The Ladder of Light (A Parable)

Ansel Adams: "Clouds, Sierra Nevada."

The old man fell asleep in his chair. He died.

He only knew that he died because when he sat up, bleary, everything around him had turned to foggy shapes. From his upraised hands extended, upward, a ladder wrought of light.

He began to climb, with no effort, feeling the way he had as a boy when he had lifted his smiling father in the pool, amazed at his own strength in the water.

It was like being a weightless astronaut. He could climb forever, without effort. With no muscles to tire, with no heart to race, with no brow to sweat, "effort" was a word with no definition.

He climbed and climbed until he reached a platform of mist where some others had stopped climbing. There, near his ladder, hovered a guardian spirit, as bright as a solar flare and as dark as anesthetic sleep. Without speaking, it said, Go. Climb. And the soundless tone of those words made him feel as happy as a cuddled dog.

Escaping Streaming Virtuality

I even joke with myself about my being an "early-onset curmudgeon." But, the truth is, I have always been a bit of an anachronism; a fan or solitude; a guy with a distaste for either conformity or blatant, conformist non-conformity; a lover of conversation over wasted hours under flashing lights and noisy, empty-headed music. I've always been a reader and a thinker. I college, I used to sit in the woods and write before the mists had lifted for the morning. I've always valued reason and good-sense over unreasonable fulfillment or risk.

The only time I ever got "in trouble" in high school was because of a piece I wrote for the school "newspaper"; a short, satirical play called Spamlet. Otherwise, not a single detention.

The Sweating Anomaly

I had the strangest experience today.

I was standing in a Wawa -- it's a convenience store in this neck of the world; there are so many of them in my state that you tend, while driving, to say, "Mah -- that one's on the wrong side of the road; I'll wait for the next Wawa." There's always a next Wawa; always, and hard upon the last. I don't doubt that they're connected by underground tunnels hung with oil lanterns.

Anyway, I was standing (leaning, really) in one of these ubiquitous Wawas, waiting for the young woman behind the counter to grudgingly slap together the sandwiches that I had ordered as part of dinner -- the unhealthy composition of which more or less negates any good thing I have ever done as a father or husband -- for the family. (My, I'm feeling parenthetical today.)

It's been near one-hundred degrees for a few days 'round here. Sweating people trudged wetly in and out, buying sports drinks, chips, cookies, cigarettes, beef-jerky, milk, bread and queso dips of various hues. The tired plastic bags in their tired hands were loaded with little packages of death-hastening treats. And they didn't care, because life is busy and it is hot and they just want something nice in the midst of a day that sucked fat ostrich eggs.


Leave me alone, each face said, in weary silence. Just leave me the hell alone! What more do you want from me? It's been a long, hot day. My children are chittering little dung beetles and my spouse is a soul-eating extraterrestrial. I NEED this brownie and I am going to wash it down with this ice-cold Coke and when I'm done, I might lick sugar cubes until the entire box is gone and my wrists drip with stickiness! So, BACK OFF!"


Really. That's what they wordlessly said.

An Idea in the Distance

I’d love to take a trip around someone else’s mind. Did you ever wonder what it looks like in someone else’s head? What’s the process like? What colors flash around the ideas? Are the sounds gentle or raking or do they take imagined shape, like the ones in my head do? -- like when I am trying to arrange a piece of music I have written and I “see” the notes as a cascade of colors in my head, like rains layered over each other in different hues that resolve with each other when things are right…

People’s minds must be like snowflakes in their individuality -- infinitely varied fractals of processes and connections of ideas and feelings.

I’d just like to visit other minds…just to see…

Alas, I only know mine, at least from the inside. I try to know those of others from the outside as best I can.

How to Be a Parental Ninja

Parents! Are you tired of the constant struggle? -- sick of the arguments? Have you had it with fighting the urge to be a killjoy when it comes to helping your children get a healthy and non-meat-headed perspective on the now cotton-candy, now obnoxious offerings that the pop culture mongers try to foist on them daily, via the television airwaves? 

We all know that advertisers and marketers want to sell our kids a belief system that will bolster sales. We all know that they want to build up a concept of what it "cool" in our babies' innocent, not-as-yet-self conscious minds so that these electronically-created adver-zombies will drag us parents into the labyrinths of the marketplace maze and deplete us of our hard earned money and self-respect. For some, this works out.

Parents, unite!

Sure -- the advertisers get money. The kids get stuff. But what do we get? We get stuck with little groupthink materialists at our dinner tables, along with a lifelong feeling of guilt resulting from the fact that that we allowed our kids to wander down the dark road of really, super-duper darkess -- to step through the door held open by that devourer of young intellect, Justin Bieber, and then to make a fateful left and get on the elevator down to pop culture Hades, where they play Big Time Rush on the PA system all day and night.