Try to find Her

With all this jibber-jabber about gender,

'tis a conundrum for any attentive community to render

a consensus about who is who and what is what

and whether to swing bathroom door open or shut,

and wondering whether she's a girl and he's a boy,

and whether we can use reproductive assets as a toy,

as if genitalia are some useless endowment to be cast aside

like an appendix or a gall bladder, thus neuterizing gonad pride.

But this ole boy was reading in a bible a little while ago,

which is, I understand, a dubious activity if I must say so

because many think that ole book aint hardly worth a dime

because those folks therein were livin' so far back in time

before there was internet and social media and trash TV

and folks was so bound up in ignorance and primitivity.

And you probably think you know what I'm about to say

about what adam and eve did on that fateful day.



But really I was a-ponderin' about something other than that--

the teachings of a man who as an ancient king had been begat.

Of Wisdom, he wrote: "She will honor you if you embrace her,"

as if there's something feminine about wisdom that we should infer.

So, if wisdom is so honorable, as Solomon presents it to be,

why did such a royal chauvinist call wisdom a "her" instead of a "he"?

For such a misogynistic polygamist king to so advise--

why, he had no business issuing such a sexist proverb to the wise:



"Take hold of instruction; do not let her go. Guard her, for she is your life."

But everybody knows this utterance, by modern standards, is just rife

with chauvinistic, sublimated predatory sexist implication

as if the lusty old king would entrap Wisdom for a coital conjugation.

But really, ole Solomon was like any decent, honorable man

who puts his lady and her wisdom on a pedestal stand.

So it's good that Wisdom is associated with the Womanly side,

so that Man can proliferate in his brawny, line-of-scrimmage pride.



And this has been going on for a long, long time, y'all.



Glass Chimera

Fishy, fishy, swimming around

Fishy, fishy, swimming around,

in the site and in the sound;

what venturesome hand or eye

could encode thy swishing symmetry?



From what current, sloshing seas

did you swim aground 'neath GMO trees?

On what slickery limbs did you then crawl

to spy out land and stand up tall?



And what shoulder, and what art

could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy fins began to crawl

what encoding hand did guide it all?



What the software? what the mode?

In which startup was it written, your code?

What bold investor? what venture tax-free

dared to make investment in thee?



When companies tossed out their dividends

and water'd the world with their vested friends:

did they rejoice their work to see?

Did them who wove the web weave thee?



Fishy, fishy, swimming around,

in the site and in the sound;

what human hand or eye

could create they swishing symmetry?



Glass Chimera

We all live in a Blueish Bussarine

It's amazing what we humans have done with techno throughout the ages of time
Way back in the mists of anthropological mystery some Croation CroMagnon got a bright idea to knock off the angular faces of a stone. He kept chipping away at it until the thing was more or less round; it looked so cool he decided to make another one. Then he got the history-rocking idea to punch a hole in the middle of each stone and then connect the two together with a wooden pole.
Next thing you know he's wheeling his stuff around on a cart, gathering his food a la cart. This was definitely an improvement.
Human history rolled along at a quicker pace after that.
Eons of time went by. Then a while back ole Isaac Watts put mind and metal together with the the potentialities of heat and water. in an advantageous arrangement. that became know as the steam engine and so it wasn't long before we homo sapiens were using the thing to power everything up. Some guy came along and slapped that steam engine onto a cart with a set of wheels and whammo we humans had ourselves a powered vehicle for purposes of transporting ourselves and all our stuff.
Wow!
Henry Ford happened along and he paired up assembly line strategy with mass production productivity. Next thing you know, everybody and their brother is out driving around on Sunday afternoon in a Model T or Model A.
Soon afterward, some other folks come along and did their version of Ford's world-changing whirligig, so then we had wheeling around not only Models A and T but also models GM and MG and model GTO and BMW and model '57 Chevy and '65 Mustang and so forth and so on.
All along the way, these fossil-fuel-powered motorized mobilizers were extending their influence into the other elements such as air and water.
Airplanes in flight, Boats on water, millions of them puttering along with their enginary cousins everywhere here there and yon and all over the world.
In 1966, a scant year after the historic '65 Mustang made its mark on the prairies and the dusty deserts along Route 66, the Beatles came up with a new idea, the yellow submarine.
"We all live in a yellow submarine," they sang.
This is a fascinating concept. The Beatles never stated it blatantly in their song, but the idea is this: in our evolving 20th-century consciousness we can surmise that this planet--even as huge as it is--is nevertheless a closed ecological system, not unlike a submarine.
Another expression of this idea is seen at Disney World in what the Disneyites call "Spaceship Earth."
While our ancestors thought of the earth as somehow infinite in its distances and its capacities, we 21st-century world-dwellers are understanding that what comes up must come down. Pollution up, pollution down. Carbon up, carbon down, and everything (as the stuff spewing from our exhaust pipes) that goes up eventually comes down. All that stuff we spew into the air and all that stuff we bury in the landfills, it doesn't just magically go away.
"Out of sight, out of mind" is a fallacy that perpetuates our fantasy of an earth that possesses infinite capacity.
We the people who inhabit the so-called "developed world" are now starting to take this emissions stuff seriously. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the so-called "third world" and "developing nations," those folks are trying to develop their economies and their infrastructures under the constraints of our post-modern enlightened consensus about us all living in a limited-capacity closed ecosystem--a sort of yellow submarine.
In our present world, India seems to be in a developmental category that is somewhere between "developed world" and "third world."
As I was strolling along yesterday on a high-tech promenade of Disney's Animal Kingdom, I lingered to appreciate this old disabled bus.

