Quillsby's Quip: Bay Area Rapid Trash Talk

"Hmmm, our so not highly performing public transit service wants to raise rates again for less service and greater parking fees. Remind me again what BART stands for. Oh, that's right: Beastly Abominable Reprobate Transport. You know - the kind of thing you get at great public expense with little results."

Sound-byte Doltishness

I am unfamiliar with President Obama's prospect to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court; but I am more than acquainted with the ridiculous clipping of commentary those cast into the sudden glare of the spotlight find themselves bracing against. This nominee, Judge Sotomayor, deserves serious consideration from everyone. However, in the land of perverse politics she is already being denigrated, and her statements parsed without context. Racism has been trotted out and lashed as a banner over the mast of her ship in the most recent smear attempt.

We should be smart enough to comprehend that being aware of race, and the nuances of it in America, is not equivalent to being a racist. Sotomayor's take that a Latino woman might come to different conclusions than a White man is mere common sense. Just as we are not solely defined by our cultural heritage, neither are we homogenous drudges living easily circumscribed tableaus.

Can we actually spend our time with greater wisdom and examine her qualifications? One wonders if the US politicians are capable of having rational debate with facts in evidence. Or has the roar of the sound-byte smothered and murdered reason?

Memory is Life

Summer approaches and the wheel turns with the year's progression. The anniversary of the loss of my father draws near. I continue to experience a sense of displacement and stunned bewilderment, as if nothing is real; all is wrapped in a translucent haze of albumen. Memorial Day evokes for me not only those who have given their lives in service but those who have touched and been intimate to my life, whether human or other. Yesterday, on the holiday, I attended a birthday party for a new friend and learned that one of his dogs had transitioned that morning. Once more I summon the wizardry of words to ward, to re-stabilize, the magic of existence. This is for you Robert and James:

On Death and Remembrance

Life's velutinous web,
we are reminded just now,
is frail but endures

Lives on eternally
in the lacework of memory
reviving and imbuing

Begets anew the circle
dirge to morning song
mourning to love recalled

The Awakening of Dreams

We forget in the bustle of life those dreams which moved us in our salad days, and in this slump of disregard, a little of ourselves becomes dead tissue; papering over the life we have desired with a film of the mundane and mediocre. In this time of disassociation we can connect best with ourselves by rekindling the pyre of bygone reveries:

Nuevo Suenos

Because he could not fly,
he chose instead the Art of Building
and followed the threaded path
of soaring constructions and vaunted erections,
winging his way over edifices
assembled from the stuff of reality
in the practical guise of fulfillment

Success, that fickle master,
lay like a shiny coin in his palm,
and beset him from all sides
hemming in his creativity
and depositing it in a bank
molded by business acumen
but embattled by the idiocy
of management run amuck:
he found his competentcy
reflected in a pool of ignorance,
the chains of corporate responsibility
wound tightly about, encircling
his avid mind, and bit by bit
tarnishing the gilded edge,
until he knew the tables had turned
and he was the coin in the machine

On a morning, as he prepared
for the routine cycle, he perchance
spied a robin chirping in its nest,
welcoming the bright fillaments
of Life with the simplicity of being,
and memories, which had lain dormant,
waked from the attic of the mind;
he recalled the original desire,
the colorful mural of his youthful soul,
felt the incompleteness of the pattern,
and panted after the navigation
of the heavens, unbridled in form
mounting once more the vision
of flight unencumbered by society:
it was time, he noted simply,
the period of dreams had swung
its pendulum, projecting outward
where the future waited patiently
coalescing from gossamer wisps
to a vibrant canvas with his stylus
poised to draw a new reality