Category: Part and Poetry

We’ve reached the halfway point of the month, and the location of a new window that really isn’t a window, exactly. I mean, it’s a screen. We were always going to have to get to the screens.

As a person who lived through the moral panic of video games as a child and then a teacher, and who is living with everyone else through the genuine cause-and-effect panic that is the morally bankrupt application of uncontrolled AI, this too-much-this-or-that in terms of digital interaction has solidified into the realization that forevermore, It’s Always Going to Be Something. People will always be upset about that which doesn’t fit within their parameters of societal or personal behavior or expectation. Even before screens, and reading on screens, my father sought to eradicate my predilection towards bookishness – without his control over the characters in the books nor over my thoughts about their actions or words or what I was learning from them, the contents of my mind must have felt chaotic, untrammeled, and wholly out of his reach… just like an individual’s thoughts ought to be.

May we guard the freedom to read forever.

avoid, escape, iterate

what mattered
was distance:
diminished

consciousness
receding
present, past –

the future
replete with
evasions.

Heard the factoid this morning that Queen Elizabeth I’s courtiers blackened their teeth with soot to mimic her own genuinely decaying teeth, as in 1533 their monarch’s unrestrained love of sugar had left its mark and dentistry was not yet really A Thing. The podcast compared this to the myriad women who have gone under the knife to change their appearance and appeal to the putative head of this government in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six. …And, I was thinking how we’re all grasping so frantically, even since primary school, for somewhere to belong, in the most galling fashion at times (see: Junior High). …and, how standing out and solitariness is not how most of us are naturally inclined, and how much effort it must take to stay true to oneself in that environment, and not even change your makeup routine to resemble the herd… And, how in two years or six months or less, the herd is going to look wholly different and even more ridiculous than it does now, and for those whose surgeries can’t be undone, then what? For whom are we changing our very bodies and selling our souls, with no reciprocity?

Collectively, We The People need Dr. Rudine’s windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors… and for heaven’s sake to maybe have a sit and a quiet think… Because beyond all of the other *waves hands* …murderous, callous, unethical, illegal, ungodly -ists and -isms, none of that “go along to get along” stuff is ever sustainable. Weren’t we all supposed to learn that in junior high?

transcendent

confidence
shouldn’t lie
in “prettiest.”

upending
privilege,
the wisest

transcend it.
Indifferent
assurance.

Hummingbirds (which I cannot draw) are the ultimate in assured indifference. Beautiful, but may or may not come to the feeder. Exquisite, but may merely give you a quick side-eye as they pass. Stunning, and could not care less what you’re all about. #goals.