I can't "book it to school" right now.  Though some of us did in 2002.

Good times, good times.

Recivilize or

 Go live in a pigsty, I don't care, our mother pretended she really didn't.  

  One brother packed his room items into the wagon and hauled it all off to the compost pile.  It was the summer of hot dogs.  We had ketchup, mustard, and dirt on our faces pretty much for the forty days of school's out.

  A lot of shocking and apalling had happened in the real world which was hotly debated as being political, or not.

  Mama drove Daddy to the train station as the sun started to make the low tide sand of the Long Island Sound stink worse.  I ran into the Golden Dolphin to get two coffees, milk, no sugar.  That was my errand in exchange for pink, snow covered mountains of rubbery marshmellow covered cupcake with cream filling.  I reasoned out loud, it had to be the sun.  Not yet, my mother didn't growl, but close to it.  She sipped the coffee and put one beautifully cared for hand on Daddy's leg.  It's too early for that, greenhouse gas they are calling it.

  The pollution?  Daddy gulped his whole coffee in four parts.  He hadn't heard any news but gave the baseball scores of the New York teams and the Dodgers.  He had a running list in his head since childhood.

  While our Dad was spending 2-4 hours a day commuting to a 9-5 our mother was making earrings to make enough money to make a vegetable garden and bring us each (six kids + friends) to the thrift shop.

  It was a secret, so I was fuming my mouth shut, hold onto the excitement and drill sargeanting self not to blow it.  Then Daddy counted out train and Post money for his day and gave mama about seven dollars for the plan.

  Wait, what?  YOU SAID it was a secret.

  Your father and I have no secrets from each other.  Dad was staring at the hourly rush build up of people walking into the station.  Mama pinched his knee but not too hard, Right honey?!

  Yes dear.  Dad couldn't break the stare zone.  Mom gave him the rest of her coffee.  This melted his face into smile, then kissing.  She pulled him back as he started to get out with one minute seventeen seconds to go.  More smooching.

  I wrangled myself into the still warm front seat of the station wagon.

  Irate negroes?

  A brother had hung up the phone with two feet of braided coil and summed up why Dad couldn't make it out of the City.

  My mother repeated the question, irate negroes?  Did he actually say that?

  We knew that it meant hotdogs or bologny sandwiches again instead of once a week spaghetti night.

  One tube sock'd foot aimed for the family room but the other slid towards my mother, that brother a stalwart always torn between siblings and parents and sides.  Answer me.  And why is your face a red sweaty mess?

  Lugging all Dad's tools back to the garage.  Not what he said.  I saw on TV.

  And his long legs disappeared him.

  My mother sworded the pen at me, YOU, go in the garage and start a list!

  Of what!??

  Now.

  She grabbed the dishtowel, group hanky a lot of days, and went to see the television.

  I crept towards following her but she swatted me away with the towel.  So I crept towards where she had a poetry-writing desk set up near the phone.  The Thesaurus was open to the A's.  I saw angry.  Then I saw irate.

  In the garage I dug out Dad's transistor radio and dialed through to my news channels.  Are Egyptians negroes?  I wondered.  I'd have to go back inside to look up consulate and diplomatic.

  We'd had half the neighborhood's tools locked up in their garage so people could go to work and take parents and kids to appointments.  The brother that was born a builder had gradually tipped the balance one tool at a time from locked up to compost pile area.  He was making a farm.  He'd replanted all the crabapples the neighbor rolled down the hill from Daddy's wheelbarrow.

  Living so close to NYC meant that thieves could vanpool.  They just stripped blocks of locks off and did all kinds of crimes.  And now this.  They'd gotten purses and luggage with visas.  They'd stolen make up and made themselves tanned and mascara'd their eyelashes.  Even cut up furs and wigs to make moustaches and beards.  It was even more serious than when the neighborhood teenagers did every sin in under twelve hours.

  Whether or not we could or couldn't say brotherhood, it was on a girls not allowed list of words; or had a flagpole or not, or had one without hardware in the morning; or knew some foreign was Greek and some I-talian, we knew American Law was all in a terrible scramble 'bout what was going to help

  Community a Japanese old person told a basement of people at St. Patrick's Christian-style collect money for lasagnas "meeting".  Long ago and on the other side of the world people who lived near each other had community.

  Whether it was a stolen thesis or relayed from school, startup would be nations and all kinds of groups were making manifestos like communist leaders, and all the traveling was letting thieves and hijackers and war criminals and "celebrities" just come and go as they pleased and Americans (sometimes literally) chained up in submission.  The religious turned political and political turned paramilitary led to a host of world event terrorism actions.  Daddy said we had to take it one day at a time, keep it simple, let God do his work, and be nice to each other.  House divided, he'd recall studying the Civil War and tell us something smart Lincoln had said.

  It's why nations do not want to let other courts judge a nation as just any old group.  Why nations can war and various groups cannot.  There's linchpin in this.

 

The churn

   Smooth lake broken by outboard motor.

  Work is closed for a couple days of maintenance.  Smart move in my opinion (imo).  When summer camps are being opened up, somebody has to switch things up in between seasons.  Long-runs require economically conservative ways of refreshing.  Sprucing up shows we care!

  It's the feel of the outboard motor churn on the lake right now.  Like when teachers who took jobs in Alaska needed to ship up their yearly belongings....once a year.  I can hear an older lake lady cautioning, yah bettah not be takin' that dingy for joy rides.  Know your purpose.  I'm always taken aback by older people seeming hip until I brain, conventional wisdom.  What's hip and trendy is survival through the churn.  No matter who wins the elections we're in one of those twin-year things.  Means, overall, not a lot of drastic economic change for America's blocs like moderates, living in poverty.

  In the churn, the outboard motor temporarily breaking up otherwise seemingly perfect stillness, people are wrestling with that action, naming that action, that happens like a thunderstorm cloud doing its thing.  All these aspects of cloud, factors of weather, particles in a globular.  Even as lightning cracks and air is sucked up, weighing down the rainwater to the points of saturation and

                Dumping

Starvation is not an overt practice in this.

Socially looking out for each other.

Subsidies...........independence.

  Thought processes have some churn as we transition into summer mode, for scholars.

  Did yah know that pushing the motor too hard has it flooding?!

Customized distribution

Only replacing what is sold, so

Logistics????

Ayup.

  Tradespeople explain the components of these human machines.  Blade and hawk.  I seen those blades in a breakfast kitchen.

Crossover.

A funnier boss one morning said, That's NOT eggs!  Who left the spackle on the grill cleaner thingie???!

  We were here in the 1990's too.  Don't worry?

  I recall many people moving from cities to suburbs had pollution poison and toxic shock to the systems, human body systems, so tradespeople shared knowledge about staying safe on the jobsite.  Dust masks, water on a sponge instead of sandpaper....eco-paints!  Formulas started with primitive art paints like milk paint!  Tea-staining.  All different kinds of people were talking to each other to find out x, y, z and to:

On a mission to be better better.

