The Okra Intercession

The other day one of my housemates boiled some okra. My other two housemates are teachers in the public school system, and were out for the summer. It was my housemate, the okra, and I. He was boiling the okra in a sauce pan, stirring it blandly with a wooden spoon. It boiled for about twenty minutes before he turned the gas out from under it.

"Try one," he said, "it's okra... it's good..."


He tried to feed it to me from the wooden spoon. I took the okra with my fingers and put it in my mouth. I chewed it, using the tongue to explore the flavor. The little green piece of vegetable released some of its familiar flavor, then it proceeded to fill my mouth with slime. It wasn't natural.

I spit it out onto a napkin. It was disgusting. I researched the subject in the internet. Many warned about the slime released in boiling okra. I came to find out a posteriori, of course. As I was about to inform my housemate about what I had just experienced and learned, he took the wooden spoon with two or three pieces of okra and put it in his mouth.

The look in my face must have been half awed and half disgusted. He chewed and swallowed, all the while staring calmly with a smirk on his face from his place in front of the gas stove. "I actually like the way it tastes..." he mumbled. 

It hit me at once why I liked it and he didn't:


He was gay and I wasn't.

There is something not quite right with Mr. Ken. He smiles alot, but at all the wrong things. His taste in music is slightly off the mainstream or esoteric circles. His breakfast consists of a raw egg, orange juice and milk, in the same cup at once. I believe I once witnessed him feasting off raw liver. He reads books about people other people consider dangerous. He steals bicycles from amongst the donated items supporting local thrift stores. He cleans them and resells on the interweb. He does not enjoy being in the midst of multitudes. His breathing increases dramatically, his eyes roll in his face, and he tells you he needs to leave. Certain lights make his migraines act up. He picks up every penny he sees on the street however scratched it may be. He prefers to wash dishes than make a side for pot lucks, even when there is an electric dishwasher present. I'm not certain he finds the sea a peaceful body. The moon looks the other way on the nights he strays. His skin becomes translucent, his organs begin to show in places. After one hour of moonlight collection, he closes his eyes, draws in a deep breath, and almost immediately his body emits light. It is a dim, yellowish light, not quite amber. Light like the light from a fixture where insects have perished and dust has settled thickly. He has many pen pals which he writes and which write to him. They all discuss dreams they've dreamt in the hot nights of Summer. Once he sweat over a post card, and the sweat made some of the ink bleed to the point of incomprehension. He mailed it anyway. I never knew how to judge him: he could be highly practical or careless. Perhaps he was both.

Shadow

There is a man I see when I wander town. He's there so often it seems to me he follows. At the supermarket, I see him. I see him walking on my side of the sidewalk. I see him at the Latin store the one time of the year I walk in there. He often wears sunglasses, I seldom see his eyes. His face is thick like leather, his cheeks fallen slightly off to the sides. 

He reminds me of a minotaur that resembles a man. 

He often wears the blue suit of a mechanic. I sometimes wonder what he does. His mustache is thick under his thick nose. His hair is short and curly. His sideburns thick like mud. His skin is always darker hued, and even in the crevasses formed by the wrinkles on the surface of his skin. He reminds me of the awful, patriarchal men that hang out in hotel lobbies, smoking cigars, discussing with others about their money and their lovers. He reminds of the kind of man that would seduce our mother's heart and crush it, then leave it out to dry. That's why I've never crossed words with him, if today merely a gentle smile, one to acknowledge his presence. Neither has he stopped me to talk. He's older, and therefore I would think wiser, so it is not up to me to seek out his conversation. I do not know what he'd have to say, or if he says much. He reminds me in some ways of the myths about the devil that are so common emerging for old Honduran ladies' tongues. He seems he works hard, but so does the devil.

Jose #1: Part 2

The coyote had sent him and two others in a different bus, as the minivan where the original group was travelling was packed to the brim. This is problematic, because as the immigrants make their way across Mexico the coyotes must pay a tax to allow for the passage of individuals further north. The head of this operation, unnamed, is one who knows each coyote by name and face.

This was Jose's first time travelling north, and as such there was no way he could know what to expect, unless by chance he ran across others in his youth who could relate with truth and accuracy the hardships of the ever changing terrain.

It was in Reynosa where several armed men stopped the bus he and the two paisanos were riding. They began asking for credentials: passports, visas, IDs. Jose and his company, coming from a small village in Honduras, knowing they were embarking in an essentially clandestine course, failed to carry any form of identification on their persons. They were asked to get off the bus. One of the two paisanos, extremely afraid, broke off running. He was soon chased down and beaten with the butt of the gun, hauled back bruised and bleeding, to be carried off with Jose and the other man in a Toyota truck to some unknown location.

