hum

Short sleep, caffeine soup, the thud
of papers served "Official Business"
And what to do with them.
Mile markers of pages typed,
Hot blue sky of baked thought.

Back home a nettled comfort,
Domestic kiss,
The dust of mutual imperfections settles
Thinly but there -
The need for constant cleaning
Of what moral entropy flakes
From two scalps.

This is good, this somewhat garden,
This oxidizing happiness;
At 35 I am not flattened,
But I am not shiny now.

Our love is a 2004 Honda Accord.
A nice love, a reliable love, a well-equipped love.
It gets us around, it doesn't let us down,
It is better than our friends' cars.
They ask us about car maintenance,
And we are good shade tree mechanics,
Generous with advice and hand tools.
We keep our mats vacuumed
And the oil changed.
Our cloth seats are fine:
Don't leather seats burn in the summer?

Fancy things make us nervous anyhow,
We'd feel obliged to slip-cover our hearts.
The honest wear, the pucker in the driver's seat back,
says this is yours.

And, we have good friends.
I have a lot of ands,
But not enough sleep.

When I get 8 hours in,
I slumber past the thrum of ands.
But when I don't,
I am terribly awake
And the particles,
The small words,
The twitchings of minor muscles,
Swarm over me and - there!
Conspire to be apparition.
With frosty whisper of
a long, middle passage.

Episode 13

Of Night Vale. The one where they figure themselves out. 

Jonathan Edwards

Congregationalism.  Constitution.  West.  Emancipation.  WWII.  Hubble.  I believe in America.

long love

Love grows long and then anything can remind you.  A pasta sauce seems a little like him in attitude, a tree smells a little like him, you detect little shards of him anywhere.  The mystics must have been like this in their later years of adoration.

bad puns

Apparantly there's a Congressman named David Camp.  I hope he becomes president.

comme les autres

Politically or socially, the shutdown is analogous to a national strike.  A small - but not that small - bloc of the public puts its foot down and says no.  The Tea Party, French farmers, Welsh coal miners.  Their values differ, they may all be doomed to fade, eventually, they all do collateral damage - similarities and differences.  But, fundamentally, an American variation on a national strike of the sort that roils other democratic societies.

a six-course life

Il faut laisser du temps au temps: You have to give time time. - François Mitterrand

inward travel

Perhaps mental objects relate to thought and memory precisely as physical objects relate to acceleration and space.

Or, if you prefer:
[With respect to mental objects]
memory : space :: thought : acceleration

we age

I look at my old writing, a decade old.  How I deteriorate.

Astoria now

A warm night that smelled like an easy, suburban Christmas of pot roast and Duraflame.

Liebnitz

A zero fell to pieces and made the world.

very regular

Zero, One, Two, Infinity.

pot culture

There was a half-smoked joint on the floor of my office elevator just now.  I kicked it into the gap between the elevator floor and the 42nd floor landing.  Maybe a rat will eat it.

yeah, yeah

The French have their si.  The contradicting yes.  (Of course it is also used for emphasis, but all emphasis is implicit contradiction.)  For lack of a si, we English speakers are forced into the use of no or any of its negative kin as a kind of whole-word prefix to an affirmation: No, I'm going.  Or else we made the affirmation bigger: Oh, yes!  Or we do without.

one line plays

Didn't you call last night?  Well, somebody didn't.

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.

David O. Ives, narrating

The styles of writing used by lawyers range wide.  But they center on spare passages that go from point A to B in a straight line.  Point B is usually first in conception.  It is where we want to go.  As advocates, the required outcome is often a given, or relatively so. 

Point A, then, is the variable and the focus of effort; it determines both the first impression and the path traveled to the destination, Point B.

Whole briefs may be well written without deviation from this linear style.  This implies nothing rigid or mechanical: there are as many straight paths to even one given point as there are radii to a circle's center.  And points lead in chain from one to another, the preceding supporting those that follow, A and B, then B to C, and, finally, Z.