Authentic, our agers brainstormed about words that describe us.

And don't firget 'bout Dad's day!  Coming right up.

Before we have to do it

in haiku.

  Getting ugly gives me a headache.  And it's just not my way.  Doesn't really help anything anyway.

  Turning cold, internalizing bitterness, it's a drag.

  But here we go into a period of....

  We have been here before on all counts.  So I should just automatically be good at it right?  Not so for me.

  War mode doesn't come natural.  It taxes my little everyday brain.  I've thought of it like having other brains; like wearing different hats.  Some mature brain that's "sophisticated" gets it.  I intellectually understand that China considers Taiwan its possession.  That makes my cat hair go up on my back.

  Like an adult being mean to a child, it makes my stomach feel sick.  My core brain yells at my other brains and disconnected body parts....like hey, ethical brain....you should stick up for the kid....yo mouth, keep it shut until you decide what you should do; how does joining the war help anything?  Could it make it worse?  Mean up and join in?  Be something alternative?  Just walk away?  Comments about it to no one?  Talk about the mean grown up behind their back?  Why????? Philosophy brain wants to know.  Why is that person an asshole?  Why are some people and places thinking they can just own everyone and everything else?????

  High road brain.  Face getting a glazed look.  This happens a lot.  Instead of being a whole human being as the world gets uglier, I put the hurricane shutters on.  I've made a cardboard replica of my real self.  No mouth.  No ears.  No eyes.  No feelings about brutes, taker overers, and assholes.  Really.

  Keep your mouth shut, my professional brain demands.  Inside I'm rolling my eyes, my doolie brain says.  If I said out loud half of what I'm thinking and feeling right now....maybe they'll only cut off half your head, some actor part of my brain quips.

  Seriously though this is why people take extra time and effort to....what's the language of love and compassion?  It's like when a co-worker lets ya know, around here we do this....It's not saying you are stupid or anything, but more like, this is an entity and so a we, and there's been a to-date, and somethings work better if we do it this way.  It's not because the boss is an emperor, but....team!  Success!

  Oh yeah, it's all a process.  And lits of decision-making.  Pick your battles is what my mom told me about feeling my young adult freedom mixed with being a very disciplined person.  There's power in being both free and responsible.

  For all the criticism of media (and all its specific names) there is something important that happens in being able to get information.  I think back to a spread of conflict during the 2001-2021 time period.  It was morning shows on TV that had enduring ability to point out the subtleties of danger and keep a free and feeling people having a morning distinguished from the all-gray of war.  And it was word getting out, how we knew...hikers taken prisoner, writers imprisoned, people like stalkers taking money to find and hurt people, online and in real life.  All that was real.  So a war footing wasn't just about hoarding money....it was how we navigate danger and stay alive as a nation.

  I remember when....

  We were sort of laughing at ourselves, our fashion choices, when we decided as a group to get out of a decade of dulldroms.  There was a mass shift from fat ties to skinny ties.  Years later we were overtly talking about red, blue, and purple ties representing poltical party.  I knew guys who bought every kind of tie conceivable.  And I knew artists who created ties.

  In the overarching narratives about the world there are like ties that are signals, giving a head's up or some commentary.  We can hear for example, that some places are being anti-democracy, anti-insert nation.  And there are changes in rhetoric and action.  Right now we are group-talking about changes due to leadership influence on people; and we are talking in broad ways about differences.

  This morning I heard much being packed into the suitcase of "bipartisan support".  And heard that the broad entity, the EU, is getting flak for sending condolences, showing sympathy to Iran for that country's death of a president.  These are two larger group 'feet feeling under the waves for non-watery ground'.

  This has been happening in workplaces too.  Teams, companies try and set an appropriate tone.  In business we are always trying to makes sales, satisfy customers, keep staff well, stay on budget with expenses and profits.  It's ongoing.

  What r u doing?

  What r u doing?

  Between the every angle of a person being surveilled including the nose picking and wedgie adjusting and the extraordinary righteousness of "owners" of place and duty....I feel like, that's not a question that should be harped at an individual.

  I've saved some newpaper articles over the years and I practice-write responses.  Today I'm trying to get my head in gear with "Israel is its own 'closest' ally" by Dr. Harold A. Black, printed in a newspaper called, The Knoxville Focus.

  Undisclosed?  Naw.  Just another still pkng lot waiting to go to work.  Hoping I make enough tips-as-wage to warsh my uni.

  Will write in periodically, nothing official.  Just another made-in-china scented sun bathing beauty for the summer.  24 all over again.

Excellent reporting

 on this week's On the Media.  A look back on the 2000 election storm.

  Wow!  In some respects 2000 feels like yesterday, 2001 feels like yesterday and five hundred years ago.  23 years.  Two decades and three years.  365 x 10 + 365 x 10 + 365 x 3 = the number of days.

  Our elections, presidential, come every four years.  Four years like a turn in high school.  Time has different feelings to me, usually depending on "productivity" and "challenge".

blink of an eye

spinning my wheels

hitting head against wall

moving forward

HALT!

Stop or I'll say stop again.

  It's often with profound and great relief that young people hear from other age groups on cause and mission.  And certainly human-to-human sharing of experience has benefitted cavemen to contemporaries.  Even when we are losing a battle, it's essential to remember longer-term life, different focus at different times.  That was part of why people named an academic degree: interdisciplinary arts.  Allowing for different focus at different times; different tools for occasions.  Dîfferent combinations of scholarship and field practice for activism, disengaging, just living...any and all professions.  Part of it was answer to that old frustration of round hole, square peg.

  Some things change, and some stay the same seems to be an anchor and overarching theme in life and American politics.

A car camping scavanger hunt

  The themed cardstock.

  The ability to rip paper.

  Storytelling to the max!

  Making sounds with any old thing.  Even this, eeeeeeew, who left a grapefruit in here?  It's petrified.  Wasn't that from a vacation before Covid????

  Can you imagine it?

  Do you remember it?

  Did you see it or just hear about it?

  History/present.  Ideas about the future.

  "What are u looking for?"

  "Just some peace and quiet."

  Adjusting.  Look in her purse, she's got a whole world in there!

  Plus these!  A kid put a fistful of rocks inside.

  We hadn't actually left the driveway.  We were out of gas.  Impromptu.  Routine busters don't have to be extravagant.  Stuff that comes up doesn't have to a crisis.  Practice, roll with the punches.

  

 

  A lot of America's ongoing solvable issues have to do with us being professional.

  In business there is no place for hate.

  In professional services there is no space for divisive to divide.

  If and when.

  The word, divisive, is coming up a lot these days in regards people and politics.  It implies action.  It's tense or part of speech or something is different from other uses of the word like division, dividing.

  I suppose that as the product of a people that split atoms and carried out other actions in relation to such division, it is no wonder, here in the 21st century, we are being chastised into deep thought about this concept so opposite unity, united, union.

