366.366 - 2016 project and Carnaval

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

Carnaval

oh!  oh!  oh!  or maybe of course!  of course I saved this appreciation for the last day!  Carnaval!  no!  not carnival!  pay attention!  spelling is important!  ask any witch!  pronunciation is important.  carnival is the collection of rickety rides associated with county fairs and some state fairs.  carnival is a cruise ship line with a questionable reputation for health and sanitation.  carnival is trash, is mediocre, is tourist class.  Carnaval is sacred.  Carnaval is the world's biggest party!  Carnaval is joy and samba!  Carnaval is Brasilian.  in 2017, Carnaval will run from from 23 February to 28 February, six days of music and dancing and celebration and sexiness and smiles and laughter and smiles and happiness and smiles and costumes and minioutfits and smiles and fun and smiles!  oh lord!  and when it's done, people stagger into Ash Wednesday or Thursday services, then go home and sleep for a week!  well, I suppose they don't, but I would, wouldn't you!  I mean, in my dreams I can imagine dancing for six days, but in the best of times I cannot imagine smiling and laughing for six days!  my goodness!  what a lot of happiness one must generate for that!  oh Brasilians!  I so admire you, cherish you, there must be a stronger verb than that!  to have imagined Carnaval!  to have created Carnaval!  to live Carnaval every year!  oh praise!

365.366 - 2016 project and the god of war

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

the god of war

the god of war?  yes, the god of war.  We know him primarily as Ares or Mars, because we the people like to pretend ourselves the inheritors from the Greeks and Romans, but Yahweh-God-Allah, the common One God of the three Peoples of The Book (Jews, Christians, Muslims) will do nicely as a god of war.  So too will Agurzil, Maher, Ogoun, Oya, Huitzilopochtli, Kara Māte (goddess), Kauriraris, Kovas, Gurzil, Ifri, Annan, Bandua, Badb, Belatucadros, Camulus, and maybe 600 other names.  yes, the god of war is important to us, no matter where, no matter when.  war is one of our best endeavors, we are good at it, and we probably need to be.  (to be fair, I have a dear friend who asserts that we - humans - are not a warlike species and do not war most of the time.  she claims to have scientific studies to back her up, and she may have.  she is a scholar and she does not speak lightly.  I only speak of humans I have known and have read about, and those I presume we succeeded.)  Joseph Campbell regarded an active military as a function of civilization.  when I read that a human, no matter how individualistic when an adult, must be part of a group, I remember that the group has violent members who keep members in, and violent members who attack other groups to protect and defend their own group.  those are the only groups I know of except for the few groups who depend on the rest of us to protect them, and their own iron customs and conventions to keep members in.  mostly, as far as I know, groups survive by killing or absorbing groups around them, and groups are both possessive and jealous of resources like land, water, women, and children.  we war.  we do it well.  we must.  no wonder we worship the god or goddess of war under so many names.

364.366 - 2016 project and literature

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

literature

literature!  the idea that some writing is better than other writing, that some is so good that it's worth reading, even though the reader has to learn history to appreciate it, the idea that some writing is exquisite.  what a great idea!  of course we abuse it.  first of all we use the word literature also to mean junk writing:  leaflets, pamphlets, other printed matter to advertise products or give advice.  sigh.  we also use it to mean books and writings published on a particular subject.  half-sigh.  for this exercise, this appreciation, please forget those meanings.  yuck!  bleah!  foo!  horribabbliskovinypoo!  please also forget how you first encountered literature:  some old and well-meaning and probably white teacher trying to remember why this writing is special.  or how you re-encountered it, some old white dude fingering his lower lip and peering into a book and reading you marked sentences.  sigh.  no.  pretend someone gave you a list of 1500 or so books to mix in with all the magazine articles and pocket books and even hard-cover books you were gonna read anyway.  pretend one day a sentence in one of those 1500 books made you sit up and exclaim!  "what?  how did he or she just do that to me?  how did she or he give me a whole new perspective on my world that I had begun to think I could never learn anything new about ever?  what about that sentence made it feel like a well-driven nail?"  yeah!  then you can notice that that author does that repeatedly and you had just missed it until that one sentence turned your somersault.  as well as I know, we don't know why some writers just write excellent language and others only come close, that just happens.  it apparently happens in all languages.  it has apparently happened since we began writing.  but thank goodness somebody noticed, and gave it a name.  literature.

363.366 - 2016 project and liberty and freedom

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

liberty and freedom

they're not the same.  dictionaries tell us they are, but lexicographers got it wrong this time.  Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  It's not as stirring if you switch in freedom.  try it.  Martin Luther King Jr. rallied for freedom, and switching in liberty confuses us.  on the other hand, if lexicographers got it wrong, then we're on our own to figure out the difference.  (that's not quite true, a practitioner of constitutional law probably knows the difference so well that he or she thinks it's obvious.)  the Bill of Rights might be a place to turn, and maybe it suffices.  the government grants us freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and it guarantees our liberties.  it grants us our rights, but our liberties somehow come from Nature.  cases brought to the Supreme Court over the last seventy years have often redefined our freedoms or our rights, seldom our liberties.  but we tell soldiers they go off to fight for our liberties and our freedom.  in this case, our freedom is not something defined by the Bill of Rights.  for white folks, we fought the Revolutionary War to determine our freedom.  for black folks, we fought the Civil War.  but white folks are too devious, and the Civil War did not suffice.  for people of color, we had to fight for freedom in the fifties and sixties all over.  for people who are LGBTQ, we recently had to fight for freedom.  for women, we've been fighting for freedom since the sixties.  don't think it's over.  the Republicans have vowed to ungrant all those freedoms, and they have just the president-elect and the Congress-elect that they might do it.  bone up on your liberties and freedoms.  I predict you're gonna have to fight for them all over.  it helps to know what you're fighting for.  best wishes.

362.366 - 2016 project and nightmare

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

nightmare

ooooo!  think of it!  the word itself, I mean.  nightmare.  a mare, a female horse, a woman's ride, maybe a queen's ride but a woman's ride anyway.  and then a night mare.  a mare woven from night.  stars shining through it.  galaxies.  nebulae.  you can only see it in the dark, when it is a deeper darkness.  maybe the darkness that lurks in humans.  mysterious.  but definitely not unknowable.  even in daylight, maybe mostly in daylight, that darkness comes to light.  beautiful people get poisoned.  innocent people get poisoned.  children encounter horrible stories, only to discover those are their own stories.  people get shot.  people get knifed.  people get maimed.  all of them human darkness come to daylight.  but twilight comes and fades, and night arrives, and human darkness manifests itself more fully.  poisonings, knifings, shootings, maimings, what we do to children, and to girls and women,  what the government does to its citizens, whether it convicts them first or not.  but mainly what we do to each other when we're pretty sure we can get away with it.  nightmare.  the horse rears.  she has teeth, she has hooves, but she has no saddle, and no bridle.  she is nighttime, human darkness, and maybe a touch more.

