№ 89. The Beach Muffins

An overpriced muffin. An over-developed beach. Boracay needs a rehab. 

№ 88. The Roll of the Keys

After my first ever paycheck, not counting the ones from many on-the-job training or internships, this was my first blood: An old Royal typewriter.

I smile when I think it was both a symbolic and a prophetic purchase. More than a decade later, I still pound the keys.

Bento Box:

Incidentally, somebody claims that the machine used in the concert clip was a Royal Typewriter. It was probably not the Royal "Quiet" De Luxe.

Here's a bit of trivia, they say that the Royal is Hemingway's machine. Nice to know.

"The Royal Quiet DeLuxe puts you right in touch with literary history -- it was one of Ernest Hemingway's favorite machines. This was the first model in a series of the Royal Quiet DeLuxe line that outsold any other portables of the time. It was introduced just before World War II, but its production was suspended when Royal Typewriter Company, like other typewriter manufacturers in the United States at the time, was converted to an ordnance factory to produce weapons. When production resumed in 1946, the Royal Quiet DeLuxe continued to gain a following among on-the-go writers and journalists." (mytypewriter)

№ 87. Entablado

The theater is a window and a mirror.

First, one peers at some unfamiliar reality outside himself and immerses his next minutes exploring the wonderland. Second, he sees a reflection of some familiar bedfellow and risks pages of emotions and memories from the epiphany.

Theater can be hazardous.

№ 86. In the midst of winter....

Lies an invincible summer.....

I think Camus said it metaphysically. And, I say, it sounds much better:

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Here's a sunny track to go with the visuals.

№ 85.Habits of the Mind (2)

Anxious. Here's a balm: "Making Paper Boats with Papa".

Open publication - Free publishing

№ 84. Habits of the Mind

It's the climate change on a planetary scale, for starters. Then there are the rabid monsoons. Did we mention the floods thick with our sewage and rich with our possessions? How about the waste segregation floating on our dead rivers?

It's all the irresponsibility and ineptness in this vast urban sinkhole.

"Anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease
about something with an uncertain outcome."---David Mansaray

And talk about another habit of the mind---anxiety. Anxiety because of and amidst all of these.

Thankfully, it's one that can be cured by a simple smack or noogie. Thankfully, the cure is mainly mental not planetary. But if you wish, it could also be physical, a break from an unproductive helplessness that's fast becoming a pattern, or worse, a cycle. It's this loopy possibility that can be self-defeating.

Daniel Smith says, "Anxious thoughts — the what-if’s, the should-have-been’s, the never-will-be’s — are dramatic thoughts. They are compelling thoughts. They are thoughts that have no compunction about seizing you by your lapels and shouting, “Listen to me! Believe me!” So we listen, and believe, without realizing that by doing so we are stepping onto a closed loop, a set of mental tracks that circle endlessly and get us nowhere. This makes the anxious habit very hard to break. Over time those mental tracks deepen and become hardened ruts. Our thoughts slip into grooves of illogic, hypervigilance and catastrophe."

So here's a smack! Figurative, for now.

--------

"One day last year, I called my brother Scott in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair. Scott was at work and short on time. I got straight to the point. 'I’m in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair!' I cried.

'Tell me more,' Scott said. 'What is it?'

'I'm anxious — again! I’m anxious day and night. I wake up anxious and I go to bed anxious. I’m a total wreck. And I’m not doing anything to help myself! I know what helps and I’m not doing it! What’s wrong with me? Why am I not doing the things I know full well will make me feel better?'

Vice Grips and Some Such

'Oh,' Scott said. 'That’s an easy one. It’s because you’re an idiot.' Then he said he’d call me after work. (NYT Opinionator)

№ 83. 18th Century Social Network

Ideas travel. But there should be a feedback mechanism and a network to link the ideas, their creators and other creators.

Social networks, in all their primitive forms, proved to be the tides that brought foam and freedom, novelty, variety and dissent to distant lands.

It's interesting to actually see, not with our mind's eye, how the light that burned in the minds of these great thinkers spread across physical spaces.

Thanks Stanford.

 

№ 82.God of Carnage

"In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers." The New Yorker

 

All huddle in midnight vigil.
They wait for paid violence to awake.

Dark menace finally rises up
To uncoil out of the silver pages.

Then bullets litter the air.
Special effects, they think.

Fire metals pierce
Flesh, bones and fiction.

Cellphones ring unanswered
In the pockets of dead children.

Popcorn kernels litter the exodus
While Gotham reels empty after the carnage.

Pilgrims welcome the refuge outside.
Almighty Bruce redeems his masses back to reality.

Bento Box: 

"It is the implicit bargain every moviegoer makes. You buy your ticket, you go into an auditorium full of people you don't know, you look toward the front of the room, the lights go down -- and in the darkness, you are safe. The movies promise us a happy ending, a return to the familiar world we know" (When it's not 'only a movie'). 

Alas, no more of that fiction beyond the film.