another brilliant analysis

Lazy-assed folk have properly grasped the opportunity costs of work. And have subsequently captured in actionality their illuminated understanding.

saturday thoughts

Returning to a first love isn't necessarily simple. Not when the first love is something called books. Loving a plural pulls a girl in so many directions. And when there are always more books to be devoured, how can a girl ever be actually content?

On the desk sit the collection of M Twain's short stories; an irresistible overdose of witty cynicism. Atop the coffee table are the books I ought to, want to read. Shelved in the coffee table are waiting texts by A Sen, A Solzhenitsyn, V Wolfe -- to list the authors visible from this angle. Scattered round are wonderful stories needing to be revisited, embraced anew. On hold at the library are two books recommended by the wise prof. Once I pick them up (in approximately 90minutes) the present near equilibrium can only be upset.

Dishes need washing, furniture wants dusting, various to put away, sundry to do. But I'm distracted. Oh, do I adore this distraction.

kipling knew

awake are no slobbery kisses
her paws won't lean on the pillow
no echo of mingled sleepy sounds
awake, the spell leaves. she goes.
a spell of fantasy, broken.
my wish let me imagine
my imagined gave pretend
then slipping
falling
startled i wake
i seem to hear her breathe
sneeze and snore
i reach to rub her ears
legs and belly
lean to kiss whisker or paw
and all i kiss is nothing
touch nothing, hear nothing
there is no slip, no fall, no dog.

i've got soul but i'm not a soldier

I'm still a bit worse from the wear of imagining a night of debauchery in the East Village. Technically, Sangria probably doesn't qualify as debauchery. However, the Sangria-induced fondling of the Greek-born, Egyptian-bred belly-dancer might. To be fair, I wasn't really fondling -- just making sure her girls were cancer free. This is also an inspired way to display the obvious merits of my innovative breast cancer awareness fundraising scheme.

Following activities included a demonstration of my eclectic dance style. I'm of the school that thinks shaking ones hips semi-annually and falling periodically counts as dancing. As the Killers croon, "I wanna stand up, I wanna let go." And then the Sangria pulls me to the floor.

where or where is the promised update on your nefarious activities????

This prolonged silence is unattractive, even on someone as yourself who finds it impossible to be unattractive.

Miss McClain, I need to know whether some Sheikh has whisked you off to his dudgeon...errrr em' "palace" (yes, I totally mean "palace") to be his head concubi... errrrr em' "wife". Basically, there are a few things that are worth knowing: are you in with the mucky-muck of some oil-rich state yet? Can I come visit your oasis in the oil fields? Is it true that you wear silk underwear underneath the burka?

Oh, you don't wear a burka. Well, that's understandable, Your figure hasn't been shot to hell ,yet, by birthing all the little sheikhs' to be. When it goes, you can bet that currently fine ass of yours that you'll have a burka folded nicely on your then empty bed.

So it goes. Rest assured dear one, when your currently fine ass has borne the brunt of time, I'll still be your friend. A better one, seeing as I will no longer be consumed by a murderous jealousy. What a day that will be.

Write back. Be sure to tell me all about the desert, fast horses, armored vehicles, and trodden-status of women who are not you.

me

conversational styles of men and women, a comparative analysis

"In the interest of something like disclosure, here is something you probably should know about me."

"Ugh-huh," he sort of mutters.

"If this thing happens, I'm likely to, at some point, stomp my foot. Either literally or otherwise. Perhaps both."

"Ugh-huh," he sort of mutters.

"It is just what I do."

"Ugh-huh," he sort of mutters.

"Seriously! Its not a big deal. I don't know why you have to go and treat this like the end of the world. It isn't. Get over it already."

"Ugh- sure," he sort of mutters.

"You are so sweet and understanding."

"Ugh-huh," he sort of mutters.

...its been awhile, she said

Today, I "ran" into a friend from years gon' bye. From all those many years ago when I was in college and said things like "like, I don't know. I was all like and like he just like stood there and like did nothing. Like totally." From back in the day when I thought showering at a guy's place circa eight in the morning meant something, as opposed to just pity.

Anyway, about this friend. I couldn't remember his first name, though I didn't realize this immediately. I didn't notice because I was too busy calling him by his middle name; perfectly oblivious to the fact that this wasn't his first name.

Point being, I must be doing something right since I got out of Dodge.

Wait a second... how is that the point!?!?

Can't recall. Something about increased neuronal activity indicated by early onset amnesia.

around a world

She changed me when
I did not notice.
She grinned, eyes sparkling,
Knowing what I could not.
Having found a simple truth,
Generously she shared the secret.
With laughter. By love. In life.

As a pulsating canvas
She has ascended whole
From all the rejection,
Tragedy,
Fatigue,
Success,
And accidents of a mortal existence.

The story mapped on her body
Shines love to her friends.
Pain, softening her eyes,
Hidden behind laughter,
In time I saw. Sometimes unseen,
Perhaps misunderstood,
A soft residue of life strives on.

i think i said that

Today during a meeting I happened to ask my employer whether the organization could rent a jump-house for the staff. Judging from her silence, she thought this a fantastic idea. Also judging from said silence, I think she was contemplating bringing in a couple clowns.

That's fine by me, so long as they are sad clowns. Happy clowns give me the creeps.

"One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

MOSCOW (AP) -- When Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" appeared in the thick monthly literary magazine Novy Mir back in November of 1962, taboos were shattered. Buried secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.

Solzhenitsyn's short novel described a single day in the life of a carpenter caught up in the Soviet Union's secret network of slave labor camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the rule and, it has been said, the average life expectancy was one winter.

The author was working as a provincial math teacher, and his greatest work, "The Gulag Archipelago," was still to come. But "One Day" was to shock the U.S.S.R. and the world.

Some of the crimes of the dictator Josef Stalin were exposed and denounced following a secret speech by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his short-lived campaign to reform the brutal Soviet system.

But Solzhenitsyn's novel, based on the seven years he spent as a prisoner, was the first real expose of the gulag - a word derived from the Russian "Glavnoe Upravelenie Lagerei," or Main Camp Administration.

Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but was exiled from his homeland because of his work, died of heart failure Sunday at age 89, his son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press on Monday.

The gulag was, Solzhenitsyn wrote, the "human meat grinder" for processing what Stalin sneered at as "wreckers," vermin and "enemies of the people" who allegedly sabotaged Soviet progress to the workers' paradise. The grim process started, typically, with a knock on the door late at night, an arrest on charges of trivial or imaginary crimes, condemnation by a secret tribunal, transportation by unheated rail car and finally incarceration in the camps.

The prisoners formed a secret army of slave laborers who built railroads, worked in mines and cleared forests in some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. In the end, by the most authoritative estimate, the gulag systematically ground down some 29 million souls.

Armed with his literary talent and prodigious memory, Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) spent more than 40 years working in secrecy, in fear and finally in exile as he chiseled away at the lies that supported the Soviet system. And in the end he, as much perhaps as any individual, helped to bring it down.

To read the rest of this article: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SOLZHENITSYN_LIFE_OF_DISSENT?SITE=FLMYR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT