belief

Leave aside whether it is true or false: to believe in literal 7-day, young earth creation at this point conditions how one thinks of other issues.  Not because of creationism, as such, but because one must do something mentally and emotionally with the conflicting evidence.

MEW

Much of successfully, usefully sophisticated legal thought consists of resisting - or rather postponing - or rather timing - the resolution.  It must come at the right moment.  Until then, thought - the issue - remains layered, interactive, moving parts.  For legal ideas - in their legality - are not the cup but the handle, the rim, the glaze, the chipped edge and the superglue that reattached the chip.  These and not the cup itself are what the law works upon - precisely to produce, at last, the cup.

over-here'd

A convincing local, with the variety of Niw Yaw'ka's accent that borders on Bostonian, is taking is out of town relations sight seeing in East Midtown, near my work.  They drink it all in and snap pictures.  He narrates.

"And that's the 59th Street Bridge.  Or the Queensboro Bridge.  Or the Ed Koch Bridge!  All you have to do in this town to get something named after you is die.  When I die I guess they'll name a fire hydrant after me for dogs to piss on."

Of course, Koch isn't dead, but I take his point.

glories

The physical equipment of democracy: booths, boxes, lists, cards, indexes, folding tables, a flag on a stand shoved out of the way.

moiety

By the time one is ordering DVDs on Levi-Strauss from Netflix, rock bottom has been hit.  Excessive drinking, or almost any bad habit would be better.

substitute diligence

Ambition motivates hard work and is, in this respect, a virtue.

rolling stone

The subways had been down since Sunday, on account of Sandy.  But parts reopened this morning, including my commute.  So I got on the first train and exited my usual midtown stop.  Up the stairs to the sidewalk.  But look!  The iron treads of the stairs had gathered rust in the meanwhile - for a time not polished by the constant step of commuters' shoes.

cynical

The lady in line ahead of me at the drug store was buying elastic underwear - the kind that shapes your body and flattens your belly to make you look thinner.  The brand name: Truly Fit.

depending from

As Sandy passes, my building sways and my windows bow.  The door chain hangs, swinging, or rather, the building sways around its mass.

pop quiz

Describe the difference between aphoristic and homiletic expression in 140 characters.

twitter's doorknob

An aphorism is the spark that flies from the doorknob as one is leaving the room of thought.

red and white stripes

I've been going to the same barber for years.  He seemed to be an assistant manager at the beginning, but he opened up an outpost shop under the same ownership nearer my work, and since then I've been going there.  I have the sense that he bought in - at any rate he's the boss at the new location.  Everyone is Armenian.

At first, it was all professional wrestling on the televisions, and framed pictures of my barber mugging, thumbs up, next to some professional wrestling figure.  A wall of fan photos, in which you could watch him age - see the youth in his face melt away.  And the capes were printed with scantily clad bimbos.  Every morning I pass and he waves, or if he's standing in the doorway, he says hello.

I suppose he's matured.  Lately the television is soccer or, occasionally, market news.  The capes are plain, good cloth now, embroidered with "Premium Barber Shop" - the name of the place.  He's gained a little paunch.  And this morning, the sweatshirt was gone.  He was wearing a red-and-white striped dress shirt, with contrasting all-white cuffs and collar.  He said not "hello" but "good morning" and nodded a bit as he did.  He has become The Barber.

rooftop

In one's career - not just professionally, but creatively and in pursuit of knowledge - it is smart to ask whether an institution or situation is a platform or a shelter.  Whether it promotes but exposes, or else protects but conceals.  (And as always, with heuristics, whether it's even a useful distinction.)

threats

But once he does see something that isn't there, he might see it anywhere and will hardly be persuaded that it is nowhere.

Ramsey

The wiser and more wry of the pastors from my childhood said that during the darker periods of his life he had though to himself: "I've figured it out.  The Lord loves me, but he doesn't like me."  This is certainly true of people, myself included: there are those who love you, but don't like you.  And certainly those who love you do not always like you.

haberdash

Walk into a men's clothing store - eh, meh, bleh.  Drowsy employees, dreary picking at clothes in the clearance section.

