Thursday, September 29, 2005

InDickted: Less Comfortable than it Sounds

A grand jury indictment is not a conviction; it isn’t even evidence of actual guilt.  It’s just a determination by a grand jury that sufficient evidence exists for a criminal prosecution.  No defense witnesses are questioned; it may turn out in open court that perfectly reasonable explanations exist for all the incriminating, inculpatory, damning facts that looked so bad at first.  Maybe it was another guy what did it.  Maybe he was justified, or crazy, or crazy-justified.  Maybe he was framed, as was the case with one Roger Rabbit.  That’s for the jury to decide - twelve drowsy people, those of our peers who didn’t have a good enough excuse to get out of serving.  Another interesting fact on this subject: the “C” in “indict” is scilent.  Plus one more: Tom DeLay is now about to face prosecution for consipiracy to violate campaign finance laws.  He’s been indicted in the courts of his home state of Texas.  It’s a strange world. 

Texas politics are all about how many corpses you get to vote for you, how many ballotboxes you can stuff or misplace, how to trick and cheat your way into office.  This is not news; it’s an established historical fact.  It’s how LBJ got to the U.S. House of Representatives, and how Karl the Rover got into politics.  What’s surprising, though, is that DeLay got busted for it.  “It’s not that I dislike the man,” said the grand jury foreman in a post-indictment interview, “but his check bounced and those tickets he gave us for the Cowboys game were way out in the endzone.  I couldn’t even see the cheerleaders.  So we’re just gonna have to fry his pasty bureaucrat ass.”

As House republican leaders scour the greater MD-VA region to find another self-righteous blowhard to bear their standard of wealth preservation, faith-based science and health, and moral superiority, a chill settles across America.  If DeLay could be inDicted, can our other cherished national symbols and institutions be far behind?  No, I tell you, they cannot.  Therefore, as a public service, I am delighted to amp up the paranoia with this list of new indictments now to be unsealed in and unleased upon our nation’s fragile courts:

* Mike Brown: for misrepresentation, misprision, and mopery.  Plus, I hear some of those Arabian Horses he judged were part of a terrorist cell, and may have paid him off for “special consideration.”
* Bob Novak: for being ugly.  Oh yeah, and that thing about outing our spies.  That’s illegal too, right?
* Valarie Plame: for being a spy and for marrying that loudmouth jerk from the State Department.  You can’t dangle that kid of temptation in front of folk indefinitely.
* The Gilmore Girls: for whining at twice the speed of sound, and four complete seasons without disrobing and cavorting on screen.  What a rip off.
* The Gaza Strip: for stripping.  Has it no modesty?  Where can we find it a geo-hejab?
* Ron Jeremy: for actually making pornography disgusting.
* Cocaine: For forcing Kate Moss to make models everywhere look bad.  To the extent that any of them actually look “bad.”
* Katrina: for grave desecration.  Also, for immigration violations, as she came ashore without clearance from Homeland Security, which was still working on her visa application.
* WMD: for evading arrest.
* CarrotTop: Don’t even get me started here.  He knows why.
* God: for tricking us into fighting a “crusade” against “infidels” and then taking advantage of our troop depletion to buttream us with natural disasters. 

I do, however, look forward to the possibility that DeLay may be found guilty and imprisoned, because that would turn “fresh meat” and “neo-con” into synonymns.  “Synonym,” as you know, is what they call words about not breaking God’s law.  On the other hand, “antonyms” are words about conservative supreme court justices.  In the long run, no matter who’s indicted, Antonyms are likely to be the last words on the subject.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

celebrating with Kel

Sunday was Kel’s birthday and we celebrated with friends, food, and fresh air.  Here’s some visuals to round it out, since I’ve been a bit wordacious lately.

with holly and daisy-lu

at Q for brunch

on our walk

what we saw

thanks for the great day, kel.  let’s do it again next year.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Using Religion to Explain Science is Like Using Music to Explain Food

Dover PA has once again taken over headlines with news of this trial on whether or not to offer an Intelligent Design disclaimer in high school biology class.  This would essentially be a brief statement that evolution is a theory, one of many that seek to explain the origin of life, and should not be treated as dispositive because even scientists have disagreements about it.  Evolutionary theorists, in turn, describe ID as a theological philosophy akin to deism, and dispute its role in any classroom focusing on the “hard sciences.”

