas laundry bag, on the oil-smeared floor of an uncleaned garage. Eventually it is cast, heaved frightfully, into a haunting, lonely acre of wooded swamp. Disposed of, sunk down wetly into the black and smelly muck, the tell-tale corpse is seemingly hidden away forever, nothing to be scared of, last touched by the messy hands of some family member(s) -- perhaps her birth mother, or a grieving and wrinkled gray-haired grandparent.

But. Quite crazily, the unspeakable horror story does not draw to a quiet conclusion. Months later, as the sun rises on an unremarkable December morning, in the middle of that cloying and hushed patch of swampland, the oddly selected burial ground, the vulnerable infant's skull -- and then, amazingly, the whole fleshfree corpse -- claws it's way out of the brown canvas laundry sack into which it had been zippered (aided by the sharp-toothed labors of ravenous swamp creatures). The remainder of what was  Caylee surfaces in silence, a shocking but wordless testimony. It lies unmoving atop its horrific, but not final, resting place. The sad pieces of Caylee Marie's earthly self are soon discovered by accident, stumbled upon by a blue-collar meter reader, as the Winter sun strains for its apex in the sunny Southern sky. Once gathered, then newly and tenderly bagged and tagged by investigators, the precious remains begin to speak metaphorically, with righteous but silent claims, challenging authorities bitterly to find the one(s) who plunged her into that dark and creepy abyss and make them pay. Forever trapped in death, Caylee summons her killer(s) to a merciless and brutal reckoning.

Sad. That's what the state of modern, American jurisprudence is -- down in the simmering South and elsewhere, thanks to the virueses carried by "real-life" Tru-TV dramas. The shocking ending of the Anthony family passion play in that Orlando courtroom, after months of justice-applied destined to become justice denied, leads to this  lesson: no one is going to pay the price for the horrible snuffing out of young Caylee. That's the way it goes in this country. A hard to fathom and irrational verdict has issued forth, like a piercingly loud gunshot exploding and echoing throughout the hills, and valleys, and canyons of the tragic old South lands. Sadly, this mesmerizing and maddening outcome, with its breathtaking aura of anger, ambivalence, and ambiguities, was actually to be expected. So, as the ballad on the stage ends, and the curtains swing closed, the major characters leave hastily without anything to say, heads bowed and eyes nearly closed, soon out the reach of TV's klieg lights. The Anthonys and other cast members will disappear into the haze of cultural oblivion in due time. The black-robed judge retires, in utter disbelief, to his secret chambers; he makes no comment, but thinks thoughts that he will never share with anyone. The dutiful jury of 12 disperses frantically as the gavel strikes down for the last time. They choose to say no words into waiting microphones, for they (the now-former jurors) are greatly fearful of the angry heat and derision that the public will soon fasten firm, like sparking electrodes, to them.

So. It's over. Blind American justice and subjective morality demand that we all trudge on. Days and months will stretch quietly into decades. Memories will begin to deteriorate. Facts, names, opinions, and deceits will get mixed roughly together, as most good story elements seem to eventually do, like a collection of hastily penned recipe notes on how to concoct a lasting legend.  Books and songs will get composed. Perhaps some of them will be sung and read. Magazines will feature colorful, alluring cover pages that present Casey, Caylee, The Anthonys, the lawyers, some jurors -- all the the main players -- who have shuffled off of  center stage. Many tears will still be shed as the great new Southern novel comes to light. But all of this, unlike our timeless American judicial system, will fade away soon. Since inquiring minds in the USA will no longer crave to read about it, the sordid descent of Casey and the passing of Caylee, in People magazine or the pages of The National Enquirer. And because it's over, and something new will have jumped up to sit in its place of dishonor.


Finally, there is this. Families of the shameful lie endure somehow, some of them even prevail, in America's southern culture. There is no innocence (nor genuine recognition of guilt) in such family aggregates, like the secretive Anthony clan. They remain the busy fashioners of America's telltale tragedies, epics, and ballads -- and they live on with their diseased blood lines until the tribe as a whole meets some unforeseen demise. For the time being, today's notorious American epic is focused madly, ruefully, on such a clan of deceivers, headed by George Anthony. At its center are two dark-haried daughters whose given names each begin with a capital C -- they are Casey and Caylee. In one instance, a daughter's name starts with a hard C and it wraps quickly, in two breezy syllables, toward a twisty, last letter -- Y.  <<  Case-y >>   The name possesses at first a harshly hissing and sibilant sound, quite unlike the lilting, tender syllables of the name Cay-lee.  Like the mythical death of the Florida child, Casey ends with the hard sound of E! (as in: eeeee)  So, I say, 'that's a lonely and harsh conclusion, that dangling Y -- way out there on the bitter end of your name, Casey.' And it leads me to think about another kind of  Y.  As in: why, Casey, why? And also, dear girl, please, when you get around to explaining (if ever) your Why?, will you kindly (unburdened for all time by the need to defend your life) give us some insights on How it all came to pass with poor Caylee? Casey, please, don't make earnest storytellers grope about in the darkness forever.