  We are also left to tend to lingering business that we have often dragged forth via party politics.

  Our political parties do not "hate" each other.

  Even a military delineation of axis and allies does not posit a formula of hating each other.

  A building is an inanimate object.  A missile is an inanimate object.  A "body politic" is not an inanimate object.

  Even in response to a genocide or an act of terrorism, a military/our military is not responding to hate.

  John 20:26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

Fear

   Fear is a funny thing.  It can be a chronic condition that goes along with not feeling confident, feeling depressed.  It can sneak up as an animal instinct.  It can be contagious.  But it can also be confronted.  Exposed.  Diminished.

  Sometimes we have personal fear(s) and sometimes it's a group thing.

  Very often we treat it as the decades-old filing cabinet in the basement that never gets lugged to the dump and has drawers stuck open; goes in there, lots of stuff.  We kinda forget about that stuff until something happens or there's disturbance and then all that vague, stuff can be activated.

  In the USA we've developed theory and therapy to deal with fear.  We've been obsessed from time to time with scary movies, scary characteristics of others, scary stuff we can virtually confront, non-physically entreat with.  Foreigners wonder at our relationship with Halloween.  Criminals and terrorists make money actualizing fear in our lives.

  Part of the individualization process, working through, overcoming fear.  Part of duty, or load or burden on "leaders"--facing fear.  It's even part of cultural advance and retreat...how a group ignores, addresses, solves, honors and disrespects fear.

  Fear can be a healthy emotion tied to experience.  It can also be a regret that we didn't fear something or someone.  It's often a toxin and intoxicant too.  And maybe it's in its power to be used where fear borders hate.  Afterall, "pure hatred" is not or maybe, is rarely an attribute or characteristic that human beings are born with.  So we wonder what's near that?  

  On the map of behavior, the spectrum of sentiment, in the surgery of emotion-fuel motivating people....where do we place "this"?

   There was a scramble in a lot of ways!  Hold on I'll recount some bits.

  John 20:28. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and My God.

  Not sure that it had occurred to people that the Baby Boomer generation was huge; large and in charge!  And they were, since their births, the economic engine of the mainstay.  As the Greatest Generation mixing back into civilian population, the Baby Boomers started growing up and navigating a world that had nuked, and that had like the carpenter fixing up the carpenter's wife's house last, NOT RETREATED.  The fighting went on in the Pacific for quite some time after Europe started painting some orderly driving signs post-Victory.

  Hitler and the damages wrought were world-mind-blowing.  And in the way the hardcore military people next marched to deal with "Korea" and world diplomats and social service people did trauma recovery work, the healing that needed to happen was on a smithereened human and sense of humanity.

  Vietnam was more dealing with a world perforated on capitalism/communism than any kind of decision to hate, to enemy.  What the little heroic nation found was that in foreign affairs....the line is razor thin.

  After Vietnam there was a mini-version of Allies/Axis re-study.  Back tracking to Colonial in order to not sieve what gains democracy and autocracy (?) had made in rebuilding nation-selves and ideology.

  Culturally in many ways there was a game of freeze tag.  But for the "radicals" rocking the boats, mostly to convey stuff like....racism and religious creed....as an intellectualism grappled with its own existence/absence it was also called upon in the way a child who has been orphaned may or may not feel drawn to a someone to trust....maybe the pastor might have an answer....maybe someone else's grandma might have an extra cookie and story of the old world.

  Fashion and food and music and television was given out in black and white first.  Comedy was cautiously prepared and delivered like sermons at Mass or water pills for "heart problems".

  In the late 1950's and 1960's, in mass or group reality, "counter-culture" was as proportionally enormous as it was in Galileo's day when being deemed "heretic" also had personally epic consequence.

  We moved as a spongy number one big hand defending the right to like a sports team, gradually into; a kid started a wave of hands up and down in a stadium....Can we do it too Ma?????

  Get ready, our mother would give fair warning to the younger kids.

  At homes from events and gatherings people needed to "process" what things were meaning.

  "Gen X" was only producing a certain amount of truck drivers per high school graduation year; likewise accountants; the same with enlisting.  Grocery stores, department stores, schools, and other "settled" institution as infrastructure were careers and lifetime (sometimes generational) professions and trades.

  Meanwhile travel was increasing; ways people could live in other countries were blooming; intangibles like advertising and "pop culture" were beginning to go faster and faster....

I gotta get ready for work

   We chased them into Kuwait to just say no to that.

  So as a Stateside Correspondent, I asked, 

  Why did the action seem so small?

  An off-the-record military person first told me the question would be relayed up.  Then tried to explain 

              proportion.

  Something else in the tightly wound retroactively-named-formula: crisis, action, crisis, action.

Formulaic, pendulum, drift, ease, no I am not running right out to see Furioso.

  Part of why Russia does military purge is to shorten tour of duty for some and move people.  Thru the ranks and in/out of status.

  We've run into this issue ourselves on working "holiday".  Some holidays have Veterans as veterans and active.  The crevasse between axis and allies right now.  We've got a spideyman patch in some places since, there's fierce fighting over control of the remnant of the masses.

  Arguing over activism, qualifications, etc. Not possible in the black which is kinda all over at the moment.  Our country is in the red.  Kramer would recall George Washington having to prove birth (in England) to a Congress voting to fund/appropriate the money that made the difference between a necessary two-army State/Nation.  At the time, the "fight for independence" couldn't be publically considered a "foreign war".  Committing to such language before Proclamations makes revolutionary blood bath, not Nation-Victory.  Not taking official action, however, is making pockets or cavities of yaddah yaddah

  I had to leave where I worked as a waitress last night to get safe from co-worker abuse of me.  I'm pursuing some carpentry leads.

   On popular music these days I hear a lot of

  I think

  anthems

  Reminds me of George Washington's low point before Independence.  People rallied in their own ways as they grappled with how things were piling up on the scales.

  When the bones are good

  Poets couched criticism to keep a low profile; churning sentiment, the ocean spray plonked words like skeleton keys.  There was a shift from romance, let's just write about love and shit, into

  There were complicated morale issues.  Fur trappers couldn't be bothered with Cotillion clothing measurements.  Spies were ambiguous.  The compassing, canon-toting ragged uniformed, tired legs couldn't be anything but soldiers.  Town squares were still forts but with outlets like pubs and taverns there was, on the sly, increasing chatter like off-track-betting.

  The start up nation went through a bunch of different flag designs.

  People were eating a lot of onions.

  There was and wasn't a general sense of united.

  Back when our poets were trying to convince us that we didn't start the fire psychologists were pushing hard for personal responsibility.  There was a shift from having become a pop rocks sugar-coated warring culture, abusive as all get out, BUT

  We couldn't seem to decide on united beyond blue jeans.

  I was traveling a lot.  My touchstone was my mother's take on Olympic ice skating.  For my reams and reams of wrestle, she'd keynote as the calm continuum, a master wordsmith, a brilliant commentator because she just uttered that truth;

  That truth that is standing before you in an understated formal-wear version of Glory.