It’s an important debate.  As the national floodtides of suffering and indignation begin to recede, the stagnant puddles left behind grow ever more fetid and rank. With the supreme court in double flux and our foreign entanglement ever more entangled, with nature raging and our leadership faltering, the time seems right to me to dump my load of spleen on proponents of the teaching of intelligent design. 

Why would I dabble thus when so many other more real problems confront us?  Because it’s easy, duh.  After so many high-caliber minds have taken aim at this subject, I need only score a glancing blow to be able to claim victory over the ID boosters. 

As I’ve seen so much crumbling and collapsing in the world lately, too often I find myself hearing the ID viewpoint and finding myself shouting, inside of my own head, a series of questions to which I cannot imagine a response.  (And, as ID teaches us, if a response cannot be imagined, it must not exist.) Since I’m tired of hearing these questions echoing in the emptyness of my own cranium, I figured I’d blast them out your way and see what good it does me.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

12 On, 12 Off

dan (on the seat to the left of the aisle on BART): It’s getting dark earlier.
dave (on the seat to the right of the aisle on BART): Yeah.
dan: Yeah.  The ehquinox is coming up soon.
dave: What?
dan: The ehquinox.  It’s coming up on September 21. 
dave: Yeah, the twenty-first.  But you called it, what, the ehquinox?
dan: Yeah, isn’t that right?
dave: I would have said “eequinox.”
dan: Yeah?
dave: Yeah, like “eequivalent,” or “eequate,” or “eequation.”
dan: “Eequilibrium.”
dave: Yeah.  But, “ehquus.”
dan: No, that’s a different root.  But, “eequator.”
dave: Yeah, “eequator.” “Eequivocate.”
random guy with a goatee sitting to dave’s right, in the window seat: “Ehquitable.”
dave: What?
RGWAGSTDRITWS: “Ehquitable.” What are you talking about?
dave: How to pronounce the name of that day that’s coming up when daylight and nighttime each take the same amount of time.
RGWAGSTDRITWS: Oh.  The eequinox.
dave: Well that’s what I said.  But he (pointing to me) pronounces it “ehquinox.”
RGWAGSTDRITWS: Interesting. 

(brief pause)

dan: Hey, you know what we should do for the ehquinox?
dave: “Eequinox.” No, what?
dan: We should all drink ehqui nog.

(extended silence)

Have a good one, people.  Keep your lamps trimmed and burning.  The night time is the right time, dontcha know....

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

security flaw

There’s a little song I might never forget.  I learned it on the first day or so of junior high, out at the bike racks.  It goes like this: 16-34, 20!  16-34, 20!  I’ve never shared this tunelet with anyone, as far as I recall - because it was secret.  It was my combination, you see.  The combination to the MasterLock I used for my bicycle.  School lockers changed regularly enough that I didn’t retain those sequences any longer than I had to, but I used the same bike lock from the start of seventh grade till I went away to college, and every time I opened it, usually twice a day for months on end, I’d sing the combination to myself.  16-34, 20!  It was stuck in my head pretty seriously. It still is. 

Well, I recently learned the lyrics to a new song.  I didn’t have the tune in mind, but he libretto went like this: 24, 6-14! 24, 6-14! Not too catchy, I guess, without an accompanying score, but it was something to start with.  These, as it turned out, were the numbers for my new combination lock that I got for the lockers at the gym.  See, I go to the gym sometimes, and occasionally I feel the need to lock my stuff up there, okay?  Not everytime.  Net even very often.  I can usually just get home in my sweatsoaked exercise garb and avoid the whole locker room “scene,” such as it is or may be.  But sometimes I also like to shower or sauna at the gym and walk out of its broad glass doors not feeling and smelling so much like a sodden do-rag.  So sue me.  But don’t steal my stuff.  Because I locked it up, dude.  24, 6-14.  Click.

So I decided recently to check out a gym near my office, thinking that it might be a good place to get my RDA of vitamin schvitz once my life got turned upsidedown by an infantchild.  I walked in, selected a locker, got into my gear and locked my precious-s-s away, had myself a decent little workout, got all perspiry, went back to the locker room, took a shower, threw on my clothes again, and got the hell back to my desk.  Tha’s when I realized that I’d left my now unsung-locker room lock behind in that strange new locker room. And now it’s gone.