 ************************************************************************

Last Note:

Casey Anthony was found not guilty on July 5, 2011 of first degree murder, aggravated manslaughter, and aggravated child abuse by a jury of 12 men and women in Orlando, Florida. However, she was found guilty of four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to the police. Later, Casey received a criminal punishment of four years in prison, yet she was credited with jail time (about 3 years) that she had already served. She is scheduled to be released from custody on before July 15, 2011.

Intuition -- It's What's in Store

The word for reflection today is: Intuition.

Intuition the gift. 'It's what's in store.' Unbidden. --  Epistemology in its most singular and mysterious.

So sugary is it 2 hear (that @ 1 time) you were the best-ever, the top, the best -- a peak in a chosen field. But: all dreams and lifeskills inevitably erode. Recede with age and experience. Leave us most in need: to see and accept a nagging intuition, awful, deep.

That would be: that the time has come. The clock has struck 11, perhaps 12. The awful call 2 step away has been inexorably delivered: life, & profession moves on, far beyond the temptations 2 anxiously, desperately, cling.

And how? With the passing margins of the pages, and in the summary notes, a dimming yesteryear is a story that has been written, has already drifted away, out pnto the o[en and rolling seas forever. (And here I take a moment 2 ponder the once-stellar athleticism of one man of steel-will named Peter Rose, or the iron-jawed Johnny Bench, the once magical Willie Mays, and like Brett Favre, and of course Joe Willie. Each greeted the hard lesson of intution, and time passing, but only dimly, until it was too late, lacking completely in the simple grace of acceptance).

Intuition. An understated and inexplicable high. One struggles 2 explain it. But: sometimes, you know?, you just know ---->

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgAhG6mmbNw

Disaster Tourism: Aching for That Lingering Look

A mighty weather front brought the clatter and roar of Summer tornadoes, with rushes of flooding rains riding on their swishing tails, into sweaty humid metro Louisville -- and thus to our vulnerable neighborhood -- in the mystic duskiness of last evening. It launched massive, silvery, madly-spinning harpoons, glinting and slanting savagely, this way then that way, right past our Cherry Springs. Too close, way too close, for any restfulness --

In the awful wreckage of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, for the rest of 2005, we often sadly referred to a daily sight with the odd name: 'disaster tourism.'

It looks like: SUVs full of people arrived from elsewhere. Snail's-pace drive by's. Necks craned at very odd angles -- little black and red smartphones shooting brilliant white flashes. Aching hunger to see -- for a little while -- what the charging weather bombs hath wrought. Staring blankly, jaws slack and distended slightly, at the ruins that once constituted some poor souls' homefront and livelihood. Curious. Hopeful the pictures will be good. And: Predatory. Words spoken in hushed tones, as if at a funeral. Japanese motorcar engines purring softly along the debris-laden, breezeless streets. Lacking, all ways, in human care and compassion.

Yes, the touchdowns, then stark and shattered aftermaths, of power storms -- Mother Nature in vivid, 3-D stop action -- seem to (predictably) spur a horrific thing inside otherwise 'normal' people . . .  Truth: I have beheld it again today . . . . Edgar Derby plaintively said:  And so it goes.

Resolve: It's a Hard Thing

No time to fallter. Press the button labeled shock doctrine. Keep a fiirm and steady hand, all the way! Then, as those all about dissolve, and look pitiful and quiver-y, both inside and out: observe.

A thin drip of glimmering red slides bloodily down, so whispery light , so truly crimson, from the promising mark that has been made, a piercing into the vulnerable skin..

And this, yes this, is what it feels like . . . a stinging pain that cuts, and burns, and lingers with inevitability. Then strain, all, to seeresolve, what it brings: slim hints of sun rays lighting up the east.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK8YAuIxTrI

Winner Takes All

My hands were still shaking, because four and a half weeks had gone by and they had not, like my jilted love, been fed. My thoughts mirrored them, fidgeting and wracking back and over my mental 'scape from one alarming thought to another. Though it would be so satisfying, or so I thought, to get out of hospital scrubs, pack of Kools slipped down into the breast pocket and a ( ___________ ) tucked into my left pants pocket, just in case I really needed to grab something. Or someone's -- sturdiness.

I had been told it would be therapeutic, as in calming and as in constructively soporific, for me to pen journal entries every day, a couple of times. Especially when I felt this miserable. The iron-handed man with whom I was about to meet had contended this. God, I hated him, improbably named White,  and his gray wizard stares. The worst thing he had ever said to me, I now recalled. I just could not get why I let his contentions get to me with such guile.

"Winner takes all," White had said.

Bullshirt, I said to myself. "Don't try to feed my that," I said, unable to disguise my surliness, lamely hiding behind lame humor. I expected suddenly for him to leap out of this work chair and clasp his calloused hands around my newly-shrunk and breakable neck.

