Max train, mid winter, six pm

 
Tiny and bent old man, riding the Max train home

Yankees ball cap, frayed at the brim

Dark honey-toned skin,

deeply lined

A new lamp, sans shade, in his lap

 #Gogyohka #5Lines

Monday - Haiku, Do you?

In the House of  Doors

we wait, the train passes by

Old shadows, what was is

#Haiku, #Senryu, #Haiga

80 years of Kit Cat clocks

Remember the Kit Cat clock?

Those searching eyes

The hypnotic tail that never stops

Spawned by the Allied Clock Company,

in Portland, Oregon, Nineteen Thirty Two 

I  don't remember where or when I first saw these, but I do remember there being one in a barbershop where I got my hair cut as a small boy. 

If we're playing "Kitch, Krap, or Klassic"  I'd come down as Klassic Kitch. 

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the timepieces. 

Still Manufactured in America on the western end of Route 66, by the California Clock Company, they remain as much a reminder of a cheery outlook as always.

You can still order one in a number of fetching colors, as well as parts, shirts, greeting cards, beach towels, etc. or read more about the history and culture of Kit Cat Clocks at the official company web site here.

Divinest Sense

So, I was reading some Emily Dickinson today - Hey, stop laughing, I can read Emily if I wanna...

Anyhow, I came across the following, which I like immensely. For one thing it resonates for me just as it stands, and for another I find it somewhat comforting to know that Emily entertained such thoughts. 

The book I was reading from has it listed as "XL" in the series on life. I have no idea what, if any, other titles it has:

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'T is the majority
in this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, - and you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain. - Emily Dickinson

Down at Irah's, Down at Goose Hollow

"She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd, and I loved her that she did pity them.” He read back what he had typed - “Wait,  Billy already wrote that, didn't he ..." *

And then "Over the mountains of the Moon, down the valley of the shadow - ride, boldly ride, the shade replied, if you seek for Eldorado. “ Back-spaces rapid-fire through the entire first line - “No, no - Eddy wrote that one” he thought. **

Since they had made conversant past time visitation possible he had talked to so many of the old writers, poets, thinkers, and fools of his kind that the line between his thoughts, his writings, rantings, and revelations, sometimes blurred with those of the past others. Still, he did enjoy the visits greatly more often than not.

Einstein was a hoot, especially after a few shots of schnapps, always a sideways twist to make you look at something again with that one.

Machiavelli, not surprisingly, Ben thought was an ass.

They said it was possibly a side effect of the Sb-5 he had been dosed with at the indian clinic that made him susceptible to the visions. His participation in the trials of the new formula paid for his therapy and a few others. It was part of a government Earned Funding deal the clinic was forced into back in '25.

From his regular overstuffed chair at Irah's coffee house just across from the Goose Hollow rail he watched the college kids in their current fashion gear, ear buds in, eyes trained on mobile screens. Bright shiny young things, some of them destined to change the world yet again “in myriad ways, both subtle and gross.” Ben thought.  

Since he had fallen below the income requirement to own a car he spent more time at places like Irah's waiting for trains, or nursing endless cups of the house blend and cruising social media on the house wi-fi with his beat up old Maruishi locked into one of the hanging racks outside.

He would sit and watch all the people, all the things, just watch, and listen. The layers and threads of connections, the nodes in the data between the thousand-thousand things, would start coming to him latter.  Sometimes they came in his dreams, flying through the tangled dream-time oak branches on silent owl wings.  Sometimes he saw them in the abstract patterns that he had first learned from the Sb-5 years before.

Drinking his first Double-Dark Chocolate Ethiopian Drip, almond milk, no foam, triple raw sugar of the day he gazed out the window and across Jefferson Avenue at the roundabout.  In its center was an old, old, Mound Stellar built up of rough boulders to about two meters high.  On the top of the mound, flat tops of the odd boulders angled up to the southwest sky, individual stones stood in a rough circle, perhaps five or six yards across.  