It used to be a carbon-emitting transportation machine in a third world country, but now it has morphed into an ice cream booth in our hyper-entertained theme park of USA inc.
I would like to thank the Artist(s) of India, whoever he or she was who decorated this bus. Nice work!
And I would like to commend the Disney person(s) who saw the historic value of this work of art. To me, it represents the idea that we all live in a blueish bussarine, and not everything that wears out must be thrown away.

Glass Chimera

Ask not what the world can do for you

If the mandarins of this world want to manage everything from their databases

if they wannna fix everything so everyone is the same and everyone has the same

opportunities and all are equal in the eyes of world and all hues and colors and

shades of gray and shades of brown black and white blend together having the same

access to all the good stuff that this managed world has to offer such as

access to all the education, employment, electoral, and economically elevatable

opportunities that can be put together by the Fed and the IMF and the UN and the

G20 and the G-hundred and the G-thousand and all the world together appointing

managers who assure that everyone is on the same page and nobody

gets blowed up and and everybody is safe and secure and fat and happy

or slim and lean as the case may be

If the bureaucrats and the directors of this that and the other feel like they need to

manage all this stuff and turn back the rising tide of climate change

and the ancient, undeniable, irrevocable urge that rises between a man

and his woman

and therefore the renegade loins of men and women who unite in their beds every night

and ever day bringing forth all these children and this family

busting forth out of their mama's womb and then growing up in Africa or Indonesia

or Uruguay or Gary Indiana or Mesa Arizona or Mexico City or Moscow or Orlando

and if they feel the need to put a rein on all our emissions

all our carbon spewing forth from all our cars and our planes and trains

and our monorails and our leaping' lizards and leviathan whales and

our males and females,

and if they think they can manage all this and

turn the unquenchable tide of the life force and and the gaia

so that it becomes something other than what it is

which is the life force itself that comes

from the loins of a man

and the womb of his woman,

and then those subsequent young boisterous bucks and does

who spring forth from the loins of mankind

then let them come to Mickey's place and see

what its really all about.

Let them discover that the proletariat has now become

the bourgeoisie

with every man chomping down on his family's piece of the pie

and every woman bringing forth her children and proud

of it

and all those neuters who wish to not participate are

free to do so because

we'd all like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony if

we could, buy hey

we'll settle for the next best thing, which is having youn'uns

and watching them grow and if you don't believe me then

come to Mickey's place and see

what's really going on.

You can't put a tether on this thing. We must be free

to live and work and have our being and have

our children and watch them grow

and hohoho every Christmas

and hiedee ho gonna get me a piece of the pie

you don't need to get it for me

gonna get it my own dam self

and for our kids too.

What's it to you?

Let them come to Mickey's place and see what's

really going on.

Ask not what the world can do for you,

but what together we can do for our children and our children's children.

Glass half-Full

Real Color or Reel Color?

Now we've leaped into the Disney scenario, along with the all the other however-many millions of people who've traveled here from around the world or whatever planets they came from.

It's pretty amazing what they do at Disney every day. And then at the end of a day, at night when the fireworks boom and sparkle overhead, it seems like a large contingent of all those Magic Kingdom gawkers decide to leave at about the same time, barreling out of there in massive members.

This huge throng gets directed out of the park, up to the monorail, out to the busses and the boats, and it is amazing to me that the Disney people have this great daily egress all computed and figured out and so well-managed. It seems to go without a hitch, this progressively steady movement of thousands of sedate, highly-entertained people trundling out in semi-darkness, about half of them kids, a gargantuan flow of folks that is being directed by mature WDW employees waving flashlights and looking as if they enjoy what they're doing while all of us cattle-like crowds are obviously enjoying the whole trip that's been projected on us so agreeably through these many years of developing Disney expertise.

So this morning I'm sitting in the big resort over here somewhere in Orlando and feeling relaxed and refreshed because we, like however many millions of other working people (you'd have to be working somewhere to afford all this) are here in the planet-perfect central Florida springtime, and I moved to share a couple of pics with you that indicate what's going on.

One pic I took yesterday. You've probably seen a print of this famous painting by Emanuel Leutze.

Now here's a funny thought I had this morning: what would George Washington have thought about all this?