361.366 - 2016 project and asylum

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

asylum

the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left his or her country as a political refugee.  what a slough of technical terms!  given that, I suppose only international lawyers and international courts "know" what asylum means.  you and I can know it's an ancient practice, at least two and a half millennia old.  I have long thought it an amazing act of generosity that one country grants citizens of another country in defiance of that second country's government.  that is, the idea is generous.  (by the way, I admire generosity in human beings; I think it's one of our better qualities.)  the practice almost never is.  I suppose refugee camps are better than concentration camps or slave labor camps, but in practice they are often not much better.  part of the reason for that is that it costs a lot to keep a human alive, especially if keeping him or her alive includes health care.  most countries balk at providing even their own citizens health care, even some "first world" countries do, like the United States of America, for instance.  but that's a different "appreciation".  for this one, I am amazed that at least as long ago as in the Greek times, maybe longer ago than that, nations took on the obligation of protecting foreigners who fled their own countries.  (yes, I know that sentence is anachronistic; 2500 years ago we didn't have countries, we had city-states and empires.  it was still an uncharacteristic-of-humans thing that humans did.  yea for them!  yea for us for continuing the practice!)

360.366 - 2016 project and Christmas-ery

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

Christmas-ery

waking up early!  squealing!  yelping!  yippee-ing!  running into the living room!  stopping in the way of people behind you!  more squeals!  stepping out of the way.  running to the presents, careful not to grab one!  waiting impatiently while parents make and pour coffee!  talking about the wrapped presents!  which one is the bicycle?  the new pony?  is there a dog this year?  who gets the doll house?  who's gonna get the ugly socks?  finally, finally, finally the parents are ready and one of the kids gets appointed Gift Distributor of the Year!  GDotY climbs in among the gifts and picks out one for each person as long as he can, then for each kid as long as he can, and finally hands the last gifts to the birthday person.  SWOOSH!  everyone opens their presents all at once while mother is still reminding them to open the gifts one at a time and write down who gave what.  littlest kid asks "Is that it?"  when assured it is, littlest kid asks, "When can we do it again?"  looks disbelieving.  "Next year?"  mother announces she's going to make breakfast.  one of the middle kids asks, "What do we do after breakfast?"  littlest kid is forlornly trying to rewrap his presents in semi-destroyed gift wrapping.

359.366 - 2016 project and Christmas Eve-ery

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

Christmas Eve-ery

I think Christianity is basically sadistic, and maybe nowhere is that more evident than in what it has done to childhood.  what is the basic law of childhood?  "Sit still!"  right.  at the time of their lives when they have more energy than good sense, when their bodies cry out to run, jump, twirl, somersault, cartwheel, twist, squirm, jiggle, play, and fidget, we demand that they sit still.  oh yes, there are pious and educational and other edifying reasons why we must ruin childhood, but our real return is making childhood miserable.  left to themselves, children would run around, explore, and laugh, so what do we demand of them?  sit still!  and then along comes a holiday, and for a few hours, we repeal the sit-still law.  and Christmas Eve is an odd mix of those.  giggles are allowed, even aloud giggles are allowed.  laughs are permitted.  sometimes even encouraged.  we sit around as families, but we can both fidget and talk!  in some families each person opens one Christmas gift.  (After all, Santa is still to come.)  in some families each person tells one yippee-yi-yea memory from the year.  in some families, the Designated Reader reads the Christmas story - preferably a Biblical version, so it makes no sense.  in some families the Designated Teller tells the Christmas story in all its wonder and delight.  at the end, in some families, people cheer and holler and blow party horns and otherwise celebrate.  I don't know all that's done on Christmas Eve, and I know that it's a very class-dependent celebration, but I have the impression that except in the most sadistic families, Christmas Eve is a happy and even a joyous time.  thank you, Scandinavian pagans, for such a wonderful contribution!  wassail!

358.366 - 2016 project and screwdrivers

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

screwdrivers

jeeminey!  long ago when I was a little kid, I was given a screwdriver without a manual.  I didn't know what it was for!  so I cheerfully used its handle to hammer nails, and its blade as a chisel, and might have come up with other uses for my screwdriver, except that some kindly man who cherished tools saw me hammering with mine and asked if he could show me how to use that tool.  "sure!" I said, glad to have made a new friend.  that unknown unnamed man probably changed my life.  he taught me how to use a screwdriver, and while he did, he taught me respect for tools and their proper use.  I never used a screwdriver as a hammer or a chisel again, never used a hatchet as a hammer, never used a...well, you get the idea.  but screwdrivers!  oh my goodness.  they take everything apart and put everything back together again.  that's not quite true.  some things are riveted.  some things are vacuum-sealed.  some things are press-fit.  but eversomany many are held together with screws.  watches are, and once you get inside a watch, its innards are assembled with screws.  if you will grant me that bolts are pretty much the same thing as screws, then engines are held together by screws.  you can detach a door by loosening its screws from its hinges, then, if you can figure out how to support the door right, you can re-attach the door to its hinges!  some things you should not take apart, because just as you loosen that last screw, the thing explodes and you can never find all the parts.  even if you did find them all, you don't know where at least half a dozen of them go.  (when you're a lot older, someone teaches you how to read and use an exploded parts diagram, and the world makes so much more sense!)  and even if you could find all the parts and get them into the right places, you don't have enough fingers and toes to hold everything in place just so, then use your third and fourth hands to press the last plate or whatever cover into place, and your fifth and sixth hands to get the first screw into place and tighten it down, then the second screw, and so forth.  no, no.  much better just never to take one of the explody things apart, or to quietly and innocently walk away and hope no one remembers you and your screwdrivers.  oh!  and that's another thing!  you never have enough screwdrivers, and you can never have too many.  and there are plain screwdrivers and phillips head screwdrivers and...oh!  it's endless!  so many things to take apart, and so many screwdrivers to take them apart with!  ah!  isn't life wonderful?