But walk into a nice men's clothing store with a serious intention to buy a couple of good suits and - zowie - the place springs to life.  The salesman that gets you turns on the charm, suggestions - surprisingly good ones - flow, and when he goes down to the storeroom to bring you your size, the other salesmen look at you a bit longingly.  Their eyes suggest "I would have taken such good care of you, you know?"  Which is probably all part of the play.  You know it's a play, but real too - you want a good suit, they want a commission.  It's the play of reality, the slicking of rails meant to carry real cargo.  The masculine compliments - "that looks nice on you," "the seat of those trousers don't need a thing," "I saw this down there and thought you'd like it."  And - whoa - the grey haired asian tailor in his beautiful tweed sportscoat, expertly marking alterations.  Playing his role too - the same basic compliments as the salesmen but in a quiet, almost priestly tone.  He half intones, half whispers, "it looks right."  And you half feel, half think: it is true - this suit on me is good.  The tailor has uttered it.  It all feels great - almost a congratulations for hard work and success.

Affluence, in moments like this, feels almost as good as a shoulder rub from a good friend.  Innocent?  For the moment, sure.  But one senses a snake in the garden.  Brooks Brothers has a line of suits called the "Golden Fleece" and I thought to myself - that's a rather brazen double entendre.

nocturn

Talents, of course, go to waste in any society.  This waste is taken as a sign of poor social order and evil of itself.  And surely much waste is evil.  Just as surely, the loss of something wonderful, glorious, is always risked in any waste, and if such is lost, that is evil, too.  But imagine a society in while nobody was wasted, in which all were put to use.  And one sees an overheated monstrosity.  Waste, in human society - that part of it that diverts excess ability - is as important as death in the world at large.

State College

There is a level of family affluence - what I grew up calling comfortable - that when combined with stable family structure and an intelligent, pacific outlook, is something near to heaven on earth and greatly to be wished.  I have in mind one of the families I saw at a wedding this weekend - which produced for the visitor happy moment after moment, as if from the opening scenes of Fanny and Alexander.

iphone

A think and highly absorbent sponge, ideal for sopping up cash.

transaction

Knowledge is not an unqualified good.  Certainly it is not a constant pleasure.  There are all kinds of stuff you'd have to pay me to know.  And people do.

Key

A little more than half of the people I know who have read much philosophy are worse off rather than better off for having done so.  But the real condemnation is this: the worse off are only a few more than half, and they are only a little worse off - philosophy appears to be not only not very good for people, but not even very dangerous.  In most, it is a slight ailment.  And in the few for whom it is more - in either direction - the excess likely lies with them.  I speak of the readers, not the writers.

according to JK Rowling

You can't have sex near unicorns.  It's tacky.

Suu Kyi

What doesn't come across so well in a video, or at all when she speaks in English, is the love and lightness with which Aung San Suu Kyi communicates with her Burmese people.  She knows how to wrap an audience around her finger, but honor them as she does so, by high regard and a kind of giving of herself.  The reserve of her English-speaking style is reversed when she speaks Burmese.  All is serious, honest, even highbrow, yet there is a sense of play, of joy, of peaceful strength flowing to the people.  She can answer a serious question with stories that build through crescendos of laughter.  Some anecdotes, many folk takes.

Idiomatic Burmese is especially a matter of constant allusions to a common font of folk tales and proverbs.  Suu Kyi pushes this further by not only alluding to these proverbs and tales as static cultural references, but diving in and adjusting them, making them funnier, fresher, and more pointed.  The effect on a Burmese audience is when she does this to transfix them.  It is as if she has taken the cultural furniture familiar to all and made it come gently but definitely to life.

This would be offensive if she misappropriated the proverbs, or indeed if she wasn't so much held in awe.  But because she is held in awe, and because she does do it gently, her breathing of life into these cultural proverbs and tales works.  That is one of the ways - only one, but what a way - in which she has come to embody the Burmese people.  She breathes life into the shared cultural heritage and by means of it drives home points of responsibility and hope for the future, of shared purpose and recognition of need.  It is the glory of folk tales and proverbs to be so used.

There is something of Lincoln in all this.  Why hadn't I seen that before?  Is it because I could not imagine anyone even comparing with Lincoln?  Because so much of his place in my mind is defined by his peculiarity, his glorious strangeness?  Probably, but she does compare.  (Rather as Mandela always recalled Washington to me.)

Her pitch for non-militaristic, non-violent change (in Burmese) was her own take on the means/end trope.  Said she: the means define the end.

