decade

Marriage is lengthy, attraction is short.
The transition is love, and then – what then?
It’s you and me, garrisoned in our fort.
To lie in bed or rise as two wise men.

For wisdom forges raw love, anneals it,
Sharpens it, weds it to oaken handles
Fit for daily use, gives it edge and grit,
Fills the armory, readied for battles.

And too the garden shed is ranged with tools,
Two plows, two hoes, the too hard soil to break.
Wisdom and love, tough and steady as yoked mules,
Yield us bread, where mere love gave only cake.

Love, that will not rise from bed, is soon past.
But afield, farm or battle, it will last.

big of you

Parked near work is a locksmith's panel van, sides painted with contact information, service details, and this: POP A LOCK SERVICE FREE FOR LOCKED IN CHILD.

fortune cookie

Blending in is blended out.

doesn't know it

The graffiti at my subway station reads: Im sexie and I know it.

stickers

Coming up to my office this morning, I see a little patch of stickers - maybe five of them - stuck to the wall of the elevator.  Fruit stickers - the labels stuck onto apples to help the cashier.  Someone has used the time riding up to peel them off fruit and deposit them onto the elevator's paneling.

This, of course, is bad.

And other things are bad.  Police brutality, ISIS, dementia, greed.  But is there any useful or even meaningful commonality to these things?  Aren't they tied together merely by being susceptible to being labeled bad?

And if that is all, what good are labels like bad?

The answer is in the mediation of such words between our thinking and our thoughts.  The broad, vague categories like bad are part of the flex of our thinking life.  Like the categories left and right, or conjunctions such as and and or, they are as indispensable and provisional as our ability to hold things in our palms for a time.  Are those buildings on my right, and those trees on my left?  Certainly.  Is it useful to be able to think them so?  Yes.  What do those buildings or trees have in common?  Only that they are susceptible to being noted as to my right or left on account of my position.  Outside my thinking, there is nothing right or left about those buildings or trees.  Does that empty such categories of use?  No, they are necessary.  They are part of my ability to move myself through thoughts, and move thoughts around.

Broad categories are the hands and feet of thought. 

When someone tells you something is bad, or when you hear yourself think with some such broad category, the question is chiefly: what is being done with the thought?  It is the motion of the doing and not the flexibility of the tool that tells.

commercial law

It is delicious to see greedy, difficult economic actors beggared by their own overreaching.  To see them do wrong and lose.  We whose clients were modest and fair laugh and clap at their deserved losses.

long middle hours

We have been together so long that our conversations reach subjects like the ranking of nations by frequency and speed of postcard delivery.

confession

I am tired of my old amusements and hobbies, but too busy with higher priorities to develop new ones.

vaseline on the teeth

A window manufacturer advertises that its windows will turn a "home" into a "living space" and one is reminded that advertising is a dialect.  For, in normal, human dialects of English, a home is better than a living space - the advertising phrase sounds like a step in the wrong direction.  Prisoners and dorm-dwellers have living spaces, but lack the comforts of home.  In the dialect of advertising, though, the expression works.  It shines the idea of home in a way that normal English does not.  Ooh, what a living space!  It wouldn't sell windows to say that "our windows will be an improvement on the windows you have, or, if your home is not yet built, an improvement on the windows you'd otherwise install."

close your eyes

Thinking is not about knowledge, but the capacity to distinguish things known. 

wisdom

A car has four tires yet but one spare.

Hannah

What but thought is known by thinking, by closing one's eyes and only - thinking. Thought, but thought: but what a but is that continent.

pettiness

Washington, D.C. is a lumbering and inelegant name, and there isn't much to be said for it, as a name, in comparison to London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing - or even Brasilia, Canberra and Mexico City.  New York City is awkward but has a certain power because of its emphatic spondee-trochee and the flat-out literalness of New and City.

It is easy to say what's wrong with the name Washington, D.C.  First, that it is too long and pointlessly compound.  Why not just Washington or District of Columbia?  Second, that the only distinctive short form is a rough acronym: DC.

Excuses can be made.  First, that there used to be more in the District of Columbia than Washington, which was originally one of two counties in the district, Alexandria being the other, before the Virginia side of the original district was given back.  (That is why the District of Columbia looks like a diamond with a large chunk broken off.  A large chunk was broken off, as unneeded and inconvenient to both federal government and residents.)  Had there not originally been a second and already-populated portion of the district, the name would probably never have become compound.  Second, that we now have Washington State.  Distinguishing the two - and, for that matter, the many other things named Washington - makes mere references to "Washington" unsatisfactory.  Washington State should not been permitted to name itself that - or name itself Columbia, for that matter, after its Columbia River.  (Cascadia or Olympia or something else would have been fine.)  Third, that the idea of an autonomous federal district was innovative and the naming of new things is often cumbersome and technical.

Certainly Columbia would have been a prettier name for our capital, although the derivation from Christopher Columbus would have undermined the attraction.  Even Federal City or Union City would have been ok.

Bethesda

Iron wings bless water.

opinion

Sue God, but on contingency.  Don't pay the attorney up front.

a hit

One supposes that Ayn Rand had great sex.

profitable

Advice:  First, ask how much you have to lose. Then, and only when those risks can be controlled, minimized, or are already acceptably low, ask: how much can I make?  The advice is in the sequence. 

hello - hello

No true individual is but inwardly multiple.  In this the thinking unit differs from the unit of measure.  The undifferentiated, single self is necessarily unconscious except by reference to others, and this puts the identity outside the skin.  The individual is ever talking when no other is around, inside the skin.  And in such individuality, and by the same cause, is the root of fair-mindedness.

drinking straw

To the one whose lifting is aided by fortune, the load seems light, or the arm strong. Few can, fewer will, turn their eyes to see that the sword of fortune has been put in the sheath of their own effort.

a man is a sometime thing

We took a guest to a jazz venue in Harlem last night, a recently reopened but historic place on West 118th called Minton's. 

A keen place, good acoustics, clearly here in the present but knowing what it had been.  Culinary black American food of the kind suddenly easy to find in the city.  (There were "okra croutons" on my salad, which would have been perfect if they had been called thick-breaded fried okra, as they were.)  Danny Mixon playing sharp piano, backed by bass and drums, with his matryoshka nesting rhythyms.  A good mix of informed and general guests, well turned out, adorning the long room, with its dark rose walls and oversize photos of performances long past.  And a lit matchbook of a singer, Malou Beauvoir.

Her penultimate song came after a pause to lean over the pianist and talk a bit.  She would improvise.  And then, between the scatting and the winks and acknowledgements to acquaintances in the crowd, she delivered a blunt if appreciative critique of the venue itself.  It stopped the room.  The best and the worst on the menu - called out, with references to line cooks by name.  "Alexander goes and Cecil thinks he can make his biscuits, but they're heavier than these plates.  The ones they're left sitting on!"  The beauty and elegance of the renovation praised - then called out for its as-yet soulless, new-paint character.  "Where's the living on these walls?"  Then the crowd - "You gotta let some barefoot in with these heels. You gotta let some mama in with these dames. Oh Minton's, let some neighbors in!"

We walk out, past the toddler running in barefoot circles on the sidewalk in his ecstatic chase of a toy car, under the careful watch of mother and grandmother, leaning against the low stoop wall, deep in their own conversation of some man.  Whose he was and what he had done, I did not hear.