I’m very disappointed in myself.  My last lock, I kept for almost a decade of steady, hard use.  This one, I kept for less than a year and I barely used it at all.  Well, I have only myself to blame, and I guess I need to move on. 

I want to believe that if I can replace it with a lock that has a better, more danceable combination, it’ll prove to be more memorable when it really counts.  It makes no difference that I can remember the combination if I can’t remember the goddamn lock.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Meeting Mickey

I don’t remember ever being without Mickey Snake, though I think I actually do remember the day I got him.  He was a gift from my parents when I was a wee tyke, too young to go with them to the wilds of Agoura and the Renaissance Faire.  This must have been back in the late ‘60s, before RenFaire was such a freakfest.  At least, that’s not how my people saw it.  It was just a place where anglophiles and Virgin Queen fetishists could eat ribs, drink beer and watch a little good clean comedia del arte.  Wenching was still a family activity.  Oh, those were simpler days.  Or maye it’s just my parents that were simpler.  For sure, there was a generally increased simplicity quotient, and that was embodied by Mickey Snake.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Wide Smiles

The first thing I noticed about her was her enormous ass.  I have seen them marginally bigger, but not on a woman of such short stature.  Short, but not small - she was as buxom as she was broadbeamed and calipygian, despite being barely over five feet in height.  As she piled onto the bus, the crowd parted around her; she needed room to maneuver and lord love her she got it, with the other riders pressing out of her way to let her through.

She wore a black leather coat with cloth sleeves, stylish and in good repair.  Under it was a discreet dark blouse with slimming vertical stripes in two tones of brown, and her blue jeans were well-constructed and looked new.  The body these garments covered resembled an exercise ball, almost perfectly globular.  Her head was another smaller sphere of flesh balancing on top, with clear mahagony skin that set off her large dark eyes.  Her hair was complicated - a few regions of burgandy color, the rest a rich coffee brown, cut into different layers, with some parts straightened and some parts feathered and some I don’t know what she did to it.  As she rolled back toward where I sat on the bus, like a bowling ball through chilled maple syrup, a slender, tiny woman got up from a seat across from me, a seat between two persons of fairly standard proportions.  Others standing nearby made no move toward the empty spot. 

The big woman noticed this shifting of seat usage and worked her way gracefully to the vacancy.  She lightly lifted herself up in a slight sideways stretch and settled delicately onto the bench.  Though I was ostensibly writing in my chickenscratch notebook I couldn’t help but notice her virtuosity as she too her seat.  She notriced me noticing and , with supreme ease, flashed me an enormous smile, revealing an enormous gap between her large, bright incisors.  I smiled back, more reservedly but quite distinctly, and returned to my notes, tried to write out a few more sentences.  I glanced up, searching my mind for a word or a phrase; she was watching and bestowed another big grin on me.  I gave her back a curt, clenchjawed nod with a half-smile - the “commuter courtesy special” - and went back to my sheet of scrawlings for a few minutes.  When I looked up again, I was, again, greeted by her dazzling gaptoothed smile, surmounted by her warm smiling eyes.  I smiled back again, marginally more feelingly, and this time I saw her speaking to me.  I pulled off my earbuds and asked her to repeat herself. 

“You’re a writer,” she said with ambiguous inflection, as much a statement as a question.

My smile congealed just a little on my face.  “Just for fun,” I responded.  “What gave it away?  The way I’m putting words in this notebook?”

“The way you look.  Like you’re thinking.  Deep in thought.”

My smile thawed out a little.  “It helps me relax,” I admitted to her, “finding the right word, getting ideas out of my head, working through what I’ve been through till it means something....”

“I know what you mean,” she replied serenely; “Sometimes you just gotta get all that stuff in your head to settle down.  That’s why I do hair.”

“Hair?,” I asked her from across the crowded aisle of the bus.

“Oh yeah.  Stylin’ the hair is so relaxing.  Lets you leave all your thinking behind.” Her smile stretched around her face like the seams on a basketball.  “Ooh, here’s my stop.  Well g’bye sweetie.” Lightly she lofted to her feet and floated down the steps at Fillmore, with her fantastical hair and her enormous ass. 

