Started typing Day.
Sneezed before I typed the Y.
Day interrupted.
.
Some refer to Dad
As Da. But it could well be
Dad interrupted.
.
Da means Yes in Omsk.
Pravda? Truth. Prav and Da make
DePRAVed BaldeDAsh.
(Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s account of his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 60s entitled “PRAVDA Means TRUTH.”)
.
District Attorney
Deleterious Apple
Darwin Awardee
.
Dah dit dit dit: B.
Da next letter is a Y;
Da last, dit/E. Bye!
hey there–
don’t you hate catchy titles that just bait to switch? we get roped in again by some son of a bitch who knows our curiosity’s worse than a cat’s so they lay down a briar of thisses and thats.
but this right jolly fellow with gray hair and wrinkles with a grin that is crooked and a left eye that twinkles now ceases the nonsense and staves off attack having baited and switched why he switches right back.
there was a calm scientist aaron by name who sought not only knowledge but fortune and fame and his pigeon chest swelled even more with the pride that his asthma was cured and he’d taken a bride.
they lived well off his royalties and truest love and they searched here and yon and below and above for the best installations of magic and light that would make perfect rainbows by day dusk and night.
so we now close the curtain on aaron and djenn the pragmatic asthmatic and his sacred wren and imagine prismatics that let our eyes feast on genetic æsthetics that soothe savage beasts.
my christmas begins w/a jaunt in the street
over asphalt & g r a v e l and concrete & tar
one w/midtown & stars & a calm so complete
near celestial bliss & h o s a n n a s — o hark
ESSO is one of my two go-to coffeehouses in the Valley of the Sun, and today I’m treating myself to a peppermint latte and a molasses-based cookie, in the spirit of the Holiday season. The one-man-band on staff, an engaging fellow named Jacob, instantly handed back one of my 20s when I mistakenly gave him two stuck together. He also has superb taste in energetic contemporary music.
In the spirit of Holiday Fun I’m going to have a little fun with this photo I took outside the entrance, specifically with the statue/sculpture of a man who to my negligent gaze looks like he’s in Colonial garb; and you can’t spell Colonial without Colon, am I right?
Dedicated to the memory of Nathan Hellyeah, inventor of the colonoscopic barstool, who famously said “I regret that I have but one lower GI tract to give to the cause of Science.”
‘Tis the season to be Silly, Friends, and at Esso, I feel free to be as silly as I want to be. Kudos and thanks to proprietor Sharon Koger for providing this special place for people like you and me!
thanks to the hershey folks
even an old mateless man
can get a kiss on christmas eve
.
and he can pour himself christmas cheer
into a lovely goblet of his own making
and with the seagram’s v o in the cupboard
he can toast the spirit of his deceased father
with the spiritous liquor
that was his father’s favorite
.
by now you may be feeling sorry
for this lonely old codger
having been emotionally manipulated
by said codger
but you need not be
all he needs for all the unloneliness he wants
is to get off his fat ass
and go out into the world
call a pal or a gal or a gal pal
and see if a christmas movie is viewable
go to the dive bar across the street
or better yet a coffeehouse
with a cheerful barista
who knows him by name
and ask for the usual
shoot a text to a faraway loved one
or a joke to a nearby old friend
.
but before this old myself does any of this
i’ll have another so delightful kiss
and kiss you, my cherished reader, as well
in a way appropriate to the both of us
and urge you to celebrate in your way
what you find most fittingly celebratory
and i raise my goblet to you
and wish you the best
first let’s establish what SOTM stands for/and later i will beg for it to stand for something else
SOTM stands for Show Ourselves The Money
and is pronounced, unsubtlely enough, Sodom
I felt SOTMized this last election cycle/because i wanted a few candidates to win so badly/that i contributed modest amounts to their campaigns
and to this day, almost seven weeks after the election,/ALL of those candidates,/and some of their pals as well,/are hounding me/and pleading with me/and guilt-tripping me/and badgering me
to Show Ourselves The Money/(the Ourselves being the candidates, of course)
to give them more for next time/because the bad guys are outspending us
i want this bloodsucking buggerish nonsense to stop
because the implication is Whoever Has The Most Money Wins
and Decency and Right vs. Wrong do not seem to matter
so i am begging everyone to change the paradigm
and please make SOTM stand for Something Other Than Money
.
other more civilized countries put money in its place/and limit campaign spending
let us learn from their example
for i cannot sit comfortably with this going on–
can you??
