WP Daily Prompt: Heard….

I thought I’d heard it all, but I was wrong. Shit-gibbon is now the gold standard. Oh wait! No–what he actually said was “fascist, loofah-faced, shit-gibbon!” Right. Now that is a 14 karat gold standard. Thank you Senator. xoxo

 

Aesthetic–WP daily prompt

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/aesthetic/”>Aesthetic</a&gt;

 

stay hopeful

today’s prompt: hopeful. This is one of the last pages of my sketchbook, or maybe call it a playbook. Yeah, playbook. It’s an old family finance record book I picked up for a buck at a goodwill. Make art, stay hopeful. Happy new year, y’all.

The Love Rock

wordpress daily prompt: <a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/retreat/”>Retreat</a&gt;

Here’s my working metaphor for the coming year: There’s a big boulder along the waterfront in Lincoln Park here in West Seattle. It’s north of the Colman pool and is referred to as the Love Rock because the word  is always, always spelled out with driftwood and shells, rusted metal and sometimes flowers in the summer.

Last week, I rode along the trail on my bike, glancing at the rock as I passed. Someone had brushed all the letters off and the pieces were scattered on the ground around the boulder. I kept riding and thought I would rebuild it on my return trip.

An hour later, I was looking forward to making things right, but I was too late–some good soul had already put things aright and Love triumphed once more. we’re in this together.

Never back down, never retreat.

WP Daily Prompt: missing

I listened to a talk today by Gil Fronsdal who has a new book out entitled Buddha before Buddhism—it sounds interesting. It’s based on this very old text called the Book of Eights.

The Eights refers to a collection of poems with eight lines each. Gil read one of the poems and it exhorted followers to abandon obsession with the past, thoughts of the future, and basically be in the moment. Not rocket science, but not easy, as it turns out. I mean, if spiritual leaders have focused on being present for like EVER, then it must be more than a little challenging.

Anyway, the poem goes on to suggest abandoning dogma, rules, orthodoxy of any sort as it detracts from being in the moment. Thinking of life after death detracts. Thinking of righteousness detracts. Thinking of sin detracts. Thinking of those many, many ways dogma detracts.

Seriously. And then he said something funny, but also thought provoking. Imagine your neighbor is a religious person and shares all the ways this religion helps her/him through the day with this rule and that belief and this promise. And then she/he asks you what you believe in and you just sort of stand there with nothing to talk about for all that practice of being in the moment.

Nothing.

And in fact, in that nothing, the only thing you supposed to do is be with the nothing. The Nothing Moment. Lame, right? Like this whole team-jersey, book-of-rules belonging gig is completely missing and all you have to show for it is this lousy nothing-moment!

And that, the poem suggests, is the gateway to peace.

Think about it.

WP Daily Prompt: protest

No, dear, that is too easy.

In the target rich environment of our United States right now, protest is a writing prompt in search of its antithesis, if only to give things a little texture, a little variation.

There is virtually nothing happening these days that doesn’t deserve strong protest. The only decision point is selection. Be selective. Make it count. And keep the faith, baby.

WP Daily Prompt: martyr

 

Modern Martyrs

If a martyr died in a forest

or a city or a desert for that matter

and there was no phone, no internet, no tv

did the martyr die in vain?

WP Daily Prompt: Construct

Construct

It turns out, in another of life’s funny little twists, that sometimes who others think we are is more important than who we are.

Take for example the impact of audience on a performer. It goes without saying that the success of a live performance is relational. The audience matters. I went to a concert recently, I won’t name names, but it was made clear that the singer—accustomed to a warmer, more engaged audience than she was getting that night—was displeased. And her displeasure made for a lack-luster performance. For the most part, the audience did not know her. She was part of a season-ticket line-up. I found her subdued but wonderful anyway and wished I’d seen her in her native Portugal, not chilly, rainy Seattle.

Identity is a strange thing. Often molded by what others see, less by one’s true nature. It is a construct we offer the world. And sometimes, the successful construct becomes the thing itself and is perpetuated, exaggerated and amplified by perception, as in an echo chamber.

And if there really is no there-there, no internal stability, that construct will be vastly more comfortable and vital than the confused, murky, unformed fog that  no one really wants. Construct a priori. Works every time.

WordPress Daily: faded

Faded

Right out of the gate, the word makes me wistful. One word. It conjures time, not enough time, too much time, time to go, time to stay, time past, time to come, a point in time, time lost.