When I turned back to my pen and paper, they seemed too flat and thin to have very much to say.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Private Drive

It was bizarre, driving home last night.  I have driven that road countless times, in sunlight and fog, in good spirits and bad, alone and in the company of friends and family…. The road had no surprises to offer me, so much so that, on autopilot, I chose my favorite lane heading over the bridge and then, a few minutes later, changed lanes for a few seconds to avoid a heavy metal plate in the roadway that might have disrupted the baby we had sleeping in the back – a lane change that anticipated an obstacle I’d hit so many times that I knew now to dodge it before it was even visible ahead of me.  I really knew my way around those five blacktop lanes, all right.  Sometimes you have to take solace in the little things, and this was one of those. 

Then we got into the city and it all went to hell.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Everyone Complains About the Weather but Nobody Does Anything About It

The problems in NO are not unanticipated.  Their practice of supraterrestrial burials in crypt cities is of renowned longstanding there because it’s necessary – graveshafts in NO are wells, opening into Big Muddy herself, filtered through riverine accretions going back to time immemorial.  They knew that they couldn’t bury folks down under the water table, and also that eventually the river would smack them all a good one.  Nature will always eventually get the better of you.  It may take a good long time but nature is patient, and patience is a quality much respected in hot, genteel places. 

No, NO knew it was at risk.  It did all that an economically-depressed locality could do with levees and zoning regulations but, to survive as a city, it was going to need help from a higher power. The unspoken mantra in such cases seems to be that the lord may forsake you but the federal government will eventually have to come in and clean up the mess. 

Thus, when the people of Iraq found themselves condemned to live under a dictator whom even we considered a threat to our own self-determination, it was our federal government that stepped in to fix things for them.  Even though those guys were foreigners, and non-christian folk too, we went out to fight and die in the desert for their sake.  And maybe we had a quick war and a long, painful, protracted post-war conflict that has us mired like a man with one foot on the pier and one in a boat that’s slowly drifting further and further out into the river, into which a hungry snapping turtle has crawled.  But, showing remarkable resiliency and determination, we figured out how to fight the good fight in Iraq against an enemy that’s more of an ideal than a man of flesh and blood.  Who’d have thought, after those lessons were well-digested, that we’d get so tripped up by a natural disaster? 

Then we saw what happened to those poor people with their tsunami.  Of course, they were living in dangerous conditions, barely over sealevel in old ramshackle buildings, a mass of society’s downtrodden, already too near desperation to be able to sense much of a change after hell washed them out, but still, we offered them aid because we are a giving, generous people along with being the world’s richest nation.  Our aid offer was paltry, though – so paltry that we were a laughingstock.  It took several corrections of course before our contribution came close to reflecting our ability to help, to say nothing of the enormity of the disaster.  We’d known immediately how to respond on 9/11, but it took us a while to get our sealegs when we had a big flood on our hands in Indonesia. 

That was late December, ’04.  Here it is now, early September, ’05.  Not a year has passed and we face disaster in our own precincts.  New Orleans was at the core of our national history and heritage.  Pirates and ghosts, whores and sharks.  Coffee and beignets.  Jazz and Andrew Jackson firing at will from behind flaming bales of cotton in the final triumphant bloodbath of a war already over.  And NO was full of dilapidated old buildings full of poor dark people, and they were our people, and we still didn’t know what to do for them (or about them).  The president didn’t visit for days – in fact, the end of his vacation was a more pressing concern for him than to attend to the devastated zone.  When he got an eyeful of aftermath, he chastised the relief effort rather than apologizing for it. 

Our flailing was commensurate to our obstinacy in being unprepared.  The scent of failure was that of rotting corpses trapped in flooded attics.  We knew, in ever one of those cryptic graveyard cities, that New Orleans was surviving by the grace of a provident fortune, just as we know that the west is running out of wood and water and our children are fatter and more ignorant than ever before.  We put our efforts into school testing programs instead of teacher salaries; food classification systems instead of poverty prevention and local farmers’ markets; desert hotels that replicate coastal playgrounds instead of intelligent growth and land management.  And in New Orleans the money needed to shore up the antiquated levees was spent on x-ray equipment for the airports, and local kids who actually cared enough to volunteer to serve their country are 7000 miles away and serving a very attenuated purpose while their neighbors spray red Xs on houses harboring corpses. 

