182.366 - 2016 project and completion

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

completion

an alien, looking over my life, or even my "office", would shake his head and say, "No, you mean incompletion."  so much debris from tasks and projects, begun and left partially finished!  and I suppose the alien would be right, but I'm going to claim that I also appreciate completion, tasks, projects, and even to-dos that I've seen through to the end, finished, and stepped back to admire before I started on the next.  yeah, I'm never really finished.  ever since I was little, I've had a list of to-dos bigger than I could ever finish.  it's how I learned about priorities.   I think I invented priorities for my to-do list without ever having a name for them.  but now and then I finish something and I get to check it off.  done!  goddam that's a good feeling!  akin to it is the feeling when I recognize that I'm never going to finish a task, a project, or a to-do, and I can stop nagging myself about it.  that's another form of completion, and I appreciate them both.

181.366 - 2016 project and Vietnam, 1954-75

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Vietnam, 1954-75

oh man!  the great ugly poison clot in our bloodstream.  possibly the stupidest war we have ever fought.  possibly the first of many.  we leapt in without thought, horrified by Dien Bien Phu.  well, I can't prove that.  but as a twelve year old boy lost in a new country that people told him was his home, I knew when I read about Dien Bien Phu that we couldn't not jump in.  we had a myth.  nobody defeated John Wayne!  and we were John Wayne.  and little brown men did just that, they pounded John Wayne into the dirt at Dien Bien Phu.  we had to prove it was a fluke.  we tried for twenty-one years.  one of the problems was we never knew - or could never say - what we were fighting for.  white supremacy?  unspeakable.  the white race's right to colonize any damn where they pleased?  we couldn't say that in 1954 and we damn well couldn't say it in the 70s.  but what else were we fighting for?  oh yeah.  against communism.  right.  except that's not a for.  how can you ever tell you won that one?  eventually the Berlin wall would come down and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would break up.  could we say we won then?  is having Putin rule Russia a win?  okay, then we won.  yippee.  and I guess we can retroactively say we won in Vietnam too.  the world didn't topple into Communist rule like people promised us it would if we didn't win in Vietnam.  blah.  we didn't win there.  we never knew what we wanted there.  or we did, but it changed with every new set of Presidential advisers.  and we never had a translation from what the Presidential advisors thought we fought for to military objectives, things our soldiers could do, other than fight courageously, and die, and come home maimed.  it was terrible.  it was stupid.  it was disgraceful.  and it haunts us forty-one years later.  well, it haunts some of us.  maybe when those of us who were alive in 1954-75 have died, maybe no one will care any more.  maybe no one will notice any similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq.  maybe there aren't any except for those of us still haunted.  I am one of the haunted.

180.366 - 2016 project and the French Foreign Legion

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the French Foreign Legion

once upon a time the French Foreign Legion was like dragons and fairy princesses and mermaids.  it existed in books and stories and movies and Time magazine.  it never occurred to me that it was real people, like the Marines.  it never occurred to me that it existed from day to day, like a Chevrolet did.  or that you could meet a person in the French Foreign Legion like you could someone in the Navy or in the Air Force.  no, people in the French Foreign Legion existed long enough to carouse doomedly, then gather in a fort and die heroically.  I never asked questions about them any more than I did about dragons.  and then came Dien Bien Phu.  the Vietnamese under General Giap trapped the French Foreign Legion on the top of a hill and just pounded them with artillery for days and days, about two months.  well, it didn't happen the way I remember.  alas.  nope, Dien Bien Phu is a valley surrounded by mountains with plenty of caves in them.  The French built an airstrip in Dien Bien Phu and surrounded it by the French Foreign Legion - at least in my imagination-history.  the Vietnamese took over the mountainsides and put their heavy artillery in the caves, then just pounded the hell out of the French Foreign Legion.  in days they made the airstrip unusable except for supply drops.  it took two months, but the French Foreign Legion finally surrendered and France gave up trying to hold Vietnam.  never fear!  the United States couldn't stand the idea of little brown men defeating big white invaders, so it took on the war to keep the little brown men in their place.  and twenty years later, Giap drove them out too.  or at least that's one version.  so who were the French Foreign Legion?  in story and book and movie, they were criminals, failed professionals, unrequited lovers, men who couldn't shave or hold their drink, and who operated more or less without discipline until they were sent into a trap where they became highly disciplined and very professional soldiers willing to fight to the last man for a battle plan that required them to be surrounded and running out of supplies.  Dien Bien Phu was made for them!  in the real world, in which we seldom run into dragons or fairy princesses or mermaids, the French Foreign Legion was created in 1831 as a special branch of the French Army for foreign nationals who wanted to fight in the French military.  you can still join today.  it has French officers, but its troops are from anywhere but France.  according to at least one reporter, they are what the fictioneers describe, except for the part about undisciplined, drunk, and incompetent.  no, the French Foreign Legion insists that they be soldiers, and they are.  and they fight for France anywhere they are deployed.  they did fight at Dien Bien Phu, but they were part of a large army trapped in the valley.  some people say that the French Foreign Legion does the kinds of things the French would be embarrassed to have its Army do, but I know of no official statement of that.  yes, the French Foreign Legion is a perfect group to make into romantic heroes and into dark anti-heroes.  maybe that's what I appreciate about it, or maybe I transfer the feelings from the stories, books, and movies onto the real people.  they did become real people to me after Dien Bien Phu, and they continue to be.