But these times, right now, are painful, confusing and frightening. Today’s onslaught is quickly buried under tomorrow’s diem horribilis and the beat goes on, each previous outrage a faded reminder of how unprepared we were and still are for what’s coming next.

WordPress Daily Prompt: vigor

The puppy’s name was Vigor. Bob’s neighbor pronounced it Vie-gor which sounded more like a superhero than a puppy, but in fact, Bob decided later, his neighbor was right.

It was a dark and stormy night. Seriously. Bob had meant to prune that oak out front but the wind got to it first. A huge branch broke, falling across the electrical cable to the house. The cable pulled free, snapping and spitting , writhing in the driveway out in front of the house.

Vigor was inside, running from window to window, upstairs and down, whining and barking, growing more frantic in the darkened house. Bob and his wife, enjoying a date night, were blissfully unaware of it all as they were transported by Moonlight, the movie they’d chosen to see after a quick dinner downtown.

Little did they know that at about the same time as the protagonist of the film is transformed by heartbreaking events, the live electrical cable outside their house had found purchase in a box of kindling they kept on their porch, next to the firewood. Sparks smoldered and brightened, died down and picked up again as if deciding whether to go forward with the plan. Suddenly a splinter of kindling caught fire and a flame wavered boldly in the wind.

Vigor was riveted. If Bob and his wife had been there, they would have been impressed with his focus and attentiveness. Perhaps. At any rate, they most assuredly would have been impressed by the northwest corner of their house which was lit up with orange white light, shadows dancing, kindling crackling with fire.

The neighbor, the one who called the puppy Vie-gor, saw the situation and called 911. From his porch, he could hear sirens in the distance, devising a plan for what he might do if the fire jumped to his house in a gust of wind. The chance of this small blaze blossoming into a multi-house consuming inferno was not high, but still, the neighbor liked to be prepared.

And here’s where Vigor proves himself. The puppy ran to his doggie bed and grabbed his much beloved velveteen rabbit doll, floppy eared, loose limbed, low on stuffing but all the more charming for it. That rabbit was his friend. That rabbit was his family. Vigor did not begin or end a day without that rabbit at his side.

Vigor grabbed his friend and ran upstairs, jumping out the only window in the house that was open,  landing on the peak of the pitched roof over the front door, slipping down the shingles to the gutter and catching himself, his friend safely in tow, floppy ear in mouth. He teetered on the gutter, his little puppy nails clattering at the aluminum, finally losing his balance and falling, a jumble of legs and ears landing on the hedge of periwinkle below. The sirens were closer now and the neighbor, who had seen Vigor’s heroic escape, ran to the house.

He called for the dog but there was nothing but the sound of the fire engines and the crackling fire. He called again and then heard a rustle of leaves. Tumbling out of the hedge came Vigor and his rabbit. The neighbor scooped them up and carried them to safety.

Then he called Bob and his wife to let them know what had happened and that Vie-gor was a hero.

WP Daily Prompt: pungent

Pungent

It was odd: here we were, smack in the flat out center of the country, far from the coasts east west and south, and yet that smell was coast, deeply familiar and buried somewhere inside of me. It was the high-tide smell of wet tennis shoes left in the afternoon sun and sand to dry. It was a smell I knew so well, growing up south of LA in a little beach town back when that particular town was actually little.

But here? Where I lived with my husband and two kids? Middle America at its most middle-iciousness, a life far from the salt spray and waves and desert bright sun?

It made no sense: my husband’s running shoes, pungent with the scent of the pacific. I told myself I was imagining things and yet….

He travels for business but never anywhere near the coast. At least as far as I know. I picked up the shoes and inspected them. God, how I hated that smell, and as I knew, once you got your tennis shoes wet at the shore, they were pretty much shot. Like these. I tapped them upside down on the floor and there I found further evidence: tiny mounds of sand, like an hourglass spilling open.

I stepped back. Just then I heard his car pulling into the driveway and felt a tiny shiver of anxiety rise up in my chest.

WP Daily Post: anticipation

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/anticipation/”>Anticipation</a&gt;

I so love the word antici……….pation. The sadomasochistic potential! It’s the perfect word for how we live now, all of us, in anticipation of the next crazy thing the Bad Boy in Chief will do! Never has the highest office in the land garnered such attention, such fascination. This is how we live now.

Someone asked me if I’d heard the latest Warren speech which was supposedly a good one, and of course I had not because…well, because it doesn’t show up in the news. At least not the news I follow–Washington Post, New York Times, Slate, Salon, Politico. Zip, zilch, zero, nada.