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

Jose 1:

Jose (#1, as anonymously each male will be called Jose and each female Maria) grew up in a small village of Intibuca called Pueblo Nuevo. He is a young, brown skinned man in his early twenties, voicing a shrill laughter of E's naughty jokes. He appears to have arrived to Virginia from the Garden of Eden, knowing nothing of sex or nudity and calling marriage 'accompaniment' or 'finding company'. I see his childhood in an isolated cerro, full of God's Word (Logos) dripping from his mother's lips from the time milk dripped into his lips from his mother's breasts.

"How do people get over here?" I asked.

"They take out loans from different people. People that have come to the US and have gone back to Intibuca with money will provide loans, but with interest."
"What if you come here and you can't find a job?"
"The interest adds up and you have to pay more. Sometimes the people that lend you money ask to hold a title to your land before they let you borrow from them. If you fail to pay the loan, they keep your land as a collateral."

"How much does it cost to come here?"
"It costs about $10,000, or 200,000 Lempiras. My family was able to borrow L. 60,000 from a gentleman, and L.50,000 from a lady that had worked here in the US and gone back."

The conversation went on to describe the sacrifice, the effort, the dangers of the road to the Dream. "It's gotten a lot harder to make the trip." he said, "Bandits in Mexico stop the buses and ask for credentials and will take out anyone who lacks credentials. It has made the trip more expensive..."

The young man talked openly, as if it had been a breeze. But before he told me the story, little did I know that he, like many others, had to grip onto his life with the fiercest claws of faith his soul could conjure.

The Full Story of Mimmo the Black Cat, or How I Almost Possibly Became Homeless for a Brief Period of Time"

by Virgilio Nebel on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 7:27pm

The last time I saw Mimmo the black cat was Thursday. When I left Friday morning, the cat had already left to wander the Fan, and I did not return home until 1 a.m. A friend claims to have seen him prance across his path near the Visual Arts Center.

A black cat at night- an omen for some. Another friend claims to have seen him very early on Saturday, apathetic at the morning cold, staring as the doors swung open and closed. He sat on his cushion on the porch. Later, my housemate would say that he ate enough on Friday as to keep him for a week. Perhaps that's why he would simply stare as my friend exit the house. I left early to volunteering doing people's taxes, feeling a little sick from the piña coladas and the screaming the night before.

The cat, at that point, was no longer on the porch. Thursday evening was the last time I saw him. Saturday came and went, swimming and tea, verbs and nouns, and Sunday, with its VCU game, arrived still excited about Friday and more excited about itself yet. Sunday morning: No black cat on the porch, no black cat out back. No cat at all. Sunday brought a multitude of eyes and sounds, a massive pool of positive energy amassed on Broad St after the consecutive victories.

A smoke bomb went off near a broadcasting van, the several revellers quickly scattered. The ecstatic wave swept onto Monroe Park grounds. All this away from the roaming grounds of the cat. By Sunday I thought: "Strange.. the cat hasn't come back." I noticed as the day drew to a close that something had tipped the recycling bin, something had torn into an old box of cat treats. I didn't think much of it. I turned it right side up and disappeared in the house.

That afternoon caught me meditating in Quadrangle Park over the fact of the cat. Had it been run over? Had the Chinese Restaurant on the corner had such bad business that they had neglected buying chicken and started harvesting feral cats? This was not to depict them in a bad light; but rather, in somewhat of a blue light, sad at the fact that I had once read a news that had a picture describing its content and that picture showed a crate with many cats cramped inside, all meowing in unison, grateful at being saved from their fate in someone's fried rice... In all this, a friend baked several pizzas at my place and took them, ready to eat, to his place, where I have no doubt they were devoured with humility and gusto.

I walked home to get the bike, and rode to eat pizza at another friend's house, a ritual at this point. The anchovie pizza was as salty and tasty as always, nevertheless the thought of the tiny slivers of the fish halves reminded of the image on my friend's cat's collar, which made me always want to name it Fishbone. The thought of this cat eventually would carry me to the thought of Mimmo, and the thought of the several fates that cat can suffer in its instinctual nocturnal pursuits.

