quick

An unstrung bow soon becomes naught but a strange stick.

waiting for something

The answer is to stop asking. 

an obscure one

"Remember: Gatorade is basically soda, so give them water, and maybe orange slices, when they play."

assembly

Like each other great city, New York looks big, but is much bigger than it looks.  Across from my law firm is a public school building that houses an elementary school in the lower floors and a high school in the upper floors, about ten stories in all.  They are conducting a fire drill on the sidewalks.  A sea of children - about three thousand in all, I'd guess - organized into tight rectangles managed by teachers, each with a red binder.  I can see them out the window, sunlit and looking like confetti in their bright, juvenile clothing.  The short youngsters towards East 57th Street and the lanky teenagers on East 56th.  The motorcades to the U.N. General Assembly pass in the orange-coned special lane, heads of state with their entourages, yet another layer to this phyllo dough city.

Luxembourg

If there is no benevolent deity, patience is not a cardinal virtue, but only a tactic - though very often a good one.

glories

Horses' gaits.

glories

Sutton Foster singing at Café Carlyle.  Sitting there, happy and in love, his hand touching mine under the linen tablecloth as we near a decade, murals aglow behind Sutton, her eyes locked with mine as she purrs.  The pianist, really accompanying - setting off long low vowels with slightly staccato notes, pulling back altogether for her riffs.  The quiet a capella duet with her musical friend who is married tomorrow.  The lovely wine, the wide open smiles of prosperous men, dined and wined, then drunk on her performance.  Waves of understanding: so this is what Woody Allen was getting at, what the Upper East Side has going for it, what this organ of New York's cultural viscera is doing.  A pearl of song in an expensive casket; its lid lifted an hour each evening.  Will we be back?  Perhaps when old, when seventy, to remember last night.  It will still be there.

school is in

It is 7 am.  My N train pulls into the 59th and Lex subway station.  There, at the foot of the down escalator, a mother glares up the descending steps, draws down into a half squat - I suppose to improve her view up the escalator - and, sounding like a drill sargeant, yells "Hustle! Hustle! Hustle! Come! On! Hustle!"  She punctuates each echoing word with a big, meaty clap of her hands.  I exit to the sight of two bleary-eyed pre-teens half sleepwalking, half running, down the moving steps to catch the train, backpacks tugging heavily behind their downward gait.

hymn

Nothing sings quite like need, especially for deliverance.

Carousel of Progress

If I could reintroduce one happy fiction to American thought, it would be a sort of futurism or utopianism.  We did better with those dreams than we are doing without them.

greek key

A certain amount of illusion is called for in the construction of anything that depends in any serious way on the regard of others.  To present a naked form invites contempt or, worse, misapprehension.  Even a paper cup is printed with some sort of design.  This is more than decoration.  It makes the thing more there.

a mean one

It's unkind of me, but there are some people who should not be walking down the street toting 2(x)ist and Victoria's Secret shopping bags.  The mental images are unfortunate.

zippo

Eventually, the threads of a screw strip out and the screw's head is tapped out from too much rough turning.  Ruined, irreparable.  We all feel like that busted screw sometimes.  We feel that way precisely because we are not made of steel - we feel and are flesh and blood.  And that is our rescue: we heal.  Our threads come back into neat alignment and our heads return to the ready unless we mistake ourselves and our substance.

vicera

Everything is messy inside.  That's why foreign policy isn't done in glass houses.  (Except lately?)

wasting time

If I were a snitch, man!
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd tattle with delight
If I were a stealthy man!
I'd never play the face card.
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd weasel and play dumb.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a subtle-sliding snitch,
Sly ol', shifty-eyed ol' little man.
...

