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.

Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

The grouping of sounds . . . said something comforting to Inman about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.
                                                                                 -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Hello, hello, baby -- You called? I can't hear a thing. I have got no service in the club, you see see. What, what did you say? Oh, you're breaking up on me! Sorry, I cannot hear you, 'cuz I'm kinda busy. Kinda busy. Kinda busy. Sorry, I cannot hear you, 'cuz I'm kinda busy.

                                                                                  -- Lady Gaga, "Telephone"

Because I try to maintain a sensible equilibrium during difficult times, I have been re-reading Charles Frazier's book called Cold Mountain. It's about the chaos of battle, panic and loss, perseverance, and ultimately the hope for redemption in the old South during those bleak, defeating days after the Confederacy fell to the Union. Inman is the protagonist of the book. Yes, that's right, Inman.

Climbing back up the slopes of Cold Mountain seemed the right thing to do since lately I have experienced (in my troubled mind), unwillingly and incessantly, patterns of four -- thoughts, phantoms, memories, fears, questions, or some combination thereof -- that collide and become jumbled up in that hidden but conscious part of myself that I call Me. Each package of four always I experience as a mysterious and discordant nexus. I know what I imagine is not real. But yesterday I believe I saw four jagged and stony pieces of meteorites, aimed at me like brutal, fleeing convicts scarily blowing in from the four corners of our minimum security galaxy, borne on perpendicular shafts of gray interstellar winds. Like the raw ingredients of an unholy zia, the four racing rocks seemed to have emanated from a secretive otherworldly desert. As yesterday gave way to nightfall, my thoughts became fixed on a collection of daring, logo-covered stock cars -- each was coming relentlessly toward me from north, south, east, west -- grill toward grill, bright and flashy headlights merging into a blazing white and blinding spotlight, as if a chicken at the crossroads battle had been green-flagged by an unseen and evil-minded mastermind. Goofy. Troubling. Unstoppable. As each of these episodes recedes in my imagination, with the postmodern and symbolic ambiguity of a David Lynch movie, I hear this song, Into the Great Wide Open, as unseen credits roll,

     They moved into a place they both could afford,
     He found a night club he could work at the door,
     She had a guitar and she taught him some chords,
     The sky was the limit -- Into the great wide open,
     Under them skies of blue. Out in the great wide open.
     Rebels without a clue.

So what will this day bring? I have a premonition that it might be my last. But that's probably just my paranoia at work. Why do I say so? Because here in the darkness before dawn . .  .

I am staring transfixed, sensing a hotness in me, at a strangely alluring piece of photo-art. It is a stylish picture made with a classy Nikon camera on a sizzling desert day near the Four Corners of the Southwest. It decorates the front panel of a CD jewel-case by a local rock 'n roll band. The group is called Dark-Eyed Juncos -- desert-dusty, sharp billed, and relentless scavenger birds of prey. They (the musicians) remind me of hardened, blue collar power trios like Cream, Rush, the James Gang, and other music legends.

This stylish picture's hues are primarily black, white, gray, and a color that makes me whisper (to myself) fuchsia, a lush pinkish hue. It depicts my friend -- and current stylist at a place called Dream in Color -- named June (who plays a dedicated-to-rock bass guitar for the Juncos in local clubs) and her two middle-aged male bandmates. She is perched in the middle. These men have crept close to her and appear to be whispering secrets into her left ear and the right. ('Here we go again. I feel the chemicals kickin' in. It's getting heavy and I wanna run. I wanna run and hide. -- So, what are you waitin' for? Take a bite of my heart tonight!) One man is dressed in a spotless and glimmering white linen suit, topped by a tilted white fedora. The other is clothed in a diabolical black frock coat, with a pirate-style do-rag (all black with white diamonds) tied over his skull and an equally black gentleman's stylish top hat over it all. 