179.366 - 2016 project and our founding documents

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

our founding documents

to be clear:  the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and the Declaration of Independence.  (I didn't even know there was a British Reply to the Declaration, but of course there was.)  when I was little, I learned in school or in the books I read from American schools (my granddaddy was determined that I know more than those Brasilians would teach me) that the United States of America was the culmination of thousands of years of history.  first Greece invented everything, then the Romans made it powerful, then England made it almost democratic, then the United States made it wonderful.  yes, we were the reason God created history.  that may never have been said explicitly, but it was there in a lot of lessons.  now I was a little skeptical of American world history:  there was no China, no India, no South America (not even Brasil!), and no Africa.  I failed to notice that there was also no Spain, no Portugal, no France, and no Italy.  later I would learn about the Balkans and Russia, and wonder how they didn't squeeze into world history.  but I digress.  in the history of our country, I was impressed by how we made ourselves.  we had been British colonies; we declared ourselves independent, and fought a Revolution to make it stick.  we argued about government until we created the Constitution, and some brave and noble men insisted on a Bill of Rights before they'd accept the Constitution.  back then, I was awed by what a wonderful job we'd done.  of course, "we" were white folks, but no one explained that to me when I was little.  (my father tried.  he told me I must never tell my playmates that there was something wrong with their skin.  I looked and I looked and concluded he was crazy.)  I really thought "We the people" meant we the people.  I really thought "all men" at least meant all men, except I thought it really meant all women too.  I thought it was part of that same trick in which you say or write "he" and mean "and her too".  anyway, hundreds of lessons later in which I learned how "all men" was slowly dragged out to include most men, then most men and most women too, I'm still impressed with the documents.  I know the Declaration means more nearly what I read than what George Washington read because it inspired Spanish colonies when they broke away from Spain.  I know the Constitution means more nearly what I read than what Alexander Hamilton read because people all over the world have used it as a model without our guns helping them along.  I have learned that, sadly, they don't have any more commitment to those words than we do, but I still think they're good words, inspiringly assembled.  if we leave nothing else to the historical record of mankind but we leave those, then hurray for us.

178.366 - 2016 project and non-representational painting

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

non-representational painting

once upon a time, I was little.   books had squiggles in them so grownups could explain the drawings and paintings.  the drawings and paintings showed worlds pretty much like the world I played in when grownups weren't around to tell me what I should see.  I think it was that houses looked like houses and horses looked like horses.  hm.  did that come out right?  houses in the drawings looked like houses in the world I played in when grownups weren't around, yes; and horses in the drawings looked like horses in the world I played in when grownups weren't around.  so I was comfortable with those drawings, and had no idea what a historically and geographically compressed interval they had come from.  of course, way back in once upon a time, I thought every day was part of everyday everywhen, and that rural northeastern Brasil was part of everywhere.  kids get funny ideas.  but along came school and education, and I was floored to learn that ancient Egyptian drawers and painters saw the world all wrong!  wait!  no!  that didn't make sense!  they drew and painted what they thought represented the world around them.  yes, that made sense.  and I could kinda get the twist it took to represent the world that way.  I could even try and draw the world around me like it might have been represented by an ancient Egyptian artist.  oh!  wow!  damn!  and I learned not to show those drawings to teachers or parents, since they went nuts when they saw them.  school was a lot about learning how to avoid teachers and parents going nuts.  but then, outside school and outside the world of my parents, I think it was The Book of Knowledge that opened up new kinds of paintings to me.  I told you about "discovering" Guernica.  even before that I discovered paintings that seemed to me to be just swirls, messes, things like I'd created with fingerpaints.  except they weren't.  there was an onpurposeness to them while mine had just been playing, not knowing what else to do, or how to do anything else.  I learned to respect them and puzzle over them - and keep them out of sight for teachers and parents.  and I learned what cubists painted, and sorta intuited what they did, but only much much later learned what grownups who didn't go nuts thought the cubists did.  so now, I can see abstract paintings, or African paintings, or cubist paintings, and not go nuts - usually.  I can be impressed and even awed.  until someone comes along and tells me, "See?  this is a dragon.  here is his head, and here is his tail, and this is his mouth, and that is the fire coming out of his mouth."  "Unh, hunh," I say, still seeing an oval and a circle and a triangle against a curved surface, but what the heck do I know.  oh.  I do know that I appreciate non-representational drawing and painting, I just don't have stories for the instances of it.

177.366 - 2016 project and American place names

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

American place names

or rather the play between their spellings and their pronunciations.  Los Angeles (Law San-juh-lees).  Duluth.  Sault Ste. Marie.  Mackinac.  Tejon.  Baltimore  (Ball-mer).  New Orleans (Nawr-lins).  Baton Rouge.  Jal (Hal).  Omaha.  Sepulveda.  Cahuenga.  Chickamauga.  The mother language of American is English, and English stole from maybe a hundred languages to get its vocabulary.  Following a good example, American learned its place names from several dozen languages.  and, of course, made some words up as it went along.  Like Tarzana.  Lovely!

176.366 - 2016 project and piped water

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

piped water

maybe you have to experience not having it to appreciate piped water,  not everyone does.  globally, something like one person in seven (14%) lives without piped water.  that means you have to go get water you need, or send someone for it, or pay someone to bring it to you.  then you or someone you trust must prepare the water so it is safe to drink, to wash in, or even to wash your clothes with.  yes, it's fascinating for a little kid, but it's what one has to do for some group of grownups.  and somehow you have to store the prepared water, and keep the stored water and its container clean.  in some places in the world, a lot of work goes into what the men think is just providing water.  in this country, the United States of America, we are all men.  that is, nearly all of us do nothing to have drinkable water except open a valve and let it run.  (even in our mighty country that's not universally true, but the percentage of us who have to fetch and prepare water is very small.  we do have places where Republicans have saved money by poisoning the water supply.  Flint, Michigan is the most egregious of such places.  but that is another story.)  I bless civil engineers for making this miracle true for most of us, and I very much appreciate piped water.