It's amazing how much the world has changed since Washington crossed the Delaware River in order to surprise attack the occupying armies of King George III, and thereby accomplish the revolutionary crossing by which our national independence was wrestled from from those stuffy old Brits. But you've gotta love 'em, gotta love them Brits. After all that, they've turned out to be pretty good friends and Allies. And I think quite of few them are ambling around here at Disney just now.

But here's another pic that I'll lay in front of your eyes. I thought of it this morning. It's not a Disney pic, but it expresses a wonder that's on my mind. The photo was taken a year ago at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on the absolute other side of our country.

What I'm pondering here is the color, and source of the color in the image. In that greenhouse where this pic was snapped, there were hundreds, yay thousands of very colorful flowers.

What you see here is a very interesting plant that offers an intense red bloom, which hides beneath stripy leaves. But here's the catch. The intense blue here, and the yellow flourishes that capture your attention are not, as at first they seem, part of the flower, but rather, an imposition of colored light that has shone down through colored facets in the overhead glass roof of the conservatory. At first glance, all the hues seem to blend in riotously colorful montage of flowery exuberance.

Images we see are not always what at first they appear to be. When I was a kid growing up in early-1960's America, Disney had a TV program that was custom-tailored for all of us newly-prospering postwar suburbanizing Americans who were at that time going crazy with millions of purchases of a new technology called --haha! -- color TV! On Sunday nights, we'd watch Disney's Wonderful World of Color, and it was pretty amazing, even more amazing to us than, say, what you'd see today on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or blahblahblah whatever.

And guess what! Last night as we were piling out of there with all those millions of temp-Floridians, I saw the person who used to host the Wonderful World of Color on Sunday nights.

I saw the real Tinkerbell!

I guess it was because I wished upon a star.

Glass Chimera

Oh, Give Me my Naivete Any Day

Oh how naive we are!
We people of faith,
we God-believers,
Let us glory in our mental density!
Oh, how the erudite people of this world
do reign so smartly over us. Oh how they excel in their
proficiencies. Let them revel
in their victory!
Praise be to the savants who
have got it all figured out.
From geologic ages hidden in the mists of time,
they have creeped and crawled and
uprighted themselves from the muck and
the mire. They have propelled themselves in their
homo erectus mobilities and they have evolved
ever so incrementally
in their homo sapiens profundities
not to mention their post-modern
efficiencies
while we fairy-tale tellers grovel in our
religiosity and our neanderthal
naivite.
We stand stupefied
in amazement at the sight of sunrise/sunset
while we mumble prayerful phrases from
of old
from the mists of our antiquity
and the annals of our simplicity, such as:

Oh Lord, my God, You are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty,
covering Yourself with light as with a cloak,
stretching out heaven like a tent curtain.

He lays the beams of his upper chambers in the waters;
He makes the clouds His chariot;
He walks up the wings of the wind;
He makes the the winds His, flaming fire
His ministers.
He established the earth upon its foundations.

Oh what simpletons we be!
So chauvinistic and simplistic to believe
such anthropomorphic allegority.
Oh what mumbly-peggish muck we maintain when we insist to proclaim
all this ancient metaphoric modality,
while nowadays
every educated erudite knows
that PreCambrian begat Cambrian, and all that Paleozoic jazz,
which worked itself into Triassic and Jurassic razzmatazz
and so forth and so on through Mesazoic, then Cenozoic
on into Paleolithic and Prehistoric Man
who persists in doing whatever he can
in the wake of Pleistocene ice
which is nice and will suffice
to explain a lot of glacial turbidity
and anthropologic historicity
instead of anthropomorphic naiveté.
So we see eventually we evolve along
without a prayer, not even a song
in the midst of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon arcanity,
destined for humanic profundity
through Mitochondrial Eve,
not Adam and Steve
with no assistance from above
while meanwhile push cometh to shove
except an occasional shower or two
a shower for me, a bath for you.
And hey,
if I'm a simpleton in this my childish view,
what's it to you?
Huh?
At least I don't say um between every word,
stalling,
so as not be interrupted by my esteemed colleagues.
Please forgive my simple revery,
amidst my disprespecful levity
as I was a-saying,
'though maybe its more like praying:

You covered it with the deep
as with a garment;
The waters were standing above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled, at the sound of Your thunder
they hurried away.
The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to
the place which You established for them.

When every school boy nowadays knows
that such Genesic biblical prose
is just some old Mosaic tale
of Noah, and Jonah in a whale?
Really?
Be that as it may, I insist as I persist:

You set a boundary that they may not pass o'er,
so that they (the floods) will not return to cover Earth.

When every school boy nowadays knows
that if we don't stop these carbon-spewing shows
then the polar ice will melt,
polar bear will lose his pelt
and all the coasts will flood
with climate change like spewing blood
and life as we know it will come to an end
only to begin again
just like the good book predicts
in spite of all our international edicts.
Selah.
And Rah ra, sis boom ba.
On the other hand,
ice is nice and will suffice.

Glass half-Full