June wears a stylish, but reasonably modest, gray dress, an enveloping shawl with long strands of fringe, and high cut gray-leather boots sharply decorated by straps and buckles. She sits outdoors whimsically (reminiscent of the mythical Alice, in a granny rocker, anxiously making her way back from Wonderland) on a fiery hot, improbably overstuffed easy chair of fuchsia out in the  burning Mesa Arts Center park. June has a 'curious girl' -- or is it perplexed and frustrated? -- maybe surprised but heart-aching -- expression on her face. Her finely etched eyebrows are arched high. For the moment, she seems pinned tight to her perch, like an avian corpse stuck on the board of a science experiment. The entire photo backdrop is a mysterious blend of pink and gray, like an airborne cloud tinted by a flaring sunset. In the middle, at the top of the photo, is a prominent number 928 (which seems harmless enough) on a plain black panel. Ambiguity and ambivalence drip like liquid drugs from this CD cover. What secretive temptations, what salacious thoughts, which indecent proposals, what hurtful assertions are being whispered into June's ears? What does she hear? (Does she hear anything?) Will that linen white or distrusting black one turn her head? I begin to imagine that June is, what now?, what?, shaking, rattling like an angry desert snake's tail, now coming apart while lurching back and forth hard -- a desert bird, a junco, ensnared, pinned, pulled, then ripped by the wings while anxiously attempting to take flight. -- I blink and everything goes white. In my thoughts, I fear that I have gotten lost somehow, not knowing where, on a vast and sunny expanse of Death Valley desert . .

But somehow and for some clouded reason I suddenly stand erect and gaze blankly, feeling alone -- there is no searing heat, no numbing cold, no physical sensations at all -- outside the glass door of the cramped little hair salon of Cheri Casio (a stylist of mine from another lifetime -- but not that long ago . . . ), which I visited almost monthly for twenty years. I am looking through the wide pane of glass that holds the swinging door-frame and spreads out to effectively form most of Cheryl's storefront wall. It is a sultry and cloudy afternoon during the month of June. It is the year 2006. Forgettable days. Summer in the South is really coming on. A sense of irony wells up in me. The building that holds Cheri's cramped quarters is growing steadily warmer because the Louisiana humidity (a phenomenon constant and oppressive in the old South during deep Summer months) is beginning to build up like a radioactive cloud. Many of the little hair and fingernail shops surrounding Cheri's are dark and abandoned, haunted by the irrevocable loss of their lease-holders who fled the tornadic violence of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then the horrific flooding aftermaths those troublemaking ladies brought to town.

I notice that my in-glass reflection looks forlorn, I am shaggy and unkempt, dark half-moon circles of depression underline my eyes, my shirt is wrinkled. I read the name of Cheri's business painted in green and gold just above eye-level -- A Cutting Remark -- on the illuminated pane. I hesitate. I can't bring myself to push inside just like old times. I am leaving. Soon. It's going to come too soon! Is this the last time? "Probably," I whisper wistfully, to myself and gaze down. No one overhears.

Cheri has been a kind and loyal (but lonely and husband-hungry) friend, over month after month, over year after year (for almost 20 years, over 200 trips in, I told you). -- She's a Catholic girl raised on a Mississippi riverbank across from New Orleans. She exhibits great pride, precision and perfectionism in her work. Once a thriving business, she has now lost much of her clientele to the powerful storms that have come and gone. Cheri would invariably ask for my Dear Abby opinions, as we waited for her hair-dyes to seep into my roots and before she would go swinging her scissors around my head, about her recurring troubles with men both single and married.

That forlorn aspect I see in my reflection is beginning to feel like an anvil of guilt pulling down on my neck. Okay, I will not tell her that this is the last time before I leave. No farewell. No 'thanks a lot,' my dear. I have decided. Sorrow will rule the day. (Sadly I know this is the wrong thing to do.) I hold a tattered, paperback copy of the novel Cold Mountain, which I thought I was going to re-read as we waited in uncomfortable chairs for the hair color to take effect. -- Why? . . . Seven long months have passed in this damaged and reeling area, as it struggles back toward wholeness from being hurled into a barely civilized, medieval state by ferocious winds and deluges, still reeking with the acrid and messy smells of hurricane floods rising up from the bayou turfs. Each stressful day (all through 2006) devolved slowly into a long wake in an unsanitary civic funeral parlor, yes, a wake that refused to end at sunset, like a nightmare and unfunny parody the film Groundhog Day.  I tell  myself:  Not one more painful utterance of  'So-long, pal. Thank you and goodbye. You've been great.' No more daylong wakes. Not one more clingy handshake. No more awkward hugs and teary endings. So I turn my back wordlessly, regretfully, to A Cutting Remark. I feel sad beyond words. Walking toward my car, head down, like a preoccupied pall-bearer carrying a corpse toward a gaping hole that's already been dug. I know this is wrong, an immoral choice, a sorry turn of the screw. Perspiration drops trace from my neck down my guilty spine. I wonder if Cheri will forgive me for my disappearing act. I will try whisper an emotional 'I'm sorry,' ever the con at work, into her ear someday.