175.366 - 2016 project and translators

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

translators

oh man!  I can almost sorta read Spanish, so I can stumble through Juan Ramon Jimenez or Unamuno or Lorca or Octavio Paz or Pablo Neruda, but oh dear god!  a translator helps, especially one who has an ear for both English and the particular Spanish of one of those poets.  but I have no Russian.  without a translator I would have no crush on Anna Akhmatova.  once upon a time, I had just finished two years of German classes and could fight my way through Hesse or Brecht - not only could but did! - but oh how much better they sounded translated!  I am told Rumi can only be read in Persian.  Thank you, translators, for giving us English versions anyway.  thank you three translators who made Beowulf available to me at different stages of my life.  thank you for the Norse eddas and sagas.  thank you for the Greek and Roman myths and legends.  thank you, translators - even those I have not yet discovered.

174.366 - 2016 project and computer programming

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

computer programming

once upon a time....  it seems like that now.  it didn't then.  I was twenty-three and supposed to earn a living for my family (I had a wife and a child at the time).  I had graduated from college with a physics degree, I had found a job as an engineering employee at The Boeing Company, and I still didn't know what the hell I was going to do.  I had read about engineers, and what I and the people around me were doing wasn't what engineers I had read about did.  an engineering employee with five or six years experience told me not to worry about books and just do what I was told.  not very satisfying.  my boss came to me one day and told me he had a job for me that no one else wanted, but since I had the least seniority in the group I had to take it.  that seemed about right.  but what he wanted me to do was program a computer.  well, I didn't know anything about computers and I didn't know anything about programming - this was back in 1965 and computers were about twenty years old and almost everyone didn't know much about computers and programming! - so the first thing they had to do was send me to some classes.  basically I went to a "What is a computer?" class, then a "What is programming?" class.  god in heaven!  I thought someone must have invented computers for me to play with, and invented programming so I could trick computers into doing what my bosses wanted.  but the second thing they had me do was take some more classes, "What is assembly-level programming?" and "What is programming in Fortran?"  mercy!  then I got to work with some engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a program we were going to use to track the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft on its way to the Moon and while it orbited the Moon.  what?  well, like in all good stories, I've skipped a few details, but the essence of the story is true, and I did get to work with JPL engineers on the Orbit Determination Program for Lunar Orbiter within weeks of learning what a computer was.  and I worked programming computers for most of 46 years after that.  I'm still infatuated with computers, and still think that computer programming is the best puzzle-solving available.  it was and is a wonderful way to earn a living, and the way it's done now has little apparent relationship to the way we did it back back when computers were nearly new.  still, I bet you can find dozens of young men and young women focused intently on the computer programming they're doing, each of them grinning, and each of them with eyes alight as if they were making love instead of dragging coal out of a mine.

173.366 - 2016 project and the samba

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the samba

oh my word, yes!  first you should know, as I understand it, there are two sambas.  one is the "unabridged", the uninhibited, the real samba as danced in Brasil.  the other is the cleaned up version, the Protestant samba, or ballroom samba developed for American ballrooms.  honest to god, as I understand it, Americans went to Brasil and were captivated by the joyous, the rambunctious, the bawdy dance that Brasilians call the samba, but they knew it would never fly in the United States and Europe, still nearly dying from a stiff dose of Victoria, and an almost fatal case of hypocrisy.  so well-meaning Americans tamed the samba and loosed it into ballrooms in the USA and in England and in France.  it was a hit.  and Brasilians who see it ask, "What's that?"  still, it's one of the most popular dances on "Dancing With The Stars".  (uh...wait.  at least it is with me.  I may be biased.)  but, oh my goodness, watch the real thing.  every year the internet releases dozens of videos of real Brasilians dancing the real samba in the streets and in the parades during Carnaval.  every year I do, watch and sometimes download.  oh my, yes!  if there is an afterlife and if the universe is kind, I will get a new body and I'll be able to learn and to dance the samba.  (you can probably tell, I count on neither.)  oh!  one more thing!  and this is vital!  in the Brasilian samba, there really are two dances.  of course a man dances!  of course he sambas!  but really, his role in the samba is to support the woman dancing.  oh, the woman dances!  oh, the woman sambas!  and she is what is glorious about the samba.  she is what the Americans dared not bring back from Brasil.  she is samba, and samba is celebration!

172.366 - 2016 project and air conditioning

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

air conditioning

you surely are not surprised!  today is the first day of summer, and the fourth day of an excessive heat warning (a condition the national weather service declares) here in Los Angeles.  it's about 1730 (5:30 pm for half-day clock people) and the temperature has dropped to 108 degrees here where we live (in the Encino lowlands).  bless it!  our air conditioner has been running since before dawn.  the temperature inside has stayed mostly moderate, a touch or two of cool, and a brief interval of warm.  bless air conditioning!   bless the engineers who came up with ways to do it.  oh, may this summer not strain yours, and may the blue fairy bring us both a sturdier, stouter replacement for next year when we'll need it more.