357.366 - 2016 project and liberal democracy

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

liberal democracy

stop!  unbunch your panties!  untwist them.  whatever the right verb is.  sit back down.  drink at least 8 ounces of cold water.  now relax, and pretend you can have a civil conversation about this - or at least that you can read or listen civilly while I monologue.  fret not!  a liberal democracy is the same thing as a Western democracy (probably not a WestWorld democracy).  AFAIK, the United States was the first, set the model, and continued to be one right up through the Barack Obama presidency.  I have little hope of it surviving a Donald Trump presidency, but that remains for current events to elucidate.  the Weimar Republic was a liberal democracy.  so was the French Third Republic which lost so disastrously to the Germans in 1940.  the British government is more or less a liberal democracy.  what the heck then is a liberal democracy?  well, despite my prejudice, I'm going to use the Wikipedia definition and description.  it is a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism.  (more Wikipedia:  "Classical liberalism is a political ideology that values the freedom of individuals — including the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and markets — as well as limited government. It developed in 18th-century Europe and drew on the economic writings of Adam Smith and the growing notion of social progress.")  what does all that mean?  it means the government is limited, and has its powers separated into three branches:  the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.  the government's job is to effect the rule of law in everyday life in an open society.  its main function is to guarantee equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all citizens.  it relies on free, fair, and competitive elections between candidates of more than one party.  typically it has a constitution, a document that defines the government, grants it powers, and protects its citizens from the government.  again typically, it has universal suffrage.  at least, this is a description of a more or less ideal liberal democracy.  in practice, liberal democracies put most of these ideas into practice in one form or another.  the United States sometimes has this form of government and sometimes keeps the form of the government but practices a more "conservative" version of the government, with reduced human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms.  it seems to hinge on the Supreme Court.  since the Warren court (1953-69), the court has mostly been on the side of the individual, of the citizen.  lately it has drifted onto the side of the corporation, which means onto the side of the very, very wealthy.  the Donald Trump presidency may undo everything the Court has done for us since 1953.  me?  I appreciate the Warren court and its interpretation of the constitution.  thank you, everyone who contributed to it.  damn, I hate to see it go!

356.366 - 2016 project and solstice

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

solstice

what the heck is the solstice anyway?  nowadays it's an astronomical event, when the sun appears to be as far north or as far south as it's gonna get.  now that may disturb you, since the solstice today occurred at 2:44 am L.A. time, and the sun was nowhere to be seen in L.A.  the earth is tricky that way.  not all events are L.A.-centric.  on the other side of the world, where the sun was shining, the sun was as far south of the equator as it ever gets.  that means, today, in the Northern hemisphere we get the least amount of daylight hours during this year.  some people say that's the shortest day of the year, but a day is just about 24 hours long day in and day out, so that's not quite accurate.  daylight hours get shorter and shorter until the winter solstice, and then they get longer and longer until the summer solstice.  anyway, last night we had the solstice, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.  the sun declined as far south as it will this year.  way back in olden days, in Europe, pagans celebrated the winter solstice, partly because as soon as it was done, daylight hours got longer, and soon spring arrived with its promise that life will continue.  yea!  Christians, needing another reason to kill pagans, stole the holiday, moved it off four days so it would make no sense, and decided that was when their Savior was born.  it was very weird, especially since everybody knows Christ was an American, and America hadn't even been discovered yet except by those people who lived all over it, but didn't have guns or smallpox.  but Christians never worry much about making sense, not as long as they have someone to kill for a good reason.  so anyway, today is the solstice, and Merry Christmas.

355.366 - 2016 project and engineers

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

engineers

damn I do! appreciate engineers!  now, I have to admit, engineers come in two classes to me:  real engineers and engineering employees.  real engineers get their licenses, and if they are successful, they become partners in an engineering firm, or they found an engineering firm.  engineering employees never take either risk, but they do good, solid engineering work for their corporate employers, and if they're successful may become an engineering executive in a corporation, but more likely top out as an engineering manager.  either way, as a real engineer or as an engineering employee, they do logical work, using the laws scientists have learned about the real world, and they design and help build the structures and devices we all use and call technology, and even some we don't recognize are technology.  I imagine but don't know that a team of engineers designed my Winchester Model 94 30-30 carbine, assembled the prototype, and tested it before it was marketed and sent into production.  the car you drive?  engineers designed and built all its pieces and components.  Engineers are responsible for bridges, dams, roads (freeways, highways, farm roads, streets - anything paved), power lines and the structures that support them, transformers, robots, helicopters, rockets, airplanes, automobiles, trucks, earth moving machines, construction machines, iPods and iPads, computers, smart phones, gosh, that's all I can think of now, but for everything I listed, there's probably at least one thing I didn't.  don't get me wrong.  other people are involved too.  there are designers and inventors, for instance.  but the solid, dependable, count-on-able technical work that imagines, draws, creates, builds, and tests the whatever, is done by engineers, and they are the ones also who examine the pieces when there is a failure, examine the pieces and determine what we needed to do differently.  damn I loved to listen to engineers, or to work with them, back in the days when I was employed.  they were so calm and orderly, systematic, thorough.  thank you, engineers, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

354.366 - 2016 project and journalism

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

journalism

okay, I admit it, I don't know what journalism is.  apparently it's different from news reporting, especially news reporting on television.  but knowing what something is not is not knowing what it is.  for instance, you know that motorcycling is not driving a car, but - trust me! - unless you ride a motorcycle day in, day out, no matter the weather, then you don't know what motorcycling is.  okay, after a little research, I have an idea of how journalism differs from news reporting.  as you know, news reporting seems - and I honestly say seems because I do not know the truth of it - to largely involve taking down and repeating what so-and-so says, or reading and repeating what a handout says.  in other words, news reporting seems to involve little thinking and no fact-checking.  (see me raise my hands and shake my head.  I cannot say it is this way, only that it appears to be this way.)  I think journalism distinguishes itself by actually learning what's behind the handout or the soundbite.  I think journalism actually tries to dig out facts and occurrences that the handout and soundbite cover up.  now, the "facts" for journalists may also be what other documents say, or what other participants say, but at least they have a fuller story, a behind-what's-shown story.  news reporting shows the mayor without a hair out of place and wearing his shiny suit and his shiny shoes and lifting a shovelful of gravel and smiling at cameras, and tells us that the mayor said his administration has built eleven hundred miles of streets in just two years.  journalism finds out and reports that the mayor's administration has granted contracts to build streets to exactly fourteen contractors, and nine of them share one co-owner, who just happens to be the mayor's brother.  news reporting quotes Our Leader as saying that the war is holy and must be continued until the infidels and heretics are eliminated.  journalism shows us that the infidels believe in the same god we do, only the infidels spell his name with an i and we spell it with a y, and further shows us that the heretics only differ from the orthodox by thinking that Our Leader must come from a different family.  no wonder journalists are thought to be dangerous.  and no wonder that our founding fathers included special protections for journalists and journalism.  if the incoming president actually manages to get rid of journalists and journalism, we will be the poorer for it.  I would say we will be the more ignorant for it, but many of you apparently think that is a virtue.

