~

She said, "Be of good cheer!"

Ghost

A ghostly looking woman, who said she believed in reincarnation, but does not intend to die anyway, told me that she had read in a flyer handed out by Jehovah's Witnesses, that God answers all prayers, except that God operates on a different time from the human time. (Makes sense?) I only nodded, and she then asked me what my astrological sign was.

Recently, I reported to a friend that Anglican Archbishop James Ussher had estimated in 1650 that the Earth was created October 23, 4004 BC (Julian), 9PM, and my friend asked: "In what time zone?"

Walking across the second floor pedestrian bridge between buildings yesterday afternoon, cold rain falling on both sides, I felt like a ghost myself, faltering, devoid of energy, life. I took the elevator down, stepped into the gym, and in the locker room met my old Chinese friend H., who immediately asked where I had been. I briefly mentioned personal problems, and he patted me on the back.

Today marks exactly two months since the shipwreck,

The newspaper reports that Roman Polanski, under house detention in his Swiss chalet, is editing there his latest film entitled Ghost. Tiger Woods in the meantime, is hiding on his yacht, named Privacy. The other day I told somebody that I wished I had had their problems.

Strategy

"I do have a strategy," Reagan said after one detailed briefing on the challenge of the Soviet Union: "We win, they lose!"

(From a Wall Street Journal article From Berlin to Baghdad by Fouad Ajami, Tuesday 11/10/2009.)

King Kong

Up, down, up and down, up then down, like a rollercoaster, someone described my present life to me. It's not what they call a bipolar disorder, it's what country singer Randy Travis called on his first album the storms of life. One friend's family is all shaken up because a brother committed suicide hanging himself in his guitar shop, another acquaintance is traveling to Brazil to marry his sweetheart. Happy, lucky man. Normal reactions to events. Me, I'm on a rollercoaster. Events of two, three years ago are ancient history now, and even their lingering consequences don't bother me any more, but events of the past 5 months are what has been throwing the ship on the rocks. Metaphor mix minestrone.

You were like King Kong four weeks ago, said a friend reacting to my story, you were on top of the Empire State Building, before the airplanes flew in and knocked you down to earth. Lower than the earth, I tell him. I find myself in Hades, abandoning all hope. You're vulnerable now, says the friend whose relative killed himself. Indeed, I answer, I have four opportunities every weekday to jump in front of a train. See a professional, advises he, echoing a close relative. I recently wrote another friend living abroad that among Californians faith in therapists runs deeper than faith in God Almighty. I refuse to confide in a stranger with a diploma hanging on a wall. Done that once.

In the state of utter despair, you realize for the first time how little matters in the world where your life is concerned. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today a memorial service is being held for the victims of the Ford Hood massacre. Headlines and news of disasters, killings, accidents, anniversaries, flu vaccinations, medical discoveries, arts events, births and deaths, celebrity rumours, nothing changes the situation you fell into, nothing affects it, improves it, worsens it. You're alone.

Nix!

Stevie Nicks, the lead singer with Fleetwood Mac is a technophobe, who doesn't own a computer or a cell phone.

"I believe that computers have taken over the world. I believe that they have in many ways ruined our children. I believe that kids used to love to go out and play. I believe that social graces are gone because manners are gone because all people do is sit around and text. I think it's obnoxious."

Q: If you and I were having lunch, and I pulled out my cell phone ...

A: I'm gonna put my hand on your hand and say, "Turn it off, for now. Just give me an hour, of you, I really want an hour of just you, and your heart. I don't want you talking to someone else while we're having lunch." It's love, you know, it's relationships. I don't want love and relationships to be lost, and I feel like that's happening.

POETICS

In the tiny Berkeley apartment where Jim Powell has lived since 1992, there's a California license plate on the wall that says "POETICS." Powell didn't buy it, but found it years ago while clearing litter alongside Interstate 880 in Oakland.

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"You know on the roadside you'll see a sign that says, 'This section of freeway cleaned by 'so-and-so'? So a group of Deadheads I knew decided to clean the mile beside the Coliseum. Caltrans gives you an orange Day-Glo vest and gloves. You go down there beside the freeway and everything is covered with 14 layers of diesel soot.

"Someone found that license plate in the ivy in one of the cloverleafs and said, 'This belongs to you.' Whoever owned that plate had their car stolen. And the people who stole it ditched the plate into the ivy. So that's my 'poetic license' and it's a stolen poetic license, which is appropriate," Powell says with a grin. "Your poetic license should come to you that way."

MORE...

Socialism in America

A Russian immigrant's view.