Not content

Not content to let nature take its course, we brought in all of the fallen leaves and ironed them individually.

I fed you

I fed you oranges, but told you it was tiger meat.

Despire

to have negative aspirations, i.e. despirations.

As in: wanting to slum.

Once upon a time

a butterfly escaped from a storybook and entered the world. The real butterflies immediately noticed something was funny about it. It seemed too substantial to be a real butterfly, because of its traces of paper and ink. But it also seemed to only half-exist, having been created from the imagination of its book's author.

Although the real butterflies sensed something odd about the book butterfly, they were kind to it, treated it well, and helped it look after itself. The book buttefly needed the help, because lacking natural instincts it often needed to be told what to do. Despite the friendly reception from the real butterfly, the book butterfly desired to become real, and went about asking everyone how it could do so.

A toad suggested that it should just wait because the passing of time would render it real. But time passed and nothing happened. A bird suggested (while trying to eat the book butterfly) that the problem was that it had never been a caterpillar, nor even spent time in a coccon. "Perhaps", speculated the bird, "if you behaved as a caterpillar, and made slept in a cocoon, acquiring these experiences would make you real."

The book butterfly tried its hardest to emulate caterpillars. But they were unable to tell that it was not a real butterfly, found its behavior very odd, and most refbuffed it. So after a few days the book buttefly gave up, concluding that it would not be able to acquire the experiences of real butterflies.

Then one day, the book butterfly was flying by the base of a tree when it heard an new sound, the cry of a cicada. Cicadas are very wise, spending years meditating beneath the earth. The book butterfly presented its problem to the cicada. The cicada buzzed for several moments and then suggested that the book buttefly must find the author of its book. Perhaps if the author were to write more about it, perhaps writing that it were real, or writing about its days as a caterpillar, perhaps then it would be real.

The butterfly heeded the cicada's advice, and took years seeking out the author of its book. Eventually the author was found and the butterfly presented its case. The author was remarkably happy to fulfill the request, and the butterfly soon felt very real. But it was never sure about whether it was real and in the world, or merely back where it had started and in a book.

Lepidoptera

Sometimes the prettiest caterpillars turn into the plainest little moths.

From:
"I like butterflies" by Gladys Conklin (Holiday House. New York, NY. 1960)

The wind...

I could not understand anything he did. It made no sense, was all to no purpose. He was always reeling about, never staying in the same direction for more than a day or two. Years had passed, with endless pursuits begun, none finished.

"I don't know why I live this way" he said, "It can't be helped. I'm just carried about by the wind within."

Food comma

It signals a momentary break between the eating of different foods in a meal, as when slightly pausing after biting into the potatoes after taking a bit or two of the meat.

Some irony

about a group of people whose adventures in trying to see a performance are far more amazing than the adventures featured in the performance itself.

I find

things changed.

But this morning I awoke from a dream of some complexity, but so dim that I could barely remember anything. Maybe, the whole dream was like that: Too dim to make out, but hinting of a greater complexity. If so, my dream was not complex, but I dreamt of complexity.

Why am I not

a Norwegian sailor?

A bookish man.

"BF94," he mutters in wonder, "that call number is new to me."

The snakecatcher

had been hired to remove all snakes from the king's vast palace garden. He labored for hours, searching the garden for snakes, scooping every snake found with a net. By the end of the day over a hundered snakes had been dropped into the snakecatcher's basins, and the snakecatcher was certain that he had searched all areas of the garden, had found all the snakes.

But then he noticed a certain nook he had overlooked, just into some bushes near a tree. Perhaps another snake might wait there. He went under the tree and looked into the bushes. He saw an enormous purple snake, staring out, so that its face pointed towards the kings palace. The snake was much larger than any other snake in the garden, larger than any of the snakes known to grow in that country, larger than any snake the snakecatcher had ever seen. Not having moved, it spoke, "There will always be snakes". Oddly calm, the snakecatcher said and thought nothing, turned, and left the garden.

His final clinic

had no real medicine. Neither did it have herbs, obsecure teas, or any exercises to be conducted. The doctor had concluded that most ailments can be treated through the application of water in its various states and temperatures: boiling, as steam, frozen into ice or snow, as a cold vapor, and so on.

Dialogue while walking to work

Me to stranger: We seem to walk at the same pace.
Stranger to me: It's our eagerness to get where we're going.

The reawakening

of the second mind, brings responses to things not here. A little jelly fish at ocean's bottom whispers.

When I was a child I actually imagined things. Now I just have thoughts, sometimes about things not here. A part of the mind withered.

We are

always chasing after phantoms and visions. The prudent tell us to ignore the call of ghosts and dreams, to attend to the present.

My wife says:

The oldest one is still alive. And he will be the last to die.

Headquartered

in the fortress, I survey my domain.

So maybe

you don't really believe in any particular religion, or maybe you do, but either way:

If you could choose which religion were TRUE, which would you choose?

The new simplistic

psychology, invented to replace or add on to Freudian id, ego, supergo.

I present three gremlins of the psyche:

1. The Negato, who firmly says "no" to thoughts, ideas, opportunities, and so on. Maybe you should draw a picture? No, says the negato, and you don't draw it. Maybe you should go out tonight? No, says the negato, and you stay home.

2. The Affirmito, or Creato, or some better name, who is the one who comes up with all those ideas of what you just might do. If you always listen to him you'll be constantly active, and constantly doing new things. Perhaps there will be no direction to your actions, and maybe nothing will get finished, because each idea must be acted on, each opportunity taken.

3. The Schmego or Shmego, who doesn't really make this a nice trichotomy, but has to be included anyway. A sort of internal guardian angel, who sometimes has the solution, does the right thing, when nothing ought to work -- the thing-inside that brings the dead-drunk home safely.