"Did you write anything?," he said. Unmoved. Unmoveable.

"This is my last," I said.

"What makes you think so?," he replied icily.

"I'm posted to get out. Remember, sir? Breakout time. I'm just about to go across the bridge." I laid four white, legal-size sheets on his desk, by my left hand.

"You are going nowhere until I sign-off," White said implacably. He nodded, a bare tip of the head, to a security guard who materialized behind me, by the suite's doorway. A moment of breathlessness shook me. I sat on my hands, literally sat on them. I hated it when they shook and people saw or when I had to clasp hands with another.

"Well, let's get it started," White said. With a swipe of his hand, he grabbed my papers. With a look more serious than I could have ever before conjured, stupor or no, he read how I now put the pieces together. The guard pulled back into the hallway, judicious but not more than an athletic leap away.

I had written on the paper, in pencil:  I have lived many fruitful and some fruitless years, and I never really thought it would happen, that I would actually kill off another person's seamy existence. Other than my indefatiguably controlling and perennially pissed off former spouse, I had never really felt a bona fide temptation, like I would genuinely accomplish it (until lately), to murderously end the life of another, even one of the crudest and most cruel members of the human parade of losers who have invaded my life. And as an addict (euphemistically in full-blown recovery) you can imagine how outlandish some of those human dregs have proved to be. Whenever anyone asks me 'why did you do it?,' I invariably respond by claiming that he earned the shot, deserved it more than anyone I had ever met, and that I did our wounded race a humongous favor. Homicidal anger though is a shrieking, self-destructive, and nerve-fraying spin cycle, a topsy-turvy thrill barrell-roll of a ride as some call it, from which one never comes back wholly and which depletes one's self-justifying spirit indelibly. My plan called for me to pay out $5000 in untainted currrency, which I did, for a bullet to the back of a monster's brain. But I learned something long hidden in my heart (after the money had been doled out) when, with my good hand and arm, and a trifecta of tiny white Oxycontin tablets, I suddenly cut another down, in an irresistible-impulse rage, with extreme prejudice, as they say. Too bad for me and my dim future that I did this deed in a church, gun protruding from my left palm, as religious tune whined out from a synthetic organ, on a Sunday morning, while about a thousand eyewitnesses looked my victim, who also whined miserably when the metal hit him, and me over with eyes agog.White glanced up at me, his forehead wrinkled by rejection, sitting on my downturned jittering palms and fingers.

To Be Continued

No Place for Crosstops

I am working out a couple of new short stories; one will likely (working title) be called "No Place for Crosstops." Yes, that is a Green Day musical allusion. Here are some possible opening paragraphs. I think I will do five, one for each work day this week. A guy with a wandering mind and a creative-impulse working overtime, spun out in this room, has gotta do something, eh? I'm asking for your help. Which one(s) seem(s) to draw you in, initially, more than the others (which implies, of course, I know, that they all might suck; this is the constant, worrisome dilemma of the contemporary storyteller)? You know?

Monday:

It was very good, very, until it all began to fade, as undetectably as a once-sparkling coat of satin paint slowly degrades, then pales away, all of this mainly unnoticed on the walls of any small, poorly-lit European salon. Mr. Obscure Writer reacted to the urgency he felt by gripping a cheap blue Bic, and he began to write sentences, scribbling madly, cursive not so polished, about what he had suddenly intuited while looking above a hazy, smoked gray London skyline. This time he believed that he could, if he were single-minded, if he could remain focused on a crucial point in time, finally tell it like it really is, perform like a refined and sensible imaginateer, and tell them all, as well, at long last, how it ought to be.

(What I am hearing in my head: Stereophonics, "Mr. Writer")
Play it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnbb_zfIxBY


Tuesday:

He closed his eyes, and his inner darkness rapidly enclosed him, but he felt as sick (even sitting down in an overstuffed Victorian wing chair) as if he were spinning and stumbling in jagged circles crazily -- like some misbehaving little miscreant would perform when he turned round and round and round quickly till falling-down dizzy, even though he had been sternly warned by all not do so. Do not open them, do not peek for any reason, he thought he heard again, though he was absolutely by himself in the flower-scented room (well, the only breathing being at least) as he looked, sitting, all over, left to right, the well-tooled and burnished casket that now possessed the long-perished remains. It had been a cruel, thunderbolt of an insight -- what he had seen, with his own eyes -- when first he peered down, very reluctantly, perhaps cowardly is the better term to use, and saw what, or should that be who, was staring back at his face with a bleeding and pleading stare from the interior of the satin-lining of the burial box where, in all situations predictable and orderly, the dead one's head should have been resting, eyelids forever slammed down, brainlessly.