171.366 - 2016 project and mathematicians

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

mathematicians

I have a friend who used to think that mathematicians invented new ways for us to add faster.  I think I have convinced him that mathematics is what we learn after arithmetic:  algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, set theory, groups, rings, fields, topology, probability, statistics.  once upon a time I knew smatterings of most of these, and the basics of several.  I was studying physics at the time, and thought they might be important in that study.  confession:  I mainly studied them because they were so damned much fun!  along the way I made a passing acquaintance of people like Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, Lagrange, Cauchy, Galois, Legendre, Gauss, Fermat, Euler, and probably others, including a few of my instructors.  I was in awe of them.  the physicists I knew studied real things, like stars, electrons, and sub-atomic particles.  mathematicians studied ideas, and the logic that made those ideas special.  I could learn about them, but didn't even have an idea how to have an idea about ideas.  I am still in awe, and very aware that while I've been away, not only have I lost much of what I knew, I've lost my own adeptness at applying logic, and that while I was forgetting, mathematicians were adding to those domains.  if I knew where mathematical east was, I would bow toward it,  mathematicians, I salute you, and thank you for the work you do, what you add to what we know.

170.366 - 2016 project and arithmetic

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

arithmetic

yes!  those magical combinations +, -, x, and /.  The first two I discovered on my own.  take this with a grain of salt, but I remember sitting back in a sandbox full of the wonderful truth that 2 + 3 = 5 and it didn't matter whether I was counting toy trucks, flowers, hummingbirds, or red peppers!  I wanted to run tell someone, but I had already learned that grownups just made fun of you when you figured out something important like that.  it didn't matter that there was no one to tell, though.  it was important and I knew it.  I must've told someone though.  I remember an old man trying to convince me that two days plus three days equaled five days, but that was ridiculous.  who ever had two days, much less three days, or five days.  no, a person only ever had one day, this one, and sometimes he didn't even have that, 'cause it was night!  grownups!  when they didn't lie to you, they tried to confuse you.  and sometime later, still before school, I figured out that if I had twenty-five centavos in a coin, and the toy I wanted cost seventeen centavos, then that left me eight centavos, enough for eight of those paper-wrapped, fish-shaped, hard-sugar candies, which probably was enough to bribe my little sister not to rat me out for buying the toy I wanted.  my mother noticed my fascination with addition and subtraction, and made a gazillion flashcards.  dear god!  they took all the fun out of figuring things out, but if learning them meant getting her to forget the damned flashcards, I'd learn them.  and I did.  but grownups proved themselves again.  my first grade teacher was no more delighted that I knew addition and subtraction than she was that I knew how to read.  if I wasn't going to learn like the other kids did, then I could just go stand in the corner.  one of the girls in the class told me the secret.  "Pretend!" she scolded.  so I did.  and my first grade teacher was happy again.  leaving me to wonder did people really turn stupid when they grew up?  I've never quite figured that out, but the little girl's secret has been invaluable.  "oh!  the earth is round!  gracious!"  it works every time.  just like arithmetic!  which has been a fun tool ever since that 2 + 3 = 5 day.  and I haven't even told you about the flashcards for the "times tables" or the "gozintas"!  a miracle!  if you could just learn them once, then your mother left you alone and maybe even bought you another Robin Hood book.  bless flashcards!  and bless that little girl in first grade.  if only she could have taught me to pretend when teachers told us stupid things!  but bless her for saving me the trouble she did!  and yes, I still love arithmetic, and am sometimes still awed by its simplicity.

169.366 - 2016 project and sanity

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

sanity

you know, those intervals between times when I turn to Lindy and say, "I have to buy a gun."  or more likely, "I have to buy this text on advanced physics."  I can't think of any other good examples right now, but trust me, I bought the text on advanced physics, and I bought the gun.  no, I haven't used the gun to shoot up the text on advanced physics, yet.  and if you were to catch Lindy without me nearby, she might think of another example or two of my strange (read mad) urges.  now, at age seventy-four - good grief!  seventy-four! - I have read real people's stories of their adventures with what we call insanity.  I admire you for surviving and sharing with us, if you're one of those.  thank you.  and I recognize that most of my life has been spent in sanity,  but there have been times, and there may have been a long interval, that I spent, well, maybe going in and out of sanity.  I'm not sure and I'm not qualified to say.  I did spent five years working with a clinical psychologist, I think, reconstructing the story of my life, reconstructing my ideas of a future.  bless you, good doctor!  I don't know what he would say we did, but that's my interpretation of what I did working with him.  and since then I've only had a few episodes of "I have to do X!"  once I'd done X, I was satisfied to share your world as well as I do.  so, yes, I appreciate sanity, and intend to continue to participate in it.

168.366 - 2016 project and connection

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

connection

that's probably not a real word.  or if it is, it doesn't mean what I mean by it.  what I mean by it is that spark that passes between you and someone when for a moment you are a person and that one is a person and you recognize each other as persons.  now that may mean nothing at all to some of you.  I am told that some people, maybe even many people, just know everyone always as persons, and everyone always knows those people as persons.  forgive me.  that is so foreign to my experience that I don't really believe it.  someone is trying to fool me.  there is no world in which that happens.  on my planet, two men meet as adversaries, competitors, possible opponents.  a man and a woman meet as hunters, for each of whom the other is possible prey.  but we are all civilized now, aren't we?  most of us do not meet carrying a bow and arrow, or a club, or a spear.  even most men do not meet each other packing heat.  no, we meet each other, smile, say hello, shake hands, pretend we are all friends, and isn't this wonderful.  skilled civilized people automatically remember the new meetee's face, shape, and name, under the label friend.  really skilled civilized people remember also the date, time, event, and introducer.  crimeney, what a lot of remembering!  less civilized people, like myself, sometimes remember face and name and maybe the label friend.  these less civilized people walk through a world in which most other people are feral, but have agreed not to attack each other under the aegis of civilization.  hurray for civilization!  but even these less civilized people have moments when connection happens.  a poet meets a fellow poet, or remeets him or her, for instance, and something in the smile or the brightened eyes....  spark!  oh yes.  I know you.  we share experiences even if our lives never run parallel.  connection.

