Yesterday as I stood at my dishes, obsessing over the shine and spotlessness achievable with a little hot water and a few antibacterial suds - not to mention my careful note of the new sink in all of its hard plastic clean perfection - I worked on this mind frame I am developing.
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Trained as a painter (I say "trained" whereas in actuality it is more like I was allowed to paint for a while when I was in college - you know...like: Q. "...have you ever smoked marijuana?" A. "...well, yes...just while I was in college."), I discovered a few things back then that I can't seem to forget, not that there's much use for them, mind you, or a place to profitably exercise any such visual gifts (unless one wants to 'create' a portfolio to hawk at art galleries, wooing their owners, their patrons, prostituting oneself to the dollar yet again), , and you know how dominant, or more like, pervasive the profit motive is in this culture.

Barbara: EDIT THIS SHit will you? DAMN.!


Ah, college days*. An accumulation of rushing instants: surprises during the 60s, mobbed milli-seconds of shocked realization in the 70s; day to day awakening of not a little joy in the 80s, the now and againness of an unwelcome and occasionally severe dismay endured while under the influence of one of the headier wines of life throughout: an almost viscous curiosity, which, when satisfied, we poured carelessly into vats and barrels labeled Knowledge. This store, in all and in sum, results in that peculiar ultimate totality commonly called one's education.
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I happened to discover with effort the simplest process in the world, that of concentrated observation. It leads to a revelation: the intrinsic beauty in ordinary things. Things that busier, perhaps more "normal" humans rarely notice or ever come to value come alive. The latter occurs despite the fact that we are raised and taught by means of contrived rewards to pick up mostly cues that have little to do with beauty. We are a colorless, utilitarian, pragmatic and obsessively practical lot, it seems, as a result.

Some of us, meanwhile, having aged without meaning to at all have become the elders of the bunch, a decidedly unheralded group, believe me, particularly in a college town, like this one here(with the exception of the politicos, like, say, Mary Sharp).

*(Graduating high school in June of 1960,I began university studies in September of that year -- I have yet to end those studies)