353.366 - 2016 project and deadlines

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

deadlines

oh my yes!  deadlines!  what would we do without deadlines!  we have to clean house before Mother arrives!  this term paper is due tomorrow and I need to do seventy hours of research for it, hm.  uh-oh!  I meant to let the steak thaw all day, good thing I have a microwave!  deadlines.  the rent is due on the first.  our taxes are due 15 April.  (we have to make up for the taxes wealthy people don't pay.)  we have to leave at seven-thirty to be sure we'll be there by eight-thirty.  I suppose there's some way to live without deadlines.  there may even be people who live without them.  the earth, as far as I know, never has to plan for its next perihelion, it just keeps traveling its orbit.  I can imagine that Buddha - insofar as I can imagine Buddha at all - simply traveled to Maharang and arrived there before the solar eclipse.  I can imagine that Lao Tsu - insofar as I can imagine Lao Tsu at all - simply had his taxes ready by March 1.  but me, I have to remind myself that I need to send my poems to Don Kingfisher Campbell by 1 January to have any chance that they'll reach him by 8 January.  (which brings me to a device some of us use to get an extended project done, called "creating a false sense of urgency".  suppose you need to build a Skyscraper by the end of next year.  first you tell yourself that you need to finish it by 15 December, because nobody really works the last two weeks of the year anyway.  then you tell yourself that you must check that you have all permits and permissions in hand on the 2nd of January.  then you decide excavation must start by 15 January.  You're picking these dates not by any planning, not by any worst-case scenario, you're just giving yourself a sense of urgency that you wouldn't feel if you told yourself that that one permit about water mains doesn't really need to be in hand until 14 January.  it's a useful tool even if it is a little crazy-making.  but back to deadlines.)  most of us procrastinate, we do.  we know we have to start X by 1 May to get it done on time, and somehow it's 1 June and we're about to start right after we watch the 2012 Olympics.  really!  if we didn't have deadlines, we wouldn't get anything done - I mean humans wouldn't.  If someone hadn't had a deadline, we'd still be waiting for Cro-Magnon man.  now if I could only learn to schedule a bit more sanely!

352.366 - 2016 project and civilization

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

civilization

what does it mean to have civilization?  to be civilized?  for millennia, that question would have gotten you a blank stare, and maybe a knife in the gut.  what the hell was civilization?  then about 5000 years ago, we invented it in Mesopotamia and maybe in China and Egypt, and maybe we invented it in the middle of Africa and spread its blessings from there.  for Joseph Campbell, civilization included a king and an aristocracy and a military force and astrologers and priests and a city and a form of writing.  oh!  and a calendar, I think.  (maybe that's implicit in having astrologers.)  those seemed to have popped up in the Middle East all at once in several places.  if I remember correctly, each one of these also arrived with a technology that required cooperation on a scale bigger than the city, for instance a way to grow the food a city requires, especially a city with a military force.  (a funny coincidence:  with the advent of civilization, human heads got smaller, human brains got smaller.  civilized man didn't need to know so much, so homo ignoramus burgeoned.)  okay, if this defines a civilization, does it give us a clue about what being civilized means?  I claim it does indeed.  first and foremost, being civilized means being arrogant - you cain't help but know that your group has solved a problem that others around you didn't even know they had, so your group is clearly superior, and therefore you are.  secondly, having a military force means conducting wars and winning wars - otherwise you're a tributary to the civilization, not a civilization itself - so once again your group is obviously superior and so are you.  being civilized means having manners, and not recognizing anyone else's manners as manners.  being civilized means being a member of the leisure class, the people who don't have to work, for heaven's sake, so they can have important government jobs and run major businesses or serve in the army officer corps or be a bishop or a cardinal or learn something as arcane as astrology.  okay, roll forward fifty centuries and what do we have?  well, we may not have a king, but we have some form of government, and its important officials come from a leisure class.  we may not have astrologers, or may not let them influence major decisions about a nation, for instance, but we have scientists, and we useta listen to them.  calendars and budgets run our lives.  we have cathedrals and religious officials.  we clearly have a military force.  we no longer have a city, but we have several to many cities.  we have a distinctive technology, or several of them.  we still have writing, but we are converting to using computers for our writing needs.  so, yes, Joseph Campbell's idea of civilization still applies, and I suspect that "being civilized" hasn't changed much either.  but I confess to appreciating "having civilization" or "being civilized".   I will never be a member of the leisure class, but I admired Jacqueline Kennedy like most of the rest of us did.  I don't have real manners, but I have make-believe manners that we common mortals use in imitation of our betters.  I can read and know how to use a computer.  I may not be civilized, but I appreciate people who are.  I may mock them, but I'm kinda in awe of them too.  so three cheers for civilization!

351.366 - 2016 project and citizenship

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

citizenship

what a curious idea is citizenship!  for one thing, it varies from country to country, from culture to culture.  citizenship, several online dictionaries assure me, although I interpret, is the collection of rights, freedoms, and duties that a nation expects of its citizens.  wait, but that demands another question:  who is a citizen?  well, different nations define that differently too.  for some countries, if you're born on land the country claims, then you're a citizen.  for other countries, if one or both of your parents is a citizen, then you are a citizen.  for at least one country, if your mother is of the right race, then you are a citizen, and that country has a whole specialized priesthood to determine if your mother was pure enough.  for some countries, I think I understood this, if you are gainfully employed in the country, then you are a citizen.  (what happens if you get fired?)  yes, you can be a citizen of two or more countries, or of none.  okay, then, depending on where you live, you either are or are not a citizen.  if you are a citizen, then the government confers on you a bunch of rights, a gaggle of freedoms, and a host of duties.  in the United States, citizenship is so benign as to be mostly passive.  that is, the duties are few - basically, don't get caught committing a felony unless you are very, very rich.  and the freedoms and rights sound very impressive until you find out that they depend on how rich you are.  sneakily so:  the same law that prevents a poor man from sleeping on a park bench also prevents a rich man from sleeping on a park bench, well, unless the cop notices the rich man's clothes.  back in the days when many of us were comfortably or uncomfortably in the middle class, citizenship almost didn't matter.  of course we had it!  that and $2.50 would get you a cup of coffee.  most places.  nowadays, it's a little more important.  sometimes it seems like even if you are a citizen, you're somehow not quite one too.  you already know I think things are about to turn worse.  if you have something that proves your citizenship, hang onto it, know a lawyer, and have paid him or her a retainer.  (no, not the orthodonture device!)  yes, I appreciate citizenship, and I fear we're all going to appreciate it even more, and I hope not wryly.

