Sometimes he still missed her so much that it bit through the skin of a day and drew blood.

I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don't have a name for.

from the poem "Happening Apart frrom What Is Happening Around it"
by Jack Gilbert

"Perhaps the man had gone to the toilet first. That would not be surprising. The dog could never get over how many times a day human beings went to the toilet. Neither could it get over the fact that in every dwelling it had ever shared with humans, they set aside one entire room for the purpose of emptying their bodies. A dog used everywhere for its “toilet” and never thought twice about it. When you had to go, you went. The only reason why dogs permitted themselves to be housebroken was the trade off—you give me food, shelter and a million pats on the head and I’ll leave your walls and floors dry. It was the best deal going."

I once knew a woman who fell in love with a man quickly and hugely. Among his many attributes (she told me), he was a poet who had been writing astonishing poems for and about her since they met. She asked if I would like to see some of them and I said of course. She handed me several sheets of typescript. I read the first two poems there and then quickly ran my eyes over a few of the rest. That was enough. I looked at her and said "These are not by your friend. They're by Pablo Neruda. They're some of the famous love poems he wrote when he was young that immediately made his reputation." Was I right in telling her the truth? Did I have that right? I've thought about it over the years and I still don't know the answer. She broke up with the man but I never knew if it was partly because she learned of his lie, or other things.

In both movies and books we often see portrayed those moments of enlightenment when suddenly, miraculously, everything becomes clear to a character. They abruptly stop walking on a crowded street and standing there, stare off into the distance while people pass by. Or they lift their head from a book in the library as their jaw drops open in surprise. NOW they know what to do. I call them "lightbulb moments" because if the scene were portrayed in a cartoon, we would see a lightbulb suddenly click on above the character's head, their eyes would widen, and they'd rush out of the picture to solve the problem that had been challenging them. Sort of like the inevitable scene in a Popeye cartoon right after our hero eats a can of spinach.

But what about the lightbulb moments that are 100% wrong? All the inventors who had out of the blue epiphanies where everything became clear and they rushed off to invent something no one either wanted or bought? The left handed backscratcher. The dog self-walker. Or the moment in a famous battle where an important general thought "Now I understand! We've got to change strategy and attack this way." Wrong. Everybody died. Throughout life, all of us have moments where the solution to a problem that's been dogging us suddenly reveals itself in a flash. The lightbulb clicks on brightly above our heads. "Oh my God, that's it! That's exactly the way to resolve this." Nope. "It" happens to be the very wrongest way to handle this and by following that new inspired line, we get into much more trouble. How about the many many many times in human history when peoples' lightbulb moments have been entirely wrong.

"People who do not break things first will never learn to create anything."

Tagalog proverb

When I was fifteen, my parents sent me to an all boy's preparatory school that I despised for the next thousand days. The school worked hard to kill both my spirit and curiosity about life and nearly succeeded, but that is another story. The big event of every year was the spring prom. My first year there I was so anticipating it because I had invited Suzy Nichols to be my date. Suzy was smart and beautiful, plus I hadn't seen a real live girl for months so naturally in my mind she took on movie star proportions by the time spring rolled around. She signed all of her letters to me "lots of love." You cannot imagine how those innocent three words kept me going at a dark time. In a few days I would actually see my dreamboat, dance with her, hold her heavenly body in my fifteen year old arms.

Then I got mononucleosis-- bad mono. So bad that the school infirmary sent me home from Connecticut to Manhattan to be treated by a specialist there and recuperate. Of course this all happened a week before the prom. I had to call Suzy and cancel. On Saturday, the day of the dance, I was lying in bed very very ill. My mother came into the room and said I had a visitor. I could barely open my eyes and didn't even ask who it was. Suddenly like a vision of what I hope God will look like, Suzy Nichols walked into the room. She was very dressed up and one thing I remember to this day was she had even put on fingernail polish. She lived about eighty miles away from New York so I naturally asked why she was here. She said, "I came in to see you. Since we can't have the prom at your school, I thought we'd have it here for a little while." I almost passed out with joy. For the next hour or so, we sat on opposite sides of that small bedroom and grinned at each other.

Usually at least once in our childhood we lose an object that is both invaluable and irreplaceable to us then although it is worthless to anyone else. Many people remember that lost article for the rest of their lives. Whether it was a talismanic pocketknife, a plastic bracelet given to us by our father, or a toy we'd longed for and never expected to receive but there it was under the tree that Christmas… what it was makes no difference. If we describe it to others now and explain why it was so important, even those who love us generally smile indulgently because to them it sounds like a silly, slight thing to lose. Kid stuff. But it is not. Those who happen to forget about this thing have lost a valuable, perhaps even crucial memory. Because in that object there was something central to our younger self. When we lost it, for whatever reason, something inside us shifted permanently.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

— Guy de Maupassant

"(Pablo Neruda) told me that love was like trees: some loves shed their leaves, others are perennial.The perennials are not as beautiful as the ones that shed their leaves. So with love. It would go dry, then it would grow again, would be new again. It was the same as with all human beings: they end and they come back. And it's quite normal that this happens to men and women at all ages, he said, especially a person who feels things will fall in love many times."

Batucana from her meeting with Neruda, from PABLO NERUDA, ABSENCE AND PRESENCE.

Fairy Tale
by Ron Padgett

The little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around Copenhagen in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha, I have eaten this excellent meal
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!

"All courage is a form of constancy. It is always himself that a coward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come."

Cormac McCarthy

At all times there are (at least) two selves fighting inside each of us.
The rational, adult self encounters a problem or a certain situation and
says: You've been here before: You've already experienced this
sort of person, situation, or difficulty. So handle it based on what happened before. Just take what you learned in the past and apply it. Do this and this. Simple.