  That one's under a lot of pressure, she'd get me to look up from reading and see a Russian trying to out point another.  I'd notice whole scene on screen and sink back into my nautilus shell.

  Oooooo, she'd wince as a Korean slightly turned an ankle.  Aaaaah, she'd be joyous for the dance-skating couple who'd gone to college and delivered pizza to get to the pinnacle.  They don't give up, I'd hear her say as I was reading a paragraph on shredded torsos and landmines.

  Some shifts are sea change.  Some wars come to people.  Other shifts are subtle.  Sometimes people slide and/or backslide into warring.  There is a continuum even when there is obliteration.

  The Serb "demands" were nothing new in the formulas of culture/warring that had developed as the Cold War hung like a blimp no one would bust.  Hostages, embassy take-overs, the tit for tat reporting turned jungle of information running craggy like Vietnam's peaks and valleys, just too lates in sat reports and phospherous residue....even people not directly involved with "war" had become accustomed.  In the 1980's and early 90's the TV magazine show 60 Minutes was a Reader's Digest version of the world.

  Likewise the photograph by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos (page 243, Problem), "Dr. Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, exhumes the blindfolded skull of a Kurdish teenager from a mass grave in Erbil, northern Iraq, December 1991" is the equivalent to a WPA image of woman holding rusty-bottom bucket.

  People "vegged out" in front of episodes of Ring the Bell as we had Gilligan's Island.  Without red, white, and blue balloons an America created a parallel universe where it was dropping into a USO tent.  Like the parents who bought toys by the cartfull and dry cleaned Granny's afghan every spring, a virtual safe space was put into place before the Internet and social media.  And the TV networks were able to pinpoint hacks into the TV tubes, like Hamas in ski masks targeting widest audience during Sunday evening Disney programming.  Spliced it from where?????  Uniformed AV people rank and filed with light bulb electronics.

  What blanched Bob Simon's tan was the tensions like earth quake pressing news people to believe "they" should be able to prevent everything.  "They" should be the "intervention".  That, and, in a feld swoop, partly televised, there was the root-shift....

  "Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic was not dabbling or using a petty landgrab to send a political signal; he was taking a huge chunk of internationally 'protected' territory and challenging the world to stop him" (preface, xiii).

The octopus, or,

 This is complicated thinking and not just for young people.

  Real, Heart of Darkness type stuff.

  Our country, western tradition's core.  It's how we survive the nations ascending and descending.

  It's not burning each other up as witches.  And not trading Capitalism for corruption and crime.

  It's classic tales of new people per diem, confrontation, and engagement as collisions occur in the universe.  It's start-ups and adoptions and bramble, oh my!

  How's that working for you?  The question sort of echoed and barely made it into my been-at-a-concert ears.  New shoes, wrecked.  Memorial Day white pants, blotched with red wine and dirt samples of contemporary culture.  Apparently, I needed oxygen.  I'd parked my wilting self on a knee wall close to an exit but not all the way to an ocean of a parking lot.  The older couple with tanks of the stuff on pull carts broke open a crispy new lead, hose and hooked me up.

  Do you think I'm dying?

  We all dying sooner or later Missie.

  The words of the man made it over the wall.  The absence of anything and noise wall.  My brain realized the man had made great effort to push the words in the direction of me.  Me!  I'm still me!

  Don't talk, it works better, the woman patted my knee.

  I had sworn to God via my mother never to go to a Greatful Dead concert.  To date I had managed to live nineteen years of 100% truth at the end of the day.  A turn towards journalism from novel-thinking though

  At?  My father held the phone in the air for about four minutes while my mom decided if she was going to talk to me.

  Not really at.

  Near.

  Did you hear me?

  Is this long distance?  My father inquired of the collect call.

  What's this about?  An angry-sounding sibling picked up another phone and coloneled.

  Never mind.  I'll see you all someday.  Click.

  The oxygen tanks on wheels had left condensation tracks away.  The predawn sky was taking on light and cloudshapes were chunks of darker charcoal not moving very fast.

  She and then they had promised I wouldn't be a revolutionary.  I know nothing about Russia, I'd reiterated.  Berlin is not in Russia, a thickly accented person said from the front seat without turning around.

  Face half beat red from not moving.

  THERE YOU ARE LARA

  I bursted, both ends.

  She blew out a breath and without breaking eye contact threw me the sweater that had been over her briefcase arm and she said, 

  Near an airport

  Found you

  I sucked in all my breath to stop the bursting, wiped my face with the sweater and then sat on it long enough to wrap the sleeves around my waist.

  Now will you work with me?

  In the City I got a telegram from my mother:

  Your. Grounded.  Don't.  Come.  Home.  Until.  You.  Figure.  Out.  Your.  Your.  Future.  Love.  Mom.

  In the orchestra playing as the wall came down over years I played strings with Didion.

  When I bumped into an old French friend on a dancefloor in Montreal, half on purpose, and blurted out her pal-name in the flash of recognition, she made dance moves, wagging her finger, shaking her head, mouthing No, nooooo, no; hands clasped hiding the steeple, then shaking tremble, dropping arms to sides and wiggling, away.  A couple decades later people were trying to relay such times to younger people the way a grandpa will demand the wrench, god dammit, the wrench.  Just had the thing fixed, give it!!  Yep.  Now.  Here.  We are.  "Feeding the pigs together."

  It will still be cheaper here, a foreign-accented man said to me in the aisle of a home improvement store in June 2020.

  "America's promises, which Serb gunners took seriously at first, bought Sarajevans a brief reprieve.  But they also raised expectations among Bosnians that they were safe to live again.  As it turned out, the brutality of Serb political, military, and paramilitary leaders would be met with condemnation but not with the promised military intervention" (Problem, preface).

  Not a genocide then.  That was part of the big tidal plain floods all along.  And hot spot activity just splashed all over pop culture.  Outside of records' offices nothing was categorical.  Then digi-this-and-that eliminated boundaries twixt wars and revolutions and economies and "styles" like Olestra taking the healthy gut materials out of a body with the oily discharge. 

  All the coming and going without language and law enforcing place and people blurred even nation-builders into the smoking holes of 9112001.

What's on trial?

   "But American resolve soon wilted"....

  Be it resolved ?  The internet needed a Constitution or an Accord...

  "Saving Bosnian lives was not deemed worth risking U.S. soldiers or challenging America's European allies who wanted to remain neutral"....

Why the word "risk"?

What's risky about this?  Break it down teleologically.

Why?  A fifth column journalism question that helps define _________.

"Clinton and his team shifted from the language of genocide to that of 'tragedy' and 'civil war,' downplaying public expectations that there was anything the United States could do"....

Break it down militarily.

  Language as form.  Language as place.

  Projectiles are not "just language".

  Immediately part of the problem with non-Parliamentary party politics had to do with rank and file, subordination and wit.