350.366 - 2016 project and being a poet

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

being a poet

mostly I wear the title lightly.  I know I am, not by my own declaration - one can't declare oneself a poet - but by my acceptance among people I know as real poets.  so as I said, I know I am, and most days I do what needs to be done.  yes, being a poet in no way excuses one from doing laundry, or fixing supper, or getting one's breakfast.  no, becoming an invalid, or at least partly an invalid, excuses one from that if he or she has a partner who takes it on.  if one is freed from much that being a human imposes, what responsibilities are left to someone who has become a poet?  writing.  thinking.  caring.  communicating.  learning.  yes, I think those are the five duties of a poet.  how can you be a poet unless you write poems?  so one writes.  but about what?  that requires thinking.  one thinks and one thinks.  about what is happening in the world, particularly what one's own country is doing.  about people.  about interactions among people.  about interactions between people.  about grammar, and words, and how they play, tumble, whirligig, delight, defy, and dance.  about darkness, oh damn yes, about darkness.  about the little waking between two sleeps.  about poems by others, current, recent, historic.  about what's new in poetry, or at least the little that you know about or hear about or read about that's new in poetry, and in language.  and so you have to listen to the world, listen to the speaking around you, listen to the speaking from where important people thrive,  one must learn about new speaking and old speaking, and being new in this world, and being old in this world, about stories, about stories, oh my word, yes, about stories.  but always, again and again, about words, and how they work and play and dance and transform.  how people use them, how other poets use them, how songwriters use them.  oh, and one cares.  one cares about people, and about history, and about dear-god-what-are-we-doing-to-ourselves and about people loving and about people dying and about people riding horses or shooting guns or fighting wars.  one cares.  and one communicates.  one lets people know a little of what shows up in all that thinking, in all that listening, in all that learning, and all that caring.  which brings one back to writing.  oh my goodness!  and I have forgotten performing!  how could I?  yes, one finds a way to get out and perform and reveal one's new poems.  and with that, I think I have written what I know about the responsibilities of a poet.  is this an appreciation?  damn right it is!

349.366 - 2016 project and liberalism

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

liberalism

what a strange collection of ideas!  what a collection of strange ideas!  government by agreement?  consent of the governed?  government founded on liberty and equality?  Charlemagne would have thought a liberal crazy and probably dangerous.  Bismarck never once asked for anyone's consent as he molded Germany out of a thousand duchies, principalities, and tiny kingdoms.  George III must've wondered what the colonists drank instead of tea - didn't they know they had governments by his permission?  liberalism sprang up in England, as far as I know, as a logical extension of Parliamentarianism, although no Parliamentarian would have recognized it.  our founding fathers did not look out their windows and see "my fellow citizens", they saw a rabble, a mob, at best they saw possible soldiers.  and they were so liberal they fought a revolution to get a government based on those ideas.  liberal government came to be - at least in name, if not in practice - in North America and in South America (thank you, Simon Bolivar), and then spread back into Europe.  India picked up the idea and sorta ran with it.  hm.  I can't think of any other.  certainly Russia does not have one, nor China.  no, in most places government is won by power, who has the most or best soldiers, or the best guns.  conservatism never forgets that we the people, the rabble, the mob, are to be ruled, governed, kept in line.  normal American conservatism puts up with the ideas of the vote and "my fellow Americans", but just barely; it longs for the good ole days when the rich were the citizens and we were just grateful.  I suspect we are in for a time of unraveling, a time when rights and liberties get undone.  I doubt that I'll be around when people began to demand them again, to the point of being willing to fight and die for them then.  it'll be interesting for some future historians to see what kind of country emerges when they come back, what rights and liberties mean then.  wish our descendants well.

348.366 - 2016 project and time running out

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

time running out

oh man!  yes!  never have I so appreciated the idea of time running out as I do now.  in this case it's not just that I'm 74 and have had a sequence of cautionary incidents since 2012, but there is also this election, and a sense that everything changes come 20 January 2017, and changes for the worse.  maybe not.  maybe not.  maybe we just enter a new phase in the struggle for what this country means, especially what it means to and for poor and working class citizens, and for minority citizens.  but for me, time is running out, and I know no next thing to do.  and tonight, it's ten o'clock and I haven't finished an appreciation.  I haven't made promises for this next week.  (both are due by midnight.)  it's a perfect storm of time running out!  funny.  my solution?  I want my new carbine, I want a gun range, I want to shoot fifty rounds into a target or a sequence of targets.  no.  it wouldn't give me back any time, it would in fact use up time and move nothing forward on any of those time running outs.  it would just soothe and distract me.  sigh.  I think there is something very little boy in that solution.  okay, despite myself and my indirection, here is an appreciation - and it is an appreciation - of time running out.  and finishing it gets me down to making promises for next week.  as well as I can tell, there still is nothing I can do about the next presidency.

347.366 - 2016 project and running

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

running

oh my goodness, no!  not now!  on a good day I walk, on a normal day I barely walk, on a bad day I shuffle.  running is quite outside my capability with this infernal bilateral sinus tarsi syndrome.  but I remember running.  once upon a time I was little and lived in Brasil.  in my "memories" of those days, I ran as much as I stopped to investigate.  I must have brought with me some idea of what the outdoors was supposed to be like, what it had been like in Albuquerque or Texas or Baton Rouge before we went down to Brasil, because I remember so much being "new" down there.  I cannot tell you clearly what a happy difference it was:  I found things "new" and the grownups around me found them "different".  apparently "different" brought along "inferior" and "awful" with it, while "new" brought along "exciting" and "intriguing" instead.  grownups were forever sighing about how different Brasil was from "the States".  I think I decided early on that they were crazy.  we had new flowers, absolutely new vines, new ferns, new animals, new beetles, new trees.  I don't think the grass was new, but I just may not have noticed that it was.  and we had new people.  nothing in my experience before Brasil was like Brasilians.  Brasilians were happy, they sang.  when Brasilian women walked, their whole bodies walked.  they talked excitedly, not morosely.  yes, they understood why a new grasshopper, that sat like *that* out at the end of a stalk was exciting, especially when it jumped!  goddam, the world was wonderful, and Brasilians knew that!  but I was telling you about running.  oh my!  when I could get away from my parents, or the Brasilian woman who was supposed to tend me, I ran everywhere!  there was so much to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste if I dared!  my poor mother!  one evening I tried to tell her how different the dirt tasted in Brasil from in New Mexico.  poor, poor, proper, unsuspecting, grownup woman!  oh, you may not remember:  the grownups I knew were missionaries, Protestant missionaries, Southern Baptist missionaries.  nothing was charming or delightful to them!  nothing!  no wonder I ran from them, and talked with Brasilians, and learned Portuguese the only way you can learn it, by talking with people who speak it natively.  I ran and ran and ran.  even in "the States" that dreadful year-plus of first grade and starting second grade, I ran.  I ran completely around Dufroq School, I ran from the slides to the seesaws to the monkey bars to the carousel.  in Texas, I ran through the fields.  back in Brasil I ran while we played soccer, or ran alongside the river that flowed out past our yard.  even after I got yanked out of Brasil and dumped into this country, I ran and ran and ran, until something happened.  mid-adolescence?  I don't know.  suddenly it wasn't cool to run, and I desperately wanted to be cool.  sigh.  years and years later, I dated and loved a young woman who ran, so I did.  well, sorta.  I made running motions, for a few steps.  goddam, learning to run again is hard when you're an adult!  but I strove valiantly, and sorta did it.  I ran about three miles every other day for a while.  and then one day I didn't run, I put it off til tomorrow, and tomorrow never showed up.  I couldn't run now to save my life, and it might.  <grin>  but I appreciate running, and I appreciate my many memories of running.