spaghetti squash

Most of my dreams repeat, but last night's dream was new.  I'm in the apartment, sometimes in the living room, other times in the kitchen, later in bed.  It is daytime.  Every few minutes, I notice a new gap or wide cut in my body.  Each is painless and bloodless and I do not notice them until I see them with my eyes or feel them with my fingers.  I feel no fear, only curiosity at their great depth.  Each cut goes almost through to the other side.  One cut is on the pad of my thumb, and goes clear through to the thumbnail: I can see its inner surface, backlit like pale stained glass by the sunlight coming through my bedroom window.  Another cut is to my thigh, another to my side, just below my ribcage.  There was no blood, no pain, no muscles, bones or organs.  Instead, there was only an excellent view of stringy, pale, slightly translucent flesh that was precisely like that of spaghetti squash!  I am certain that spaghetti squash is the object whose memory was used to paint these wounds in my mind's eye.  (We ate a lot of this and other varieties of squash growing up.)  The picture above nails it, right down to the slight glow of light through the thin, scraped out part of the squash.  It is rare that I can show, with good accuracy, a scene from a dream, but the picture above is very nearly what my thumb looked like (except that there was no fork, and nothing spilling out).  Awake, all of this seems gross, but in the dream it did not seem so.  Instead, there was just a sense of curiosity satisfied - so that's what I look like inside - and curiosity not satisfied - where are these gashes and cuts coming from?  My brothers and sisters will find it amusing that, after so much reluctant eating of squash as children, one of us eventually dreams that he really is made of the stuff.

above and below

The obvious is overcome,
Is made foundational,
Built on, and lost.

For example,
We worshipped the sun once,
When needs were plain as light, warmth, food.

But we think, we are more than needs,
We aggrandize, we sell:
Sun King, Sunkist^©.

Somehow, briefly,
These cloud the sun itself,
So that I say: "There is the sun."

And probably you ask yourself:
"What's his reference, What's the
Antecedent?"

But I'm pointing
To that orb in the sky
That is not harvest, nor king, nor

Lawrence of Arabia's sun,
roasting Gasim, nor the
Homeric dawn,

Nor the solar,
Capital-S Sun that
Anchors our massive galaxy.

We thought our way to those objects.
Instead, the arcing sun,
that hot circle

of light above,
Glimpsed momentarily,
Then tabernacled with reasons.

hate

Sitting in a hospital to look after someone else, my healthy body hangs heavy and awkward.

The feeling of our bodies as constant threats, as ever-present sources of ruin, like sleeping with a coiled cobra. The feeling that, while healthy, our bodies are gaudy, showy things - that I am as indecent and vulgar walking around this ward in a healthy body as I would be to wear an actual crown.

And then the queasy sense that it might be the other way round - that the physical self is the master and keeper rather than the kept: that my body has me at gunpoint - kidnapped!  That our bodies keep our souls as playthings, as whores, to be kept until tiresome - and then my body will kill me.

Nightmares. Awful and imbalanced thoughts.

Perhaps I should be in hospitals more, around death and misery more often. Then I would sit through a hospital night, sleep in a vinyl padded chair unperturbed, and not see old women wheeled past, not smell the morbidity, not hear the machines beeping, the patients moan. I would just think about the work I brought with me.

Was there ever so wondrous and humane a thing, so necessary and good, that was yet so hateful and disorienting, as a hospital? Those intense cross-currents and resources of moral and physical force are what make a hospital, like a courthouse or a prison or a military base . . . a real temple: the house and ministers of something to be reckoned with.

stepping out

A favorite - on the sidewalk or at work - are older ladies whose clothes are fussy, old-fashioned, but put together.  Church ladies, older secretaries, daytime museumgoers.  Stiff bows, jewel-tone synthetic structured jackets, undyed wool in loose weaves, patent leather flats.  But more, the carriage and expression of the ladies themselves.  Poised, ready, unhurried but going somewhere, soft and sure.  They and the world have worked out an understanding, and neither crosses the other.

now

To hide is vice.  But once lit bright, what will show?

glories

Legos are a fine example of how something extraordinary may be made to seem simple, even obvious.  Legos are to toys as Mark Twain is to tall tales: unsurpassed.  The blocks are a marvel of geometry, their interlocking, exact proportions are a joy to think through and graph out.  Their manufacture is precise, and of just the right formula of plastic: from a single material is achieved the correct function, form and color, with durability.  This is a beautiful achievement: there are no gaskets, coatings or paint.  That, only the right plastic could manage, an example of synthetic material that is the opposite of cheap.  The right form and the right material give Legos their wonderful snap/unsnap quality, which is satisfying to feel and hear, giving a sensation of creative construction backed by soundness.  A construction of Legos, unlike blocks, holds fast.  They therefore invite engrossment: a sustained investment of a child's playful effort.  Their play value is unsurpassed. 

There is nothing showy about a bucket of Legos, but everything worthy.  Naturally many of the themes and sets and so on devolve to ordinary toy silliness, but I can think of no better toy than a big bucket of ordinary Lego bricks.  Det bedste er ikke for godt.