After he had watched the movie {proof} he got a little angry and then quite sad
His own brain harbored no delusions but it was shrinking and had gone from a fusion reactor of ideas and insights to a sputtering engine with bad carburetion
And the movie did drive home how finite Earthly time can be
So he suddenly felt the urge to settle his affairs of the heart
Got out many pens and markers and dozens of sheets of his letterhead stationery
Wrote a sonnet that would apply to every one of the fourteen significant lovers he had had
And then wrote thirteen more sonnets similarly themed but unique to each lover
Retaining the final line in its original form for all fourteen of them
It was the line that was most absolutely true yet would mean something different to each person:
I so regret we did not make more love.
He sent most of the messages by snail mail. Two he scanned and e-mailed. One, the sonnet in its original form, he kept, because the lady was dead.
.
As often happens, attempts to settle affairs end up with the affairs being more unsettled than ever
but that,
to use a phrase found in many mathematics textbooks,
is “beyond the scope” of this account.
most of us/before we die/die down.
you can say dial-down if it makes you feel better./most of us are comforted/by some degree of euphemism. “die” in its various forms proves too//off-switchy.
this seventy-year old text-speaking to you/is dying down. his muscles do not bunch the way they did/and his brain shrinks. the fires of his youthful lust/are mere embers, glowing dimly./his skin withers and his hair/has lost pigmentation
but on the upside anxiety is down/braggadocio is down/vanity takes a back seat to sanity/and contentment is frequent
the die-down devalues hoopla/and prizes the warm glow of a comfortable conversation/and a restful nap? o my
“in seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy” said william blake
may you have a long, enjoyable winter, my listening friend/with underblanket warmth/and much hot soup and oatmeal and coffee/tea/chocolate
and then
let Spring follow
she is decades younger and centuries older than i am.
her grade school christmas wish in 1967 was “happy birthday Jesus!”
she soothed a dying man’s passage. but for her he would have died uncomforted and utterly alone.
she made the nightly news for her comment after finishing the Phoenix 10K. Asked how she manages to finish such grueling races, she cheerily replied, “i just get right behind a good-looking guy.”
she is a fierce pickleball player and a friendly scrabble player. she seems to revel in well-made movies with graphic and realistic violence. I had no idea she carried such bloodlust in her until i went with her to see the northman.
of all the astonishing things she has done, she seems proudest that she is the mother of her son.
in my world there have been four Queen Elizabeths. two were queen of england, one portrayed cleopatra queen of the nile, and my beloved friend, whose friendship i have cherished for most of my life, is the queen of Kindness.
long live the Queen!
in school learning our language /we were given series of verbs arrayed/so that the first word was the verb’s present tense the second its past tense and the third the past participle
drink drank drunk swim swam swum jump jumped jumped
because unlike mathematics with consistent rules, language is also an echo of historical impacts like conquests and fads and new inventions
.
in my dim remembrance of latin class at glendale high school taught by the brilliant and petitely beautiful maegene nelson up drifts the word for “this” which was “hic”
and in latin the nouns come in masculine feminine and neuter forms
and they also come in cases and we were taught five those being nominative genitive dative accusative and ablative
so for hic nominative case, the masculine was hic, the feminine hæc and the neuter hoc
in the genitive or “belonging to or derived from” case all three are hujus
this, students just starting to learn latin have for hundreds of years learned by rite by chanting repeatedly “hick, hike, hoke/hooyuss hooyuss hooyuss”
and if you o reader have that in your head too after fifty years/you are in your way my sister or brother or sibling
for our bond is a weird singsong jingle/and without it we would not quite be who we are
One with Clay, Image and Text 