346.366 - 2016 project and goodness

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

goodness

man!  when I was little, I *so* wanted to grow up!  I wasn't sure I wanted to be a grownup, in fact I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a grownup.  that looked like about as much unfun as there was to be had!  but I definitely didn't want to be a lil kid any more!  I was tired of goodness!  dead tired of goodness!  goodness was what I escaped from into my dreams, into my stories (Greek gods and heroes, never Roman), into my playing out past my back yard, out past the town, out into the real world!  dear god, yes, please!  funny, I would pray to escape god!  I looked forward to boarding a sailing ship (like pirates did, or marines!), to scaling a castle wall, to fighting in the streets of a burning city!  as well as I knew, that was the part of a life that was worth living before one was doomed to be a grownup and do nothing that anyone enjoyed for the rest of one's life, to never ever have fun again, to be chained to an eternal stone of good deeds.  jesus!  what makes grownups communicate that life is like that to a kid?  anyway, somehow I survived.  I never did fight in the streets of a burning city, scale the walls of a castle, or board a sailing ship, but goddam!  I got to program computers when most folks didn't even know what a computer was!  I got to help fly robots to planets, when most folks thought that was just science fiction!  I got to help convert signals detected by sensor arrays into astronomical pictures of more galaxies than we had ever imagined the universe held!  then when I blew that career, I got to try free-lance programming for a while, then to program and manage databases, and even manage UNIX servers for an insurance company!  I didn't buckle any swashes, but damn, I un-riddled some puzzles!  and as well as I can tell, goodness had nothing to do with anything I did after I left home.  I don't mean I was an evil person - I'm not rich!  but none of my decisions hinged on doing good.  having fun, yes; doing good, no.  maybe what I really appreciate is ungoodness.

345.366 - 2016 project and a motorcyclist without a motorcycle

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

a motorcyclist without a motorcycle

<grin>  yes, I appreciate me, but in this case it's a wry appreciation:  how does one be a motorcyclist without a motorcycle?  and no, I can't resolve that by going out and buying a motorcycle.  that would just be stupid.  in 2013, I proved to my own satisfaction that I am a danger to myself (and therefore, I presume, to others) when I ride a motorcycle.  I mean, for heavens's sake!  I was executing a slow U-turn, something I had done hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times, in forty years of riding a motorcycle.  there was no other traffic.  the street was smooth.  there was no excuse.  I lost my balance.  lost my balance!  I dropped the Harley on my left leg and shattered both bones in the lower leg.  sigh.  no, that's not explicit evidence for my conclusion, but my conclusion is not much of a jump either.  so, I stand by it.  but that leaves me with a conundrum:  how does one be a motorcyclist without a motorcycle?  you see, I wasn't a poet who rode a motorcycle, or a computer programmer who rode a motorcycle, I was a motorcyclist.  to understand this riddle, you have to let that in:  I didn't ride a motorcycle, I be'd motorcyclist.  who I was was motorcyclist.  and now I don't ride a motorcycle.  I drive a car, and drive it very well - my wife says so.  but I'm not a car driver, I'm a motorcyclist who drives a car.  I think being a motorcyclist is in some way like being a colonel or a general, once you've been one, you can't ever not be one.  you can be a general, retired, or a motorcyclist without a motorcycle.  it may even be aggravated by being a Harley rider without a Harley.  it's a strange state of being, a strange place to see the world from.  and maybe that's a gift for a poet.  I sometimes think every poet sees the world from his or her own peculiar perspective.  normal people are not poets, and vice-versa.  so living in this existential riddle - how does one be a motorcyclist without a motorcycle? - is good practice for being a poet, and keeping faith with you as I be a poet.

344.366 - 2016 project and character and personality

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

character and personality

oh that's interesting!  lexicographers have them as synonyms!  how funny!  and how revealing!  it probably means that for the most time, we treat them as equivalent also.  and yet we know - don't we? - that they're different.  character is the collection of qualities we chose to adhere to for life.  we might be honest, for instance, but of an honesty you can count on for life.  that's part of our character.  but we might be friendly sometimes too, at which times we know how to do small talk, and we know certain social games, certain social skills, we can set a stranger at ease, we can even make a stranger feel welcomed and accepted.  but suppose we are also a security officer at work.  in that role, "friendly" is not appropriate, and we are not.  "deadly serious" is appropriate, and we take that on.  my point is that there are attributes and qualities that we put on and take off as easily as we might a sport coat or a jacket, and there are some that stick to us throughout what we do, that we could no more put aside than we can put aside our blood vessels.  the latter attributes and qualities are character, and the former are personalities, and yes, everyone has personalities.  who you are at a party is not who you are at a funeral.  who you are at a formal inquiry is not who you are at a celebration.  who you are for your kid's birthday is not who you are fishing with your buddies.  those are all "real you"s, but they are temporary "real you"s, rented, so to speak, for the occasion.  at your core, though, you are someone who persists, whatever personality you put on for the occasion, and that persistent you is your character.  yes, having these distinctions is worthwhile, and yes, I appreciate them.

343.366 - 2016 project and writing a poem

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

writing a poem

take all this with a grain of salt, maybe half a pound.  at the time I am writing a poem, I cannot really observe or take notes.  I am writing a poem.  that is all I am doing.  I cannot write a poem and listen to music or carry on a conversation or look at pictures.  while I am writing a poem I am writing a poem, that is all.  while I am making a story, I am similarly but less intensely just making a story.  if you interrupt me while I am making a story, I can stop and do whatever you want me to do instead of making a story, but I cannot do that and make a story.  while I am writing a poem, if you interrupt me, you have probably killed the poem.  I may be able to "finish the poem" but that is writing an ending to the poem I had started, not the same thing as writing a poem.  this is how I think I write a poem, but only how I think it happens.  as I said, I cannot do it and observe at the same time.  first of all, I can't just write a poem.  it isn't a skill like fishing or taking a test.  first I have to find a "place".  it is no physical "place", of course, it is a mental space, a from-ness, a way of seeing the world or me, or maybe an escape from the world into which I carry my concerns about the world.  I think of it as "the space in which poetry can happen".  I don't know the way, every time I get there by a different path, a different technique.  I have learned some ways that almost always get me part way there - reading someone else's poems often gets me almost there, so does puzzling over a Zen riddle, sometimes imagining myself in a historical incident does - somehow I get there, and when I do I nearly every time have a first line with me, or part of a first line.  I have no idea how that happens, but it certainly does not happen that I hear or make up a good first line and carry that with me into that space where poetry can happen.  no, I "step into" that space, and the line forms, and while I write it down or type it into the computer, the rest of the poem begins to form.  sometimes it requires a bit of unscrambling - I think the poetic mind works differently from the rational mind, but the listener needs to hear the poem through his or her rational mind, but that may just be an excuse for my editing.  in any case, sometimes I unscramble the poem from the way I first hear it to the way you first hear it.  sometimes I need some connecting lines between parts I "receive".  so I write down what tumbles into my mind, work at its order, work at its connections, then come back to my usual mind, and work on the spelling and grammar and sometimes my choice of words.  and then I'm pretty much done.  sometimes, rarely, I can go back and fidget with the poem, but usually that just messes it up.  no, I sit down, find that "space", and write my poem, then leave it alone.  I do not know how or why this works, only that it does, for me.  yes, I appreciate writing a poem, but I do not know how.