  Tarring and feathering was more of a popular version of military command.  So few were "hung for treason" because the Constitution gave equal weight.  In 1848 differing "republicans" were running around claiming territory.  In Russia there was "revolution".  The world's ruckous fighting was over flag and favoritism.  Degrees of violence were still more like Shakespeare's sarcasm.

To the mat????

 Let's get ________ on their asses!

Uppercut!!

You can't tackle a herd of buffalo; tact?

Everybody's different, so we have "general rules of thumb".

  A university chapter of STD was brainstorming as if we'd taken a campaign job.  Pondering "appeal".  

As in advertising should have appeal.

Teleological, and don't say asses.

Change is gonna come.

Rule of thumb?  Is that Swedish or something?  How do we explain it to the Chinese?

Like a canister of obnoxious sound; there was something blown,

Indicating: a shift, politically

In time of season

The vigor with which the young people "manned up" was like Big Sur waves.

  A creative started shooting bean bags out of a hand-cranked pipe.  GET AWAY!!!!!  She hollered.

  All is WAR, a calm, fat walleted Republican kid was relaying from having been home for dinner.

  WHY????? Another kid in an amalgam of clothing collected from spending the night in the homeless camps yell-asked.

  Is that a frat tee?  A love interest inquired from the fringe of my Jesus bubble.

  Sigma Tau Delta, it's an English thing.

  A graduate student was brushing clumps of hair onto a restaurant bar towel.

  "NO. No.  No."

  Despite the ambassador's plea of 1000; He...no...killed more than 7000.

"The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred" (preface, xv).

1848.  The United States of America.

Chapter 16

   If our great and grandparents were the Greatest Generation for securing the freedoms of democracy, our parents' generation were genius at business.

         Iacocca and the Japs.

A man falls

A shell lands on a downtown market

"The graphic images from this massacre generated widespread American sympathy and galvanized President Bill Clinton and his NATO allies.  They issued an unprecedented ultimatum, in which they threatened massive air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs if they resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo or continued what Clinton described as the 'murder of innocents'" (preface, "A Problem From Hell").

  For us the decade of the 1990's had started with as much immense hope as there was misery in the world.  Israel and America's political leaders seemed to be hearing us"

"us", a quickly burning-out "bunch"

compared to the boomers in

size, doggedly chanting for 

World Peace, like we'd caught 

an unnamed virus from Pope 

John Paul.  The hid-their-lights 

when necessary "activists" and 

"progressives" to Cold War 

stalemate-cooled-icy-vicious-behind-the-scenes had chained themselves to trees and the radicals rafted into subtle impact zones to be, sometimes not so subtlely.  Greenpeace, Gorilla Girls, 28 Days and the pursuit of drug-doing as lifestyle: Grunge, were statementing some sort of group Will & Testament.  Plenty of us waffled between ascetic and just "individual" getting into the microsegments of time as 24/7 kid-pay jobs replaced education system babysitting in our lives. Strategists warned of shifts in the balance of power but the Boomer engine repeatedly proved outboard motor to post-Vietnam stasis in D.C.

  Don't rock the boat generally meant not to jeopardize the group buffet. 

Margaret Thatcher in Moonboots.  It was just one of those sayings amongst creatives sometimes seeing politics taking cues from popular.  Our agers came up with dozens of soundy expressions to indicate gear-shift.  They said, he said, she said, it:

  Trying to "go with the flow" sometimes meant hanging on every word, more often ignoring, and then increasingly just be in the moment.  For those of us not wanting to fling ourselves off bridges with bungee cords or otherwise, just out of focus, slightly out of frame served as a cocktail: ingredients--Constitution + Living It.

  Loosed from the moors and morals by tribal viking shields focused/focusing on 1. Keeping up with the Joneses 2. Glossy glossy frus frus ode du toilet and talcum powder 3. Go west young people; ours produced.  Mostly to not suprafanfare but Oprah gave shout outs.

  For every pair of mom jeans, a cut out butt section started a recycle project.

  Their ALWAYS older than us, young women rageboasted of twin beauty mothers.  When ya coming home, I don't know when had been a lullaby.  Pass the what?  Pass the popcorn was knowing, I can change me, but

  In the days and days after September 11th there was just as much shock at where does this leave our group as there was at rogue terrorists who could be so

  Part of the literature is peering through a telescope at a planet post world on fire; a lot of it was suggestions on what to do; most exuded both uncertainty and forged-into what did you expect.  Some measure of mass consciousness had incrementally sunk.  Not unlike in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the what does it matter now obliterated genuine optimism regarding redemption.  Like Ossama Bin Laden had caught a gold fish in a bottle and sent a message back:

This is your culture on crack, 

The terrorists put out the cigarette butts.

  Stillness.

  A small footpath through the ashes.

  Another tower.

  Hamas gunning down concert goers.

  Another village wiped away.

  1995.  Buick put out a fifty year since 1945 commemorative TIME magazine issue.  "The hour was late, all was chummy good will when Molotov remarked that at last he could tell the others what had happened to those Poles."

Sometimes a stick, sometimes a carrot

   Some our-agers were at a real diner in New York City.  The clang of real dishes, a server's crisp white towel with Manhattan clam chowder like a Chagall, in India, a friend of a friend kept making comparison between cultures.  Someone who'd drank the night before trying to make sense of napkin notes.  A jokester getting cynical on like a Halloween mask.  Sports on the TV; JAG on another TV; and Murphy Brown on a third TV.  Personal TVs, not sanctioned flat screens.

  My mind wandered, up north, coming on summer.  Snap peas, shoots, muddy rubber boots, slowly coming out of winter mode, people like bears.

  Stick figure drawings more than "ani-may", a writer beating a character into submission.  I call that housekeeping, a pudgy guy said.  A woman piled receipts on top of the cartoons.  Housekeeping, she said in a tight-chested high pitch.

  Yes, but if a philosophy doesn't have a form, is it really philo?

  Yo, Socrates, fries or onion rings?

  The fizz of the soda like atoms doing their thing.  Chicago, I reported on the whereabouts of some of our bards.  The poets had taken the lead like running the Olympic torch through villages.  "Hip Hop" had freaked out the mayors of certain cities where venue-planning was strategic for both "the peacers" and the

  What to call people, my own literary self in a perpetual tea cup dangling on a string above America as a themepark.

  I vill tewl yooo, the French girl finally answered to the posed question: Who would you like to beat?

  All of us were hanging

in a living free-write of

           Expression

Suspended from a ceiling of oppression, repression, the air near the bull's eye, target-seeking, targeted, being funneled, funneling

  This place is getting downright Cuban, the jokester said coming out of the bathroom.

  

  Customer or SalesPERSON??? The tuxedo'd asked at the Convention Center.

  Both, our representative answered in a booming voice tamed professional.

Sundresses and cotton slacks

   It was Daddy's idea.  The world had had a hard year.  No sense dragging it all onto Mother's Day.  Crispy, cozy, casual.  No sense looking like the country's politics had been frontlines of a civil war.  Chicken and corn and tomatoes.  And fold the paper napkins nice.