(She also has that mystical quality that comes of her long house arrest and release.  Assassinated political leaders become martyrs, political saints.  But are dead.  Her arrest gave her some of that - in this case deserved - halo, but left her alive.  She has something of the resurrection about her.  It is almost too much.  You can see why the Tatmadaw feared her, and how, in fearing either to release or to kill her, they made her more fearsome.  What a demon she would be if devoted to political evil and not to good!)

days

Familiar love is felt most tenderly at departure.

Bishop's storehouse

A welfare system is most readily premised on fellow feeling, or family feeling, or religious feeling.  An extensive state is a welfare state only by ideology or necessity.  Generally speaking.

recess

I often joke that people will never be as impressed with me, nor like me, so much as they do at the start.  I find that often true.  Of myself to others, and particularly of others, to me.  But this is not a decrease to zero - only to a happy moderate level, where love might grow, or not.

Adams

There's something wonderful - albeit aspirational - about John Adams insisting that the government of Massachusetts be constituted as and named a commonwealth.  This is what the government was to be: neither a libertarian gossamer thread confederation, nor yet a ideologically tinged republic.  And especially not a state: that heavy word.  Of all these words, of all these ideas, commonwealth suggests an organic and inseparable expression of us: the river of the people's intent and action.

eat not

Consumption becomes consumptive when it is not directed.  The liberated (that is, self-directing) person consumes for ends beyond adhesion to what is pressed on him or her in the marketplace.  And thus that liberated person directs the economy through their consumption.  But when consumption is not externally directed but a compulsion, the openness is driven from the structure, which compacts into an animal - or nearly plantlike - knot of illiberal instinct.

seen through her eyes

One kind of love is a tenacious innocence.

nosin

One of the difficulties of an egalitarian, democratic culture is that it obscures the value of different virtues for different situations - different stations, to use that word with its older connotations.  There are times and places - but I more mean roles in life - for which self love, or aggression, or restlessness - are virtues.  And in which humility, or acceptance, or quietness are virtues - or vices.

cliches

Great realities may grow from mustard seeds, but that which was tiny had never been not nil.  Nothing comes of nothing.

hundred million

Simple things, places, homes - these can look good with little trouble.  Lively, clean, intelligent - little more is required.  But expense looks well only with great trouble and greater taste.  I'd bet the truly beautiful interiors among great Manhattan penthouses and townhouses could be counted on your fingers and toes.

stasis

Part of adulthood is how one deals with the simple social vices: drinking, gambling, smoking, gossiping, etc.  A iron-sided giant, I suppose, avoids them all.  A lucky person perhaps finds none of them appealing.  But for most of us, the ordinary and sufficient path is maintenance.  To continue to avoid most of these vices - those that never appealed much in the first place.  And if one or two have their hooks in us, to moderate them in quantity and effect.  And then to take pleasure in that moderated remainder - that we not seek pleasure elsewhere.  To keep them trimmed back and then take what one can from them.

Porgy and Bess

My cab driver this morning is an old opera singer - he toured with Porgy and Bess as "Robbins" for years.  We talked about shape note singing and Bach, chromatic temper, and the best cheap seats at Carnegie.  He sang for me a little "Woman is a Sometime Thing."  We were a joy to each other and the ride was too short.

Thinking of Disraeli

We do not live in the present because we live through our minds.  We only exist through the present.  My mind is a quantity of eternity, bounded by time but not of it.

arrow point

Less is more.  Usually.  Open space clarifies the essentials left central.  Choices made benefit from open options going forward.  But this is only because of how we inhabit time.  If time were not unidirectional, less would not be more.

next

In an emergency, energy is wisdom.

smart cliches

Someone was just telling me that a draft "Succeeds almost in spite of itself."  Seconds later they're telling me that it's obvious that the writer "put a lot of effort into it, but some things don't quite come off."  While there isn't a strict contradiction in these two statements, it is easy to see that something has gone wrong.

