Ri$ing Expectation$

A child bends over to pick up a penny,
an adolescent, a Benjamin,
a banker, a billion, expectations
just about equal: Where’s the next?


(05 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)

Pennies into Dollars

Pitching pennies into a penny-jar
on your way out the front door
teaches your children

how to save pennies indoors;
rolling them up in paper tubes
teaches their paper value to banks.

What teaches us the reification of
millions, billions, trillions of dollars?

(04 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA) v8

A Libertarian

Once a Libertarian I carpooled with tried to talk me into mortgages as rock-solid investments: “My mortgage is my bank account!” he chortled, smiling. “But the bank actually owns your house,” I argued, “If you lose your job, the bank will take your bank-account-house. What will you have left then?” In his scenario, it could never happen. In a while, the computer company we both worked for was taken over twice. I wonder if he still works in high-tech, & still has his same suburban house?

Walk, off

After e-mailing Ivo that
light rain's cancelling our walk
to the posh mall a mile away.

I hold out my R-fingers
to my cat Reggie who sniffs
them, growling appreciatively.


(01 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Where the mind repairs

While watching my Maine Coon cat Reggie at the end of his tether at twilight, I’ve just read a back of the book (mag-end) piece by Eric Hanson about celebrity encounters in which Swoosie Kurtz is the sightette.

I think all writers should be required to write fluff-pieces like this forcing them to reveal who they think is (or was) a celeb, leaving us a voluntary dig into their (if not our) time. Just how fluffy were they? The names they drop will reveal all.

Example: I could begin with Somebody we all know & admire (John ‘Kenneth’ Galbraith) & work my way down to an as-yet-not Somebody who I know & admire (poet Karl Kadie) sparing you their specifics, directing you instead to Google for proof of their relative existence on The Web.

Which is where the mind now repairs, right?

Crypto-rosary

In 1952, @ 10, I read a sci-fi pulpmag story in which a far-future monk secretly uses his tunic buttons as a crypto-rosary. I'm now told it's "The Quest for Saint Aquin," (1951) by William Anthony Parker White, (pseud.) Anthony Boucher. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Boucher www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/boucher.shtml
variety-sf.blogspot.com/2008/05/anthony-boucher-quest-for-saint-aquin.html

Weighty matters

Weighty matters weigh heavily as the Taurus
carbon observatory falls to Earth & sinks.

Mardi Gras offers one last day’s distraction.

Obama gets even seriouser with Congress;
Bernanke says the recession will lift this year.

Anybody still running on hope is wondering:

What in hell are the Republicans thinking?
Can’t they see we see right through them?


(24 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v2