167.366 - 2016 project and they

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

they

you know, they make me test for my driver's license every year now.  they make English so confusing.  they made this car, see, and it had hubcaps on every wheel but the steering wheel.  he or she reconstucted this car, and they used chrome in a lot of places where the original car didn't have chrome.  they took pictures of the sky and found a hole, a little piece of sky in which they have no stars.  they make electing a president so difficult!  they have all these rules and some of them make no sense, but the ones that do make sense, they apply wrong.  they have this building where they make all these laws  and they call it the capital but they also call big letters capitals.  they tell you not to go out in snow in thin shoes but then they grade the snow and ice of the roads and streets so they have these big berms at the edge of the road and they completely block your driveway.  that they.  yes, I appreciate that they, and I hope I made you smile at that they too.

166.366 - 2016 project and Star Trek

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Star Trek

I do.  I appreciate Star Trek.  I didn't when it first showed up.  yeah, yeah, another science fiction show.  I waited for them to bring in the clowns.  movies and television had done science fiction before, but they'd never respected the "reality" of science fiction before.  Gene Roddenberry did.  slowly he won me over.  yes, these were real people on a grand voyage, encountering the kind of marvelous creatures that Odysseus had for Homer!  really?  really.  and having adventures like Odysseus and his companions did.  but wait!  there was more to it even than that!  Gene Roddenberry actually respected these characters!  even Captain Kirk.  sigh.  Kirk was okay, but not my idea of a spaceship captain or someone ladies would swoon over.  apparently I was wrong.  but I came to value, to esteem, the respect the characters had for each other.  Spock, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov were just as valuable and respected in the stories as were Kirk, and Scotty, and McCoy!  wait!  even their opponents were respected!  yes, they were aliens and opposed to whatever the grand Kultu was that funded the Enterprise and let it loose, but the opponents were honorable within their own cultures, and could be negotiated with!  and there was always that Prime Directive that all the officers at least seemed to really adhere to!  imagine, a whole military committed to something like the Prime Directive!  Gene Roddenberry did, and I came to admire and appreciate the series and its later reincarnations.  Viva Star Trek!  Bravo Roddenberry.  Thank you for a milligram of hope for some future humanity that respects itself and others.

165.366 - 2016 project and lists

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

lists

there are people who don't need and don't use lists.  I am not one of them.  I use lists.  I list to-dos - for the day, for the week, for the month.  I'd probably have a to-do list for my life if I thought I were going to live that long.  I have lists of books to read and books to buy.  I have lists of things I'm trying to get done.  I had a list of kinds of programs I wanted to write.  I once had a list of topics to address in a poem.  I had a list of places to go on my Harley.  somewhere I have a list of philosophical questions to consider - I think they're philosophical, but after some reading, I suspect philosophers wouldn't think so.  I once made a list of lists I had made on my computers, where I could find each list, and what the list was intended for.  a friend once teased me that if I just did the things I thought of without making lists, I'd probably finish the things I want to do.  I told her yeah, maybe, but I'd never know, since I wouldn't have crossed it off my list.  I may be a bit manic about lists, but they're about the most useful tool I have to gather all the scattered splinters of this mind and focus for a while on getting something done.

164.366 - 2016 project and Thorstein Veblen

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Thorstein Veblen

were you ever eighteen, nineteen, twenty?  were you ever a pain in the ass know it all?  did you talk too much?  had you not yet learned that while you're talkin', you ain't learnin'?  I was, I was, I did, and I had.  in some college class in which I blathered on about what was so self-evident it needed no proof, the professor called me back as I left and suggested I read Thorstein Veblen, any Veblen, but particularly _The Theory of the Leisure Class_.  thank you, I said, and waltzed on out of class still listening to my own monologue.  several years later, maybe even after college, I noticed an open book in a used book store.  yes, once upon a time there were stores that sold used books, and in some of them you could find almost anything by chance and almost nothing on purpose.  it was a game to drive the serious pain in the ass crazy.  in any case, I glanced at the open book, then stood closer to read it, then sat down to read some more.  A seriously good-looking young woman walked up, exasperated, and announced, "that's my chair and that's my book."  now I knew or at least strongly suspected that neither was true, that both belonged to the used book store, and what she meant was that she had been using them first.  I gallantly returned both and she remained unimpressed.  "what book is it?" I asked, and she replied, "oh, just Thorstein Veblen's _Theory of the Leisure Class_."  I about fell over.  could my professor have been right after all?  so I looked for the book.  I looked for it under the label "economics".  I looked for it under the label "sociology".  I looked for it in a "general" area, which included books by retired military officers, mostly generals but some admirals.  finally I asked the person at the cash register if they had another copy.  "oh sure," he replied and plucked it off the unlabeled shelf behind him.  those were the good old days, so I ponied up the five dollars or maybe even two dollars and fifty cents, and took my book.  it was wonderful!  it confirmed a little that I suspected, but revealed a lot that I didn't have the information or the wit to even guess!  and Thorstein Veblen had spelled it out, piece by piece, ages before,  to prove that I hadn't changed much from the PITA KIA that I'd been at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, for a while I ran around with my _Theory of the Leisure Class_ held high like a Bible hollering "why isn't this taught in school?"  and of course it is, some places, some times.  but mostly not.  we prefer the mirror that shows us to be the nice people, the good people, the smart people that we know we are.  and if some damnfool author runs along holding up a mirror that shows us to be a little foolish often and a lot foolish sometimes, well then, poo on him and it's his own fault that he's ignored and forgotten.  except he's not, not entirely.  here and there, now and then, a few economists and sociologists quietly extend his work.  but there's really not a lot to add.  here's my nutshell of it:  we've set up a class system in which even the rich and very rich don't have as much power and wealth as the wealthy, that is, the already unimaginable rich who also own the land and the means for producing wealth; we've set up laws and traditions and devices so the wealthy stay invisible to us, but they control jobs and incomes and prices for the rest of us.  I am told my nutshell is too simple and naive, but I think it's close to what I read in Thorstein Veblen who wrote about them over a century ago before we started calling them the 1%, the 2%, and the 10%.  is this a problem?  if so, is there a solution?  Veblen's job was to show us what's so, even if we didn't want to believe it.  I think he did a damn good job.  if we want a problem and a solution, that's up to us.

