In the morning the weather from this table is obscured by clouds, cool wafts of Pacific air gust along the sidewalk. Overcast threatens rain. Leaves nod. There is a Radio Flyer wagon in a second story apartment window across the street that is being used as a planter.
In Zokas Café watching traffic, reading. I note an article on technology company spread sheets.
I try to draw, my pencil, lead number 3B hesitates.
Schubert is on; a quartet drifts down in the café.
Across the way there's this guy, animated pointing to his sandwich talking to his wife. He's going over the sandwich like an engineer goes over a new bridge. An amazing series of frowns cross his face, there is a puffed explosion of gray beard on his chin, above them lips too large for his face, rubbery and mobile, his forehead furrows and unfurrows as he talks in an odd rhythm disconnected from what he might be saying.
He is a man whose idea of conversation is a series of pronouncements and prescriptions for everything; the sound of his voice is insistent and stressed, slightly pressured. I imagine he is someone’s father, his offspring are fat and very calculating, easily accused of being slow witted, they are probably very smart having been brought up in a house with faded prints on the walls, paper blinds pulled, so the light is very yellow, the floor groaning from bookshelves filled with heavy books, and the scratchy sound of a operas played on an old record player.
One chooses love or not.
"I fell down." Is not the same thing as "I fell in love." As love always involves an "other" that one easily blames for the state of "love".
It makes the fallen a victim. Absolving one from responsibility, as if an accident happened. One does not "fall in love." it is an act of will, a choice, in a culture that denies the will and makes victims of us all.
If I choose love it is a conscious act as much as not choosing it.
No two loves are the same; they are fingerprints on the way to a larger target destination. Our radar’s amber in the half light of the control room, LEDs red and dim, shapes bent over silently watching the approach of meaning, trying to decipher the epistemology of the universe.
Wittgenstein said that the world is everything that is the case, and the Tractates led the reader from there to the conclusion that in the end there are things which defy understanding and cannot be contained in a logically formal structure.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
I could never think of Seattle the same way after "Here Come the Brides" went off the air. I miss Bobby Sherman.
2 - Chris Arabia
When I went to Seattle I had two goals. 1) visit Hendrix's grave; and 2) grab some Dick's (after listening to a friend extol the virtues of their burgers for 4 years).
Dick's refused to serve me a burger without onions, so I walked out. Reactions to this have run the gamut, from endorsement of my tough consumer stance to defense of Dick's freedom to inflict onions upon me. I agree with both positions, so I exercised my right to eat elsewhere.
We had Indian and I have never regretted it.
The Hendrix grave (in Renton, subject of the Supreme Court porn area decision) was rather moving. People are always milling about quietly, awaiting their turn, visiting JMH, and moving on.
Oh, the mountain and the volcano were cool, too.
3 - Eric Olsen
Yeah, some misguided neocon triangulators think Hendrix is more important Bobby Sherman. I say "hah"
4 - Chris Arabia
Unhand my hypotenuse, scoundrel!