(What I am hearing in my head:  Green Day, "Brain Stew/Jaded")
Spin out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHP4TWIxx_I


Wednesday

They had been kissing in that way, that morning, for long and precious minutes like Caleb had often believed, yearned, that one day would be possible. But, then, she without warning rolled away from him, rotating mostly on her left hip awkwardly and too quickly, and she sighed heavily, with a disappointing frown, leaving him with his arms still curled out in a grasping semi-circle and confronting a sense of surprise and utter loss, like that complex sensation of the numb-jawed, wet, blood-sucking pop (but there is no real popping sound) when a useless tooth gets extracted from one's pried-open mouth. Displayed on the LG flat-screen monitor were the dazzling but frightening pictures of tall buildings burning down, with people jumping off of them from heaven-scraping floors. The CD player, set down low, with bass notes on heavy, was just at that moment rumbling with the smoky piano crescendo (Yoo-hoo-ooow-ewe) at the close of the cover of "Imagine," by the musicians called A Perfect Circle. Caleb and Gina had never been huddled together in a desperate and awesome moment of choice quite like this -- and the wicked, deceitful conspiracies that they had concocted to lead them to it, this naked decision point, lent the present tense a breathless, high-up-and precipice-dangling tingle deep in each of their undernourished stomachs.

(What I am hearing in my head:  A Perfect Circle, "Imagine")
Play it loud:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktv2C9vnRKU


Thursday

I have lived many fruitful and some fruitless years, and I never really thought it would happen, that I would actually kill off another person's smarmy existence. Other than my indefatiguably controlling and perennially pissed off former spouse, I had never really felt a bona fide temptation, like I would genuinely accomplish it (until lately), to murderously end the life of another, even one of the crudest and most cruel members of the human parade of losers who have invaded my life. And as an addict (euphemistically in full-blown recovery) you can imagine how outlandish some of those human dregs have proved to be. Whenever anyone asks me 'why did you do it?,' I invariably respond by claiming that he earned the shot, deserved it more than anyone I had ever met, and that I did our wounded race a humongous favor. Homicidal anger though is a shrieking, self-destructive, and nerve-fraying spin cycle, a topsy-turvy thrill barrell-roll of a ride as some call it, from which one never comes back wholly and which depletes one's self-justifying spirit indelibly. My plan called for me to pay out $5000 in untainted currrency, which I did, for a bullet to the back of a craphead's brain. But I learned something long hidden in my heart (after the money had been doled out) when, with my good hand and arm, and a trifecta of tiny white Oxycontin tablets, I cut another down, in an irresistible-impulse rage, with extreme prejudice, as they say. Too bad for me and my dim future that I did this deed in a church, as religious tune chimed on a Sunday morning, while a couple of hundred eyewitnesses looked my victim and me over with eyes agog.

(What I'm hearing in my cranium:  Green Day, "Hitching a Ride"")
Louder now: 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOy9V6vpNs&feature=related

Friday

It was the dream again, the one that forever made Agnese stare at the unthinkable. She was lost and wandering within a mysterious pine forest, at the base of the hill east of Montepulciano, her home village, and Agnese as usual could not find her way. A gray fog seemed blanket thick and icy sharp. Just like the one that now kept her home for single women, near day's dawning, out of sight from all mortal eyes. Agnese struggled to breathe nomally. Again she was searching, in this untamed forest that was rumored to have magical powers, for the confessional box where her all of anxieties and guilt would be relieved. Or so she chose to tell herself half-heartedly. Wild owls called out in shrill tones. Something big and menacing, and uncaged, and apparently bloody hungry, growled near her. The shadowed trees exhaled one then another, and another -- like lost souls randomly sighing. But the cold mists that she always discovered, in this bizarre night journey, prevented Agnese from beholding anything or anyone clearly.

The Land of Ever-Been Meets the Place of Never-Was-Before

Oh, make me over; I'm all I want to be; A walking study; In demonology;
Hey, so glad you could make it; Yeah, now you really made it; Hey, so glad you could make it now
Oh, look at my face; My name is might have been; My name is never was; My name's forgotten
Hey, so glad you could make it; Yeah, now you really made it; Hey, there's only us left now.

                                                                                               Hole, "Celebrity Skin"


Part I  --  Oh, Look at My Face, My Name is Might Have Been, My Name Is Forgotten!

There was a sultry night in October, long ago, when my parents both, two adult neighbors, and I looked up toward the dark, clear Summer sky. I think a neighbor kid, named We were in our family's rambling back lawn. Unlike in urban settings today, a canopy of twinkling stars was clearly visible all over the awesome, vast-black overhang.

My parents and those neighbors were disturbed, and shook their tilted-up heads. My mother and father each spoke about disgust and fear, a couple of times. One neighbor seemed quite certain, except his voice had a faltering quality to it, that the End was near. Yes, the End.