163.366 - 2016 project and imaginary beasts

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

imaginary beasts

geez!  I think I encountered them in my reading before school, the centaur, for instance, the cyclops, the unicorn, the gryphon, the satyr, the pegasus, the minotaur.  (no wonder I hated run dick run!)  scylla, charybdis, the firebird, mermaids.  of course, one of the best things about them was knowing about them when other people didn't.  or later, finding someone who did!  wow, it was almost like having a secret friend!  and they weren't just there for my little-kid reading, they showed up again in the fantasies of my adolescent  years, and those of my oughtabe-a-grownup years.  heck, some of them even show up in my poems now.

162.366 - 2016 project and strangerness

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

strangerness

I so did not appreciate this when I was a kid!  I didn't know any way to get away from it.  or maybe I did.  I immersed myself among Brasilians, and stayed um Norteamericano.  I did, but I spoke Portuguese like a Brasilian kid once removed.  that is, now, looking back, I don't doubt that Brasilian kids would have heard the foreigner speaking at their language, saying what they said but not quite in the right situations, or half a beat behind.  but I didn't know that then.  I knew my strangerness from a loyalty I felt that I knew they did not.  I knew UnitedStatesean history, or thought I did.  I knew about the founders, knew the pretty-story version of the ideas that went into the Declaration, the Constitution, the Pan-American organization, and knew we (the country portrayed in Brasilian newspapers, in Time, and in The Reader's Digest) didn't live up to them.  but we could, couldn't we?  mightn't we?  I mean, there was Eleanor Roosevelt fighting for the United Nations and what it might mean to the world.  oh well.  before I could resolve that issue to any satisfaction, slam-bam!  I was thrown into this country speaking something like English with a northeastern Brasilian accent.  people I thought of as Spanish-speaking kids could understand me better than the white kids I was supposed to hang out with.  I worked desperately for three years to learn to speak English as if that were normal, and at least learned to speak written English.  but I did forget Portuguese, or made it damn near unreachable.  and I discovered, sorta, that I was illiterate in idiom.  if someone said, "I'm all tied up" (and people useta say that), I wondered why.  if I could see them, there was definitely not a rope or even a string on them.  but even more important were the phrases that every child knew for six months, phrases that baffled the grownups - just about the time grownups figured out the phrases, kids quit using them - and me.  so even after I conquered my accent, or thought I had, I still spoke fractured English, just mended well enough to get by most of the time.  and all that history is still with me.  I frequently find myself stumped for a phrase that a real American would just drop without thinking about it.  I frequently have to invent a way of saying what I mean when a real American would just use a phrase everyone knows.  but that's very useful in poetry, isn't it?  being a stranger to the language means it's always a creation for me, and that creation happens within the boundaries and constraints set by the rules of English I learned in those three years when I was desperately trying to become an American.  but it's not just the language.  the language is just the most obvious way I stumble in real life, among real people.  the culture is a minefield of surprises.  I'm forever learning ohmygodIdidsomethinggauche.  I have become more graceful at sidestepping the consequences of my gaucheries, and using them to learn about the culture that I am supposed to think of as home.  I think it gives me a chance to find and see oddnesses that other people glide by as normal.  so yes, I appreciate my strangerness - most of the time.  there are times I wish I could give it up.

161.366 - 2016 project and Guernica

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Guernica

ever since I was little, I have loved that painting.  I remember discovering it in _The Book of Knowledge_ or some such approved book for me to browse.  I turned the page and there it was, and I was in awe, transfixed, inarticulate.  only after staring at it, at the bull, at every section of the painting, soaking in that this was a painting, but it was so unlike any other painting I'd ever seen in other books!  only after simmering in amazement for many seconds did I try to show it to an adult.  "Look!" I said reverently.  "Oh, Picasso," whoever it was dismissed.  it was another piece of evidence that grownups didn't know squat about the world I lived in.  I didn't know until later that it was indeed a Picasso, that it was his response to the Nazi bombing of the little town Guernica.  I didn't know until much much later that Guernica was a Basque town, bombed more because it was a Basque town than for any military purpose.  those only enriched that initial awe and inarticulateness.  I can still sit and stare at an image of it.