But the barest twinkle in the Boy King’s eye gets front page coverage. The latest complete reversal in what he said yesterday or last month or last week, gets screaming headlines because apparently we can’t conceive of something so confounding. But he’s been upfront all along, people. All along when held to something he said last month on or off the record, he simply says, “who cares? Nobody cares except you.”

Do this. Google the following: who cares? nobody cares except you. trump and see how many hits you get. Fox news or CNN or DT himelf asserts that you or I simply do not care. That the news cycle is now less than an hour. That our grasp of reality is being systematically debased. Debased.

Because rather than try to care about fraud, conflict of interest, sexual abuse, demagoguery or the rest, we now have new headlines to gasp about. Headlines! We sit in mindless anticipation of the next outrage.

WP Daily Prompt: elicit

Elicit

I’m a progressive democrat. As such, I’ve been subjected to a choir of talking heads saying I need to understand the America that voted for D. Understand their perspective. Understand their grievances. And I’ll be honest, this seems like regular old liberal masochocism, but still….

This morning, prompted by a slew of Two Americas headlines, I thought, yes, indeed. We have two Americas. If you look at the voting map of America, you see very clearly that large cities overwhelming voted for HRC and smaller towns voted for D. But wait, there’s more. And no, this isn’t a scree about social wedge issues. It’s about Regulation.

Because Regulation is one of those issues that the 1% cares a lot about. Regulation elicits a cri de coeur from every corner, whether banking, industry, land use, construction, water, plastic bags and taxes. And while there are examples of successful deregulation, it is at the heart of many of our historic failures such as subprime mortgages and cable deregulation of 2003, oil transport without double hulls and subsequent spills (Cuyahoga River).

Ok, ok. So here’s the thought: Population. In big, big cities, population is an issue. You have millions of people counting on the same water, the same air, the same lane on the freeway at the same hour every day. You have millions of people sharing boundaries with other people and trust me, you in that small town somewhere in the middle of america, you don’t really know how dicey that becomes, or how quickly.

You don’t understand all those regulations about water use and the imperatives to be smarter about something as simple as storm runoff. You don’t understand about the pollution of several hundred thousand cars on the freeway, having to share space with you. You don’t understand that wildlife areas really are precious, seriously precious, because you have lots of them. We do not. We used to, but now we have people and neighborhoods and sprawl.

Don’t get me wrong, I love city living. But without Regulations? I think it would be a living hell taken over by the least attractive elements of our demographic. So instead of us bending over backwards to try to see it your way, maybe in this one area you could stretch a little as well and understand that we are dealing with problems you don’t have to think about. At all. Regulations, rules, guidelines are often there for a reason. A drag, I know. But true.

WP Daily Prompt: mythical

Mythical

mythical black swan

ripples on a glassy surface

the sky is shattered.

WP Daily Prompt: filthy

Filthy
It’s rumored he has a thing about germs. Like Howard Hughes hiding for months on end in the Beverly Hill Hotel, lights off, peeing into a bottle, watching an endless loop of Ice Station Zebra. Except this guy is no recluse, okay? def not a recluse.

So, he has a thing about germs and he has a thing for glamorous hotels and resorts, especially his own. Also like Howard Hughes!

He’s driven a lot of businesses and ideas right into the ground, too, just like Hughes and that  ultra-heavy and impossible Spruce Goose. That was crazy but beautiful, really beautiful, you gotta admit. Like it should be in a sculpture park somewhere.

But anyway, then they’re different. For example, this guy’s can’t focus. Seriously, even he has to tell himself publicly: focus, dammit. But Hughes never had a focus problem. Monomaniacal, maybe, but not ADHD.

And there’s another big difference is Hughes actually knew how to do things. Did you know he made the first motorized bike? With a steam engine! that’s just genius, right? I’d love to see that bike. Apparently anything with a motor got his full attention. But this guy—he lives for love. For adoration. From afar and strictly in the moment. All that connection stuff, the ongoing bullshit, wtf, isn’t that why he’s the boss? so someone else will do it! I think so, buster, I think so.

Apparently he’s been able to temper his thing about germs. But keep an eye on him. Did you notice at the end of the debates how he wouldn’t go down and shake hands with anyone in the audience? Filthy, they’re filthy! a little voice screamed in his head.

Honestly? I’m looking forward to seeing that yearly procession when he has to address the House…and shake hands. A lot of hands. Black hands and lady hands. Asian hands and brown hands. Lots and lots of hands. I wanna see how he gets past through that particular gauntlet. He should start practicing now.