Most briefs must employ a second type of treatment, however: a sweeping look from a point arrived at to survey the surrounding ground.  Defensive passages are most often of this kind.  We are often saying, first, that from those grounds this follows: Point A to Point B.  But then we often must then say, to guard the ground newly won, that nothing prevents what followed from being so, and in particular, none of several prominent apparent troubles are actual: Point B becomes a perch or vantage point from which we survey the surrounding ground and discuss the prominent features.

Defense is a special interest of the advocate, but the sweeping survey can support the linear progression in another way, since the surrounding features may be positive as well as negative: describing positive surrounding features show the reader that the outcome urged is desirable.  This is, if you like, offense - secondary to the primary offense, which is linear.  Commonly this secondary offense is a policy argument, or direct recognition that the outcome urged is not only correct or permitted, but in fact right and just - even, occasionally, beautiful.

These patterns, of course, scale from small to large: the sentences making littler point, the paragraphs their own, and the larger passages carrying the great points.  In each, the style yields linear advances followed by panoptic sweeps.

This style is not exclusively legal, though when it is not, it risks being high-brow.  It need not be; some uses of the style are delightful.

For a short example of this style that is at once high-brow, popular, workaday and delightful, see an old station identification sign-on from WGBH public television.  It is a hybrid of legal notice and mission statement; it hits all the bases required by FCC regulation, media and charity law, but speaks to its public in a popular mode.  Being television, the panoptics can occur in the visual, and do, freeing the narrative to be almost entirely linear, though there are a couple of panoptic sentences.  There is no need for defense, this being a station identification and not an adversarial argument, so the panoptics are of the second kind and devoted to invoking delight and a feeling of rightness.

A couple of smaller observations on this WGBH ident, which delights me:

First, it begins with a "This is..." sentence: a humble rhetorical workhorse and a favorite of mine for beginnings, here perfectly deployed.  Pointing and identifying - either "this is..." or simply the gesture of pointing - is one of the earliest acts of communication by any child, as it probably was for the human race.  This is powerful because it is fundamental. 

Second, there is the dated but beautiful use of the verb to cope, a good example of the use of certain simple words possessed of uncommon depth.  The depth of the to cope is that it bears both the more contemporary connotation of struggling to dealing with, as one copes with an adversity, as well as the deeper, older connotation of ably dealing with, as a mason copes with stone.  The WGBH use is a rich balancing of these implication, though unfortunately the worse for wear, since the years of intervening usage have pushed these connotations out of balance and so far towards struggles and sufferings and away from valient effort that we hear "to help to cope" and visualize a good person comforting an aging friend in a hospital rather than a strong person helping another cut stone.  When writen, I think to cope would have richly conveyed both struggles and successes: a possibility lost to the shifting sands of usage.

The Castro

San Francisco is an old dame of the stage.  She looks less well in the sunlight, but is sapphire in shadows, shrouds of mist, clouds that roil and roll as if time-lapsed.  Her drag is sincere, but her glitter is beaten leaf-thin by long habits of irony.  Had Wilde grown old and become a city, San Francisco would be his glorious, tawdry dotage.

dreamscapes

In my dreams, the locations of my life - Astoria apartment, childhood home, the law office I work in, even the commute - have their counterparts.  Recognizable, but warped.  Larger and more beautiful, but often threatening.  This seems to be common.

I work in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, the upper twenty floors of which belong to my firm.  In my dreams, it is the same, except that there is a coffered, high-ceilinged, dim and creepy food court and conference area at the top.  One floor down from that, four small corner balconies, reached from the 46th floor landing of the fire stairs.  (The top floor of our offices is, in fact, the 47th.) 

When in my dreams I step out onto these balconies, they are windswept and ominous: grey clouds roll above and below, obscuring the street.  Sometimes I just go out there myself to be outside and feel the heavy wind try to pull me over the edge.  Other times I go with whoever in my dream I'm talking to.  They dislike my pressuring them to do so.  I don't know why I do pressure them.  Other times I'm chased onto these balconies, or take refuge, hiding there, from whatever greater danger roams within.

to others

A lack of ambition and love results simply in a lack of existence outside one's head.  Unless one has both the talent and luck of Emily Dickinson.