When the waters recede I expect that the famous old cemeteries of NO will be found torn wide open.  Marble and limestone will carpet the pathways with morbid abandon, a mosaic of shattered dates and names, bits of carved angels and mourning lions, pilasters and domes and arches; and the bodies will litter the rubble, their mute jawbones cakes with sludge, yet still intelligibly indicting us for our hubris, our shortsightedness, and our gullibility.  We ignored every clue that god gave us.  It’s the old story of the man surrounded by rising floodwaters who sent away a cop in a police car, then one in a boat, and then one in a helicopter, each time assuring his spurned rescuers, “the lord will provide.” As the waters closed over him at the peak of his roof he asked the lord why no provision had, in fact, been made for him.  “What are you talking about?,” the lord asked as malevolent floods consumed him.  “I sent you a police car, I sent a boat, a chopper….” We were given every warning that this disaster was potential, probable, imminent, ongoing, worse than we imagined. 

We couldn’t deal with it.  In the face of a local catastrophe on a global scale, we foundered like some laughable archipelago that can barely field a summer Olympic team.  Now the sun may have set on the House of the Rising Sun, and all we can do is damage assessment.  What happened to us, and why was it so bad?  The worst thing was that we absolutely, utterly fell apart.  We collapsed as a nation.  Google’s home page black ribbon bound us together more than presidential leadership did.  I’m not hoping that this disaster results in a change in national leadership, though that would be a good start.  What I really hope is that it results in a change in national priorities. This is a disaster that dwarfs the physical impact of 9/11, and is likely to claim more lives when all is said and done. It is the first worst thing to happen to us since the twin towers came down.  In the chronology of our crises, this one ranks primary now by mere virtue of novelty.  Maybe that means that we can move on, finally, from the WTC.

By which I mean, move back – to being a nation that cared enough for its poor not to stand idly by while they drowned in a totally predictable inundation.  A society in which people turn out in the streets to help each other rather than to steal each other’s stuff and shoot at rescuers.  A place that doesn’t have to fill up with water before we recognize that it’s a behavioral sink.  I may be asking for too much here – Katrina was only a category 5 hurricane, after all.  It can’t work miracles.  For that, I’m afraid we may need the federal government.  To the extent that it’s paying any attention, that is.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

S.Y.S.: A Poem that Forced the Issue

I have a good variety of little stories in store for you, and I’m halfway through two more as I sit here.  But tonight I have to get something else off my chest and out of my mind.  For months now a particular strange little phrase has pestered me.  I can’t stop repeating it to myself sometimes, and other times I think I’ve evaded its power when all of a sudden I can’t think of anything else.  It’s really taken over to an unacceptable degree and the only way for me to overcome it is to give in to it.  Here it is, then: the poem that arose from the weird little phrase I couldn’t stop thinking.  As the sages said, better you than me. 

S.Y.S.

The yeti is a hairy beast
who lives in the forboding east,
amidst the mountains cold and high
where clouds are carpets for the sky.
The serengeti, in contrast,
consists of praries broad and vast,
baked under Africa’s hot sun
where wildebeast and jackals run.
One hardly would expect to see
a sunbaked African yeti,
and just as strange, or stranger yet,
the snowbeast on the serenget.
Yet this is just what I once found
out on that ancient hunting ground -
beneath an arid little glade
a yeti sweltered in the shade.
How he arrived at such a spot
is something I could answer not
I only knew he just looked beat
perspiring in the torpid heat.
The sweaty yeti of the serengeti
looking awfully out of place
all he knows is ice and snow
of which there was no trace. 

I came to him as there he lay
exhausted in the heat of day
he looked at me both up and down
and sighed without the strength to frown.
This curiosity exotic
regarded me with gaze quixotic
as if to ask me not to ask
how in this place he’d come to bask.
I, in my turn, looked back at him
and felt a fate upon him grim
his massive body almost lost in
prostration and heat exhaustion. 
His sweat around him formed a pool
that kept him anything but cool;
his shaggy mane with mud was caked;
he licked his lips with thirst unslaked.
Not wishing to provoke attack,
I slowly opened up my pack
and as his perspiration trickled
I offered him my last creamsicle. 
The sweaty yeti of the serengeti
stretched on his enormous shanks
I let him eat the frozen treat
and took the stick from him as thanks.