Stop thinking this, I command. Then my imagination heats up, working hard, and I let slip to the ground the worn paperback of Cold Mountain -- as if I am stroke victim gone horrifically numb on the left side -- but I am not standing in the raggedy parking lot anymore. No, I standing upright again in a place far (perhaps very far?) away, inexplicably, that I have never encountered before . . .

but . . . a strong feeling of disbelief overwhelms me. I feel dizzy and claustrophobic. I have been been lurking motionless -- on a hard, gray industrial carpet -- in the dim and poorly finished-basement hallway of an indistinct office building. The walls need to be washed, having turned iron-gray mixed with urine yellow, an unattractive and cloudy tableau. I sense anger and disbelief. This basement smells like an ancient library. Well, in fact, it is an old library I notice. A high-tech office telephone with a complicated panel of buttons and lights sits archly on a thin white shelf by my side, a waist-high protrusion on the bottom half of an old dutch door. The message-waiting light on the phone flashes red brightly. -- On (red). Off. On (red). Off. On (red). Flash. Flash. Red. Flash. Off. Red (on) . . . Persistent. Unflagging. You've got mail are the disembodied words that echo through the hallway. Tirelessly the blinking continues. Eight voice messages have been captured in the terminus. Eight lights a flashin' . . . Seven calls a waitin' . . . Six words unheeded, I hum spontaneously, stupidly, to myself. The phone flashing red, off, red, off, red, off has been ignored for six months, perhaps more. This I somehow know. I judge it to be an evil sign.

Anger swells anew in my heart. This phone extension apparently belongs to any staff member. A catchy song -- Hello, hello baby. You called? I can't hear a thing! -- about telephoning pops into my head. Then, a nameless, faceless aged co-worker stands with me, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this situation is all wrong. Callous inattention and disrespect are words that preoccupy me.

I ask her, why did these calls come in? What did the callers want? Does anyone care?

In a hushed tone, the old woman worker tells me, ' . . . Well, you see, sir, the secret password was not retained. No one has it. Can't do anything about it. Not now.' 

Then, she shrugs. I feel like bursting because I am so mad. Liquid and toxic disdain floods my body and soul.

And who's gonna fix this? Who's gonna this mess clean up?, I demand to know, like a charging bull in small pen. Get I.T. pronto. No excuses. Fix it. -- Who's in charge here?

I look to myself like the hollow shell of a court-martialed officer, clothed disgracefully in a tattered uniform, a failed leader with no conscripts, bereft of his battalion of Misfit Toys, sent back to an empty barrack. Big winds issue from empty caves, I remember, as an old saying goes.

The bland co-worker replies like a dispassionate junior officer, 'Why, you are, sir. You're in charge."

I blanch, my hands fly up, and I lean back quickly as if shocked by an electrical current. Here it comes again. I sense a tingle in my neck, then  rush of vertigo and quickly I am feel turned upside down,

Then rapidly, incongruously, I go slip-sliding down a steep metal chute straight into the driver's seat of my frigid car, hitting hard on my butt but seated upright, at the chute's bottom. I hear a bone-crunching sound. My tailbone area crackles in pain. After a single nervous breath, immersed in the green glow of my illuminated dashboard, a strange fantasy swirls to life --

I am driving my car to the New Orleans airport, block by block in the famed Garden District. It is a wickedly frigid and incredibly dark winter morning of 2006. The neighborhood is enveloped by a deep and pure blackness. Silence reigns. Houses are dark inside and out. Many are abandoned, boarded up, water-scarred; some are tagged with painted-on graffiti, courtesy of post-Katrina search and rescue squads. Many tags are shaped like a cross (with a variety cryptic symbols around it -- these denote clues like 'empty house' or 'abandoned animal on these grounds)' There are still bodies of people and animals lying, decomposing, in some of these places. But search teams have gone home and must be sleeping now in warm encampments of their own. A great many street signs are utterly useless. They lay face down, their poles flat on the easements by the sidewalks or wedged in messy gutters, toppled by the ravaging winds and floods those big, hurricane girls brought by.

My headlights shine like the eyes of a wild beast in this deep, unnatural darkness. On the deadly day of August 29, 2005, thousands of streetlights all over the city of New Orleans malfunctioned catastrophically. Their cycle of lights -- red-green-yellow-red -- disappeared. Traffic lights began to blink  either yellow or red incessantly as the Hurricane Katrina headwinds at last relented. The maddening and incessant flashing for months upon months, most of the lights in the Garden District were yellow, lacked clarity and finality, hurled caution into the wind. It symbolized a taunting message from the inscrutable gods: 'Heads-up, trouble abounds. There be no safe passage during this life.' The taunting, like trash talk on the basketball court, went on month after month unremitting throughout the city streets. 'Fragile is life, vulnerable is humanity, we hold your fate in our hands, so vulnerable are you! At times the taunt went: 'Make your own rules. No more black and white, no more red and green. Nothing clear. Or make a break for it. Dare you, loser.'