And what went wrong was facilitated or caused by the unmeaning slip into a cliche, here, succeeding in spite of one's self.  The trouble is that this is an intelligent cliche, in that it actually expresses something that is hard to put into a few words without having advance formulation.  So the expression has utility and carries meaning.  And that's the rub - it was being misused.  All the speaker meant was that the draft was a mixed bag of things that worked and didn't, but on balance better than worse.  Perhaps feeling - wrongly - that this observation was too thin, the speaker reaches without realizing for a "smarter" way of putting it - and instead found something smarter that says something else.

fifty-seventh

Tomorrow a new Whole Foods opens a block up from my work.  I pass it every day and have watched it complete.  But today!  Whole Foods' Eve, I suppose.  A crush of activity, inside and out.  Cement workers listen in disbelief to their foreman as he tells them what they're going to rip out, pour, smooth and replace today, just outside.  Carpenters with long grey beards and (carpenter's) pencils stuck over their ears, cutting wood for last adjustments to the check-out counters.  A line of trucks, with drivers perched in their cabs, as amused as me, waiting, watching the hive of activity, taking it all in.  Stacks of empty boxes and scraps that, for once, dwarf the big garbage trucks waiting to haul it all away.  Everyone on the ground with "Hello my name is" tags on their tshirts, somebody's idea of bringing order - or at least identity - to the mass of effort.  Shopping carts, unscratched chrome shining, with blue protective plastic still clinging to new grips.  Potted orchids, already in place, stems trembling in the blow of an air conditioning vent.

sow

Marriage and children: the great wagers.

voting booths, voting boxes

small boxes, reliquaries

Traveler's Rest

The field gate is always shut
But is not a wall.


Silent winds and still hinges
Test the latch and lock


That hold monogamous, and
Wait for a lost key.

glories

Trollope's first-person narration.

Plantagenet

Lovely: The idea that one would half fill a committee, so that one's choices could bring their own choices, and thus serve happily.  The committee is, in terms of independent voices, half its apparent size, and includes helpers that are happy to be at the table.

up from the ooze

Illiteracy - or other forms of disconnectedness - localize and the human spirit and help it congeal into the strands of culture, with their funky tang, that give color and eventually substance to the broader, more sophisticated, all-too connected culture.

This is part of the magic of childhood - within which we were each aboriginals, then with our little tribe.  The smell of fire pits and drying meat.

I remember the mark of lost virginity.  My body had this tang, this slight scent in the crevices.  My own culture of odor-producing skin bacteria.  And the first time I really got up against another person, skin to skin, a hardier and more widespread colony of bacteria crossed over.  And my sweat came to smell like anyone else's.

Trollope

What is snobbery but overt observation?

checkers

Being physically attractive in the ordinary ways: fresh clothes, cut hair, upright gait, pleasant expression.  It's probably the most common, and most benign, game adults can play.

lawyering

The difficulty of service is that it cannot be faked or multiplied.

abstract

There is something spiritual about the internet.

screenname: journeytotheworld

I call this the traveler's chant, 
Sittin' on a train or in the back of a car,
Thinking: Maybe it's me, 
Yes I do have places to be;
And I'll be there.

choose

"Preserving options" is a terrible life strategy, with few exceptions.  Yet few strategies are more common or more express among my peers than this: let no door close.

tranquility of print

Scriptures, potentially the most damaging aspect of religions, are in practice the most reassuring.  This is entirely a matter of medium and age.

today

Endure.  The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all

ever

Energy exceeds intellegence.

Leland

At a certain age, older relations stop filtering their memories.  The 1930s, back on the red clay lot in back of the lumber mill, the rough old house, its walls patched with waxed cardboard.  The older sister that gave her a second-hand bicycle.  The younger sister that rode it to the cotton field, played around with Leland and got pregnant.  Her papa took the bicycle and cut it into pieces.

the grammar of blows

From a spiritual perspective, violence is indistinguishable from magic.

agrarian

Who that writes and reads to live (or to maintain one's place) wouldn't prefer - or say he prefers - the plow?  It isn't just the agrarian myth, it is the agrarian fantasy.  (I don't mean that, as such, it is unreal or insincere.)

magpie

The adult version of the juvenile mistake of happiness: a search for purpose or meaning.  Of course, many adults never graduate even from the juvenile mistake.

highest class

I am daily impressed (in both senses of the word) with lawyering as a form of service.

Ousley

Redemption, outside a theology, requires proportionality from the subject unless the medium is fungible (money, or in some cultures, blood).  This is the dark side of secularism for a wrongdoer.

flesh

The practice of law is the service of those who need to work upon - and under - power and integrity by means of authoritative words.  To understand authoritative in the preceding is to understand the sense in which an attorney represents.  And this is the beauty of the bar: it is a sort of incarnation of words.

counterparties

Most people are a little slippery.  Many people are downright slippery.  This is less by craft or malice, and more from laziness and cowardice.

