Writ

Being Here, Doing This

THE GUY IN THE BACK seat of Cash Cab
is heavily into the Neo-Beat Chic
(hip snap-gnosis, deprecate gesture):
Shirt buttoned horn rimmed open face serious sandwich,
And I guarantee he’s wearing
although I can’t see them
scuffed brown oxfords.

O my tribe, my freakish tribe;
freaks and smarters, lovers and waders;
It seems sometimes we’ve been us all:
timorous t-shirt wearer
ardent bandplayer
elder statesman
louder advocate
interoutcast
audient
spotlighter
extra.

And I know this, him, us, the shoes, all and none, because:

Mine are in the bottom of the closet,
road-kissed soles of a tale that’s its own telling
ready and waiting
and definitely
on the bus.

Crit

Jack Horkheimer, A”H

HIS CRACKLY EXHORTATION TO “KEEEP Looking Up!” now residing in the ears and cassettes of those who loved his weekly five minute-PBS-slice of observational astronomy, Jack Horkheimer, AKA “The Star Hustler,” passed through the luminiferous aether this morning on the way to consult Mr. Sagan about young DeGrasse-Tyson. Mr. H will be missed as much for inspiring stargazers to look out into time as for inspiring nerds to keep it real, old-school (e.g., Demosthenes or Galileo):

Recognized by his TV sign-off “Keep Looking Up”, Horkheimer revealed that although he intends to be stargazing well into the third millennium, nevertheless he has already erected his own tombstone with the following epitaph:

“Keep Looking Up was my life’s admonition,
I can do little else in my present position.”

?

Night-time Toddy

A ZOROASTRIAN (BECAUSE HE WAS, and because sometimes it really does matter) once jumped the battery of my otherwise unbroken vehicle on an otherwise sad day and, because this is my life, we got into a discussion of God(1) and it wasn’t long before we were agreeing on the need to sleep peacefully at night and that one cannot do that without being right with God (read, said he: right with one’s fellows), and hoping for the best of whatever’s the next world, or even next unseen moment, without such store of good- and God-will is a vain enterprise indeed; which thought seems to be one also preached by at least all the paths I traveled in the circuitous route to root and seed which is the path of all life and words and, and to ignore this discomplicating fact my new Zoroastrian friend told me (and still tells in brain-snapshot’ metaphor, read: man jumps battery; jumpstarts the journeyer; recharges the charge; do I have to make it plainer?) would keep it unshared with wherever and whoever your Sunday finds you: snugly newspaper-nested, walking the line, paddling madly onshore. And isn’t that what he was really saying?

-=-=-=-

(1) That Indescribable Essence which is never the same from you to me or anywhere in between, and which I persist in describing here and there.

Torah

Santayana Amended

THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN from history doom their children to redeem it.

(And on that unironically hopeful note, Shabbat Shalom / have a nice weekend / go Red Sox!)

Life

Essentials of Domesticated-Primate Character: Food Chain Consciousness

AT LEAST ONCE IN ONE’S life, one should encounter a place where one is in the minority: it has the potential to sharpen the senses, humble the soul and question the assumptions. A different, but equally primal, experience, can be had by entering a place where one’s species is in the minority — or to be blunt, prey. Something essential there is through knowing the bottom of the food chain.

Life

To The Victor Goes the Printing Press

IT’S TRUE THAT THE VICTORS write history — but not all victors are dishonest. Ask yourself: Do they learn from, or at least admit, their mistakes? Trying to overcome one’s own Bad Self ™, personal or cultural, is a good sign that the necessary self-correctives are being observed. If not, dissent is not only patriotic: it’s a sacred duty.