At a very slow speed under the morning darkness, worried about who or what might be approaching, I roll the car carefully to the storied intersection of Broadway and Freret, near historic but hurricane-ravaged Tulane University. On Broadway I am heading toward the airport. A shiny dark red Suburban emerges oversized,  from darkness, to my right. It comes toward Broadway on Freret Street. It is on a right angle to me. Its brakes whine as it halts for the yellow light. I look over. The whole scene goes bright yellow, then dark, then . . . on each of the four street corners sheets of cold mists -- like an amber cloud of airborne illness -- settle down and seem to spread like paint over all.
I think I see Cheri sitting the Suburan's driver-seat, a thick black coat with a high collar is pulled up around her neck and dark hair. Her stare is red-eyed, menacing, ungodly. I am very alarmed. The woman looks right toward me and through me. Her lips are closed tight but I hear her angry sentiment "Get away!"  She shakes her head back and forth, violently, to emphasize her bitter indictment. I spy an animal in there with her. Dark-tempered, black, and furry -- a big dog?, a gorilla?, a black wolf?, a different kind of predator from an untamed wilderness? The beast stalks around the interior of her SUV with menace, its full furry tail swishing madly. Momentarily I think of piney, Tennessee forests swaying in stiff winds in the story of Cold Mountain. A horrific sense of resignation wells up in me. I sigh -- but the whiny sound of my cold breath redounds to me, from the green glow dashboard, doleful and stale. The cold pinpricks my face like a spray of ice pellets. Heartbreak takes me. I feel lost. Alone in the dark. Freezing and lost.

A song springs up on my car radio -- "Animal"

(Admittedly, I fall into a confused state. In reality, this cannot be! The properties of time, sound, and place are bending right before me. This record will not be heard by anyone anywhere on any radio until early 2010. -- Yet, here it plays on this winter morning, an up-tempo departure anthem, way too uptempo for this deep, misty cold, and soulful pre-dawn --

     Here we go again, I feel the chemicals kickin' in
     It's getting heavy, And I wanna run
     And hide -- I wanna run and hide,
     I do it every time, You're killin' me now
     And I won't be denied by you
     The animal inside of you. Oh oh,
     I want some more. Oh oh
     What are you waiting for? 
     Say goodbye to my heart tonight.

I grunt, Ugh. --I whisper lyrics I have just heard: 'Hush, hush. It's us that's made this mess. What are we gonna do?')

The unbidden song ends with an eerie fade, not a cold and definitive endstop. No music follows. Radio static buzzes around my ears as if the station has suddenly signed off the air. I reach for the FM buttons. Oh right, I remind myself, the radio in my vehicle no longer works.

The scratch of static dies away. Silence prevails. The illuminating yellow lights keep blinking. Momentarily, (like a fool) I worry needlessly that a runaway Amtrak train, it's exhausted conductor catnapping at the controls, might come crashing through this scene to mash me senseless, just as Cheri's fiery Suburban runs into me. A four-corner, four-direction disaster is what I imagine, I gasp and look away. I wish it would . . . Nope . . . I don't, I don't, I won't. Moments of inaction slip by. No other cars or trucks come by. Silence reigns. This stupid shit is just never going to end, I shrug. Dejection. S.S.D.D., I tell myself -- same stuff, different day. 

(Time brings about a difference .Months later, after my mind has cleared somewhat, I wake in a crowded lecture hall and see an authoritative and reliable professor standing behind a podium. I sit on the left hand margin of a hushed audience. She begins in a measured way to pose intellectual insights and deep questions to ponder about post-traumatic stress disorder, as if it were a clinical disease. With her smooth and trained voice, she posits a thesis. PTSD is a condition wherein someone victimized by a real life experience, which often proves lastingly painful and horrific, is burdened, perhaps in an unalterable manner, by . . . Huh? What? My mind must be wandering through the jargon . . . .

But wait. Wait. -- I wonder if I have indeed heard the expert at the podium correctly. What was that that she just said? The professor skims hastily over her text toward a poignant conclusion. She seems to be suddenly short on time. But I am still back on her previous point. In my limited brain matter I piece together an image of a Netflix movie that unreels time after time deep in someone's unlucky cortex, an emotional tsunami masquerading as a technicolor, Dolby surround sound show either On-Demand or Pay-Per-View lasered into a fated person's head. It is typically triggered by the pulse of a hidden command button.