342.366 - 2016 project and living on purpose

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

living on purpose

OMG!  I feel like I just stepped into Carlsbad Caverns with a candle.  there's a lot to explore here.  let me start with a little context.  a few days ago, I told you I learned a lot from Werner Erhard.  this is some more of what I learned.  I apply it, and have for thirty+ years now, in cooperation with two of my friends who also learned a lot from Werner Erhard, or from the staff of his organization, or what used to be his organization.  I choose not to get involved with the history of all that, just to plunge on in to what we three do.  to begin with, we pledge to live as our word.  that's a helluva promise, and yes, each of us breaks it from time to time, cleans up the ensuing mess, then remakes the promise.  standing in that promise, each of us declares his or her vision, for the world and for her- or himself.  in the context of that vision, each of us chooses goals for his or her life.  holding those goals, each of us makes promises for what she or he will get done in the next week.  no, we don't go through all of this each week.  we usually set our visions and goals every six months, sometimes as often as every quarter.  then we make promises every week, promises the keeping of which move us toward our goals.  each of us acts as a committed listener and coach for the other two, so each of us has two committed listeners and coaches.  I cannot tell you how we might have lived without this set of tools, but living with this set of tools has changed each of us enormously.  one of us got a Ph.D. and became a lecturer.  one of us turned himself into an artist.  I developed strength as a writer, as a poet, as a story-maker.  for me there is the satisfaction of keeping my promises, of seeing myself purposefully move toward my goals.  I also get something from wrestling every three to six months with what *is* my vision for myself and for my world, what goals do I set given that vision?  it's an interesting and curious way to live.  every week is a revelation, and often a clarification.  and in the end, it means nothing at all, but damn it sure provides satisfaction.  yes, I appreciate living on purpose.

341.366 - 2016 project and death

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

death

I claim I'm not morbid, just realistic.  once upon a time I had just finished the first grade, and hadn't yet started the second grade and concluded that schools were just stupid, and no wonder grownups acted like they did.  (second grade started with my third reading of "Run Dick, run."  I had thought two readings were beyond stupidity.)  I went to a hospital for a week - or it felt like a week - for a boodle of tests.  you see, I had been born with a heart murmur, and back in 1949 or so, that was A Bad Thing.  after the tests, the doctors and my father gathered near the door to my hospital room, and talked without moving their lips.  talked very quietly so all I could hear was their murmuring.  then the doctors watched while my father came over to talk to me.  I don't think my father had much empathy, on the other hand he was a very successful missionary and preacher and even trouble-shooter for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, so he may have been empathetic as hell when he was god-manning, and completely without when he was fathering.  in any case, he explained to me that my heart murmur meant I was a very sick boy, and that I mustn't ever run again, or jump, or climb, or somersault, or turn cartwheels, or spin til I was dizzy, or do any boy things.  I remember hearing it like a death sentence, my father the judge, and all those doctors the jury.  I was stunned, unbelieving yet believing, and lay there trying to imagine what life they had left me.  would I embroider rigorous patterns on pillow cases?  would I sew pretty clothes for other people to wear while they did fun things?  would I watch out a window while other kids ran, jumped, climbed, turned somersaults, or cartwheels?  take this with a grain of salt, maybe a pound of it.  I think I turned my back on the door, and saw death sitting there in the chair beside my bed, but death wasn't reaching for me, just watching me.  and then death was gone.  I think someone turned out the lights when the grownups left the room - which meant the room went from half-bright to dim.  I think I lay there in the twilight, indignant and pissed off.  I think I didn't yet have language like "pissed off", but I knew the feeling.  I think I remembered and savored remembering running and jumping and climbing and somersaulting and cartwheeling.  I had done that a lot before I came to that hospital.  I had never died.  I had never felt sick.  why the hell would I do either now?  (I was born into a Southern Baptist family, I knew words like hell.)  all that disappointment and betrayal and hurt flashed into anger.  "F**k you!" I told my father and his doctors, even though they weren't there any more, even though I didn't have that language, but I sure as hell had that spirit.  "I damn sure will do any of those, all of those."  and I did.  I ran, I jumped, I climbed, I somersaulted, I cartwheeled, I sword-fought using palm-fronds we'd hacked into swords.  I played soccer or did what clumsy kids do while other kids are playing soccer.  I crawled into what I thought were parts of the jungle.  I out-boyed most boys my age. or at least most boys I knew,  I not only did things I had explicitly been told not to do, I did things other boys had been told not to do.  I was not a hellion.  I didn't defy grownups.  I waited til they were out of sight, then did what they'd forbidden.  I walked up to Brasilian grownups in neighborhoods I wasn't supposed to be in, and asked them what they were doing, and sometimes asked if I could help.  secretly I defied UnitedStatesian grownups a lot!  and I lived just fine.  I do remember that if I looked over my left shoulder, I often thought I saw death sitting and watching me, but death never reached for me.  I think I grinned at death a lot.  we weren't friends, but he wasn't my enemy either, not like those pesky UnitedStatesian grownups with their lists of what I mustn't do - which I then had to do.  death was just there.  a presence.  death hasn't reached for me yet, but I think death sits a little closer these days.  I still grin at death, and keep doing what I'm doing.  I appreciate death.  I wouldn't have had the life I've had if those doctors and my father hadn't tried to make death the threat they thought death should be.