Great ones

This is the first year I've seen dragonflies right in Manhattan. Big, jungly ones. The first I saw this summer was novel enough that a high-power lawyer I was walking with stopped to snap a picture of it with her blackberry to send to her husband. The third made a trend. And this one is the first for which I've realized that I've lost count. This one is brown rather than sapphire. But it gets the blog post. Fly with pride, brownie!

cocktail party

T.S. Eliot urges in his last play that we remember that we are not just persons, or even bodies, but also, simply, objects.  That our quality as mere objects is part of our being.  As when we fall out of bed, or get smacked by an unseen tree limb in the dark, or plow heedless through a spider's web the next morning.

Hacienda Temozon

A gentle grandeur, born long ago by now-slumbering industry. A fabric, wove of sisal and wealth, worried into softness by the hands that work it.

sightings

Back in the mid-eighties, in upstate South Carolina public schools - and I'm sure elsewhere - you could see boys with long, wide rattails, waved or permed, dropping from the back of an otherwise buzzcut scalp of blond-brown hair. 

And there he was, in my subway car this morning.  Not just the crimp-waved rattail, but the bored, slouchy attitude, the braces, the striped tshirt with the elasticity at the neck all given out, just hanging.  He pushes past the woman to exit first, his small rudeness not aggressive or hurried, just careless and selfish, shoulders plunging and rising with his loping gait.

Common 1980s middle school white trash.  Released back into the wild, after a thirty year hibernation.

up

Ambition and possession are foundational.  The possessions need not be material and it is best the ambition not be.

preacher

There are forms of thinking that build, and that break down.  Ecclesiastes, or a mindset in Qohelet's vein, can pour acid that will dissolve anything.  The value of love itself?  Thought of that kind pours on, sizzles, and it is seen as conditional, the faulty, then treacherous, then futile and then - pop - nil.

out of the corner

Imagine a race of alien explorers who pass our planet, who simply drive by: as anyone might pass the local library, without even taking the foot off the gas or turning to glance; as a New Yorker crosses Times Square, heedless; as a political staffer might pass the monumental core of Washington, seeing nothing and concentrating on his groceries; as a museum goer passes a masterwork, having already seen too many paintings.

bump

"My yoke is easy and my burden light."  More generally, the work of entertaining one's self beyond a simple degree is a burden, spurs ennui, a grind.  We are, alas, made for the plow and not the surf.

advantageous

I am happy to hear others' problems.  But I do not want to tell my own.

pump

I remember the first time I went to Harvard, and it was by subway (locally known as the T).  The recorded voice called out the stations along the Red Line from South Station: “Downtown Crossing” where the doors open on both sides. “Park Street”, the first subway station in the US. “The next stop is: Charles/Massachusetts General Hospital.”  Suddenly we were above ground, the Charles River in view, the cupolas of Harvard's houses and schools distantly visible above the trees: we were about to cross into Cambridge, and behind, the wonderful hill over the bay that is Boston, the intellectual bastion of America, bulwark of our revolution, nursery of our best ideas.  Back underground.  “We have arrived at: Kendall/MIT.”  Closer.  “We have arrived at: Central.  The next stop is: Harvard Square.”  What a rush!  We pass the ghost station, the old Harvard station, now sealed shut, its platforms still dimly visible through the windows, then a screech as we turn a sharp corner, and the great cavern, all 1970s civic architecture, of the current Harvard Station.  The doors open, we pour out, I exit up the steps marked “To Harvard Yard.”  And there, one of the great iron gates, its inscription: “Enter To Grow In Wisdom.”  Through that gate, I could see the old Yard’s well and pump, its wooden handle there to grab and work up and down, to feel that I was there and that this Harvard, this great well, its centuries-old pump still working, was mine.  That is how Harvard greeted me.