The other self wails no, no-- this is new. It's entirely different. I don't know how to deal with it at all. I've never met someone this wonderful but I'm terrified I'll do something wrong and lose them. Or I've never encountered anything this confusing or dangerous or challenging. I'm at a total loss for what to do about it. Paralyzed. Frozen in its headlights.

No matter how often life repeats itself, a part of us always clenches and says in a scared voice, "This is brand new to me. What do I do now?"

"May what you have made descend upon you."

Frank Bidart, "Curse"

Thinking about the Harry Potter phenomena, here's something else to consider: "U2" is said to be the most successful rock group around today. They have been together for 25 years. All told, they have sold 130 million albums in that time. The Harry Potter books have sold 270 million copies, not including this brand new one. The first Potter book was published eight years ago. Generally speaking, books cost a lot more than cds.
Go Harry.

"When the sun is going down,
there are colors against the sky.
I have seen my hometown in your eyes."

THE BLUE NILE

A bum was sitting on a bench wearing a winter parka and a wool cap. It's 80 degrees today. When I saw him I wondered "Isn't he hot in that outfit?"
A short while later I realized there are different levels of bumdom. At the first level you have a hard time telling whether they are bums or just people who don't care about their appearance anymore. Halfway down the levels, you come to the man I saw today. They wear the kind of utterly inappropriate clothes that announce they aren't really here anymore. They're somewhere, but not here. Wearing down parkas on 80 degree days in July set off the warning lights. At the same time, there is a woman in the neighborhood I sometimes see in the middle of January walking around in a t-shirt, shorts and flip flop sandals on her bare feet. The behavior of this group is often as bizarre as their clothes. On level 1 it's usually just the clothes. Midway through, it's the clothes and the behavior. At the bottom of the bum levels are those people so filthy, so revolting smelling, and so minimally human that there is literally death all around them. In the way they look, smell, act-- everything, death is so close by that when you see these people you can palpably feel its presence.

Really good idea...

Following the disaster in London . . .

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national "In case of Emergency (ICE)" campaign.

The idea is that you store the word "ICE" in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted "In Case of Emergency".

In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It's so simple that everyone can do it. Please do.

Please will you also email this to everybody in your address book, it won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this.

It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest.

For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

For more details, see http://www.eastanglianambulance.com/content/news/newsdetail.asp?newsID=646104183

She was one of those people who has an excuse for everything they do wrong. She told you these excuses with such conviction and fervor. Sometimes they were interesting, most of the time nonsensical or annoying. Often it was obvious they were flat out lies. She spoke as if life were one big plot against her, trying to trip her, always devising new and insidious ways of keeping her from achieving her goals, whether that happened to be meeting you for lunch or being a stand up human being.

The automatic door at the cafe doesn't always open when it should. It's interesting to watch different people's reaction when it misbehaves. Some get angry looks on their faces and just stand there, indignant and impatient. You can almost see the comic bubble above their head filled with the words, "Come on, come on--open, willya? I'm in a hurry." Other people move their arms around any old way, hoping to catch the electronic eye that triggers the door. Others smile and look sheepishly from side to side to see if they're being watched.... The array of reactions to this unexpected STOP is wide and no matter what, almost always funny.

The old woman is carrying a vacuum cleaner that must be fifty or sixty years old. I have only seen pictures of machines like this in classic design magazines. It is shaped like a zeppelin-- completely aerodynamic, all green metal and flying chrome. It appears to be in absolutely pristine condition-- like the owner has cherished and pampered the thing since the day she bought it. The object is arresting both because of its singular shape and perfect condition. I'm so impressed that I stop and just stare as she walks by. Then out of the corner of my eye I see a couple standing a few feet away staring at it too. The man and I make eye contact and we grow similar smiles-- isn't that the coolest thing you've seen all day?

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."

Rilke

"Rilke proves relevant by defining love as modern man's equivalent of the prayer to our vanished gods. It is the great gift that the otherwise radically indifferent if not inhospitable world can bestow on us-- in the form of an encounter with another person."

Ulrich Baer,
introduction to THE POET'S GUIDE TO LIFE: THE WISDOM OF RILKE

Fashion No's--

1.No human being on planet Earth ever looks good wearing a bucket hat.

2. No man should ever wear a white belt. And if he wears a white belt combined with white shoes, pray for him.

3. Only .000000000001 % of the male population can get away with wearing their hair in a ponytail. And if they are either bald or over 35, forget it.

4. Baseball caps were never meant to be worn crookedly. And when they are worn both crookedly and pulled down over a person's ears, that person looks demented whether they are on tv, in a music video, or whatever. Demented. Period.

Yesterday was the last day of school in the Austrian system. A half day, around noon all of Vienna was suddenly invaded by thousands of revved up kids looking for somewhere to go, something to do with all that new summer freedom. The streets, the subways, every McDonald's in sight was commandeered by mad hoards of kids poking, screeching, tripping, singing... Roaring on end-of-the-year adrenalin, they acted like they'd just been shot out of a cannon and were flying through the air, arms and legs kicking, towards who knows where.

________________________

Propped against the wall of a hotel was one beautiful new crutch. Naturally I looked all around while thinking the obvious.
________________________

Every day a man comes to the park with a dog under his arm and a short new Cohiba cigar in his mouth. The dog is a 14 year old fox terrier that is blind and deaf and truly on its last legs. Like clockwork, the man puts the dog down on the grass, stands back but not so far away that he can't redirect his old friend when it needs it, and lights his cigar. He told me once that despite its age the dog eats a lot, is in fine health and seems to enjoy life still. So as long as that's the case, the two of them have a nice co-dependence-- a few times a day the dog wobbles around on the grass, delicately sniffing this and that and pissing everywhere, while the man smokes a cigar which his wife refuses to allow in the apartment.