No one ever seemed pay much attention to it or go up on top of it though there was nothing preventing it. Nothing of course except the odd "You're not supposed to be here" feeling that most people who might have done got when they reached a certain proximity.  Most of those people forgot both the feeling and the mound as soon as they walked away from it.

Ben did not forget, because along with that feeling he also got something else. It was like a silent disclaimer, an "unless" clause to the warning vibration. There was something that appealed to his non-conformist nature there,  something that appealed to the old ones.

Sipping his coffee there he watched as the light on the mound slanted towards that "photographers best" side light. He could have sworn he saw a shimmering there. There was something different, something else there on top besides the expected few small trees and shrubs, besides the sparse tufts of grass growing from between the rocks, besides anything that he recalled a name for.

It could have just been that he was tired. Beyond tired.

This fatigue existed in him in spite of all the advances in technology, or the progress towards a “more orderly and sustainable society". His Dr claimed it was largely neurological, a genetic fault of his, a misfiring of synapses aggravating wildly unbalanced dispersal and uptake of serotonin and dopamine in his brain.

He had hoped to speak with someone more astute, one of the philosophers or mental health people of not too distant history maybe, but then the technology had abruptly broken down, catastrophically, according to all the government and industry spokespersons. 

Ben felt himself no longer capable of discerning truth from fiction, propaganda (a banned word) from information. He did know that when conversant past time visitation had come into being there was a general  lack of consensus regarding exactly how that actually worked.***

It was almost time for him to board the Blue Line to Hillsboro. He had the barista top off his go cup, picked up his Gabriel Hounds daypack and headed out the door. He went the longer way towards the stone mound. 

Even though he had felt the "Go Away" buzz before, it still came as something of a minor shock to his system and he stumbled just a bit, one of those odd little two-step glitches, but retained his vertical attitude. The closer he got to the edge of the mound the more the buzz manifested itself as a multiple electro-magnetic waveform, capable of simultaneously overpowering in both the utra and sub-sonic ranges. His skin tingled, the hairs on the back of his neck stood at full "Danger, Will Robinson!" attention. At the same time he felt a massive presence, a tangible weight upon his shoulders, as well as a rumbling deep in his bones that told him something big was right in front of him, something huge, something that appeared to be moving towards in slow motion, even as it moved at speeds beyond any attempt to describe or define. It was coming. It was here. Just like that.

He paused and in his peripheral vision he could just see the Methodist church across the street, shimmering wildly, as though seen through heat waves on a Mojave Desert summer day.

He stepped forward again. He heard the customary tinnitus ring in his head take on a new, more energetic vibrato, and again he paused.  He almost expected to be struck dead or at least deaf and blind as he stepped forward again, that one last step, to place his shaking hand on the stone.  Everything stopped.  Every.  Thing.

No sound, no movement of traffic or pedestrians, or anything at all, stirred up close to the roundabout. There was not even the ringing in his ears, utter silence and total stillness was all around him.

He remembered to breath. He climbed up on top of the mound. He looked around.  Loosely spaced around the top of Tsik'to'li Unelanvhi, the eye of God, were rough upright stones, a meter or two tall each.  Ben stepped forward again. He laid his hand on the petite monolith.

If anyone else had gotten close enough to see through the glamour of the mound over the next few years, they might have noticed there on top a weathered daypack, much faded by sun, wind, and rain.  It had been there for all time, a remnant left by an Old One - by Agigalie liga Kway nee, by I-Am-Grateful Ben.

*Othello, Act 1, Scene 3 - http://shakespeare-navigators.com/othello/T13.html

** Eldorado, Edgar Allen Poe - http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eldorado/

*** It had occurred, it seemed, as an accidental result of a collaboration of indie geeks and volunteers from the Applied Physics Department of the Unseen University trying to find a practical use for the Holographic Theory.