Caro & Michelle

Power or alcohol: neither corrupt.  Either magnifies and therefore reveals - albeit selectively.

scape

Our capacity for dreaming suggests magnificent mental capacities.  I dream of someone I know, fairly shy, but in the dream bolder and talkative.  It is a subtle transformation - his personality is transformed, but not warped.  This is impressive mental work.  Imagine the talent of a novelist who does this with a developing character.

And yet.  This is all taken from my observations of my own dreams.  I suppose we have all woken to a brilliant idea, occurring in a dream, to find that the idea is not only not brilliant - it isn't even an idea.  Perhaps the brilliance of dreams is only the false glory of observations made in a uniquely credulous state.

glories

The words flat and sharp as they apply to music.  The acuity of the metaphor, an accident of language.

Wolf Hall

We all know what ghosts are like.  Music and books are ghosts.

more faith

Gambling and religion.  This much in common: evocation of the absent object of desire.

Darius

In an office setting one has involuntary pee-mates.  Folks who are coming to, going from, or in the restroom as you do the same, more often then chance would have it.  They're on the same rhythm, somehow.

faith

A religion is known and properly judged by its works precisely because it is spiritual.  All its works - particularly the numberless ordinary examples of kindness, waste, joy or blindness.

nearly perfect, perfectly wonderful

The Tampa of Magic Mike.  The drywall stacked up beside preposterous condos, faintly desperate, the thinning commercial thoroughfares where the bars are (I think of Greenville's old Silver Fox, placed exactly where Soderburgh puts his strip joint, the beach scenes all seen through the sickly tint of sunglasses, the cement picnic tables under fiberglass umbrellas outside fast food joints, the Ford F100s.

melting

On a summer weekend, Coney Island is the New York of New York.

forebears

A half-serious proposal: now that we're done with the 50-state quarters, I'd like to see 234 quarters with ordinary Americans citizens on the back, one for each year of independence.

The criteria: they must be dead, they must have lived ordinary lives, committing no crimes and reaching no great achievement, none may have been elected to higher than municipal office; each must be randomly selected from a demographically representative sample of thousands from each year.

Unnamed on the coin, each would of course receive some description on a website somewhere.

And then I would have an artists' competition for the engraving of each - with the only artistic criteria being that the subject be recognizable, individual and dignified.

The American Citizens' series. And if an interest group (veterans, lawyers, whatever) hijacks the idea, I'll disavow it - it has to be about ordinary people of our past, full stop.

petty

I flip my 3-month wall calendar and now see September creeping up.  Alarming.

all you can eat

Overwhelming popular support is only occasionally a sign of an idea's goodness. It more often indicates an all-round payout.

contract

Surfaces and interfaces, par excellence: lungs, skin, words.

Cupertino

This child, by love, grew heavy with self
To bludgeon others, and boil under pressure.
His parents knew his power and fell to serve him;
Greased his rails and raised a locomotive
That Dreyfuss might have streamlined.

Steam built and flanges gripped.  Late they resisted,
But as pennies on the rail resist.
He flattened them into mementos of his coming upon the world.

He whistled.  A high note, shrill.  An evangelistic pitch.
John the Baptist without humility,
Not from the wilderness but through it
Like a steel stab through flesh.

The multitudes came, and he was full of bearings
That he gave to the throng like orders, like blows,
And they received his hardness like bread, like water
And worshipped him and the wounds he gave them.

Lovely stigmata, blessed touch.
As lepers they received of him.
And though it was but Hal and sham
It was more certain than they,
So that they loved and sang:
Was it not piercing?

And I say nolo contendere.
I would not lay my neck across such tracks
To have the Atcheson, Topeka and The Salome
Sling that child of chrome down the line.

more popular

Do not think about your amusements.

unpopular

The trouble most people have with truth is that it is unsatisfying.

the social gospel

Raising up the humble is appealing, particularly when linked to the casting down of the proud.  But this depends on it happening in a moment, at least in a mental moment.  As an ongoing promise, the appeal is lost - all that is left is a continual raising and lowering - an unhappy human churning, by divine agitation.

glories

Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple

power

Two complaints, superficially identical, may be of two distinct species.  One is a prayer, the other, a command.

across

I'd rather be my kind of fool than his.