There you have it, good people.  Who says poetry has to blow chunks?  Who so sayeth, indeed?  and with that, have a very happy Thursday.  Don’t forget to share dessert.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

follow-up on the 38

it’s been a while since my daily ride on the bus made its way onto the headlines here at the hut, which we call “hutlines.” since when?  since now, you little troublemaker.  just keep quiet and eat those hard candies. 

Here’s my bus-related post, then: what do you see when you keep looking?  sometimes it’s disappointing, as when the ad you thought you just read for “buggy wings” turns out really just to say “saucy wings.” But, as often as not, you can find some interesting follow-up questions for people on the bus if you give them a second look:

A question for the coldly beautiful young woman in the seersucker suit with the sophisticated-looking sandals and the perfectly coiffed blonde hair: that skirt looks great on you, but what’s with that second degree rugburn on your knees?

A question for the tall skinny guy with the long grey scraggly ponytail who rode bart with me from the oakland airport and then followed me onto the 38, with the beat-up black slacks, scuffed black shoes, threadplucked knit black turtleneck, inscrutible political buttons on shapeless black cardigan, gaze of disillusionment leavened with cynicism, jealously guarding a black rollaway bag with “Alter” written on it in garrish white letters: is that your name, or your instructions?

For the consideration of the tough, handsome, rutger hauer-type guy standing with intimate proximity to my face, a huge bulge in your trousers prominently thrust toward me at eye level: you must be very proud, but I think that the brown-green boulder shuddering into and out of your left nostril every time you breathe is ruining the effect you’re going for.

A question for the well-dressed, severe-looking business casual man in brown slacks, black blazer, shiny black shoes, stylish shades, with an all-business briefcase and a serious afterwork scowl: why do you smell exactly like a bowl of lucky charms cereal in whole milk?  And can I have the prize from the box?

On monday I will go to work in formalwear, in honor of the penguins that zach got to see this weekend at the academy of sciences.  He sends his love and reminds you that labor day is over, so get your lazy asses back to work.  transmission over.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Ground Floor

Has anyone noticed that I can’t shut up?  I’m all about the words, running and tumbling around in my head like some barely repressed catholic high school wrestling team. I’m thinking of words so much of the time that I sometimes forget what they point to, overlooking the significance of the signifiers. They’re toys that never break no matter how I bend and twist them, tools that never tarnish no matter how long they’ve sat in the back of the junk drawer waiting to be remembered and dusted off. 

I wasn’t big on toys as a young tyke; I had a few of the requisites but I spent more time at Brentano’s, Duttons and the ol’ public liberry, than at Toyz Am Us or such places.  Words were my entertainment of choice and my closest confidantes. I don’t know when it started, but I do remember when I first realized it:

The Country School was not even remotely in the country.  It stood at a gritty corner of a particularly typical part of the east san fernando valley off Laurel Canyon near Magnolia (which sounds more bucolic than it actually is).  It was an adequately-appointed acre or so of low buildings and open playspace, and, to the best of my recollection, I enjoyed my time there.  We learned sharing, climbing, and a nonsense song that later turned out to be “Frere Jacques.” It was a good place to learn to be with my little friends. 

But the one clearest recollection I have from the Country School is from when I was about three years old, and concerned getting to know my life-long companions, the words I was just learning to use and enjoy. I guess this was my first playdate with them:

I was, as I intimated, at the Country School, standing outside at the base of a treehouse tree on which we were encouraged to climb to what seemed at the time to be dangerous heights but were probably pretty benign by objective adult standards.  Having descended from on high, I stood there on a wooden pallet that served as a sort of landing for the treehouse ladder, through and beneath which the ground was visible.  And this was my moment of linguistic epiphany: I asked myself, what am I standing on - the ground, or the floor?  I could see the ground a few inches below my feet; yet the worn boards were like a floor - but floors were solid, and not outside.  I stood with my hands on the gnarled bark of the tree and my feet on the dusty pallet for some time, lost in a sudden awareness of ambiguities between words and realities.  It dawned on me that, even when there were many words to choose from, each with subtle shadings of meaning, sometimes they could still only approximate that which they were called upon to describe.  I couldn’t resolve this conundrum as I stood there on the pallet, on a floor floating just over the ground.  I figured it would take some more time and learning before I had a handle on it. 

My opinion today is unchanged.