Robbie Robertson - He Don't Live Here No More

* Othello, Act 1, Scene 3 - http://shakespeare-navigators.com/othello/T13.html

** Eldorado, Edgar Allen Poe - http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eldorado/

*** It had occurred, it seemed, as an accidental result of a collaboration of indie geeks and volunteers from the Applied Physics Department of the Unseen University trying to find a practical use for the Holographic Theory.

Well, Hell...

The picture has nothing to do with the post as far as I  know.  I just like it.

No fun stories today. No foggy insights bristling with fuzzy logic, inane intuitions, or rampant chemical imbalances(I hope).


I just read my last two posts.


I am disappointed to find them rife with poor usage and typos, awkward, full of thingys, and otherwise an embarrassment of goofy errors. Yes, I know better than to let them go out that way. Ok, I mostly know better, some issues of sentence structure still elude me.


Don'tcha just hate it when that happens? Oh, that has never happened to you? Um, yeah, me either.


Mia Culpa. Next time I'll read it through another time, instead of just three or four.


Yes, ok, out loud.
 
Oh, and that other part that seems really odd, that's just how my mind works - I make no apologies for that.


I will be as Silly Putty, stretch some more, break, moosh together again, and bounce back somewhere near I hope to the often obscured and invisible writing path I persist in following.


I stole that Silly Putty bit from @johannaharness, fair & square, I think.

He-Who-Must-Not-be-Trifled-With has tea with Huizong, Emperor of the Song Dynasty

An excerpt from WIP The Shift, my 2011 NaNo

 He Who Must Not Be Trifled With was back on the road. It was not really a road though, as it was actually a cow path through a pasture just east of Liberal, Kansas. He had taken some time off the trip to commune with the other more interesting denizens of the forest. This had given things out west time to simmer for a while. He had been careful to not let any more of the local people wherever he passed through see him. He knew that in this time, even more than in the past, the sight of a small hybrid dragon would cause the kind of stir he was just not interested in right  now.

 Although he often thought of himself as wyvern, probably because that was what his dear mother had been, he was actually not exactly that. He had too many legs, four of them instead of the usual two. He had fur instead of scales. He was much more intelligent than any wyvern who ever lived before. He could affect things from great distances if he so chose.

Andy, way out west, just outside of Colby, Oregon, a bit east of Portland, that bastion of high hopes, Murder Buy the Book, and awesome views was now learning to live with his new bestest friend, Bernard. Not a St  Bernard, but still a very large, friendly, slobbery and extremely(thanks to He-Who) intelligent dog. A  dog of great imagination who still kind of remembered having been a bear, and before that, something… else. He would get around to Andy and  Bernard later though.

Right now He Who Must Not be Trifled With’s feet were tired and bitchy. He had still not yet gained enough strength back to fly. He had forgotten how much he considered walking to be appropriate only as a leisure activity, a novelty, for more closely scrutinizing ground life. It was Not, decidedly not, in his informed estimation, an acceptible means of traveling long distances. At least he was getting his memory back, and with it, some of his former intelligence. He now knew why he had woken up after so many centuries of sleep.  It was about to happen again and there was, or was not, about to be a shift in the world of men.

One could say that it was a Good verses Evil thing, but he preferred to think of it as a moving forward or not thing.  The one he was going to go see, to teach, to protect and enlighten, would make a difference. If that one went one way things would move forward, as they could, to a new level of human thought and understanding, which in turn would affect the rest of the natural world. If that one were not protected, not shielded  from chaos and shown a new way, then things could go decidedly different.

