Braille

It isn't so much blindness
as a blindfold
when the message of the heart
comes through
and you refuse to see it.
I don't see no smoke
and certainly no signals
and that's no jungle telegraph
but just the rain running down a noisy gutter.
But I don't need fucking Braille
when the message of the heart
is "No."

The OTHER dream trick

    I guess everybody has these: the dream that is a movie that you're watching but which you're also in. Last night's was... highly memorable. The sheets stayed safe, however.
    (The other other dream trick, I guess, is extreme geographical dislocations. I don't know if most people have those either, but boy I do.)
    As this is so short: in other news, who the hell put muscles on me? Don't you usually have to exercise for that to happen?

The horror, the horror

    Bad nightmares all night. Anywhere I went, which included locales as far away as Europe, there was nothing to eat but pizza. Pizza, pizza everywhere. Also, the psychopath who hates me was blaming me for everything. So nothing at all like real life. I was trying to write him a check for some reason, but had difficulties. For some other reason, I was trying to write it on a sheet of paper about the size of a chair. Maybe that was the difficulty.
    Can you imagine the celiac sprue horror movie though? "They Fed Me Pizza." The terror! The horror! OK, it'll only work on one out of 133 people. But boy would we be scared! Hey, there's an idea for Hollywood: Narrowcast your horror movies! Naaah, that would be crazy. Just keep remaking old TV shows. That'll work.

Impractical joke

    For a couple of weeks in April, I grew a beard. It came out grey, so I removed it immediately, but while it was growing, I took down my Facebook profile picture. First I put up a picture of myself with a book in front of my face (ie, Bookface). Then I changed it every day, generally choosing someone with a bigger and bigger beard each day. I started with Santa, went on to Gabby Hayes, then proceeded through Darwin, Rip Van Winkle, the Chinese kung fu master in "Kill Bill, Volume 2," and wound up with Rutherford B. Hayes. (Couldn't find any bearded pictures of Helen Hayes.)
    It was just me being silly. I'm sure barely anyone noticed; profile pictures are small and hard to make out  anyway, which is what makes it an impractical joke. But I was boundlessly tickled. And if we're terribly honest, I don't look at all bad with a grey beard; just older than I would rather look.

Terror

    Ten years after 9/11, I find that I am still insufficiently terrorized. This is odd, as I have been panphobic nearly all my life. If anybody is going to be terrorized, you would think it would be me. Maybe it's that I haven't hung on cable news the way that most Americans do. I figured out a long time ago what "If it bleeds, it leads" means, and therefore prefer to dwell on the seven billion people who DIDN'T die today, rather than the ones who did. I sense that a lot of Americans cannot keep this straight in their minds, and just focus on all the bad news.
    Then again, maybe it was the formative influence of growing up during the Cold War. The nuclear balance of terror was a lot more all encompassing than anything we seem to face today. Universal obliteration was a lot scarier, fear of it was constant and that fear looked to be never-ending. When it ended, the relief was lasting. And even if idiots can wipe out a building, buildings, or even larger places, there is no sense of a universal threat anymore. Regardless, sorry terrorists; this timid person just isn't terrorized.

Grave dancing

    Hey, I'm glad that Osama bin Laden is dead, or at least that he's no longer able to foment damage. But I feel more than a little creepy about it. I don't believe in capital punishment. I'm not happy about the three pointless wars my country is involved in, with no end in sight. And grave dancing never seems like a good idea. If the death of one man causes you to shout, "USA! USA!," maybe you need to rethink from where you're drawing your pride.
    For all that, at least somebody remembered the point to one of those pointless wars. That it wasn't any of the people who started that war is a credit to him and another bad mark on the crowded record of those who did. And maybe my friend Ossama won't have to go by "Sam" anymore.

Fireworks

    In '04, Alice and I went to New York for a few days around the 4th of July. We crammed a hell of a lot of fun into a few days, though there was too much walking for her tastes. She forced me to see "Rent," for which I'll always be grateful. On the actual 4th, we had an early flight that required us to get up before dawn, so we couldn't be out and about for the fireworks show. However, we surely got to hear it. Memory says that it shook the building, though I'm pretty sure memory is just having fun with me. The building was the Barclay Hotel, which we loved flat to death. Memory also suggests that we weren't having much trouble with traffic noise or other kinds of city noise at the Barclay. In turn, this suggests that those fireworks out on the East River were too damned loud.
    This was brought to mind last night when another batch of fireworks was too damned loud. Yesterday was Olympia Fest, and though it ended at 5 pm, there seemed to be a fireworks show associated with it that started around 9 pm and ended... well, I think some time around next Wednesday. I dig fireworks; I really do. And maybe it just doesn't seem loud when you're watching and you can ooh and aah. But I was trying to listen to a baseball game (and they were trying to play it, also in the neighborhood; seems like the booms might have been a bit of a distraction) and having a little trouble paying attention.
    I wonder if there's some way to make the pretty colors just as pretty but damp down the boom booms just a bit. (Also, you kids get off my lawn!)