That night caught me peeking into my neighbor's trash bin as my neighbor walked out the back door for a cigarette. I feigned a wandering medidation with improvised whistle and the cat call "Mimmo..mimmooo..mimmooooooo". Riiiight.. a definite blurring of the line between voyeurism and honest concern, as it might occur in the neighbor's perception. Regardless it was late and cold and no meow emerged from the prevailing darkness. The cat was blacker than ever. It had been absorbed by that ephemeral generalized shadow we know as night... the night had even swallowed the meows.

Monday carried in its breast the return of the housemate and the rehearsals of the delivery of the tragic news. I had had to deliver this news once before, to another roommate, but that time involving the thought that the cat was then somewhere within the empty spaces of the washer. But that's a different story.

Monday morning I realized what the torn cat treat bag meant. It hit me: Maybe the cat was starving out in the wild, and maybe it wanted to come in but it was unable to because it never saw me when I opened the doors and I never saw it when the doors were open. So I left it's little red bowl full of treats for it, just in case it decided to stop by once again. I was hoping that that would give it the energy to return to the back door, where he could be observed from the kitchen scratching the back door screen as if knocking to let him in. But he never came.

The evening came so fast, with the need to deliver the bad news. I called the housemate three times. It was around eight in the evening, as I stood telling my parents about vague cyclical thoughts regarding joining the air force, that the phone vibrated in my left pocket, and his name came up in the neon acqua of the screen- "Veer G lio, I soh you cohlled me three times, how ahr you?" and I said, "I'm ok.. well, maybe not, I... I have some news concerning Mimmo, he.. he kinda disappeared. I haven't seen him since Friday.. Or in fact.. I haven't seen him since Thursday, and he didn't return all weekend... but I left food out and something ate it, but I wasn't sure if it was Mimmo"

"Oh my Gohd..." He talked about how the news would break someone else's fault and how he would try to cohll him and look out for him. I said sorry, hung up, and got ready to leave. I drove home thinking about the smell of dead animals, and with that, about how ephemeral we actually are, and how little glory there is left in the decaying bodies of the once living. I thought of walking into the night and hoping to track the smallest hint of decay, and following it like a hound to its source, where I expected to find a small, bony lump of black fur half torn by crows or grackles, like so many mangled mice he had brought home as gifts of appreciation, which I had to gracelessly pick up in bags and tote to the trash bin out back.

I noticed the neighbor's bin was missing, and thought that maybe where the bin was was the cat. Maybe his little red toyota had trampled the dear Mimmo, and in his silent type silence he would conceal the tragedy until the day he died.

I went to sleep that night feeling terrible. In a way, this cat had disappeared under my watch. I went out again, this time less motivated, to call him. When I came back I went straight to the freezer, pulled out the ice cream, slapped two scoops in a bowl and made it disappear. I could feel the weight of anguish in the whole two floors and basement of the house.

Mimmo's archenemy -Eeor- sits on the cushion on the front porch where Mimmo was last seen. His cold eyes judge the tenants that neglected to care of his kind. Later, he creeps out from under the stair case where he so often harassed Mimmo, and arrogantly wanders off.

Tuesday morning, no cat. The housemate goes out early, calls out to him, without response. He has resigned to the fate of the cat, but mutters once again that that person whose heart shall be broken at the news shall not hear the news until it is requested. In my mind, my lease will end as soon as enough time has elapsed to prove the cat gone forever, for part of the cheap rent is caring for the cat in the housemate's absence.

I come home for lunch, hoping to find him in the old spot, but he lacks. I walk in, hoping the housemate has already once entered the empty rooms of a work day afternoon, but he hasn't. I bang as many pans as I can this one time, as that once has brought him to the back door screen, which he pulls with his tiny claws. But regardless of the banging of pans, the screen remains tense.

The work day goes by. I get signatures for a food stamp application, drive back home. I plan to scout the entire neighborhood for a five block radius. If that fails, I will stick several pictures of the cat on a Word document (to save money) and print several copies, then clip them and staple them to every post with a tiny birdhouse.

Ironically, it was less than two weeks ago when i asked my housemate, "You love letting the cat out... what would happen if he goes out and never comes back?" To which he answered an equivalent of 'that is always the risk.' Well now it was a reality, and he was afraid to break the cat lover's heart.

So I began scouting Main Street, concealing my concern behind my harmonica and my sun glasses, mind you the sun was sinking, and walked across the street to where a trash can exposed a black figure. I was relieved at finding out it was a plastic bag and disappointed at not providing closure to the mystery, but again relieved at the fact. I kept on walking and playing and saw this sketchy path between the Visual Arts Center and its left neighbor. I walked through it fearing to sniff decay and looking for black furry lumps amongst the weeds.