 And of course there would be opposition. Like the plot of any good book or script, there seemed to always have to be that opposition. It was a question it seemed of maintaining the balance of all things. Besides, it was more fun that way.  To him personally, it would be no particular catastrophe if it didn’t go his, or perhaps their, way. He was used to things in this world not always working out to the most optimal, or the most benign way. He had seen evil empires come and go. He had seen  mass extinctions, continental drift, Pandemics – human and otherwise, all come and go again. He recalled his conversations with a certain Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty on the subject:

 At one point a a couple of millennium back Emperor Huizong in China, though they didn’t call it that there then, had sent out an edict. OK, more like a question really. He gathered all his advisers and far-seers from the land to ask what one thing would be true in all earthly mortal situations. They had gathered in their robes and their finery, deliberated, debated cussed and dis-cussed until many, many water buffalo had returned to the rice paddy, and of course, in the nature of all efforts to seek truth by consensus, had failed miserably to come up with  anything remotely resembling a right answer.

Huizong, a painter and philosopher of no small talent, needed to get back to a particularly nice lily, whose vibrant essence and delicate personage he had been attempting to capturein watercolors for a considerable time. The Wyvern had known that without this one, silly little saying, the Dynasty could not reach the next level in understanding the nature of being. Finally He Who Must NOt be Trifled With made an appearance in his austere and greatly enlightened self, before the Emperor. It was the utmost in privacy of course, as it would not do to be seen by the masses.

He had kept the Emperor on edge for a considerable and appropriate length of time. He found that the full toothy-venomous fanged smile was not needed here in this place of relative civilization(for that time). Rather, an understated medium faint grin was more than sufficient to keep the gentle(for that time) man’s attention without making any crass threats.

Finally He-Who spoke: “Do you want to know now? Do you really want to know?”  “Yes. Yes old friend, I feel it is important beyond my reckoning or surely you would not have come all this way through so much time and space, just to partake of my meager tea time offerings”. “Then I will tell you. It is…Wait, why Zhao Ji, is that a new kind of lily I see on the end table?” “Please!" said Emperor of all he beheld, except of course He-Who. "Don’t tease an old fool so unmercifully, you wicked teaser in the possession of all knowledge you!”(The emperor did tend to lose all cleverness when rattled in the most charming child like way) "I beg of you! I prostrate myself before you!” "Surely without your tutelage I and all my empire, tawdry and base as it must seem to you, shall all expire in the misery of vital knowledge Unattained, lost to all generations!"

“Heh, heh Zhao Ji, How could I refuse one so eloquent beyond both his years and his species?" smoothed the half Wyvern, many centuries Young Zhao Ji's senior and loving the rare attention (They had stopped calling Huizong that when he got to be Emperor, But He Who Must Not be Trifled With called everyone by whatever name He chose)  “Very well, young Zhao Ji,  it is not anything very complicated it’s just(pointing towards the lily) – This too, shall pass way.” “Of course it will, tea time will be over whenever we, I mean you of course, say that it is!” “But, Please, tell me!” “I just did.” said He Who-.  

“What?!”cried the Emperor, totally not getting it.  “I told you young Emperor. This. Too. Shall Pass”. “Well, yes, but – but , really I would think …wait! You are right!” And the wyvern was, at least  up to the level any human was able to comprehend at that time. Whatever you thought, whatever was happening, in it’s time, would also pass out of being, and be no more.

Oh sure, now days, at least as recently as that nice young man Al Einstein had said(such a  nice boy, and he too had passed) - As Al had said “In the end all is energy. It can be no other way.”  Something some of the more thoughtful of the human race were still wrapping their heads around, as the youngsters would say.

He who Must Not be Trifled With stayed a bit more, in fact spent the next fifteen years gently and patiently(well mostly patiently)pounding it through Emperor Huizong’s’s head that “This too Shall Pass”, while seeming almost insultingly simple, ultimately had far reaching philosophical and indeed scientific implications.

Then, just before He Who left the now truly old Emperor, he gifted him with the disturbing proclamation of “Unless of course you want to delve into physics, quantum and beyond, where everything will be up for grabs again in the One True Thing scheme of things. The Emperor was both laughing and crying at the same time as the ageless Wyvern winged his way off towards the west, where he said there was need of “some serious attitude adjustment”.