Maybe I'm making this up or projecting but there's this kid I coach and when we interact I get the feeling that she's thinking to begin to explain to you what's going on in my head would require a tremendous amount of energy and a tremendous amount of faith in you that you're going to listen and try to understand and instead I'm just going to say 'beans'. And then she says 'beans'.

Which sounds kind of pretentious but I don't think there's any like weariness or disillusionment to her. I think it might just be how it is.

do you think we know when the line "get your filthy paws off me" was first said in popular media?

 Oh. duh.

Charlton Heston said "take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape." in Planet of the Apes.

duh.

But then you look and they clearly have hands

 So that line was really uncalled for.

There's a lot of things that were said and done in the past that we in the present have to make amends for. 

And a lot of things being done in the present right now that the future will have to make amends for.

Maybe we can start--I have the microphone that can speak to all of humanity at once--maybe we can start by acknowledging that this man was under extreme fictional duress and he didn't really mean what he said in that moment. I don't know if they circle back to it later in the movie. I haven't seen it.

your mind is so powerful

 your human brain is so incredibly strong.

never forget that.

imagine anything.

point your imagination ray at anything and watch it transform.

a powerful beam of imagination 

scattering across the sky

to strike all the butter

and call them forth

to coalesce into a giant sphere

that towers over the skyline

the butter orb

hurtling across the filament

I mean

the firmament

to do cosmic battle 

with your greatest sadness

that bubbles up smoking

fumes that take the shape of

balled eagles

I was coaching today and a kid farted and a kid smelled it and said

 "Ew somebody tooted."

And this girl standing next to her goes, cool as anything, "It was probably me. Even though I didn't do it."

And then dropped down to sit on the mats.

I've never in my entire life seen a better way to diffuse that situation before. 

"It was probably me. Even though I didn't do it."

With all the confidence in the world.

Unreal.

 I was talking to someone recently about political caricature and I brought up the idea that humor and sarcasm and irony are good at exposing truths about institutions and established power but that you can't build something useful out of them. And the person I was talking to said that laughter can still be cathartic and useful to help people manage.

It's hard for me to disagree but I don't feel like laughter is helpful at this point in time. Removed from context, Trump is hilarious. On some level, we've been laughing at him the whole time. But it doesn't stop him in any way. 

Patton Oswalt had a joke about the end of the Bush administration where he said people would come up to him and say "Oh man, you comedians are in trouble now that Bush isn't president. You aren't going to have anything to talk about." And he responds

Imagine for the last 8 years there were demons just flying around in the sky and they would randomly swoop down and sodomize people. And I wrote ten killer minutes about the sodomy demons and then the Pope banished them to another dimension and people go 'boy Patton you really miss those sodomy demons'

Much like senseless demons, Trump is formless. He's a void. He doesn't stand for anything. And I feel like the best way to build something is to be sincere. 

Not that humor doesn't have a place--I just feel like in my lifetime we've been in a golden age of political humor and things are terrible. If political humor actually did anything, why are things like this?

ode to the Mets but it's just 'up on his horse, up on his horse' for all the lyrics

dude

 dude

what

oh

I thought

yeah

no I just

ok

That was a poem about a guy who when he was four met a frog wizard and the frog wizard said in ten years I'm going to sneak up behind you and slap you and if you catch me you get a thousand frog dollars and if you don't you get slapped and tough break kid and the kid tried his hardest to remember but then he forgot and wasn't sure about the day and time anymore and then he got got.

reading back my old posts

from 14 years ago

I always feel

like I did too much

but now I don't

scuttling cruttling

scuttling cruttling

scuttling cruttling

the crab who pinches and snips

scuttling cruttling

scuttling cruttling

the crab who pinched a thousand ships

a crab in a bottle

a crab in the house

a crab full throttle

a crab fights a mouse

scuttling cruttling and doodly duddling

every crab has his day

skitter and scatter and tickety tatter

the crab

the crab 

the crab

commander and leader 

enchanté

when it's a blue evening

 it's a blue evening

the engine in the distance

leaves in the wind

why not take a heaping spoonful of black pepper

straight down the gullet

live a little

time unwinds in a cool blue line

always pointing ahead

to where one never arrives

if only a bracing spoonful of freshly ground black pepper

could shake things up

my my my

what a rush that would be

in a dogwood tree

visible from the window

lies a nest hidden

by musty white flowers

boy oh boy

could I over go for a piping hot spoonful of pepper

send my sinuses into overdrive

send my taste buds to the moon

on a pleasant calm blue evening

the range of best

 I love that for some people the word 'best' can mean 'something they think is very good' and for other people the word 'best' can't even be used at all. Nothing of the world can truly rise to the level of 'best'.

People who never use best think that people who use best for things they like are frivolous agents of chaos. They only live to disrupt the natural order of the universe. You can't just call something 'the best' and not even mean it. Oh is that your 'best friend'? Is that the 'best meal you've ever had'? Yeah and what if money was just worth whatever we felt like. If we have no fixed points of meaning then we're adrift in a sea of nothingness. The 'best' is a standard by which all other things are judged and it's not something we can just toss around in place of  'pretty good'. In short, you shouldn't be trusted with anything and your words are the honks and squawks of madness itself.

