To Blog or Not to Blog...

A High-Heel Sandal

Data needs a base
In which to be organized
To Excel. Wrong shoe.

Suppose for a moment that you have been given an assignment: to hammer a 12-penny nail into the smooth plaster of a wall.

On your left is a steel, 22 oz., blue-handled Estwing hammer, ideal for pounding spikes, nails, and other such binding devices.

On your right is a gold, handcrafted, stiletto-heeled Evelina sandal with soft folded and braided kidskin mignons.

Meanwhile, the nail is calling, “Hammer me!”

So, I ask you, which direction would you reach to solve your thumping needs? Your right or your left?

Here in corporate America (i.e., Cadmus Communications), we reach to our left and the high-heel shoe, innovation (if you want to call a mallet innovative) is saved for others, and the hammer...

...well, the hammer is for middle management to bash our heads.

The Word and the Beasties

The sole difference
Between Man and Beast is found
In a whispered Word.

What makes humans so different than animals?

We can eliminate the basics because both have core instincts that drive toward continued life. Now, some would claim that animals lack emotion; but if you’ve ever seen a mourning calf wailing over his dead mother or a lonely dog welcoming her owner with wet tongue, one must suppose these creatures feel some sort of connection to their fellows.

Others may claim that it is the human’s ability to reason that separates us from the foraging beasts; but then I would have to question what it is these folks precisely mean by reason?

For, if you strip reason down to its bare essentials, you could say that reason is the ability to recognize cause and effect. By this definition, you could postulate that all trainable creatures can reason because, through training, these beasts “learn” cause and effect, i.e. a dog hears a bell and salivates because he has associated said bell with food. I grant, that such “reasoning” is quite rudimentary; nevertheless, I want to believe that humans are not simply human by a matter of degree (that is, some animals can in fact reason, but the human does it better in a more complex manner.)

Many say it’s the ability to communicate that separates us from the beasties. Again, this is faulty because animals do communicate. Perhaps, not with language, but at least nonverbally. Two male rams smash into each other. The stronger wins. These rams have communicated. And then there is the phenomenon of dolphin song, which some say is a language of sorts.

What about the specific thing called Human Language? Is that the difference?

What I’m trying to get at is that, while watching Ella grow and change, I am waiting for her to become a person. When will she become something slightly more than an “animal” struggling for survival by being so goddamn cute?

In my gut, I think that will happen when she articulates her first word, which no doubt will be a slurred and giggled: “da-da-wack-o”

By Gale Unfurled

                              xliv
There is a beat to Nature’s naked feet
Some say, a rhythmic dance—a waltz maybe
Or perhaps a swing—that they claim will heat
The breath to life with shouted words of glee.
A post-modern finger ballet, some see—
Random movements mapping a random world...
No choreography, chaos the key
That twists the digits into pretzels, curled.
With up-raised voice, these others tell of hurled
Limbs, undulating, that neither repeat
A ripple like a flag by gale unfurled
Nor sway patternly as stalks of blown wheat.
      But, as dance and chaos in sight compete,
      I stare flabbergasted...lost...incomplete.

A random sonnet filled with random words, seeking order in rhythm. And from that order, perhaps I touched on something I actually seek.

Sometimes, it’s strange how things work.

A butterfly moves
And the next thing we know, a
Hurricane comes

What Tattered Rope

                              xliii
Music is perched on a pen’s pointed tip,
A nestling craving brav’ry’s feathered wing
To take flight. In black ink, a new quill dipped
Drips words to cool the season’s wintry sting.
Yet, friends leave to brave a cold far colder—
A chill of Artic wind blowing across
Foreign lands darkened by sudden dusk. Brrr...
My loss is their gain—their courage tosses
Them o’er seas churning with contentment’s hope
In a re-discovered country, despite
Snow (or because of it). What tattered rope
Will connect us as they brave this new night?
      But, for these friends is born a fresh day, bright.
      Dodge this chill! Heated Pen, take flight...and write.

The Hoggards are heading back to the frozen tundra, and I’m not talking about Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. Finland calls them back. I believe for the last time.

When I was first told, I have to say I was more than a bit perturbed by the whole situation. To move from country to country and back again like some twenty-something jet-setters bordered on absurd. Before they could even get settled in America, off they go too Findandia. The height of capriciousness.