   Of course it is, more dangerous the way it's been handled.  All the bad guys ever hear is that the few got AID.  And the moderates of the world tend to think, oh, the problem got money, no worries.

  You could hear it in the news spin/script the past few days....

  Vague and armed groups amassing in vague places where all sorts of weapons flow across "boundaries"; territory jurisdiction changes; changes in "leadership" the world over....there's opinion and criticism, talks and targets.  The aggressors have been quite active over the ast few years.

  Meanwhile all the average person can do is follow along with a broom and dustpan.  We got elbow grease!

A sound

 of battle is in the land, and of great destruction.  Jeremiah 50:22

  In the old days, people gathered as congre-gation, they heard from people who studied God's Word where they, in that time period, were at.  The prophet people relayed history to date....where the people had gotten off track, how they adjusted course, and where they hadn't.  God was in charge the whole time.  Whether the people were remembering to care about each other and tend commitments, Commandments, or whether they were fighting each other, fighting selves, fighting with God, God was in charge the whole time.

  The prophets were not the only people in the congregation.  Prophets were bards and mediatrix.  They would mediate all the voices of the congregation and pray about all tensions and causes to celebrate.  They would listen.  God would indicate through the process of being in the role of prophet, best practice; things on the horizon; changes that could be made; God's....'through-line'.

  God had been quite dramatic about certain things, like WHO is God; WHO made everything; HOW not God beings had witnessed and experienced again and again not being God.  All through the Old Testament, the bedrock of the New Testament God makes decisions.  And free will allows for everybody and everything else to abide by God's decisions, or

  Way back in the Garden of Eden, the apple is placed in the story as a symbol.  God had said, Stay off that tree's fruit!  Kind of like the Ten Commandments say, Thou shalt not kill.  And what happened?  The also symbolized "evil" tempts and persuades; the non-God beings Adam and Eve stray from their union/commitment with God.  They can't then.  They can't continue in perfect union with God.  They trespassed.  God made decision.

  Much time passed.  Some say God felt lonely too.  That He came up with a reparation plan.  That plan was Jesus.  God would send his only son-also-God, Jesus, to teach the world about "love" and "forgiveness".

    By the earth time that Jesus came, humanity was quite wandered away from ideal.  Jesus had lots of material to work with in explaining why his/our father reprimands, chastises, requires people to admit or confess up to doing against God; forgetting about God; worshipping other things; hurting self and others; wreaking havoc.  Even knowingly and unknowingly joining up with evil, people do.  

  Jesus and those first disciples lived by example.  Yes, they affirmed, there's human condition.  But greater than all that misery and confusion, ecstasy and passion, greater even than violence and death and evil, is God.  I AM, God had spent a lot of time explaining.  And then sent a part of himself to walk with for a time.

  Part of why Jesus cried so hard before his suffering and crucifixion transpired was because even as the son of God, he could not change all the people into peaceful; He had to accept God's decision(s) too.  People and darker spiritual forces (the forms of evil) were not accepting God as ultimate.  Jesus also taught that God's got long, long term plans.  As one lifetime humans (part of the condition), all of us, even Jesus as a soul in a human body, only have so much time here.

  Jesus devoted himself.  He glimpsed and felt the entire human experience; prayed and committed to absolute faith, being in God's hands...he dedicated his suffering and human death to the overarching principle of the forgiveness of sin.  In his devotion to God AND to the human family, Jesus translated the power of mercy and love; He mediated a way.

 

  One day postCovid I was doing the dishes when a TV program caught my attention.  It was students and professors talking about the collapse of state education.  The interviewer may as well have been an open mic and VCR.  All the science departments just

  It was similar to what Victoria Bruce discovered about the people living around a volcano.

  Political promises v corruption.  The people the size of ants with "scientific" equipment scrounged, come by, repaired and repaired, passed from generation to generation, the only survivor, the instruments, the equipment.

  Hospitals the world over are kept as fronts after bloodbath and pillage.  

  Educational titling.

  Sometimes people marvel at how a piece of chocolate came to exist in a desert.

The absence of description

 

  The Renaissance painters revealing truths about their patrons with the turn of a brushstroke; Shakespeare line by line swipes at hypocrisy and corruption, personality quirks and changing morals; Non-textual controversy in iconic photographs of the poor; Surveillance imagery of people the size of ants being annihilated.

  Incremental democracy, like a staircase littered, hierarchical establishment on either end, prison at the bottom, authoritarian at the top.

  It was no wonder so many walked away.  From the staircase.

  The Beige.  Embroidery floss and posters.  Skateboards, cement.  Jam shorts, graffiti'd beach towels.  Tobasco sauce on powdered eggs.  A pinstripe on Grandpappy's old Ford.

  On the whole Capitalism sustains a surviving remnant despite the devastation: Debt, famine, plague.  Americans hand-paint signs when the neons lose their glow.  One more potato chunk and I will buy your hashbrowns at that price.

  Where are your manners?  Mama sharped to rouse us out of staring at.  At the door were punks and greasers.  There was no where else to go.  For all the endless possibility of road trip and "different," living the dream of not working and free...here came home a motley group covered in tattoos, paints, jewelry, layers of clothing and leathers.  Someone had remembered our Mom had said.  She pushed her way through us and opened the door and squeezed her way past a viking in a biker vest and redirected coming home to the patio.

  Where have you been?  She asked the "adventurers".

  Friends-over dashed to the phone to see if they could stay for dinner.

 

"She called us beautiful"

 Beautiful people, that's what she said.  That was all she said.  For a good five minutes the room was filling with end of residency.  And the energies.

  Beautiful people.  Us.  All.

  Covered in wars and diggings, downpour and static air, cross cultural layers, and with tools to define boundary.

  People putting markers on folding chairs, loved ones to come!

  Mine!  Yours!  Two people walking around swapping articles of clothing.  Performance Art?  Someone asked so no answer was given.

  Having survived semester was accomplishment.  Beautiful people.  

  An invitation, Your Presence Requested, sketch of a person in mirror, drawing self.

  The sense that it might be a spoof.  How could classwork make a master?  Commence doing life.  This piece of paper says,

  Many of us left that semester born in our call.  Others had parents and siblings come to help reconnect images of self with family.  People were chucking whole "homes" out the windows into dumpsters.  A Rwandan male student cried.  Ebony porcelin teapot, Does the world only want our tears?

  

  Postcards written before the parting.

  Semester college.  One summer I couldn't wait to get home to my parents' slip and slide; the next I was unfit to go to their home!

  I could not utter a curse-free sentence for the rage/outrage, and could only sputter bits and pieces of a dissertation.  I could draw memorized maps of the world but couldn't, apparently, write my way out of a bag.  Didn't YOU get the memo¿?

  "What did it say?"

  'The Cold War is over.'

  The dorm door slammed so hard the photo show someone had installed along the hallway went crooked.

