Early Racism

They were marched into the classroom, single file, and lined up along the blackboard to face the roomful of white faces. It would be sheerest invention to say I remember everything about that day. The only things I recall had to do with questions about how my own situation was about to change.

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Poem: The Joyride of Becoming

I rarely write poetry, but I'm finding myself in new territory these days (divorce, new home and several other related changes), feeling some angst when it would seem that I mostly have cause to celebrate new perspectives and opportunities.  I've often joked that I experience this sort of distressed happiness because of my gypsy roots.  Friends tell me that this is the plight of control freaks and that I need to loosen up. This is my response to them. I've long been fascinated with the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. I made his theory of the flux the focus of my poem.

The Joyride of Becoming Erich Vieth (2014)

Heraclitus wasn’t fooled when people talked about “permanent” things. All is flux, he proclaimed. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Now that Life has hurled me out of my self-conjured comfort, Every moment whispers that Heraclitus is correct; the world is permeated with universal acid. This is not a philosopher’s word game. I feel it in my ever-morphing bones. Everything. Every thing is a nonstop dance of destruction and creation. Every cloud, creature and canyon a ghostly multiverse, a sprawling swirling that runs through our feeble stop signs, ignoring these empty-shell words we try to use as hooks to stabilize our vivid imaginings. Even my steadfast dog threatens to become an ontological metaphor. The SuperFlux gives rise to joys that will inevitably threaten and dangers that will someday delight-- A roiling process that moves in and on in a thousand ways On both sides of our skins and skulls, whether we are ready or not. Failure to heed this fact that all nouns are verbs tempts us to walk with undue swagger and blurt out false promises. Yes, some things change less noticeably, mostly things that don’t cry, though all things eventually crack, crumble and re-assimilate. It is our friends, lovers and central truths that are the fastest fire and water: Even though they look the same from day to day, they are self-extinguishing works in progress that we struggle to know only through sparks and splatters. Trying to possess them is to try to embrace dancing flames and swift whirlpools. Act, we must. Judge, we must, or we would quickly die. We are told that to live well we must know well, though we are irretrievably smeared across all that is. Even that magic three-pound organ in our head cannot wrap itself around the impossibility of this daily task. Taking this plight seriously risks sanity. If only I could better convince myself to go with the flow. As we pause to drink water molecules previously drunk by Jesus, Cleopatra and Heraclitus, we become Fatigued. We summon up courage as a substitute for knowledge and we have faith that all Motion is Progress, whistling while rearranging our decaying deck chairs, convincing ourselves over and over that it is the Blobs in this lava lamp that are stably meaningful, rather than the process.

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Cyclist getting wiped out by car door

I'm really ambivalent about what happened in this video. Cycling is my preferred method of transportation. I've never yet been doored. I assume that every door I pass can open at any time and wipe me out. Therefore, I slow down quite a bit when in a hazardous situation. The guy in this video likes to take changes as part of asserting his rights. Check out the way he shot through the pedestrians before the crash. The narrow path right before the crash and his insistence at traveling at a brisk pace were accidents waiting to happen. That he was wiped out by a door thrown into the bike lane angers me, people should be more careful opening car doors. On the other hand, almost all people who open car doors do it blindly. It's a fact of life, like the fact that the tides go in and out. Further, the consequences of riding fast through hazardous areas will be an injury suffered by the cyclist, not those who throw their doors open. Hence, my approach of riding very slowly in such zones, even though I would be legally entitled to go as fast as I want in the bike lane. I'm sorry to see this guy wiped out, of course, but the video leaves me quite ambivalent about who was the victim.

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John Oliver points out the scandal of for-profit colleges

The amount of accruing student debt is incredibly distressing.   John Oliver has produced this excellent expose on the debt, the politics and the long trail of victims. Thousands of students are running up enormous debt, especially at for-profit colleges.    Thanks to the lobbying efforts of educational institutions, student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy regardless of how bad the track record of the institution for actually placing students into jobs in their fields of education. The marketing strategies of for-profits are especially reprehensible. Excellent job of exposing this dysfunction and fraud.  Once again, we rely on comedians to do the best journalism.

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