          http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp

160.366 - 2016 project and dragons

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

dragons

European dragons are lazy.  they hang in the sky like a comet.  they are an enormous lizard, sometimes called a worm, or a wyrm.  they sleep on a huge hoard of treasure, treasure they have no use for, except to keep it from humans.  occasionally they fly about and kill whole herds, cattle, sheep, horses, anything that herds.  they scare the bejesus out of princesses who are chained naked to a rock.  they fight with knights, although no one in his right mind knows why.  one sneeze and they could blow the knight away, incinerated.  oh, did I mention that they exhale fire?  not always, just when they want to.  on the other hand, Chinese dragons bedevil philosophers, kings, and generals - and the Chinese didn't even know about the devil!  (devils yes, the devil no.)  Chinese dragons are constructed:  the horns of a deer, the head of a camel, the eyes of a devil, the neck of a snake, the abdomen of a large cockle, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, the paws of a tiger, and the ears of an ox.  yes, an artist had to be damn knowledgeable to paint a dragon!  Chinese dragons could be symbols of power, fortune, good luck.  they had power over wind and water, hence storms, particularly tornadoes and hurricanes.  if I remember correctly, the Chinese once built an enormous fleet, the equivalent of ten Armadas, maybe a dozen, and as soon as it put out to sea, a huge storm arose, a storm so huge they called it the storm of three dragons, and it sank almost the whole fleet.  the Chinese concluded that they'd better fight their wars on land.  Chinese dragons embodied both yin and yang, particularly in their scales.  Chinese dragons were very wise, so they spoke in apparent riddles.  Chinese dragons sometimes advised kings and generals, but they sometimes devastated whole armies.  you can see why I think European dragons were lazy.  either way though, encountering a dragon was likely to spoil your whole day, unless you happened to outsmart it.  then it felt beholden to bring you power, wealth, and good marriage, which everyone knows is the same as good fortune.

159.366 - 2016 project and summer dresses

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

summer dresses

you know the ones.  the material is so light it floats on any breeze.  they can be opaque but are often translucent.  they are more the idea of a dress made almost real than anything people in the 1940s or earlier could have imagined.  they swirl when the wearer does a partial turn.  they flirt for her when she stands still.  bless them.  bless their designers.  most of all, bless their wearers.

158.366 - 2016 project and a standard transmission

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

a standard transmission

what a funny name!  it is not standard.  what comes on a car if you don't insist is an automatic transmission.  when you do insist on a standard transmission, you get one with four gears or five gears or six gears.  where is the standard?  but that's just me quibbling about names in English.  tsk upon me!  and wait!  a standard transmission is also called a manual transmission and I have no quibble with that name.  its manualness is exactly what I like about that transmission.  I love shifting at the time when the engine noise sounds right, shifting up or down.  I love using the transmission to slow down the vehicle, letting the engine do the work instead of the brakes.  I love the feet-juggling action required to release the brake pedal and ease into gear without stalling the car when you're stopped on an uphill slope.  as you can see, I love that it requires some skill and lets me show off that skill.  (it should be noted that one shows off skill with a manual transmission by not calling attention to your using one.)  often when we get where we're going, I turn to Lindy and say, "I love using a standard transmission."  I do.

157.366 - 2016 project and Leonora Carrington

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Leonora Carrington

imagine grey
clouds
rain
even the earth and its flora
a world best represented by charcoal
a pencil would be too sharp

now imagine red
yellow blue green orange
even brown seems vivid
brush strokes on canvas
sitting beside
the charcoal sketches

imagine a life
that starts in those greys
but ends brilliantly among the colors
colors that danced onto canvases

"a canvas is an empty space"
she said
and filled canvas after canvas
with colors
creatures we know in dreams
or from the world we glimpse
between sleeping and waking

how did she
wedge a foot between
and peer into that world
painting for us
the "oh yeah!"s
we might never have thought of?

Wyatt Underwood    ©  2016

156.366 - 2016 project and selectivity

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

selectivity

I am told that one can build an electronic device that responds only to the right signal from a particular other device.  a bluetooth device for instance, that takes commands and returns data only to your computer; it doesn't respond to a car driving by, for instance, who just happens to emit a signal at the same frequency.  or to your neighbor's computer.  a car unlocking device that only responds to a particular fob, or one of a small set of fobs.  I sorta know how that might be done, but am fuzzy on the details.  but people have been doing a similar thing maybe as long as we've had people.  haven't you ever seen a pretty girl or woman sitting alone, apparently oblivious to men strutting and pawing and snorting around her, to horns and catcalls and rude remarks, who apparently comes back to life as soon as her friends enter her space, even before they recognize or greet her?  I once watched a pretty young woman do that only she came out of it for her father among a horde of several hundred engineers and technicians streaming by, more or less on their way to their cars and their ways home.  but I have seen school age kids do that for a parent or an older sibling:  they were gone, and then they were animate.  I used to do a variation on it myself.  I would go into my room and turn on my radio, tuned to the country-western radio station, and do my homework - math, science, history, English - until supper was ready.  I'd shut off the radio and be the second or third responder to the call, with no idea what the radio station had played, or what my brothers and sister had done.  the house wasn't that big.  what I mean is that what I was doing then was shutting out the rest of the world until I got the right signal from the right device, the supper call from my mother.  I think I do a similar thing now, when I lose track of everything around me while I work on a poem or on a story - unless, of course, Lindy calls.  yes, I appreciate selectivity.

155.366 - 2016 project and unsubtlety

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

unsubtlety

what?  yes.   I looked up that word, and found nothing.  huh?  so I looked up antonyms to subtlety.  (imagine me blinking.)  the first one was ignorance.  I definitely did not mean that.  so I looked up subtlety and learned that it was being subtle.  not much help.  so I considered what subtlety means to me.  a Jaguar is subtle.  it doesn't exactly say, "What you think is a year's wages, this man thinks is pocket change."  but it leans in that direction.  especially when his serious car is an Aston-Martin.  and maybe that sentence is another example of subtle.  by contrast, a Harley is not subtle.  a Harley is big.  a Harley is mechanical. it shows off its mechanicalness.  those of us who love them think they are beautiful.  a Harley has awesome torque.  a Harley doesn't cut through the wind, it doesn't sleek through the wind, it bulls through the wind, tall and proud.  and the rider of a Harley sits low in the frame, so you can see a rider with fairly short legs sitting comfortably on a Harley.  I could be mistaken, but I think there is nothing subtle about a Harley.  that's the unsubtlety I appreciate.  and I appreciate that kind of unsubtlety in a poem too.  Wanda Coleman's raw rage, Lucille Clifton's defiant ode to her hips, Amiri Baraka's demand to be heard, to be listened to in a world built on white supremacy, Galway Kinnell's hunt for the bear, these, I say, are unsubtlety, and I praise.

