He's got a point. Seems like worlds are colliding. Saved by the bell from another Columbine massacre at Elk Heights. The kids had shotguns and dynamite. That boy shot on the bus last week. Another car bomb in the suburbs. Another flight canceled. Next, they'll require everyone submit a full profile to any airline you plan to fly on. Metal detectors in pre-schools. Lie detector tests. "No, I'm not supplying him with sugar. How much television? Four hours, no, not more than four hours. Four hours, that's it."
Better to have the violence on TV than on the streets. That was Shakespeare's theory. Show the blood. And then Peckinpah made sure it splattered. Seemed a good idea, in theory, but now, violence, mayhem, murder everywhere, and the critics say Mel Gibson's "Passion" has meaningful violence. Maybe we should eat out, tonight, get some hamburgers. Eat some burgers with mad cow disease. No, I'm going to bake a nice spice cake. A spice cake with white frosting. Just frosting. And while it's baking I'm going down to the creek and meditate on love. I've got an hour.
A flood came through here. Lots of trash along the banks. Looks like the contents of a supermarket, all these shopping carts, and that tattered sleeping bag hanging in the branches of a cottonwood, the belongings of some homeless person's camp washed downstream. Pussy willow and blackberry bushes and the stalks of last year's anise reflect in the water, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of life in the water. A silent spring look.
Limbs and vines, a blue slab of plastic, reflected, the water clear, hardly a ripple, and the reflections perfect until a breeze ripples the surface and slightly warps the images. Sights deceive us; everything we see is deceiving. Like yesterday in the Coffee Catz, a man with a trim beard works at his laptop next to a younger man with a ponytail sharpening antique razors on a wet stone. The younger man asks the waiter for vegetable oil and is brought some 3-in-1 oil, and the man at his computer looks confused, does this coffeehouse serve oil? Can I work with these razors being sharpened? Maybe, he concludes, the other man knows the owner, and it is just his luck to sit next to a man sharpening razors for whatever. A cosmic word, whatever, and the stars revolving in their paths, ever-bound, while a man sits at a computer, searching for meaning, surfing without direction day by day.
And I have a thirst, and I keep coming to this coffeehouse to satisfy my thirst, and I drink tea, and the man there drinks coffee, and the other man is served oil, whatever, the moon orbiting but not revolving, me revolving, here, sitting on this log by the edge of the creek, and the sap in the vines rising, and I feel love for strangers, even politicians, feeling loving feelings, so I breathe the spring air, knowing that the love I'm feeling has to feel real or I'm not going to be really feeling the love I need, and the "so" is such a big word, means volition, means cause and effect, means by the force of my argument to change the effect and be the cause, because I'm bound by my lifestyle, and I can only be unbound by love, unbound by joy and compassion, and the leaves turn, and the rain falls, and the creek fills, and the homeless are made even more homeless, and my husband will soon be home from work, and I'd better check the cake, the cake, God, the cake, and after that, what?