the life of the mind is lived on the skin

The glory of Pepys diary is that the life of his mind was in the doing, the activities, the little resolutions to alter behavior, the pride of learning to use a slide rule, the function of a rabbet, the quality of tar.

ingestible, injectable television

I suppose a fair number of drug addicts get into it by way of boredom. Same as other addictions. Wonkavision. 

invertedbrate

One needn't see plants as reaching for the sun. Like moles, they burrow for food. They are at their most, down there, leaving only their branching tails sticking out, wagging upward, belching oxygen and sucking in sun, but feasting, snout down, in the moist earth.

provision

Old age is the child of the childless. 

grass

Life rides out into the prarie and is sustained, for its season, by the gradual consumption of its ration of possibility.

notes on Auden

Law is society.
Law is rule.
Law is a great piece of code.
Law is accounting.
Law is the field of play.
Law is the glove of force.
Law is the mind of power.
Law is the heart of restraint.
Law is the mountain pass.
Law is the mountain range.
Law is the railing by which we steady ourselves across the passage of time.
Law, like love, is a feeble thing that conquers all.

payment

Time is the infection.

snipers

The clouds that do not rain twist our hearts.  We sweat of them.

flash, trickle

Modern sculpture certainly has its moments: indeed, moments are mostly what modern sculpture has.  The faucet sticking out from a bronze cloud.

limits

On the one hand, excessive ambition is ugly.  On the other, it is low and unattractive to treat life as if its goal were to find a hole to crawl into.

glories

The heat wave breaks and the weather is warm, not hot, the air embracing, not sticking with humidity.  I cross streets and head to work.  There: on the sidewalk, waiting, the young couple, a sort of perfection.  He, standing, block shouldered, next to the phone booth, similar to it in tallness, dimension and form, a Latin slab of young power, seeming carved not born, gentle and content next to his wife.  She, beautiful as only a young mother, fat and short, can be beautiful, lovely as every best apple or peach would wish to be, lit by her own light, happy in the way of those unsmiling in an open privacy of maternity.  Their infant, unseen in a loose sheet, passes from her to him.  She breathes a thinking breath.  Her pink polo shirt is not tight, but her breasts are ample.  His blue polo shirt a field of sky.  The flowing sheet, of soft yellow and white, their treasure within, hardly catches the breeze, drapes between them, falling from his cradling arm like flag from its mast: a blazon of parenthood.

interstices

If there is other intelligent life, I suppose it is as likely to be here on Earth, yet unseen by us, as it is to be elsewhere.

a local one

Policy aside, Michael Bloomberg's mayorship has been a signal act of public service.

shallow

Perhaps you've seen the inverted water bottles used with cages for rabbits, hamsters, and the like. The bottle feeds a steel tube, which is sealed by a small steel ball.  The animal, licks the bearing, lifting it, and a little water flows.  Click click click is the sound as the little ball falls back into place between licks.  A little steel click click click.  That's what I hear when I click my mouse at work - the same clicking.  And really, as a I read through the news online, what's the difference?

weep

I have never been sympathetic enough.  Brokenness in others repelled me when it did not tempt me as an opportunity for advantage.  But this is mostly because I feared and loathed - and fear, and loathe - brokenness in myself.  There are substances that are weak once broken, and others that weather breakage and persevere.  God willing, we - you and I - have that persevering strength.

next, on thinking with cliches

Blank canvases invite bad painters to think - this time it will be different!

indigo

My crowded subway commute gave me a few minutes to stare at a teenage boy's tattoo, which started just below his left ear and nearly covered that side of his neck: I love you Mom and Dad.  My mind leapt to what my parent's reaction would have been.  But what of his parents?  Anything from comedy ("just don't expect us to get one of those for you, son!"), to mild gratification ("that's nice, what's on tv tonight?"), to aesthetic critique ("that flowing script is all wrong - we would have preferred black letter"), to anger ("you'll never get a job now"), to - nothing (if his parents are dead and the tattoo is in remembrance).  My own reaction, of course, was to think about it: it is stating the obvious, but a lot of instinctive behavior - these rudiments of cultural and tribal mores - is about stating the obvious in mysterious ways.  And like the markings in Revelation, this boy's tattoo is, in its way, a mystery, of the "Behold! I show you..." variety.

