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Identity
Dear Sugar
There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good that you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that these issues will need to be resolved again. And again. Some things can be known only with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of them have to do with forgiveness.
June 2011
Dissonance
A few propositions: Dissonance inspires patience; discord, correction. Discord is neither arranged nor disarranged; it’s haphazard, without any sense of audience or any context larger than itself — an earmuffed dolphin in a closet with a drumstick attached to its flipper. Dissonance, however, is a seal wobbled by currents on its way to a fish-rich cove. It has a direction in mind. Dissonance expects to be heard. It’s composed.
May 2011
February 2011
Every year, new words are added to the language — too many, if you ask me. Nouns are dragged into alleys, beaten into submission, then sent back into the world dressed as verbs like “transitioning” or “gifting” or, if you pardon my English, “languaging.”
February 2011Faccia Tosta
VISTAs didn’t draw paychecks. Volunteers in Service to America, we signed on to live, theoretically, like our clients — in this case, convicts in North Carolina prisons.
February 2011How I Went Punk
Researching the Clash’s lyrics online, I was startled to discover that they rhyme — though the words are impossible to understand! How touching, like putting on your best shirt to visit your blind aunt.
November 2010
The World In Red
Floreta Cook buried her husband, Cookie, in the Questa Cemetery in New Mexico. It was a good cemetery. Cookie had always admired it. He liked the sign on the gate saying to watch out for snakes, and the cemetery grounds were bright with wreaths and saints. Cookie had believed in all the saints and gods and had seen patterns everywhere. To Floreta life was chaos, apocalypse probably just around the corner.
September 2010
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