Finding Our Way Out of a Corner

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[Image: “‘We’re Trapped!’ (They Cried, Ignoring the Exit),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.

(Henry Miller [source])

…and:

Parallel Reality
(a peculiar notion)

A huge part of the maintenance system for egocentric conditioning is the belief in a parallel reality. This original faulty premise from which people can live their whole lives goes like this:

There is an alternate, parallel reality that exists simultaneously with this reality, and in that one, everything is as it should be.

Consider this:

A little child is playing and throws a rock at a tree. The rock ricochets and hits his little brother in the head who begins to scream. Mother is frightened by the screams and rushes out of the house, demanding to know what has happened. Little child senses this is not a good situation. He knows the right explanation could save him, doesn’t know what that is, and goes mute.

Younger brother yells, “He hit me with a rock!” Mother yells, “What is the matter with you? Why did you hit your brother with a rock?”

Little child whimpers, “I didn’t mean to. I was aiming at a tree. It bounced off.”

Does this work? Is the child off the hook?
No way. The response from mother is
the all-time award-winning crazy-maker:

“You shouldn’t have done that.
You should know better.“

At first the child is bewildered. He tries to figure out how he could have known something he didn’t know. He concludes others must be able to do it, and there must be something wrong with him for not being able to. Finally, he just accepts, “That’s right, I should know better.”

This is the birth of the parallel reality myth in which:
I know what I should know
I do what I should do
I feel what I should feel
I look how I should look
I never forget to remember
I always make the right decision
I always say the right thing
and on and on and on…

Here, in this reality, I should know better but don’t; there, somehow, I do.

It would serve us well to see that the little child who threw the rock could not have known better, that we never know better, that this is an illusion, an imaginary world perpetuated by looking at a moment that has passed and saying, “It should have been different.”

(Cheri Huber [source: fragments can be viewed at the Internet Archive and Google Books; the entire passage doesn’t seem to be available for free anywhere online — other than at whiskey river’s commonplace book, of course; I could verify the whole thing by purchasing the ebook at Amazon; other booksellers offer it in various formats, too])

From elsewhere:

A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules, a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration—like trying to invent a perpetual-motion machine in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or trying to trisect any given angle with a straightedge and compass. The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:

The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.

Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Proof

(Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan. 1, 2026, NYC)

You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too
Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/
Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then
Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name
To invisible?

You’ve got to imagine:

Who heard your name
And refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch
And said “not now”?

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,

New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,

Where there is always soil
For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.

In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.

City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,

You have to imagine:

An Army that wins without
Firing a bullet,

A joy that wears down
The rock of no.

Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear/up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.
You have to imagine:

That space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit, on its way.
This moment is our proof.

(Cornelius Eady [source])

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Our Only Hope Is to Be the Daylight

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[Image: “Wawona Tunnel, Yosemite National Park, 8:24AM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.

(Allen Wheelis [source])

…and:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity—of immortality—we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst [source])

…and:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

(Ellen Bass [source])

…and (in slightly different and excerpted form):

In the Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

(Barbara Crooker [source])

From elsewhere:

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window… that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is…?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs… planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

(Thomas Pynchon [source])

Living With the News

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
our only hope is to be the daylight

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

# 30: You think your country lurches towards disaster.

You think your neighbors have lost their minds.

You think when you wake up tomorrow, things will be worse than they were this morning.

You’re probably right…

…and you’re probably wrong.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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Finding Something Like a Sweet Spot

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[An atypical image for a Friday post here… For the last several months, I’ve been playing a CRPG (computer role-playing game) called Divinity: Original Sin II. It’s one of those looong, immersive games in which your character, in the company of optional others, must explore terrain, battle monsters, find treasure, and so on. The “land” you’re exploring, Rivellon, consists of several regions which are quite complex in terms of their variety and the ingenuity with which various features are hidden — too complex, really, to carry all around inside your (well, my) head. The image here is screen capture of an interactive map of Fort Joy, the game’s first major region, courtesy of the mapgenie.io site; different types of “people” and experiences are indicated with different types of icons — helping me sort out and remember what I need to do next, what I should avoid for now, and what I most enjoyed (or didn’t, haha). And yes: the “interactive” element of the map lets me zoom in and out, and show/reveal any or all of these features, so I’m not overwhelmed with everything at once. I can’t tell you how much this map has helped preserve my sanity.]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future… Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you’re overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can’t understand them for the life of you, even though you’ve tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you’re the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you’re finding life to be the one thing that’s trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.

(Henry Rollins [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

In Perpetual Spring

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

(Amy Gerstler [source])

…and:

Once more I’m encoded to fear dying and to sense I never will.