The lecturer says for them all to listen up, this is her last key point..

She reads through half moon eyeglasses with shiny black rims, a very academic look. She holds note pages steadily. 'Often an innocuous moment of sensation can be the tripwire, that hidden command, that reignites the painful experience one has had. Post-traumatic and disordered I have posited about what one has suffered. It could come from the smoky odor from a house fire that's turned a family's life into cinders and fear, or a seemingly innocent pinewood smell or a piece of clothing with moth balls on a hanger that waits like a lingering marauder deep in a backroom closet. Or, as you all have no doubt heard, for many survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in this region, it could be the hurricane-soaked reek -- just a whiff or two of this most putrid smell -- in a flooded home or a lowly Toyota's previously flooded trunk now cluttered with salvaged junk from the storm. Finally, perhaps it could come from the head-turning odor, or the sorry sight, that rises from sidewalk piles of tragically ruined and discarded personal items: personal photos, kids' toys, broken knick knacks, decimated X-Box an PC units, musical collections and stained  castoff clothing, all on a torn up easement in front of an abandoned dwelling during the heat of a day,' the professor contends.

The professor closes her notebook. She looks pale, grim, fretful. She stares at the floor of the lecture hall briefly. Silently she tucks the notebook under an arm and strides out of the room with looking back. I notice one phrase -- author unknown -- scrawled onto the a erase board. It reads: 'Let us learn from The Great Deluge.We've come too far to turn back now.'

I sit, in a dead-stop, at the nexus of Freret and Broadway, a crossroads, a zia some would contend. It seems like time to fly. Gotta go, bro, I tell myself. Delta is ready when you are! 'We love to fly, and it shows!' Elvis must leave the building -- The amber street lights caution against rash action; they flash without sentiment: Go. Don't! Go. Don't! Go? Don't! . . . . Sick stuff. Survival. Just doing their job. It's all too confusing. Prepare to stop, or prepare to fly?

Like in a poorly plotted horror movie, the false image of Cheri with the red eyes fades into the deep black mist. On all 4 streets, the nexus, the absurd yellow blinking will go on for months more. Can't anybody or even a computer in this effing town repair anything? Can't anybody tell me clearly what I should do? 'How many more repeats . . . .?'

Suddenly, I flinch. My muted cellphone vibrates somewhere deep inside an interior pocket in my hefty overcoat. A phone call? A text message?

      Hello, hello, baby. You called? I can't hear a thing.
     What, what did you say? Oh no, you're breaking up on me,
     So sorry I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy . . . --

A message at 4 in the morning? No. Impossible. It can't be . . . My heart thuds. My stomach rolls. I get that dizzying feel of vertigo again. I am spooked because I sense who's trying to reach me. In fact, I'm sure of it. Here in the everlasting dark with my Sprint phone at my service, this cannot end well.

Towerless and powerless, like it is after a hurricane's stiff winds have blown through the scene, I can't linger anymore. In my mind I hear the nervous trill of the future song again:

     Here it comes again
     I feel the chemicals kicking in
     and I wanna run and hide
     I wanna run and hide:
     say goodbye to my heart to-night 

And without warning, once more I find that I have been placed transfixed, a hotness rising like a cloud in me, at a strangely-alluring piece of photo-art on a CD cover. The number 829 looms at the top of a black-slate panel, as do the ominous words A Dreamer's Remarks. I recall that this scene at one time seemed harmless enough. But now, with its few alterations, it may foretell a cruel coincidence. Is this a secret code?, I ponder. Is this supposed to be funny, some kind of joke? I feel anger and resentment. But I smile in resignation because reality can be stone cold, and unforgiving. In my mind I hear the tinny echo of a Tom Petty tune about the great wide open spark to life, in a cavernous room, perhaps far far away.

 

In the entrancing photo (the one which I am studying), there is an oddly appealing scene of three people, obviously a trio of rock 'n roll band mates. One man is in spotless linen white, with a spotless white fedora; one man is cloaked in a black frock coat with a black do-rag (covered with white diamonds) tied over the top of his head, and the last figure, a pretty female, dead-centered in the picture, a Summer girl it seems, wears big silver hoops for earrings and stylish gray clothing and boots. She appears to be tight-lipped, perhaps curious, perhaps alarmed, perhaps grateful as she heeds the words of one of the male musicians being whispered in an ear. I gather that she is piecing together a deep, dark secret that has not yet been disclosed . . . .
 

*****

Soundtrack.  Click here to listen to:

"Animal," by Neon

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