  I thought it wasn't a war, my voice came out of chest so tight I sounded like Mickey Mouse.  Fallaci's legs were crossing all the string in a can boundary markers on the sports field.  I couldn't keep up with so much.

  Weeks later we were being let out of a city building.

  Are you the medical attention?  I asked of a blueblack clad in a sort of leather catcher's mitt.

  Ladies, I want you to go directly down these stairs

  I CAN'T MOVE

  When you get yourselves up and ready for the day, go directly down these stairs to Decom

  Decom???

  I cannot move, my legs, LaRA

  Yes sir, I said staring at the machine gun held in perfectly upright script position.

Who's to say?

   Blank piece of paper.

  It seemed like all those tensions stirred into the tinder of peaceful caught spark and what was left of multiple cities was something glinty, skeletal, guts burned off by the stratosphere of media.

Even in the worst shitpiles, my God treats me special

   the specialness of faith

Imagine being locked in a prison cell with no name, no rights, no access to law; very little chance of survival; Would you feel your faith?

Ways we feel our faith vary like snowflakes.

  For some it's being on Jeopardy with questions and answers to category like, Things that fly around in the universe.

  For others, a bead of dew never quite plopping onto a leaf in a breeze.

  For me, 

Crem de la crem

  We couldn't afford to go anywhere for spring break.  Businesspeople, economic conservatives, communicators, creatives, Walter and I kept flippung the lid up on the pizza box and not eating that.  We'd been stuck together on date nights before but usually entertained ourselves just watching contemporaries do their thing.  This time everybody had gone to Florida.  By the third beer Walter settled his remote on volleyball, our-agers.

  I always think of this when it's clear that the Democraps are going into all the offices and the Republ-i-cans turn themselves into tacos.  Blankets, books, sofas, the middle ground high road.  Not a "couch potato", more like a taco, to: Does it look like I want to sit here on my ass for the next four years?!?  

  Potato, taco, either way....cocooning

  Waiting.

  Chrysalis stage to a national reset.

  Like our military friends who are the first to turn choking on tears about war into words, orders usually, Get the kids in the car; PULL, to an outstretch....there are those one step ahead in the race, seeing the plan.

  Those same older brothers that will chide a dreamer, will pick up a thrown corsage or campaign pin and wrestle flung back onto lapel, back onto mantel, back into cradle.  The Republic itself, family AND hearth.

  In '92 we were still wearing our 1984 clothes.  Walter's tummy was starting to show beneath his tee shirt.  He grabbed it and pulled

 himself off the sofa, held out an arm, Dis thance isthmus?

  We were actually exhausted like Jim Bo Hannan and PJ Harvey on a ninth day of eating canned weinies found in one of those cotton skirt covered cinderblock hidey hole food stores.

  Like a donation-goal thermometer, the communicators on our college campus had held the lines open while projects launched and stars were born.  Pump Up the Volume had been more of a manifesto to our-agers, like Purple Rain our "code" could not just be scripted into computer-input.

  Our slow dance squish was hard to interrupt even as the "us" around on campus started finding apartment, media, "food"....

  Did you smuggle this exile?

  Answer the question.

  Walter and I had almost fallen asleep, still dancing, the "party" just went on around us, the short, scarry-faced man in a loose fitting jogging suit was shoving a passport-sized square of a photograph in between my face and Walter's shoulder.

  Italy provided Ukraine with 8 packages of military aid in 2022 and 2023 and will intend to maintain the same level of additional military support in 2024, which shall be determined in detail through consultations between the participants and taking into account Ukraine's contingent needs.Feb 24, 2024

  Several hours after the party that never happened, happened

  Walter had convinced a younger classperson to take a pop-up internship to help sort out who all had come to the random dorm/apartment sanctuary "room".  No one had planned to encounter the INS so birth certifucates had to be found, yaddah yaddah

   Jordanian pilots on fire 

                   In a cage.

               Airliners disappearing.

St. Vincent in Paris, Paul 

in Mars Hill,

still we wait

already told [truth in prophecy revealed]

  Kentucky Derby days are always long.  A whole lot of juleping to get to momentary race and prize.  Same way some envision WW3.  Really.

  One interesting aspect of St. Paul in Mars Hill is that he goes into their thinking, speaks to the people in their terms.  Maybe it's intuition or the Holy Spirit, but St. Paul seems to know there would be revisiting and revisiting of same arguments between humanity.  I think this has to do with replacing and/or substituting God in equasions of trust.

  Literary-wise Updike's ottoman was the perfect non-news event.

 

     

  In other years the fams collided.  Relatively same issues.  Cease-fire calls "on the table"; economies had been ground to dulldroms pandemic and hot spots; monies on the loose in a baby's down moment.  After the bombs had poisoned the Hiroshima and Nagasaki people, and the treacherous fighting continued in the Pacific on a media-back-burner, drinks on the patio would be served once the baby was down.  The world aids/fams were frontline in and outs to "containment" that could be mustered by the misfits.  Michener describes the sort of metamorphisis that happens in place and people as war supplies and mode change around despite same-old pagentry or 'bidentry'.

The one?

   I guess some writing pieces are like songs.

  Color in the Coal was a core sample of a mountain my generation came upon.

  My own drill even cut across the geographies or stratography of my own life.  Some of us turned focus to art even as the dust of the Towers got on the foreheads of football players turned soldier and answering the call to duty.

  I was reluctant to get back into more scholarly thinking and writing.  Making money and so good sleep was the priority.  And I've always been more business than artistic.  Sinead O'Conner was still alive.  Fiery messages in music had coiled into swaths of style, interests, and occasionally some person from some popular front would make it across a bridge from somewhere else.  What it felt like right up to loved ones being taken hostage.

  Reading a history of Women in Art left me confused.  That confusion was compounded by what was happening in the world.  I couldn't find the healing efforts put into hybrid fields of work in the art book.  There'd been scenes, and shows, and movements, it looked like, there were scraps of "bodies of work" and rumors about what had happened.  I scrounged for art, marks, sounds, something left behind by the other artists.

  Was piecing together pieces of the story of the artists of Black Mountain College and the Happenings, Kaprow wrote about the art of the time breeching the biege bulldoze by people participating.  Like the "new journalism" being progressive within newspaper page, hard to pin someone's personal growth in an endeavor as what's happening across the board.  I think that's something that happens with pop culture.  Something cool, centerstage!

  Doesn't necessarily mean the nation would vote for the something cool.

  I gottah get ready for work.  This weekend is one of the first for lots going on post-winter.

  I got out of the books and pamphlets because one artist shot another with a handgun.  Because I was a paperdoll who cared to project bust dysfunction.  Only a step ahead of what cracks a couple decades ago 

Porn through the Post Office?!

   Yesterday I walked into a room and on the TV was a Family Feud Classic.  It kind of encapsulated that sense of growing up.  The postcard of the past is more backdrop than present.  And somehow we face the present as being in the present not so much as people with pasts.

