E.P.

The personal world is boxed in by the commercial world is hedged in by the natural survival world is circumscribed by the cosmic world is determined by its own realized (yet 'unthought') world of foundational principle. Ezra Pound, my consciousness works in the work world, horizons of the middle class: am I nothing else? I've met nothing but.

But I've read outside it.

Ideal Rule of the Road

Point A to Point B over no elapsed time.

NEW JACK PoMitO

Fat Joe playing The Beacon. The seizing of scissors. We, eating bagels. Drizzlesponged skies.

Honey

huni huny
huhni huhknee
hunni hunne
huhNY Hun knee
huhnnie huhney

etc

Juris Prudence

We sought the Law, and the "law" won.

What this country needs is a good 5 (or more) William O. Douglases on the Supreme Court.

Moonglow

Agglomerate this:

The scene from Scorsese's The Aviator where DiCaprio gives Blanchett the control of his plane and he drinks from a bottle of milk as she lifts the nose gently above a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains: Benny Goodman's "Moonglow", Hampton on vibes.

The scene from Josh Logan's Picnic, where William Holden and Kim Novak come together dancing under the strung lanterns -- a scene my sister-in-law said she re-enacted at parties with her first husband when they were married at that time.

They dance to "Moonglow". Two 'wounded' people try to salve one another. (Of note, Roz Russell wants Holden, too, but is deeply frustrated and then scornful, drunkenly tears his shirt; Susan Strasberg wants him, too, but is a precocious teen and comes to mope at not being able to vie with her beautiful sister; Kim herself wanting to be valued for something more than only her 'dull-minded' beauty-pageant looks).

The 45 RPM recording of this, from the movie, was overlaid (as was the scene) with The Theme From Picnic (you remember, ". . . on a picnic morning/ without a warning . . ."). Did Steve Allen write that theme, those words? I bought it on a lark, way back when, but not more than a handful of years after the movie. Summer. May Company. Second Floor, to the north of the escalators.

Let's Get Lost

You and I are here to cull through gossip and look for intrigue or maybe just 'get a good buy' -- and wind up merely saying 'goodbye'. And to sing.

Why is it worth our while to do this? If this is an electronic artifact for later on, how do we know it's worth anything? That we're worth anything?

Here's one take: I'm both best judge and worst judge. Worst, because I'm tied so very close and find importance in both the matter on which I write and the style in which it comes to be written. That precludes any response from anyone else. I suppose the fact that what I write is being written diaristicly and would not be bought even if it were for sale is a prima facie case that it is worth little, at least from our modern commercial perspective.

But best judge, I am, because I'm nearest the vibration of all the strings, I'm feeling all the nuances (sounded aloud or not) of the music that plays through my system. Only a solipsistic virtue, but not negligible.

In writing for the 'whoever', even though we're lost, we last.

Zench'anyabyumDharmabum

Me dit tacite? Non dans. Pas. In Portland, soon, the store opens and the merchandise pointing to New Age ways sells. This man walks and browses and prices. Should there be a meditation cushion, something for a quiet room, its price gets eyed.

The point to meditation, if I may tentatively say, is to remove us from the complex mental tasks that frustrate our physiology built for rest and only once-in-a-while immediate fright-resolution.

We butt against mental irresolvables. Against such nagging are constructed peace virtues. Simply to become aware of that which is immediately, naturally, happening around one's seated person. Noticing it all, but not 'rethinking' any of it. Catching the whole of it, but regarding it only for its passingness. Handling none of it, phenomenally noting the entirety of it.

Since internal legerdemain is our forte, breaking with it comes with great difficulty.

Work, love, home: all these come with 'responsibility', meaning as much complex burden as can just reach the edge of confusion.

SF, by day and by night, shaped thoughts for me, yet despite its Far Eastern overlay, its Beat bruises, its comfortable history of hip layback and Dharma rejection of commercial mindset and blanched-out conformism -- despite that, my mind works at near-paranoid chessmove expectation rates that require a Dalai Lama's worth of meditation.

O, My! Ohhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . . . .

HUMAN ACT

Where opportunities rise
opportunities open

Given portals
threshold to pass

Love: the give-and-take of politics
politics: forced love

The Boomer Way

Listening as I am to a couple of Puppini Sister virtuoso-styled 'retro standard' albums -- and not being a drinker, but remembering that dreamy, boozy, self-satisfied fullness reachable toward the end of a six pack chasing down dinner's two or three chardonnays and knowing that a bold Amontillado would stare me down, my face to its hutch -- listening thus, nothing called out more loudly than the megaphone of the game Cheer Squad on the alumni website.

While the school site yielded maps and a few archaic photos and a shard or two of recognizable visual cues of 'Beatles Spring', the alumni site produced gold the envy of the Sierra Madre. Permit me to go a bit statistical?

'MEMORIES OF' PER GRADUATION YEAR (1960s)

Year - 'Memorials Noted'

60-47

61-21

62 -34

63 13

64- 3

65 -4

66 - 1

67 - 2

68- 1*

69- 6*

*Person memorialized in 1968 also appearing for 1969

It could simply be a reflection of school spirit that explains the higher reported numbers in the early block.

One might note, though, that those graduating in 1960 attained age 65 somewhere around or before last New Year's Eve. Were one imaginative to visualize a graph based on these figures, a slope would rise the farther back in time one went, angularly sharp beginning with those age 62 this year, with modest plateau before gazing at the sun on its decline in the west, just where your uplooking eyes meet the worry of your wrinkled forehead.

.

QUIET MICKEY

reclining mouse on floor slab

my lungs caught in a small cold
 
why did it die there on its back
 
the cough coming up with minor phlegm
 
not age, not cat bites or tears
 
my kleenex downward catching it
 
the gravity of its non-motion
 
the gravity of my stare


.