Foom! Pine needles thrash me with its limb of snow Foom! Again Foom! and I look up from my jogging, from eyes down against the drifting flakes The elegantly dressed forest standing still — a white stag — blinks at me content to be finally seen
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Jogging In Snow
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I’d take a fall for snow
Fall for Snow
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Truth on paper what a mess Me, Othello, longing black and white in real life I'm colored
Color Theory
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I have a small part in a movie “Doing Australia”.
The film has these inane catch-phrases shared as an inside joke ending in “Doing Australia” or just, in non-sequitur, “Australia”.
Example:
Main Character: The car was going so fast it was doing Australia.
We are decorating my house. It’s not my house; it’s my character’s house.
It’s not a house; it’s a room. It’s part of the movie set in an office building.
I walk around the room with the well-dressed lady interior decorator. I suggest a few alterations.
She deftly explains the reasoning behind the design; at once I am educated and, without qualm, abandon my earlier line of thinking.
I comment on this, admiring for the skillful tact she must have to constantly employ to surmount the power plays by famous actors and respected directors. She gives a knowing assent.
I’m happy to have a part in a movie. Then, I pause and sadly consider I have separated myself from so many others, I now have no one close to celebrate this good happening with.
As we casually exit my house — the room, rather — some forlorn actors begin to gather their things to leave. They are leaving for good, out of a job. Perhaps they are leaving their profession. Boohoo.
I lightly join some fellow actors in nearby room. We gather to gab. Ah, here’s the famous co-star now.
“Would you like to ???? Australia?” he jovially asks.
I return with a surprised, unknowing gesture.
He adds, “Night, eh?” as if to make it clear.
My prolonged reluctance to accept the jest unnerves him and he goes off in a huff.
I’m mad. I stew, then I pound my fist into the chair over and over.
“It’s good to express my anger,” I think. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spy the director observing me.
“Perhaps I have acted well and have pleased the director,” I wonder to myself.
It’s Doing Australia
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After getting hooked on Bowie’s “Is there life on Mars?” for a couple weeks, came across this in The Portable Jung
It is particularly fatal for such people [those who sequestered their youth] to look back. For them a prospect and a goal in the future are absolutely necessary. That is why all great religions hold out the promise of a life beyond, of a supra mundane goal which makes it possible for mortal man to live the second half of life with as much purpose and aim as the first. For the man of today the expansion of life and its culmination are plausible goals, but the idea of life after death seems to him questionable or beyond belief. Life’s cessation, that is, death, can only be accepted as a reasonable goal either when existence is so wretched that we are only too glad for it to end, or when we are convinced that the sun strives to its setting “to illuminate distant races” with the same logical consistency it showed in rising to the zenith. But to believe has become such a difficult art today that it is beyond the capacity of most people, particularly the educated part of humanity. They have become too accustomed to the thought that, with regard to immortality and such questions, there are innumerable contradictory opinions and no convincing proofs. And since “science” is the catchword that seems to carry the weight of absolute conviction in the contemporary world, we ask for “scientific” proofs. But educated people who can think know very well that proof of this kind is a philosophical impossibility. We simply cannot know anything what so ever about such things.
May I remark that for the same reasons we cannot know, either, whether something does happen to a person after death? No answer of any kind is permissible, either for or against. We simply have no definite scientific knowledge about it one way or the other, and are therefore in the same position as when we ask whether the planet Mars is inhabited or not. And the inhabitants of Mars, if there are any, are certainly not concerned whether we affirm or deny their existence. They many exist or they may not. And that is how it stand with so-called immortality — with which we may shelve the problem.
Life On Mars
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…
The tree was artificial. To save myself embarrassment and to avoid the sad truth, every day I’d water the tree, hoping the damp earth that supported lifeless limbs would detract and speak care where there was no life to care for.
Watering the Artificial Tree
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Out of some undefined desperation foot after foot to the little pond for some kind of respite The bright blue sky weakens overhead Despondent to perceive the giant cloud looming I turn back watching my shadow disappear before me A bright bloom of light taps me on my shoulders turns me around The sun peeks through beckons me join it in its descent into darkness saying, “wait” Entering into the cloud like God seating himself on His throne And the beautiful charcoal of the proud only serves to contrast so much wild brightness its fringes lit in white fire Fixed eyes remain peeled to take in such piercing radiance Now knowing I never stare straight into the pure, generous incendiary sun Only in such special tainted moments can I witness glory with my unabashed human vestiges Thunderstruck, I gape at its brazenness as it proceeds through a feathery chaos irradiating every wisp Light on light on light wafting and pulsating My jaw drops and I softly exhale a silent joy In perceiving the blue sky revealed as a dazzling, ethereal, secret green sea And gaze in wonderment at the world flipped in a wink into some vast oceanic kingdom As off in the distance some cute puffs cheekily sport ruddy pink
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I go to the edge of a Great Falls cliff. I go past the velvet crowd rope, and climb.
I climb up and to the right. It’s hard and fun.
Some children stand from where I left. They want to follow; their mother needlessly objects.
There on the next cliff are the feet of a ne’er-do-well. A green sofa chair supporting a baseball capped loafer gradually comes into view as I reach up my hands against the pull of the cliffs and gravity; he casually leans over and lends me a hand.
As I regain my footing, I find myself in a wooden tavern and get a hearty meal for myself.
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scurrying about “I’m Lost,” he said He tripped field to field countryside to countryside galaxy to galaxy “Here I am: lost,” he said There a garden grows
I Knew Him, Once
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…
Riding my bike down a tunnel near a stream. Another bike comes up beside mine. It leans into my path. I veer closer to the stream. It cuts into me. I fall into the stream. The bike rider is a baby elephant. A lost baby elephant.
I tread back, with bike in tow, towards the beginning of the tunnel in order to climb out of the stream. It’s going to take a while. I’ve forgotten how long I happen to have been biking in the tunnel. And the baby elephant, it needs to be taken care of.