340.366 - 2016 project and love

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

love

I appreciate love.  it's one of the best forces in my life.  but what I was thinking about when I wrote it down above, is that it's what so many grownup stories are about.  sure, there's a kitten to find, or a gold mine, or the missing shell casing for the evidence in a murder mystery, but that's what gives us the excuse for the story.  what the story really is about is hero Y and heroine X falling in love, despite all the distractions of the story.  when I was a lil kid, specifically a lil boy, stories weren't like that.  Homer gave us a hundred lil kid stories that we've modeled a zillion others after, and no, I do not count fables and parables and other such travesties of stories.  I mean real stories, tales that wrench your guts before they let you go, and let you go without a moral or a lesson anywhere in sight.  real stories.  but grownup stories, and again Homer gives us some of our earliest examples, involve remarkable adventures but are finally about love.  (I don't know if that's true in other cultures, but in the culture that derives from what the Greeks learned about us as human beings, yes, love is what grownup stories are about.)  I learned that too when I started reading grownup stories as a lil kid down in Brasil.  no, we weren't immigrants trying to acculturate, we were missionaries bringing our superior truth to the inferior natives, so we had no Brasilian books in our house, no Brasilian kid-stories, and no Brasilian grownup stories.  (geez, when I look back at how damned arrogant we were, I am amazed we won any hearts for Jesus.)  but we did have the Saturday Evening Post every week, and it always had stories in it.  and we had other magazines, that also had stories in them.  and as a lil kid reading grownup stories, I was initially confused.  did grownups really spend so much of their lives confused?  did they really pretend to be looking for an oil well for an hour, only to fall all over each other, kissing and such like, just when the oil bubbled from the ground?  I mean, I sorta knew that my grownups and people they called friends, people from "the States", were crazy, but I really counted on grownups somewhere, maybe in Brasil, maybe in "the States", giving me some other definition of "normal".  surely I wasn't doomed to grow up into one of the grownups I knew about.  but that's a different story and has nothing to do with love.  no, in cowboy stories, in detective stories, in stories where the hero was a merchant, or a sailor, or a soldier home from the war, or in any kind of grownup story at all, what two people were really after, no matter what stolen statue or make-believe amulet or inhuman monster seemed to occasion the story, was the excuse to glom onto each other and say "I love you."  so you may not be surprised that in my stories - and I have told you that I'm a story-maker - people fall in love, often despite themselves, and often while allegedly looking for a bogey-man or a scarab.  they do.  and several of my test readers have found some of my stories satisfying, so I think I'm onto something.  in any case, I appreciate love, even though I don't pretend to understand it or to know how it works, only some ways that it might start.  Lindy and I fall in love again every day, and that's worked for thirty-four years, so there must be something to that too.  yes, I appreciate love.

339.366 - 2016 project and target shooting

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

target shooting

I haven't done it in a while.  have had too much attention on being sick, or on not being sick when I get a day of that.  but not so long ago, I used to go every week and shoot thirty rounds into a target.  bless Target Range for providing the opportunity!  I am no marksman, but I aspire to be.  but even without accolades, I enjoy shooting my gun at a target.  funny, that's really all it is, shooting a gun at a target, but it seems so much more to me.  I feel it as a quiet time, a Zen time.  I shoot, and something happens in the world.  something harmless.  I seem to learn about my gun.  I seem to learn about me.  I seem to learn about the world, and especially about how the world is completely independent of our wants, wishes, and intentions.  the world just is.  we do, and something happens, and we can measure what happened.  and that is it.  Zen.  yes, I appreciate target shooting.

338.366 - 2016 project and ballet

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

ballet

oh for heaven's sake!  do people really move that gracefully?  oh god, yes!  and others ice skate at the world class competition level.  and some dive at the Olympics skill level.  yes, people can move that gracefully but you and I don't.  we forgot to practice, and then to do it as a discipline.  imagine!  from the time you're four or eight or twelve, you always move as if bones weren't a part of moving, just the motion.  that by the time you're eighteen, you spend all day in classes or in practice, or in competition, or - oh praise! - actually dancing!  suppose you don't have time to learn to drive a car, or to rock'n'roll, or to spend hours shopping.  suppose dance is your life, and in second place is the politics of the dancing institutions.  and then suppose you go out and run across the stage like humans only run when they dream!  suppose halfway across it, you leap, and you hang there so even Michael Jordan is jealous and gravity wonders, "what the hell?"  suppose you never open your mouth, but you work with about fifty other people flowing onto and off the stage and somehow tell a story that makes the audience cry and then damn near jump for joy!  suppose at the end of a performance, you and those fifty or so people flutter to the front of the stage as if humans and butterflies had mated, then bow as if music had taken human form.  oh god, yes!  I appreciate ballet!

337.366 - 2016 project and exploring

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

exploring

once upon a time I was a lil kid, and I explored.  first I explored what I could get away with near my mother or the servants.  later I explored how far I could get away while they were distracted:  the back yard, the alley behind it, the block that the alley attached to, the street that ran to the edge of town, across the road around the town, into and through the brush that meant "out of town".  OMG!  animals I wasn't supposed to know. a cave!  into that cave.  deeper into that cave.  past where the sunlight ran out.  past where the candle burned out.  deeper still, until the flashlight batteries burned out.  then  I had to turn, and not scream, and find my way out, til I saw light, then still suppressing that scream, walk toward the light.  and walk out into the light and do a little war dance!  later I explored, when I lived in the city, by walking home along variations from the safe path I was allowed to walk on, finding out what made those variations not safe.  even later, in this country, where could I get to on my bicycle?  where could I get to past that by walking? later again, what was around my neighborhood in Albuquerque?  why wasn't I supposed to prowl those empty blocks?  much later, working at White Sands Missile Range, what was on the other side of those hummocks around the work station?  what did the dark hide?  later on again, working with computers, was there a different way to program and get the same result?  which way was better?  on my motorcycle, where would I wind up if I took that road?  what would I see if I climbed that rock face?  how would I get down?  and now with poems, is there a tauter way to say it?  is there a way that opens other ideas?  is there a concrete image that loosens the mind or heart beyond the concrete?  how might I stay in touch with people around me while reaching into the unexplored?

336.366 - 2016 project and blood

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

blood

I don't mean I'm a vampire, not at all.  but I've lost a lot of blood lately.  enough that the hospital infused five units of blood plasma, then transfused two more units of blood.  they only do that when you've lost a lot of blood.  and this morning I gave up some more.  I had a procedure yesterday afternoon, and the doctor warned me after that procedure that "a little bleeding will be normal" but to get myself back to the hospital if I bled more than that.  (imagine me scratching my head.)  how does one know when the amount of bleeding surpasses "a little"?  well, I reluct to return so soon, so I'm declaring this morning's bleeding still "a little".  so how then does one appreciate blood?  by remembering that when it has lots of red blood cells, it carries oxygen to the brain, to other organs, including the skin.  (at one point in the hospital, a doctor told me "you have no color." I suspect he didn't mean I was transparent, just that I was paler than pale.  during the transfusion, that doctor saw me again and remarked that I was much better, "now you're only pale.")  trust me, I am not ruddy yet.  but anyway, that carrying oxygen business is important.  I am told the brain needs it, and so do all your other organs.  I'm not ready yet to do without my organs, especially not my brain.  I like my brain.   I like how it plays with words, learns about them, turns them over, looks up antecedents, finds related words.  I like how it takes them and the grace of whatever poetry is and forms poems that are very much Wyatt's poems.  I like that it has listened enough that it makes poems you like to hear or read.  thank you, brain; and thank you, blood, for keeping my brain oxygenated.  oh, how well we work together!