We searched the night sky, trying to catch a glimpse of the space contraption, now known to just about everybody as Sputnik. It was, supposedly (we only had news reports from TV and daily papers to go on -- there had been no pictures shown yet, so we had to use our individual imaginations to conjure what Sputnik looked like), racing through space, and thus orbiting the globe! On its own. Or was that "in" space, or "up" there, or "over" there. Defining the space and the then oxygen-rich, earth lifezone continuum was rumored to be a tricky thing. So, if one went to space, he or she definitely did not go up (though it seemed so). The physics of the equation and reality suggested something else. Decades later, like now, I would be reading rather difficult books full of entertaining, but arcane, science about the possibilities of whole universes -- close to us as our, well, neighbors, that consist completely and specifically of mathematics. As the philosopher Suess was to exclaim years later, 'Oh the places you'll go!' You know? 

After about 30 minutes of fruitless and semi-frantic sky-search, my father spotted it. It, Sputnik, appeared to be a tiny (I mean really tie-nee) pinprick of star. But it was behaving oddly. It was racing, like a tiny diamond NASCAR racer, on what appeared to be a consistent left to right track, with a little arcing movement mixed
in cleverly. Once it was spotted, we all stood silently, looking into virtual darkness, and (heads rolling back and forth in disbelief) watched a shiny, tiny Russian monster above, yet in, our space (as the word 'space' is used in common parlance today). To loyal and proud Americans, this was felt like a sharp and forceful right jab, to each person's abdomen, because the bitter enemy of all free peoples, the Soviet Union, was symbolically winning the struggle to do the impossible -- that is, reach out to a finish line (as in a race) and conquer space.

"Damn Ruskies,' said Mr. Alexander, with his thick accent, since he was a native of Scotland and had moved to explore the manifest destiny of the United States lower 48. "Soon enough, I tell you, they be putting us right in their gunsights from up there. There'll be no place to hide."

As a mere child incapable of deep thought, my native response on seeing the dazzling little pinpoint that was now racing away to my right (that was supposedly Sputnik) was limited to observations like "Wow," and "Cool." On an emotional level I was anxious, mostly because my parents were also nervous. And of course they showed disgust that America -- which should be first in everything -- had failed to beat the Russian scientists to space travel. I could not grasp the implications. Not many people of any age could. Mr. Alexander began to pull away toward his crackerbox, frame house next door. He tightened the features of his face, pursed his lips, then said (sadly? like a prisoner giving up once he has been captured?), "This could be it. This is going to be big trouble." Then, he walked away, head down.

I wonder where he is today. In his grave, I would guess. But his progeny live on -- three children Stuart, Jamie, and Jennifer., along with their offspring. On his grave marker, I imagine the saying, "The End is near. This is going to be big trouble.'

The brilliant, energetic, pioneering human foray -- with its many, many smart machines -- into deep space: was it trouble? Well, such a case might be made. Opposite arguments, and all manner of other viewpoints and learning about the human search for ultimate meaning, can also be posited.

Twenty-five years or so after that remarkable night of strange magic on our black-blanket lawn, still recalling with a little thrill my first glimpse of the rogue machine that had imagined Russian insignias (and warlike, frowning grimaces) on its sides, I could read and think about -- and even see detailed pictures of Sputnik I and many other satellites. So many facts, figures, and details had come into focus.

Satellites were conceived to help us look through space, then out toward other worlds -- planets like Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn -- and beyond, even into rumoured parallel solar systems, galaxies, and whatever else strange magic hovered in the impossibly vast chamber of the universe.

But the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote compelling about possibly using satellites for mass communications among earthlings. Clarke thought that perhaps only 3 (powerful) geo-stationary satellites could be launched to provide high-speed, world-circling communications coverage for our entire planet. What was once conceived as a mediating force -- a satellite -- that would telescopically cause us to look way beyond ourselves, into the vastness of the Other 'out there.' Instead, sat-tech began to primarily serve the missions of espionage on all sides East and West; reconnaisance oerflight double- and triple-checking; geological and other earth studies; and the reflection back, to us on earth, of our news and entertainment media --put another way, we got (in all quarters of the globe, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, Christian-Muslim-Hindu-etc., pictures and films, advertising images, shapes, sounds, stories, performers, fashion, ideas about food and drink, yes, the whole nine yards of Western pop culture through electronic transmissions. Pop culture myths and stories pinged up on the satellites. And they got pinged back in many directions to many land and many peoples. In philosophical studies of culture, some ask does the culture form the people in it, or is it the people present who are alive, thinking, writing, painting, storytelling who form and develop the culture. In truth, people shape culture. Culture, in turn, shapes people back. It's dynamic and ongoing as a process. Once the mass communications satellites, like Arthur Clarke had imagined, were "up" and running, it was game on. As a human community, we got extreme doeses pinged and beamed from satellites @ us about who we are, could be, might never be, and, above all, how to get the most toys in order to win the game of "I'll get mine."