Yet an otherwise banal moment may all at once suffuse me with strangeness when I realize: “This is a day I didn’t think I’d have.” All the days since [my night of near-death at Chaco Canyon] have been those. At any odd moment, a room’s most prosaic object—a terra cotta pot, for example—may say: “This light from red clay is light you might not have been around for.”

If Chaco gave me that, it also gave me the dark twin to go with it: “nothing matters.” In a healthy sense, the latter realization doesn’t cancel its sibling. Their two ways of looking differently at the same thing may amount to no more than seeing the evanescence of what’s cherishable—except that to leave one’s own body out of what went into its deepest knowledge yields a wisdom thin as paper. It takes the actual, that full flood of bodily terror, long continued, to widen the pupil of one’s inner eye. Once it has, we forget—though never completely, and rarely for long. Out of the trivial chaos of an afternoon, rain on a manhole cover may suddenly give back the sweetness of existing.

The glossy black tip on a magpie’s wingfeather can do it. Checking the body for deer ticks can suddenly bathe one’s calves and thighs with gratitude. Iridescence in sun-stricken paint on old cars. Sweetness of the plainest, most everyday faces. Richness of one’s boredoms, their motions and textures. Of a bank teller’s eyes that, for a half-second, look into mine with normal and therefore intricate brilliance.

(Reg Saner [source])

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Letting the Light In… to Make the Choice of Hope Easier

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[Images (slideshow): “No Evil, and 2 (I-40 Footbridge, Durham, NC),” by John E. Simpson.]

Among the pearls on whiskey river‘s string this week was a meditation on hope. The focus of the passage is on maintaining hope in what is often regarded as a political and cultural environment which discourages it. I’ve chosen to supplement the river‘s excerpt (marked with italics) with a bit of context from the work it comes from:

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Block wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

But hope, of course, comes in many flavors — and is useful in many contexts of (potential) despair, from the global and cosmic macro to the personal micro. For instance (and not from whiskey river):

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

(Emily Dickinson [source])

…to which one observer added a Dadaist footnote:

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers.” The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

(Woody Allen [source])

[The next — longish — section of today’s post addresses the slideshow displayed above, and gets into some technicalities of photography. If you’d rather skip over that, please skip down to the section which follows it. I’ll never know!]

Thanks to a generous Christmas gift-giver (AKA The Missus), this week I acquired a new lens for my camera. It’s not an exotic thing — not a telephoto lens, not a wide-angle lens, performs no special photographic “tricks,” really… which is why this kind of lens is classified as a “normal” lens. (And yes, that’s the technical term!) Informally, it’s what’s referred to as a “nifty 50” (a reference to its focal length), and I’ve also seen it called a “walking-around lens.” I like that: the whole point of a “normal” lens is that it reproduces, roughly, what the human eye actually sees: it doesn’t bring distant objects apparently closer, and it doesn’t extend the field of vision beyond what we say we’re “looking at” at a given moment.

Weirdly, or so it may seem, I already had two lenses providing such a normal perspective. One is a zoom lens which came with the camera body: a zoom lens ranging from the moderately wide-angle to the slightly telephoto; the other, a slightly telephoto lens which has been designed with (haha) an eye towards close-up work — not quite a “macro” lens (insect eyeballs and such), but allowing me to focus on subjects less than a couple inches away. So why, then, did I decide I needed another lens in the same range?

(By the way, if you’re wondering what all this has to do with hope: hang on; there’s a connection.)

Lenses for serious-amateur and above cameras allow for control of two qualities of objects’ visibility: (1) perspective or field of view (that’s the “focal length”), and (2) how much or how little light the lens passes to the camera’s film or (in the digital-camera era) sensor. The latter quality is controlled by adjusting the size of the lens’s aperture — i.e., the little porthole through which light passes. The bigger the aperture, the more light allowed in. And the term by which aperture is measured is f-stop: the smaller the f-stop, the larger the aperture. For this new lens, the aperture can be set to any of numerous f-stops between 1.7 and 22. Which matters to me because it’s the first lens I’ve owned capable of an aperture setting below 2.8 or so.

Given all the above, you can gather, then, that I was interested in a lens which could gather more light — useful in low-light circumstances like right after sunset, say. But wide-open apertures (smaller f-stops) have one other useful feature: the ability (in certain circumstances, and thanks to the physics of light and lenses) to focus on subjects without focusing on their surroundings.

And that’s what that little slideshow above illustrates. I took the two photos within seconds of each other; for , I used the smallest aperture the lens afforded, and for the largest. See the way isolates the pipe and “No Evil” sticker, not just because it’s centered but because everything else is rendered indistinct, almost entirely featureless? (Contrast with , which bombards the attention with details of the chain-link fence and even of the grassy background, feet away from the railing.)

That’s what it comes down to: choice. Simple choice.