  At one of my first jobs, selling coffee and donuts, a man came in one day.  Before I could force my face into a professional mask I winced and made an oooooo sound because whatever had happened to the man must have hurt.  He right away said, It doesn't hurt anymore!

  What happened?

  The man explained what a radiator cap on a vehicle was and how if'n a person opens that when it's hot, a person can get scalded.  It took a good minute for a tremble to come into my hand as I passed the cup of coffee to him.  I was like a horse on legs that just were.  There wasn't a lot of time and space between life all around and me on these "legs".

  I don't have many of my books with me.  One of the most important I've read was a history of the U.S. Post office.  I was pondering censorship and free speech.  In the history of the US, there's a critical link between the monies Congress has and what gets communicated.  There's a chapter like a still life of controversy.

The drag queen?

   There's been the expression, you can't make this up.  It applies to situation that presents itself as "perfect" or as case in point, or, loaded with meaning or irony and that actually happened.  

  Of course it was a drag queen searching for a sole of a shoe in a garbage bag filled with empty drug baggies.  Just witnessing people, ourselves in action, humans....the story is all there.  We don't have to write fiction or make up story at all in such a dynamic world.

  So, what is fiction?  Why do we fictionalize?  Are we able to plot-twist and symbolize and character real life the way we do in writing?  What does reading life as it is tell us?

  It's like theatre in real life, I said to a younger person of witnessing, really observing 1994.

  In a never written fiction I would have said to someone, I saw a drag queen!  And the someone would've asked, Was she beautiful?

  I did ask the same questions back then.  It was an early example for me of being able to reach out through technology.  Even the shadowy letters on white space of computer screen was a foot in the air between past--pounding out words on a typewriter, and the new, hit the envelope to send

  Some people responded with a video about Barbie.  The buzzword was

     "Beautiful"

  That summer ended in a lot of fighting.  People translating what just happened.

  Two of the people departing earlier than some of us rapidly approached the shared vehicle.  Both said, 

  Give me the torch

  The dashboard was bare of both lighters and pens.

  WHERE is everything?

  If that's yer everything it's anybody's guess.

 A miniature train of grown people in various states of clothed were wheeling around and around on hot wheels and children's bikes in the parking lot.

  ARE THESHE THEE ARTISTES???? A painted whiskey-sour smelling man actually whistled some of the sounds in the question.

  Didn't they tell you the circus people were coming?

  Just the natives getting restless.

  A person missing teeth walked up with two six pax of wine coolers and reported: diverting traffic from the highway.

  WHERE's the camera?  Another our-ager approached.

  No FILM left,

  No PENS left,

  No FIRE left!

  I locked myself in the truck.

  It's like a layover, I repeated to my father per my mother's order to explain myself.  He'd put us on speakerphone and an angry mother shot back, OH I BET

  LOOK!  I shouted.  The people outside the window turned in every direction.  What's coming at us?

  I haven't done anything wrong!

  Guilty people always say that.

  I haven't done anything wrong!

  Yet????

  My father remained quiet.

  The person fished the missing teeth out of a pocket and popped them in to forge an unquestioning smile.  The damp paperbags with wine coolers slid faster towards the front of the truck.

  What are the other people doing?  My mother asked.

  Maybe jumping offa bridge at midnight.

  Don't do that, she said.

  Why midnight?  A younger sibling asked.

  Maybe sooner, I said as the light in the truck brightened and a person in a skeleton costume pulled a flaming sword out of mouth.  The road goes on forever and the party never ends, my mom actually said.

  Somebody else said that too not long ago.  What does it really mean mom?

  You'll know.

  If you say so.

  You'll know.

  I think to young people especially, discovering the world and all kinds of people is more of a process.  Encountering the world gives one lots of first impressions.

  An exercise we tried in a writing group is An Open Letter.

  An Open Letter to:

 There was a huge tie-in: pop culture stuff....psychology

  A lot of research was yet being done....why Freud was used predominantly as opposed to the more Jungian work.  We as students linked personality, communism, and "self actualization" in applying ot re-applying what had been cutting edge, progressive but sidelined when dominating trend prevailed to lead culture.  Psychology/situation/factors influencing....

  Really at the heart of a lot of political controversy world-wide.  We were able to take the conversations into different time periods, so for example in ancient culture, there were first only some cultures that fashionistah'd.  We were wondering why.  Did those people have permission to "self-adorn"?  There was a loss of story about how some things came to be among differing people.

  And when we were learning about World War I, there were similar questions.  Why did the people who owned land, or actualized selves into extension of self as property have more say?

  Kind of went along with thinking about simplifying life and what's self's?  What's clutter?  What's choice?  Free will?  If a people don't have free will or self-participation built into their politics, or, it's only built in in a certain way...like being a soldier or votes not being real...geopolitics takes form as the centerstage.

Gestalt!  I took the word/concept from my work apron like it was a stone not fully tumbled and polished.  A brother said, Bless you, like I'd sneezed.  My mom said her funny to my new things studied, Don't swear at me like that.

  Geopolitics!  Other students off for the summer blurted a buzzword from the torrentials in our heads.

  Some of us had driven away from controversy squall together and met up with parents who were region-bound.  Caravaning with a soccer team, some explained of theme conversations including different languages for the same things.

  Heading back into zones as residents and graduate students we tried to map out plans for fieldwork, pinkyswore "team".  Some cities had been free-for-alls for years and the AIDS epidemic was caught up in the fever of partying as self-actualization.

  He was more of a dad that was able to keep up with why different students were at different places in their studies than a president at that time.  "W" somehow made a connection probly with Jeb, between what curriculum had been teaching and how close political frontlines came to schools.

  It was people like Dr. Edwards at University if Hartford who held talks at universities on a pause, to see if cease fire possible; and realize that the terrorist group Hamas had a partial constitution-type document; this while property-law language hadn't melded with culture not separate from peopled.....

  Sat phones, chatter, a leveling of transport, ITA REAWWEE AID

  Stay OUT OF IT!  An ambulance worker uselessly issued the order to the unkemping drag queen going through the garbage bag of tiny drug bags.  Onlookers just looked.  Finally someone asked WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

  No one approached because no one else was looking for anything.  A firehydrant cap finally came off and hose spewed something besides the sweats and smells of us pausing too.

  But he's my last chance, a kid squealed and then wheezed over and over, last chance, last chance.

  Last chance in morning's light, to get out of that territory where kids were boiled down to drug runners and sex slaves.

  Places had lost distinctions like "town" and "store".  With political pressures mounting, some people were bottling up "the booty".  Some of the cities had zones where it had been all switchblades and blood....what loved ones became coming and going....two parts of the same razor wire

the flesh and the razor wire, I wrote in regarding what I was finding as far as what people "are feeling".

  The humanitarian team I was on came to a spot outside Philly where there was a week's wait before people could even plan where to next.  It was also one of those years where there was no stopping people from amassing.