Pearl

It isn't that she decided to tell the truth.  She simply ran out of anything else to say.

clipped

Why were coins round?  Because it is easier to see that something has been removed from a circle than from other shapes?

shorter tailoring

Law is the courtesy of power - the veil by which it avoids naked display.

narrowly tailored

Law clothes power, diverting it from violence.  Power imbues the mantle of legal words with movement and shape.  The practice of law is the provision and understanding of authoritative words for life among others' power, thus clothed, and the dressed discharge of one's own power.

Paper money, and the non-violent society required for its value, is the ultimate expression of law.

viscosity

The banker's jargon of "leverage" when speaking of debt is an apt metaphor.  Like the lever, debt is the fundamental economic machine.  And it has much of the same character - steepness, stiffness, gradualness, slip and grip - all are readily carried from metaphor to situation.  The market needs the right amount of slip and grip.  And the right range of levers within it.  One propeller works in water, another in air.  For wood, a screw is needed, unless one seeks a bit to drill.

The varieties of debt are the same and properly as varied.  But tools require discipline too - as many useful shapes as there are, useless and dangerous shapes will ever be more numerous.

red letter

Servants be patient with your masters, for this is as much your service as the laboring.  I speak of lawyers and their clients, of course.

shadows

It was Fleet Week (more precisely, the Rendez-Vous Naval de Québec) in Quebec City, and we watched a presentation on Canadian Naval history.  To an American, accustomed to highly nation-centric public history, it was startling to see that the presentation was mostly about the French, the English and the Americans - and only slightly about Canadians, as such.  Canada exists - and always has existed - in the Northern shadow of great powers, and is the better for it.  It gives a cosmopolitan spine to the sprawling, rural flesh of the nation.

Before me, Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, à Québec.

Within her stone walls, an inner space of wood and plaster, painted dead white, a gilded alter before.  None of this is remarkable: the tender Marie, the bleeding Christ, in their glossy painted colors.  But suspended, mid-space, a model ship, perhaps a meter long, her mast a meter high, a ship - a French colonial ship, warlike and vulnerable, an armed fetus, its Falu red keel above me like an infant spine, curling in on its viceral crew and settlers in passage.

She possesses the volume of the church.  It responds by seeming less church air than Atlantic terror made breathable transparance, centuries ago but here the way an old tomb is both then and here, the way oceans are at once ever and now.  And in a mind's moment, the walls respond and the atmosphere of the church seems not water but the ship's ethereal aura - it has held at bay the deep demons, and this is its ambit, a walled protection, a fortress of faith.  The ship has cast out death and we are safe within the stone perimeter of its colonizing fierté.  As we are dry and living, so we are catholic.

The windows of the church are not large, but small-set, as jewels - as glass carried from the old world must practically have been - and also as threats - as any opening to this cold, hard world must have seemed: practically a invitation to savage leaks, a cascade of danger that could swamp the hardy, terrified faithful below, and set the suspended model above, afloat, adrift, into the terrible, Canadian vastness.

Babylon

Cities spell effort before they speak improvement.

motion practice

Being in court is a peculiarly stressful form of happiness.

presidente

One of our in-house catering staff wheels a cart of breakfast items and dozens of bottles of Presidente beer into a conference room.  Dominican beer at 8:30 at a law firm meeting.  Qu'est-ce que c'est?

law

"That is an old idea: tell me something more modern."
"I can tell you a more recent idea, but not a more modern one."

an obscure one

An old fashioned satisfaction: Search for case law all day on the online databases.  Nothing great.  Search PACER - one good thing, not enough.  Search the treatises.  Nothing great.  Get ready to return them and think to yourself, "Oh yeah - the pocket part."  And therein - gold.

post-ideological tissue

The poor boy.  He has the muscles of anger but none of the bones.

roman

Will identity be the skin of your palm, its ligaments, the nail, or your cross?

brag and beg

I passed by some elemental marketing this morning - a handwritten sign on the side of a sidewalk food cart:

Our Halal Food IS THE BEST.
PLEASE
try us for once.  

building the wall

What could be harder than writing - productive, technical, mind-changing writing?  The gathering of materials and their selection, the mixing of these materials into thought, almost like the combination of cement mix and water.  Then the kneading, working, coaxing of this material into shapes - shapes that are discovered in the shaping.  And then, the rediscovery of your voice as you trowel the shaped material into final form.

here

Luck is placement at its beginning and end.  Through its middle, placement is wisdom.