After the initial and completely selfish anger passed, I began to feel guilty. We weren’t good enough friends. We didn’t see them often enough. For, if we had made the effort to welcome them back to America, the Hoggards would surely find us more appealing than the motley crew of morose drunks swilling watered-down anti-freeze in the back alleys of Helsinki.

But, the guilt has passed as well. All that is left is a hole vacated by the Hoggards warmth, which is being slowly filled with the memories of the past year—memories far too few.

Far too few indeed.

A jet cuts gray sky
With gray exhaust...with gray rope
Memories remain

Intelligent Designers

Debates rage over
Intelligent Designers.
Levi's? Wrangler's? Guess?

I was speaking with a neurobiologist the other day, and the idea of intelligent design just happened to come up (or rather had been destined to come up since the birth of time). This scientist finds the whole idea of an intelligent designer absurd and diametrically opposed to the theory of evolution.

Being the person I am and naturally diametrically opposed to anything said with such passion, I affirmed the concept of an intelligent designer of Ralph Laurenian Proportions, who is constantly stitching creation into a whole that is very good. At this point, our scientist friend explained that evolution is a testable hypothesis while intelligent design is a tenant of faith and cannot be scientifically confirmed. End of discussion.

From my perspective, the scientific community has handled the whole creationist/intelligent design arguments completely in the wrong manner. First, they’ve allowed the Religious Right to hijack the concept of a prime mover from Aristotle, and therefore, have allowed Judeo-Christian mumbo jumbo to enter into the conversation. Second, these same scientists have forgotten that evolution is still but a theory (albeit a compelling one) and needs to be pounded by constant questioning. For it is only through questioning that Truth will be shucked from the Universe like monkeys peeling a bananas.

What I don’t understand is why scientists are so reluctant to test the theory of intelligent design. Study it. Probe it. Our scientist friend claimed it was non-testable. But, that’s crap. Every scientific discipline follows laws, whether they’re gravitational, mathematical, etc. So why can’t evolution? Why does it have to be random? Why couldn’t it be possible that there is an intelligent design behind creation?

I don’t mean some masculine hand pushing monkeys into men, dinosaurs into birds, cockroaches into rats. What I mean are some laws that govern the apparent randomness of evolution beyond the survival of the fittest. Suppose, for example, that DNA mutates in certain predictable ways. To test this, one could bombard simple organisms that have a short life-span with radiation to see if it would cause this organism to evolve into another organism that already exists. Such experiments would have to be more complex than radiation bombardment and may not support the theory of intelligent design but, at least, science explored the possibility.

And what if science affirms such a theory, one not based on chaos but rather order, one in which the Primer Mover still reigns supreme?

A Dripping Quill

Silence. Silence. Sigh...
Lance-like, my quill trembles to
Joust with words. Drip. Drip.

The first words are always the most difficult. Aren't they?

The Cure

Wearing Pascal's specs,
The infinite spaces spread...
Dancing, glasses slip

Peter Jennings has been dead since Sunday. The voices of my youth are becoming silent as time marches inexorably toward...

...the end.

Many fear this end, its black unknowable emptiness. If one peers long enough, that blackness spreads to wrap the heart in blankets of despair, beneath a comforter of loneliness, upon the bed of our own mortality.

But, I refuse to gaze too long at the hypnotizing emptiness.

Instead, I crank up an Ella Fitzgerald CD, grab my wife, and dance in the dining room while my daughter giggles.

Heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek
Heaven, I'm in heaven
And the cares that hung around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak
When we're out together dancing (swinging) cheek to cheek
Oh I love to climb a mountain
And reach the highest peak
But it doesn't thrill (boot) me half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek
Oh I love to go out fishing
In a river or a creek
But I don't enjoy it half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek
(Come on and) Dance with me
I want my arm(s) about you
That (Those) charm(s) about you
Will carry me through...
(Right up) To heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we're out together dancing, out together dancing (swinging)
Out together dancing cheek to cheek

The Itch of Memory

A life colored with
Mountains from past adventures
Shakes stairs with boot treads

While pushing paper from one side of my desk to the other, a memory yanked me from my seat and dragged me into the past--to the gnarled toes of the Rocky Mountains, where Going-to-the-Sun Highway curls toward endless blue. The odors of Montana carressed me; swaying green pines blinded me; the joy of cycling across the country nearly up-ended me from my uncomfortable desk chair.

My legs itched for the pedals.

And so, I walked down the stairs insead of riding in the elevator.

I guess, sometimes we just need mountains, even small ones.