Kant

Maps are the best metaphors, literally.  The best maps are metaphors, metaphorically.

unenlightened self-interest

They they stand, in every rush-hour subway car, like sentries: commuters against the edges of the doors, forcing those exiting and entering to squeeze between them, single file, slowing everyone, even themseleves.  They are the totems of limited human intellegence, of the power of the lowest common denomenator of workaday, small scale, self-defeating greed.  I think of these people every day: they force their crummy little lesson upon me.  They tell me that we are greedy, stupid and boorish.

bdellium

The application of fragrance is an ancient thing.  I like to look at an ancient sculpture or Edwardian painting and imagine: she is perfumed with jasmine, or he smells of lavender, or myrrh.

provenance

That "1" and "2" marking classes on European train cars.  There they have been, and are.

thank you internet

Aha!  I was walking down the sidewalk, thinking to myself. "FTM drag queens: I bet there are."  And, of course there are.  Cool.

cay

I've slowed down - am slowing down.  Becalmed, perhaps.  I must find new wind and the right placement of sails.

sermonette

Bitterness is poison. The bitter die alone. 

El Paso

Among the snake oil salesman's greatest tricks has ever been to seat the new amongst the choir, turn, tell his own troubles, swallow the concoction himself and offer - you - the rest of the bottle.

couger talk

"Where did you find him?  Amber Alert?"

banality

At the moment, the Egyptian channel I am watching is running an endless string of commercials.  For potato chips, DVD players, baby diapers.  It is strangely terrifying.

from the kitchen table, children beside

Bach could not have written for the journey, yet he wrote to flight, by TGV, by jet. Let fields or clouds fly past the window as one hears what is baroque, as one sees what is sped up, yet calm, crowded with life and arrangement. Nature itself is baroque when passed by with attentive reality.

steel flight

Hoist points:

A mighty engine lifts

Or may be lifted.

Winglets:

A spreading wing holds firm

But more gently.

Life vests:

Secreted with their kin

Ever ready. 

Shoulders:

As real as Chicago

Hold me between.

Boeing:

Private yet national

Of me apart.

Above:

Home and Earth beneath me

While I'm soaring.

aboard, glories

Out from my seat, I see the great left wing of this triple seven, stretching at its tip upward, away from the Atlantic below. A secondary flap makes its slight movement, and we are kept level, aloft, and in good cheer, at mighty speed. My apartment would fit through the maw of either engine depending from these wings. The luxuries of the Zeppelein were not so great. Even here in economy. 

nullipara

Childlessness and the bearing of children alike carry a heavy burden of justification - seldom carried.

channels

Boston and Amsterdam. Commercial trade and highly rationalistic religious movements are the beginning and catalysts of tolerance.  The hardness of Calvinism and Puritainism eventually become the firm pavement to congregational, then democratic, then liberal belief. 

Snowden

Well yes, of course, systems administrators are latter-day switchboard operators.  Imagine if Sarah from the Andy Griffith show ever fled through Moscow!  Moscow, Tennessee, that is.

Tweed Courthouse

What does luxury do?  Many things, I'm sure.

Sometimes luxury glows: Tut's golden funeral mask really would be less beautiful without its precious materials and workmanship, indeed without its pharonic coiffure and false beard - that is, shorn of its branding.  But it takes centuries to entomb the cultural ugliness of the artifact and centuries more for the patina of patrimony to develop. 

Contemporary luxury glows best when it is, actually, popular.  The British royal wedding was luxurious in a way that designed for masses to luxuriate in it, and was thus a distant and effective cousin to well-appointed public parks, which were meant to be, in the old fashioned phrase, elevating.  But all this must be done carefully and, forgive me, by the right people.  Misappointed luxury is a mess, enjoyable only as a shtick: Dame Edna.  A showman's luxury is for a simpler, sometimes dirtier, cultural phase: Frédérick Lemaître (as portrayed), with his dandified cane and coat, Liberace, drug pushers with their diamond-capped teeth.

So, often, luxury sickens: little need be said here, except that sickening luxury is a winking, syphilitic thing, beguiling even as it pustulates.  A crust of jewels is often a social crime that almost as often half-hides, half-advertises the actual crimes leading to acquisition.  The manicured, coiffed, neurotic, primped and pimped dog - a symbol of personal, social and moral disorder - Trouble.

Usually, luxury asserts: it is a kind of boldness, or big-toothed smile, or warning.  And that is half of why luxury sells: it promises to sell you.  The nicest paper we buy is to print our resumes on.

Sometimes luxury coddles: sensitivities - real or imagined, natural or acquired, rational or affected - are recognized and dealt with.  The incredibly soft scarf occasionally adorns an incredibly sensitive neck, like a dressing of gauze.  More often, such scarves eventually render the neck more sensitive.  In either case, luxury is a thing to be consumed, to cozy up in, to hold and squeeze as a child does a teddy bear.  That is the other half of why luxury sells: it is a little ball of ownable comfort, occasionally excused as an investment.  Luxury in this very common form is a teddy bear, and usually as infantile.  Lotions.

And thus, luxury often teaches: the needs and tastes implied by luxury are taught deliciously, because indirectly.  Why should there be swans in the lake? Why shouldn't there be steak sauce on the table?  Why are courtrooms expensively appointed?  What is the blindness that necessitates revolution?  There is much to be learned in art musuems, and an important minority of the lessons on offer from art - especially the applied arts - are the lessons of luxury.

Always, luxury signals: any of the foregoing.

sightings

In the subway, the old man who seems to be wearing a suit because it is the only thing he has to wear outside the house.

pivot

My mind knows its needs.  I find myself slowing, now and then, and it is frustrating.  I have so much to do.  But something is being considered, cooked up, within.  Some unseen timer's bell rings and there, enabled by the pause, is a new understanding, well worth the temporary dip in productivity.

March

From my perch at the shoe shine shop, I see the morning's latter commuters pass. Soldiers of many armies. Some their own sole troop: an army of one. Others, like me, of the great professional guilds, phalanxed. Most of two loyalties, officers of the family brigade, making their daily expedition to reinforce some corporate redoubt. 

day by day, trench to trench.

Fight.  It is wisdom.

fear

If I were to wish evil on a society, I could do it no greater harm than to see much of its male youth unemployed. I feel like Francis Urquhart to say it, but some sort of public service conscription is preferable to that.

ask Mr. Malaprop

And there he was, nervous, shaking, perspiring audibly.

empty rooms

A nightmare: my head empties of loved ones and self and only work and pleasure remain.

Manhattan Island

People live and thrive in different particular habitats.  Each person is compatible with a few at most, and that uncomfortably.  Some of us are riverine, others live in the forest canopy.  None of us are truly global.  The things I know how to do - some of which are, in fact, impressive - would be naught in most settings.

Saugerties Lighthouse

We're born to work, after all? Yes, but  peace and beauty and nothing to do are a fine alternative. 

Gorgias

Philosophy distances when it does not debilitate.

after Nash

In city apartments
The best dog breed is that
Better known as a cat.

gulp.

Unless your roots are blessed with location and sunk deep enough to tap water, you must engage, you must run, you must race, you must win your water.

shepherd thyself

The memory of possibly repeatable happiness is the whip that drives the great human herd from within.

on the take

Man is another of the grasping animals.

go

In New York City, stamina is a kind of intellegence.

eulogies

Children are life after death.  The childless fear a final scene like Dirk Diggler's.