Almost 50 years ago, I took part in a marriage-counseling program with my then-Missus. Obviously, the program did not salvage our own relationship. But one of its principles has stuck with me ever since; as presented in those sessions, it was, “Love is not an emotion; love is a choice.” In less succinct terms, we cannot control what we feel (which simply results from a momentary flash-flood of one or more hormones); but we can exercise a level of control over what we do with those feelings — what happens as a result of them. We can choose.

That idea, I believe, extends to other emotions besides the tumescent bubble of sentiment and attraction commonly called “love.” If angry in the moment, for instance, we perhaps can’t control the outburst of anger which directs spiteful words at another person, at an institution, at the universe in general. But the flash flood of emotion eventually recedes. What happens next is what really counts. Do we apologize? Do we continue to stoke the resentments which triggered the emotion?

I think hope is like actual love (or anger, come to that), and I think that’s what both Rebecca Solnit and Emily Dickinson are getting at. We have a choice: we can regard the maelstrom of our daily lives in confusion, with everything at once a suitable candidate for our limited attention, skipping from one subject to the other and reacting to it separately, anxiously, the general good and pleasant and merely acceptable being shouted down by the cacophony of the background…

…or we can quickly survey the landscape, disregarding the bombastically abnormal and comfusingly stressful aspects and instead drawing, yes, hope from what remains: the things going constantly, quietly right. And as with a camera lens, the way to bring about this happy outcome is to let as much light as possible into one’s perspective at the moment.

Based on emotions though it may be, I think this is the only way to live rationally. You?

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A Figure, Seen from the Back, Forever Approaching

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[Image: “Mind Your Head,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

We will be leaving Las Vegas on June 1 — headed first for the Grand Canyon, and then for a Grand Tour of California: Joshua Tree, and then over to San Diego and on up the coast to see the redwoods in the north. (We’ll do a little jog east for Yosemite and Tahoe, somewhere in the middle.) Neither of us has spent much time in the state before — no time at all since we’ve been together (pushing 30 years now)… so we’re looking forward to making its acquaintance, even for just the month we’re there. I wonder if we’ll recognize each of the sights we’ve always imagined, separately and as one?

Of course, with less than two weeks left before we hit the road again, this time for 100% unknown territory, I approached whiskey river this week not with trepidation, but with a certain, well, mindset — my mind’s eye turned to horizons never before seen. And found:

Imaginary Paintings

1. How I Would Paint the Future

A strip of horizon and a figure,
seen from the back, forever approaching.

2. How I Would Paint Happiness

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No—
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

3. How I Would Paint Death

White on white or black on black.
No ground, no figure. An immense canvas,
which I will never finish.

4. How I Would Paint Love

I would not paint love.

5. How I Would Paint the Leap of Faith

A black cat jumping up three feet
to reach a three-inch shelf.

Smooth, and deceptively small
so that it can be swallowed
like something we take for a cold.
An elongated capsule,
an elegant cylinder,
sweet and glossy,
that pleases the tongue
and goes down easy,
never mind
the poison inside.

6. How I Would Paint the Big Lie

7. How I Would Paint Nostalgia

An old-fashioned painting, a genre piece.
People in bright and dark clothing.
A radiant bride in white
standing above a waterfall,
watching the water rush
away, away, away.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

Closer to home, such as it is, I spent the last week forcing myself to read a book by an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. Now, I am typically a generous reader — inclined to give every author the benefit of even many doubts. This particular author — let’s call them X — has apparently had a very successful career so far: numerous novels, a Pushcart Prize for short stories, many loyal readers. The book I read was the first of a new series with an intriguing premise: a young true-crime reporter, a woman at that, in 1880s New York City. All of which hinted at the prospect of a quick, light read, very much what I was looking for after Richard Powers’s The Overstory…

Obviously I’m being a little coy about not identifying X or even X’s book. That I caught up with it, took it by the shoulders and turned it around — only to wince at what I’d committed to — well, yes, I was very, very disappointed. But disappointment isn’t an objective perception; it has more to do with the expectations brought to an experience than it has to do with the experience itself, and to this extent it reveals a flaw between one’s own ears — not necessarily (in this case) a flaw between an author’s.

All that level-headedness and high-minded professionalism aside, I can’t resist wrapping up this post something as follows:

Imaginary Paintings (cont’d)

8. How I Would Paint X’s Book

Gray corseted prose,
draping shirt-cardboard figures.
Statements of the obvious
cribbed from Wikipedia
and offered to the reader
in colored-cellophane drapery,
as though transparent giftwrap
could transfigure misshapen contents.
A finish line staggered across,
breathlessly, panting for refreshment.

(JES)

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The Real January 20, 2009 Post

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In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.

It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)

And yet, and yet…

I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.

And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.

[Read more…]

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