Computer-technology was just about hit the scene too. Lookout, was the cry throughout the Land of Ever Been, for it had been struck by a game-changing set of conditions. And it was reeling and adjusting. The Place of Never Was Before going to really rock its planet. Some young men were working studiously in common garages, and basement workshops, on motherboards, harddrives, and other eccentricities. This was a few short decades after the impossible had been achieved again -- by the Soviet Union again. Sputnik II had gone racing into space during Novemeber. It's pasenger was alive -- a cute dog named Laika.

As Mr. Alexander said to my father on another quiet, backyard night-watch, this time for Sputnik II. "Well now, does that not just beat all?" Turns out that no, not by any means at all, did that excursion beat all. Which begs for a new topic to look at in this metaphysical musing.


Part 2 --  So Glad You Could Make It . . . (But) Hey, There's Only Us Left Now

         (To Be Continued Soon)

Don't Blast Me -- I'm Just the Messenger

Here's An Easy Question and Answer

This little test should be a snap. What do e-mail, e-messaging, instant chat online, cell phones  – like Epics, Evos, and Blackberries -- Apps and Androids, Skype, twittering and tweeting, blogging, and “Facebooking” all have in common?

There are a couple of ways to answer. How you answer may hinge on how old you are. Or simply how tech savvy you have become, no matter how long you’ve lived. Or, better yet,  how ‘wired’ you are – though none of those things actually need wires to work.

I’d answer very simply, if I were you. They are forms of  social media. They are tools that help people – of all ages, all over the Earth – to communicate.

Social media tend to be intense. As in immediate, like here and now. Media such as texting, tweeting on Twitter, and blogging make the connectivity (that is, the messaging back and forth) between individuals  more ‘real time,’ easily-conversational, casual, up in your grill. This is now. This is the future too, folks. Welcome aboard. Connecting with others 24/7 through social media has docked in our port ‘o call. Mobile communications rule. ‘Web-based’ is here to stay. Digital has taken the day.

Yahoo, Hotmail, and America Online Are So 20^th Century

Want to be considered nowadays for bigtime lame-ness or premature geezer-hood?

Easy enough. Watch movies on a VCR. Listen to your Walkman or to vinyl records (though that is seen to be a very cool activity by a small percentage of hip music buffs and collectors). Capture cute pictures on film, instead of your phone. And – ooh, here it comes! – brag about how you really blaze your way, digitally, with G-Mail, Yahoo, or other e-mail.

Emerging trends in social media have raced so fast, during recent years, that even some young adult, 20-somethings at times feel a little lost, sadly old-school, out of touch.

Clearly, e-mail is not totally yesterday. It still works in many business situations. It’s useful when shopping online. And when you need to send information via file attachments. It’s also usually a good thing to scan (at least now and then) since teachers, businesses (like banks and airlines), bosses, older friends, and parents tend to make steady use of this modern tool.

In a December article for the New York Times, a journalist named Matt Richtel wrote about ‘the problem with e-mail’ among young kids today. He says, “It involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line, and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours. And (it uses) sign-offs like sincerely — Seriously?”

Texting, instant-messaging -- called “m-ing” -- plus Skype-ing are experienced more as here, now, immediate, real. Time-eating steps -- as many used-to-be Yahoo and G-Mailers believe -- simply cuts off ‘users from what they crave: instant conversation.’

Richtel comments on the social media habits of youth like the totally e-savvy Lena Jenny – a high school senior from Cupertino, California. Lena notes that texting is so quick (and that means very good) that “I sometimes have an answer before I even shut my phone. E-mail is so lame.”

The monster-sized social network known as Facebook  is working to stay on top with the Lenas -- and Leonardos -- of today.  Facebook plans to soon bring the world a “revamped messaging service that is intended to feel less like e-mail and more like texting,” according to Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at the company.

Broken English – Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Things speed quickly. The beautiful and the artistic can get lost in a 4G texting universe – courtesy of Sprint, Verizon, and other communication companies

In that New York Times article by Matt Richtel, we learn about a 23 year-old accounting technician who works in New York. All day, this young guy, Adam, uses e-mail and traditional phone calls while doing his job. When he slips away from work, Adam communicates almost completely by texting via his cell phone. He’s pretty skilled at it.

But, to tell you the truthm -- his little brothers, at 12 and 19, are way better.  Awesome at it. Their messages (“txts”) are short, fast, pointed. The brothers leave Adam behind sometimes. “When they text me, it comes across in broken English. (Sometimes) I have no idea what they’re saying,” he notes. “I may not text in full sentences, but at least there’s punctuation to get my point across. I guess I’m old school.”

Yes. Only 23 years old and already feeling . . . out of it.

But – in all -- this is not just a story about the death of phone calls, written letters, e-mail, or the like. According to Dr. James Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies, at Rutgers University, “It’s more of a downgrade of these things, thanks to greater choice and nuance among communications tools.”

About young kids, with their e-mail accounts, and their Samsung phones , Katz claims . “It’s painful for them. It doesn’t suit their social intensity.”

