suits

Good taste narrows one's options, but shouldn't narrow them to a point.  There are tribes, I suppose, where priests, women, men and children are each given exactly one way to look, dress and act - in the best of taste, as it is doubtless felt.  But of course, as I say that, I realize that once there is "exactly one" way, it turns out not to be - that participants become sensitive to small variations and these grow in significance, until what looks like uniformity to outsiders has blossomed into a range of significations for the tribe.

Nice

There's a dreamland in which John Waters marries Edith Piaf, who, six months later, gives birth to an inverted Eiffel Tower, a sailor perched on each upturned, hooflike leg, and a girl from port perched on his, whispering the lyrics of "C'est à Hambourg", all watching a marching band silently circle the impaled point of the Tower, clad in the skin-tight sailor stripes of Jean Paul Gaultier.

apex

A block north of my office is a public high school.  If I come into work at around 8:45, I pass through clusters of high school students talking and playing, waiting for the morning bell.  But talking and playing doesn't tell it - there is a crackle of energy, a static charge.  One can feel them discovering themselves, adulting, as surely as in a sci-fi movie, when arcs of lightning encircle a transforming hero or villain.

This morning, waiting for the crosswalk light, I find myself wedged against a little group of four, who pay me no mind during the quarter-minute I am their neighbor.  That is not unusual - I am only a commuter - but this quartet is especially absorbed.

Three boys and a girl, of equal height, similar backpacks, each in loose tshirts over jeans, in an inward-facing square, shoulders almost touching at right angles.  I'd guess them to be about 14 years old.  And in that casual, but intense way of older children, they are fumblingly, but utterly, focused. 

Three of them are taking turns gently twisting and slightly pulling one nipple of the fourth - one of the boys, through his tshirt.  It is not detectably sexual, or bullying, or even a joke.  It is all a bit slow, a little solemn.  All eight eyes are on the same point, all four mouths are slightly open, the three working arms are each hovering - waiting their turn, or having it.  The girl's part in the twisting and pulling seems to be given - and received by the fourth boy - equally to that of the other two boys.  All four have the expression of being lost in discovery - this sensual feeling, perhaps, of pulling on a male nipple - or having it pulled - of reaching through a layer of cloth and finding the nub of something just detectably responding to the sensation of being pulled - or having such a part found by others.  That a;pme is enough for awe, but perhaps they are feeling a new piercing.

The light changes and I walk on.  They will walk on in a moment, I suppose, waking to the world, but knowing something about what hands and bodies are.

public service

True gifts are known by their power in being given.  They go on to others as giving, or work on the one who receives.

squawk

Honesty is a symptom of freedom.  External pressures meet internal sensitivities, and the self evades the discomfort.  The internally stout can resist greater external pressure.  Friendly environments do not so test the weak.

Of course, this is a special sense of honesty - in that it is the truth-telling of the truthful, and the telling of the preferred lies of the false.  And we are each both, at different times.

children

The inscription over the playground entrance reads: May I never fail a friend, nor fight a foe but fairly. Oh, let them heed!

reaching

Water and light are the dollars and cents of nature.

watching his chest rise and fall

Stitch by stitch, it is by breathing that we are sewn to our bodies. 

evocative

The sound of windshield wipers, working against rain on a steel roof and windshield glass.

more Søren

Imagine that God is exactly as is implied by our actual worship, houses of worship, sermons, and so forth.  The being that is implied: is something of a joke.  Of course the worshipped is derived from the worship only on the human plane, and not on the divine.

"false"

Bad company works as a perverse filter, one that filters out purities.

Edited to add:  Interesting.  The title of this post was "false", without the quotation marks.  Blogger interpreted that as there being no title, and thus displayed none.

Søren

Thus ends the idealist, attacking every real person and thing that seeks after the ideal for its failure to attain the ideal to an unreal degree.  To wish the view of the ideal, and not just the ideal itself, to be kept pure to a degree only possible if the ideal is: lost.

putt-put

Double the last letter, and timelines becomes timeliness.  What other words transform this way?  Be and bee, but and butt, as and ass, we and wee, cares and caress, read and readd.  Hmm.

minuscule

Jesus Christ in his fifties, sixties (for by then it would not be His) - is unimaginable. 

Guyane

Someone must descend to the salt mines and onto the fishing boats and into the fields.  A society's answer to who that will be, is as defining as its determinations of family and defense.

quartet

It is felicitous that music and games are "played", for music is the highest form of play - alike to humankind and beast - the highest form of play, and the broadest.  There are moments of transcendence in sport, but it is music that completes the ascension, out from our own realm, unto holiness.

anything is possible

1)  There's an old routine in which Gilbert Gottfried does an impression of Curly Howard, as Johann Strauss.

2) Aristotle heard that in Cyprus, the mice eat iron. (Ἐν Κύπρῳ τῇ νήσῳ λέγεται τοὺς μῦς τὸν σίδηρον ἐσθίειν.)

3) In Hamburg there was a Glockenfriedhof, a bell cemetery, where the bells from forgotten churches languished, until - perhaps - selected and hung anew, in another tower.

telex

A client just gave me his pager number.

gyre

The beauty of an uneven meter - here, 7/8 time leading up to the perorative climax - is its waterwheel quality of rolling in place.

meetings and hearings

Some managers and courtroom lawyers have the advantage of exceptionally capacious, well controlled bladders.

∞¢

A crowded subway puts me in close view of the tatoo on a stranger's inner forearm.  She had a tatoo of the infinity symbol: ∞.  But twining round one bowl of the symbol's curves was the thorny stem of a budding rose.

Taken as a tatoo, this is simply the combination of two cliches.

But taken as infinity, there was something jarringly wrong about it.  Infinity is as featureless as the oneness of a unit, around which nothing twines.

coachman

There are mostly decent, hardworking people who are known to their lawyers, accountants and other professionals only by their financial disputes, in which they show little but greed.  One wants to appreciate the entire horse, one hears tale of its lovely and admirable gait, but one only gets a view of its ass.