HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
 eudaimonia (eudaimonia - translated from its Greek roots as “human flourishing”) she comes like a stranger to your door, knocks and demands entry and, if you are ready to allow her passage, becomes your friend becomes the spark that creates creation the carrier of human flourishing that blows away walls that restrict your vision, cuts the knots that bind your soul opening the all-embracing sky that carries in its winds the contagion of your spirit’s deepest reach, the fullness of your humanity the bottomless well of your completion  before I went insane dreams all night of a time 70 years past… * I was ten, the last year before the insanity of adolescence set upon me… * and I did it so well, crazy as hell, doing crazy things just to show I could do it… so many people their trust abused, it’s hard to believe I made it out alive, and how often luck saved me from finding my place in jail, behind the bars it seemed I so ardently sought, * all for pride, for place, for the benediction of any Judas priest … * so domesticated am I now… who could ever imagine the tangled path that brought me here --- dreaming all night about the years before I went insane  Moats in the Eye of a Disinterested God by Allen Itz Time and the Tides 1937 (part 2 of 13) Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record Second Stalin purge trial, 17 sentenced to death DuPont patents nylon U.S. Steel raises worker pay to $5 per day First state contraceptive clinic opens in North Carolina Gas explosion in school in New London, Texas kills 294 Fritz Zwicky coins the term “supernova” Spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas erect statue of Popeye Debut of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd First commercial flight across the Pacific “Gone With the Wind” wins Pulitzer Prize Hindenburg explodes on landing killing 36 Police kill 10 strikers at Republic Steel Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific Buchenwald concentration camp opens China declares war on Japan In a secret meeting Hitler informs his military leaders of his intention to go to war Nazi exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” opens in Munich Walt Disney premiers the first full-length animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” ---------- Heigh-ho Heigh-ho the urge to purge surges America’s most beautiful pilot disappears barbed wire around a new summer camp merit badges for killing Jews ---------- A widow, with a son who grows rambunctious and wild, living with relatives as a part-time housekeeper, decorating cakes at a bakery, her life promises little more. A high school graduate, his father’s business taken by the bank, his sister home from college to stay - the Great Depression sucks life from opportunity and ambition. He applies for work with the Work Progress Administration, but does not get called. He plays semi-pro baseball, loses an eye during pre-game warm up. The shadows of war clouds darken, but noticed still only in passing.  radio silence for the first year and a half of my military service I was in training at Indiana University for the two years after I spent my shifts sitting at a large radio console listening, trying to ferret out the secrets of the Soviet air force mostly this meant trying to dig out meaning from tiny Russian voices buried in rumpled beds of static as part of my training I learned that some of the voices on the radio get trapped in the higher ionosphere and bounce within that band for years, old voices from years past still circling the globe but most of the voices pass on through the atmosphere and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars, the human voice another bit of static for alien ears such a lesser static we are than what we hear, the sound of the big bang continuing its expansion, waves of such distant origin traveling past and through us all the days of our lives, such a joyous and holy sound, but how I I cursed it as I sought human meaning through its crunch and crackle, not understanding at the time that I was listening to the universe singing its birth song ~~~ so silent and dead would be the universe without  Fast Times at Flatonia Flats |
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