Some people don’t like to hear this. Like one who writes books and blogs about social media, Judith Kallos. “We’re going down a (bad) road where we’re losing our skills to communicate with the written word,” she says. Sloppy structure, bad spelling, and upsetting grammar are the results.

But Katz adds that texting with one’s Smartphone, and using things like Facebook, tend to mirror how people really talk to each other in person. Brief phrases, abbreviations, “creative” spelling, and oddball words get used all the time. Prediction? Katz thinks that, soon enough, e-mail blasts will give way to “faster-twitch formats,” even among older people.

Three (Maybe Four) Ways to Think This Through

First. Watch the award-worthy film The Social Network. It’s about the invention of Facebook  – and all the drama that went into it. Talk with a friend, or friends, about what the movie says. Then, discuss how social media, web-based tech stuff, and digital dreams are changing our lives and culture.

Second. Look into some stats. Research says that social media usage is spreading world-wide, fast, and will continue to do so. Talk with friends about what these facts have to say:

n  Social networking now accounts for about 25% of all time spent online in the United States;

n  By late 2009, over 240 million people, age 13 and older, in the USA, had the use of mobile-comm tools like ordinary cell phones, Blackberries, Kindles, Tablets, etc.;

n  Twitter processed more than one billion “tweets” during in December 2009; it now averages about 40 million tweets per day;

n  One of four internet page-views in the United States occurred at one of the top social networking sites (such as Facebook) by early 2010 -- up from only 14 % a year before;

n  Social media users, age 65+, grew 100% throughout 2010. About 25% of senior citizens  now belong to Facebook, MySpace, or the like.

Third. On January 24, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement from the Vatican on social media today. He spoke about the proper use of social media by individual Christians, the church, and the world. The statement has a long title. It is called “Message of Pope Benedict XVI for the 45th World Communications Day: Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age.”

Find it online here:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20110124_45th-world-communications-day_en.html

Take some time to read, think, and discuss this article. Compare Benedict’s points with the social media commentators and experts who are named, above.

Fourth. Well, this step is up to you. Go digital. So, my peeps, farewell, and . . .

Gud luk. Txt or m me when ur dun. TTYS. B real & c u l8er! 8-)

Story Fragment: Shadows in the Margins (Chilean Mining Accident)

This is a story fragment. And a not very good one at that. This is often how fictional stories are birthed. Trial and error. Organic evolution. Someday, I might just have a really great short story about the Chilena mining acident of August 2010. We'll see, I suppose.


And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows, and turns to stone.
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone -- Dragged down by the stone.

                                                                                       Pink Floyd,  "Dogs"

Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.

                                                                                   Paul of Tarsus, Galatians 6: 9

One Day at Copiapo: Not So Long Ago

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the borders between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." This highly enigmatic saying, which by all accounts is from the work of one Doctor Albert Einstein, came to my thoughts -- like a sharply painful brain-freeze, from a long drink-in of ice cold water -- when the accident first cropped up in all the news media. That is, of course, digitally, breathlessly, by many means and media, all around the known world.

Los 33 -- the thirty-three, en Espanol (which is such a beautiful and mythical tongue to which to listen) -- is how it, the jaw-dropping incident in rural Chile, El Copiapo, the rumored cave in a deep, deep down in a human-bored mountain mine, so extraordinary and perilous accident came to be labeled. But to those with true insight recognize that it was not an accident, as the event, was labeled, at all. A cave in? On the los 33? No, not in reality. But it was a spectacular if pain-inducing illusion, was it not, generated with such seeming ease by those mysterious outsiders who provide illusions and tricks of the mind and heart, in the margins of our personal and communal limited frames of reference, that are, well, spectacular and, in the end, wondrously compelling.

It all began like the sum total of human experience, in wide-angle. One sunrise and sunset cycle, that flows toward another, Day, night, then the hints of sun-up again. Yet every once in a while thihngs grind down to a halt. Someone, somewhere, fiddling with the undoubted process.
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Karma Comes for a Visit

Some moments are experienced, some things seem readily to have occurred, but some -- the most compelling ones -- are at best sensed as they unfold, through intuition, and known barely, darkly, or sometimes starkly, in the aftermath and fallout deep in a person's heart.

  One long Sunday not so long ago, around 4:00, when the sun at last had emerged -- a glimmering ray at a time -- from behind seven, mystery-bearing days of unfettered, ominous, gray cloud banks, like a sliding-by umbrella sweep of wrinkled slate, I began to feel anxious and dizzy, as if I were angling down, down, toward some limbo beyond my ability to comprehend. The monotony of a light but persistent rainfall, tedious hours and hours of it, had ended, like a curtain swishing closed from east and west. Momentarily, I believed that I discerned (wrong, that was) that I was sliding beneath, without clues of bodily discomfort -- but with a rising tide of nerves -- toward some subterranean, yawning-open zone, so far unexplored by me, of desperately seductive drowsiness.