People who like using 'best' think that people who never use best are just a quivering husk. If all you do is wait for the perfect opportunity you'll have spent all your time waiting, missed the opportunity, and pass through this life too afraid to touch anything. What good is an ideal to the flesh and the bone? Grab the world. Break things. You'll never hit a dinger if all you fear is the swing and miss. We know there is no 'best'. You're not special for being a strict literalist. What persists in life are moments of feeling and words should serve to describe that. 

big? compared to what?

 the first thing to be described as big

an age old mystery

some might say

the biggest mystery of all

the biggystery of all

my vote?

egg

the bite

 one bite will kill you dead

two bites will bring you back to life

three bites will make you go crazy

four bites will make you a

gnawed on scrap of old dusty

beef leather draped over the

banister of rickety crooked

stairs that lead halfway up

and halfway down to nowhere--

three fiends sloughed off

your sorry withered hide into

abyss but there was no

fall. it was a very short drop to

where you were.

those are the bite rules.

---------------------------

this is a poem about how growing up there would be kids who would just confidently tell you rules to things. I guess because they learned about the concept of rules and like, cause and effect. But, you know me, a sucker for serious nonsense.

one time, I'll never forget this, a kid told me (who was also a kid) with a straight face, completely serious,

 "did you know? if you can draw a perfect circle, you're the smartest person in the world. but if you draw the circle backwards, you're the dumbest person in the world."

And I remember hearing that and knowing it probably wasn't true but also thinking, "Hmm yeah I guess that makes sense."

a poem about the only thing I still remember from AP European History

 one day we learned about Pope Leo X

who said,

"God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it."

upon hearing this

my friend Chad said,

"God has given us the Chad, let us enjoy it."

a poem about the rain

 doesn't it feel like

there should be reverse rain?

I don't understand how water moves.

we should put all the water in a giant truck.

and drive it around to everyone who needs it.

which is everyone all the time.

and the trucker is incorruptible.

they are our hero.

our hopes and dreams rest on the truck scheme.

one person to bear the burden of all the wetness.

I believe in the water trucker.

the two things I was bad at in school as a kid

 spelling and math.

I remember I got an F on a spelling test in like 4th grade once. And I realized I had to study to not fail. And I was bad at math for a lot longer. Until like 10th grade.

It was because I wasn't open to the possibility of being wrong about the answer I got. There was no check in place. I'd spell the word however I thought it should be spelled and wouldn't question it. Or I'd do mental math and get it wrong and not question it. 

One of my least favorite qualities in a person is someone who consistently says these with confidence that are factually wrong. Like how I was in spelling and math. 

At some point the education system beat it out of me. It said, 'you are fallible. stop believing everything you think. have oversight on this stuff.'

And I think that's a good quality.

have you ever tended to someone else's obsession?

 what a trip right?

these tasks that give someone else so much purpose and fulfillment and meaning and to you it's toil and tedious.

how's that work?

spell check doesn't think that I can abbreviate "how does" into how's. 

Oh I'm sorry Blogger maybe you haven't heard of the popular TV show that started in 2002 called 'How's that Work' that explains how stuff works.

my sister is a pharmacist!

 yay Erin! good job! proud of you!!

hypocrisy

one thing I've become really ardent about is teaching the kids I coach how to properly greet people when you walk into a space. the words themselves don't really matter but it's letting everyone in the space know that you acknowledge them and see them and are entering with good intentions. there's really not a lot of upside to it but you really don't want to deal with the downsides.

and then I enter a space and people greet me and ask me how my day is going and I think ohmygod why are you asking me all these questions I day is going just let me exist please

And actually I think that's great and having those thoughts makes the ritual all the more important. It's like it's banishing the Me-Spiral-Demons.

I think true goodness exists for its own sake. Nietzsche said that goodness and virtue is an overflowing. It's an overabundance of itself. But decency is a response to a darker nature. Maybe. You could make the argument against it. 

at the dentist

 I was sitting in the chair at the dentist and they had the monitor up where I could see it so I was reading my patient notes and at the bottom it said

"patient is nice."

And I was like "LET'S GO!!" 

Right? Because they don't have to say that. I earned it.

And I do think that what matters, like, the thing that continues to persist in a meaningful way, is how you make people feel. Above everything else. 

And I got officially secret told by my dentist that I'm nice.

gold star for me.

 Have you ever seen a video where someone leaves some candy or food for an ant to discover and the ant gets really excited and goes back to the colony to tell all the other ants about the food and when the ant comes back to it the human has taken the food away? And then usually the voice over is something like "they'll never believe you. hahahaha. they'll never believe you."

Well I have. And I like to think of myself as an ant in relation to the larger world and yesterday I lost my favorite quarter zip that I like for running and working out when it's colder and I looked all over my apartment and then I went to the track with the slightest bit of hope that I could had left it there over a week ago or something. I was not confident that it would still be there. In the corner of the track was a garment that looked just like mine from a distance but up close it wasn't it. So I gave up and went about my business and then I happened to look at the top of the stairs and see another long sleeve shirt looking thing and it was mine! Wow. What a happy ant I was. In both small and large undeniable ways you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control and you gotta celebrate victories when you can.

I know that laugh

 The other week I was at my friend's softball game and these sisters whose mom was playing were running around and playing chase or tag or whatever. And the other older sister was trying to catch the younger sister and the younger one ran past her and just barely got out of the way at full speed and she did this kind of maniacal laugh like "wahahahaha!" 

And I know that laugh. That is the you can't catch me laugh at full speed. I've done that laugh. That's like a universal laugh.