154.366 - 2016 project and nice

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

nice

I have a very ambiguous relationship with nice.  I more or less know how it started.  imagine a man and a little boy walking along the side of a street in a little town in northeastern Brasil nearly seventy years ago.  there is no pavement, there are no sidewalks, there are no cars, there are no telephone lines.  there may have been no electric lines.  there are no gas pipes underground or above ground for that matter.  there were no water pipes.  water was delivered in huge metal ewers that were probably tin.  the houses are made of mud brick, and mud plaster covers the bricks, but the mud is painted bright colors, reds, pinks, blues, yellows.  no oranges and no whites.  definitely no beige, tan, khaki, or oatmeal.  the man and the boy both wear suits, heavy wool, dark blue, despite their living and walking within two hundred miles of the equator.  no one else except other white missionaries are stupid enough to wear dark blue heavy wool suits in that part of the world.  at least the boy's suit has short pants, so he's only wearing half an oven.  there are kids in the street, who stop their playing to stare at these two apparitions from some foreign world.  the little boy smiles at them, but the man does not.  he looks very serious and he pretends not to see the kids playing.  and then a miracle happens.  a young woman steps into the street.  she wears a loose-fitting short dress with more colors than the little boy knew were allowed in clothes.  she sees the intruders and smiles, then walks toward them and past them.  the little boy is thrilled and flabbergasted.  when the young woman walks, more moves than he knew could.  he stares, halfway to love and willing to go the rest of the way.  as she passes, the young woman looks directly at the little boy, winks, and smiles a smile he thinks has to be especially for him, even though nothing he ever did or can imagine doing could deserve that smile.  the little boy tries to watch over his shoulder as the young woman walks away.  sure enough, still more moves than he ever imagined could.  "daddy, daddy!" he foolishly says.  "did you see that?"  incomprehensibly, the man asks, "what?"  the little boy tries to describe the young woman, all the colors, and oh my god!  all that moved.  the man tells him, "women don't walk that way, and if they did, nice boys wouldn't notice."  the little boy blinks and shuts up, but he resolves he will never, ever, ever be a nice boy.  to some extent, he succeeds.  but of course, he can't really succeed, can he?  before the boy has a chance to grow up in Brasil, he is brought to the United States where the whole culture depends on everyone pretending to be nice.  ("pretending?" you probably want to object.  yes.  how many times have you heard a neighbor say, "oh I can't believe he did anything like that!  he was always such a nice man!"  then the prosecutor proves he not only did it, he did it often.)  if he doesn't learn to at least act like he is nice, then he will wind up in juvee, then in jail, then in prison.  this is not a desirable graduation path.  so he learns to act nice most of the time, and is eventually rewarded with a girlfriend, then another, and so forth, and each girlfriend teaches him more of what is needed to be nice enough.  bless you, girlfriends!  he learns well enough to survive an apparent adulthood and to retire and mostly be thought of as a nice man.  but trust me, he never learned to be nice enough to live up to "women don't walk that way, and if they did, nice boys wouldn't notice."  he loves to watch Brasilian women samba!

153.366 - 2016 project and surprise

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

surprise

when I was little, every morning was a surprise.  goddam!  here I was again!  and here was the world!  the same one?  maybe.  but with any luck it'd have something new to show me, for me to hear, touch, smell, or taste!  goddam!  there were mornings that surprise was so sweet I was up and dressed and gone before anyone else in the house was!  or that's how I remember it.  I don't know what happened, how that became "ho-hum, here's another day" but I suspect it was along about the time when I learned to dread "what will they make me do today?"  school was not a joy for me.  school was reading stupid books.  "oh yippee, 'Run Dick run' again."  it was being told ships didn't have that round bulgy thing at their stern, and going home to an encyclopedia that showed they did too, just like I remembered from the port in Recife.  it was tediously relearning that 1 + 1 was still 2.  but I still loved surprises.  what?  Paulo had a birthday?  I had one of those!  did everyone?  or what was that?  a cart?  but I knew carts, they weren't at all like that at all!  how did this one work?  what did it do?  what made cart-ness?  no, that didn't happen at school, that happened out in the real world, the world I was supposed to hurry through without looking.  thank goodness for that world and its holes where a house would later stand!  for coconuts that fell without warning.  for snakes!  for all the things that could kill you but didn't.  for all the people who answered questions from a nosy little boy who was supposed to be walking straight home.  or who let me watch what I wasn't supposed to see - almost anything real people did.  yes, I loved surprise.  well some surprise, maybe most surprise.  I didn't love being yanked out of Brasil.  I didn't love being thrust into a new place people told me was "home".  but you've read that from me.  enough.  there were a lot of surprises around twelve that weren't that cool, but I got through them.  and now we're back to "what?  another morning?  ouch!  yep, same ole me.  I wonder what new the world has for me today!"  and I have learned that some Native Americans woke to "it's a good day to die" which is another way to prepare for surprises.  death will surely be a surprise, and, I suspect, the end of all surprises.