As so often happens, I had been sitting, with some apparent ease in the untrained eyes of casual observers, in the room, in this dank apartment, that most people would refer to as the family room -- but, you see, there is no family to speak about. Not any more. They are all gone. As in vanished, certain observers say. Someday, I may join them. But, for now, it's just me, I tell everyone. One of the last things that I could remember hearing (while dropping down) was a peal of hearty laughter, canned soundtrack style, from the show on my TV. It was a story about dogs, the house-pet kind. Then, there was a little buzzing sound from the TV monitor and I imagined that the picture went gray and blank.

What rose up into my sleep-surrendering mind, at that moment, was a flicker of memory: a callous, high-pitched teacher, a man hated by all students alike (or thereabouts) was lashing me verbally me, the student, for an erroneous answer in my Physics class, long ago, telling me that I was certainly no Einstein. And then I think I dimly beheld some thin and pointy arrows of sunlight pushing down through my slightly-parted velvet curtains, only to crash like sharpened pieces onto the carpet. There is this dream-like thing that I started, a fugue that had something to to do with past or the present. I remember clearly a mask of Medusa staring at me, it's snaky head winding around the doorframe, black as coal eyes, but improbably translucent.

. . . Which, adds up to: I never saw them this time. Though I briefly (felt) their presence as I sank down, right adown like melting fluid in front of the sunlight streaks. I had just laid aside a book I cherish, The Mutiny of the Elsinore. I had already unsteadily begun to prepare myself for a social call. The three had come back to me, for me. Short of stature, manifesting as stick-like ectomorphs, bony arms, slippery translucent body coatings, and hands that felt like hooks. Big cartoon eyes, lids up and lashes unblinking, were appliqued to their faces. -- And clipped little dog-like tails, twitching away like off-point metronomes of little Yorkshire pups. The threesome,barely sensed, just . . . materialized.. Such an honor, I dreamed smirkly. All this, for little me? I was ready to sluice into battle, hard. But I was caught hard on the shoulder, and felt paralyzed, by one their grappling hand hooks. Something metal and ugly, that I didn't even know was there, like a razor-honed bullet hard-stabbed me in the trapezius. A set of eyes stared back at me, then, skittered to the left and away-- disembodied, the animal from my doorway?, a Latino man . . .

Faux peals of mocking laughter, and as the trained dogs barked on the television like the on-call actors they were, and as I felt a flicker of fear as I was succumbing, losing all control as if paralyzed by stingrays, without strength, into that deep morpheous trance, they had slipped through an short dark seam, a foamy little invisible crack between here and there that had formed in the dusty but sun-brightened air.

If you had been there, well, here present actually, you would have seen me in a chair, and you would have seen the television monitor blot out to gray, and you might have sensed the sunlight streaks coming in through some curtains, but no body would have strode through the door. As has happened at previous times, they had come on the scene -- materialized in a moment -- standing there and staring my way . . . Well, standing here. And, as I recall, the trio, with their non-muzzled and hungry demeanors, like gray shadows emerging -- materializing --silently from the darkness of the margins, was not in a pleasant or sunny Sunday mood. Havoc, cry havoc now, was the silent scream that boomed in my head. Then, all was blankness, a paralyzing flat line.

Sliding into the Future Tense


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'Cry havoc. And let slip the dogs of war!  -- Wm. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

One of his wizened old uncles once told him, suddenly, after back-to-back-to-back shots of Old Crow whiskey, that dreams sometimes behave like your impudent family members. Like the unwanted and uninvited, like the drunk and disorderly, they have a manner of showing up when least wanted and saying more than they should, and often in an uncomely manner at that.

Einstein's theorem is what he had been considering all day. That would be Einstein the scientist, not one of the bagel-making brothers. He had marveled how things -- the theory -- must have suddenly jelled in Einstein's fertile mind: even at the subparticulate stratum of the slightest sunbeam, everything is always in bustling, perpetual motion. Always. But relative. A stunning insight that could not be denied -- like Medusa's terrifying yet beautiful visage. A horror show. As kids are given to say today, it must have rocked his, Einstein's, orb.


To Be Continued 


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The first in-dream sensation, as far as I can recall, was a pang of reluctance. I stood, hesitantly. I was outside, unwittingly, of a large, shuttered and sharply gabled building in an outlying metro area  -- like Washington D.C., home turf of political illusions and landscape of perverse paranoid dreams. It would, I sensed, take some heavy knocks on the main door to get some attention. That is, if I knocked at all.

My first knocks on the imposing door were, I confess, rather timid. Taps might describe them better. No reply. Knock, knock, . . . knock (more firmly this time). Nothing. Now, I'm getting flushed. Mad. "Come on," I yell, pounding a fist on the imposing door. I am certain that I am expected. And, more, that it's expected by some authority -- I know somehow -- that I will get into this mystery house of sharp gables

Then, my heartbeat quickens. I focus on a gaping black entryway. The door was open. I looked into a deep dark hallway. Then I looked back. There was no one behind me. The door had opened wide. Just like that.