At the end of the alley: A dog's ass. By the look of it, a boxer. I kept moving forward, systematically blowing into the harmonica to produce... blues. And the blues went on as I went on as the boxer became clearer and gave way to a leash, and as the leash became clearer gave way to a crouching body, and the crouching body to a smiling face of a cut girl stretching her back Korean style in the midst of walking her dog.

I said 'hello' and kept playing and walking- That's what shy people concerned with finding their cats do. I kept walking and walked into the back of the Art Center parking lot, where this house has this patch of green grass, where I doubted the grass was greener on the other side.

They must have sold their soul to the devil to grow grass this green, I thought. But then I noticed the sweet lamp they had against the fence to the right. I kept walking, lest I digress from the mission at hand. I saw a different alleyway than the one the trash trucks use to retrieve our trash and the same one I use to park. This is a smaller path passing, no doubt, next to the house of the uber-proud parents of a Afghan/Iraqi killing machine, their delusions pronounced in the hundred bumper stickers that fill the back surface of their Jeep Patriot. At this time, my cat is more important than their veteran son, and if it were their cat, perhaps, for at least a couple of minutes, it'd be more important than their veteran son to them as well. T'is the nature of humans, ain't it?

I turned left at the end of the alley towards the corner of Floyd and Allen. I mumbled the little cat call, expecting it not to work. But what the effing hell, to my left appeared a little black nose, with a little black paw, and a little gray eye, then two gray eyes, then the other black paw, as it squeezed under the fence of that corner house that had kept him for the last three days!

It jumped into my arm, or I snatched it, I don't know. But I swear- that cat squeezing under that fence was in some degrees as glorious as a baby squeezing out of its mother at birth:

In a way they both symbolized life.

The Immortal

Today was Sam Stookey's two hundred seventy third birthday, and many swore he looked in his early fortys. In fact, for the last two hundred thirty six years, he's been thirty seven years old. Except he doesn't know exactly how old he is. He noticed something was wrong when he turned fifty nine, and then sixty five, then seventy eight, and he looked the same as those pictures from back in the day.

Sam Stookey was, short of words, immortal. He had something of an idea as to his age, having spent summers and winters thinking back in his life to what event had caused it. After he turned a year older than Jeanne Calment, who croaked back in '97, scientist hooked on to him like lampreys, assuming it had some genetic cause.

So they took a sample of his blood, sperm, hair, bone, nail, poop, skin, and whatever else science and the black market could get their hands on. Some people went to strange and awful extremes in their pursuit... Someone, for example, caught his breath in a jar to sell on ebay for about less than the jar cost at the thrift store for no one believed it was actually Stookey's breath.

Someone faked a nurse outfit and managed to get a clip of one of his daughter's umbilical cord. Another nurse took the placenta home like someone takes the leftover cake at an office birthday celebration.

A dentist removed a tooth that had nothing wrong with it and kept some plaque in a vial. However, despite all the efforts at finding a biological reason for his immortality, they found as much reason to believe in that as one would in, say, Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East.

It all became clear as he saw his first and second wives wither away in age, followed by his children and grandchildren. Sperm Banks stopped sending bottles with checks for six digit amounts within a day from which his second grandson Jules Verne Stookey passed at age 64.

If you only knew, they wrote him so many checks for so long to sell for tons to so many surrogate mothers curious to give birth to the next Immortal. All of them and their little Stookey's eventually croaked with their hopes still hanging like socks set to dry on the rope of Destiny.

Some way the sperm banks found out much earlier than the consumers how short-lived the Stookey progeny would be. However, they were making so much money from the demand that they kept on mailing Sam the vials, the checks for tons of money, and the newest and most popular adult videos. 

When the supply notably failed to provide what it promised- i.e. immortality- the fathers, mothers, children and their grand children, all  who had invested in the concept of mocking death and who were now bound to die, while still living, sued the sperm banks to such depths that no vial holding the right-handed (sometimes left-handed) effort of sultry afternoons ever made its way back to the banks because no vial nor check ever arrived in the hands of some chipper postal worker. 

Despite the ability and capacity to, as Sicilians would say, spread the seed, Sam Stookey decided to stop fooling around with love about seventy five years ago. It's not that he didn't enjoy the act of making children or the curling up on the couch to watch movies or the shedding of tears together at some nostalgic point in life.

It's that he carried the weight of burial in his eyes, hands, and memory. He had planted to many kisses faded on lips that dried in coffins. He had replaced too many dry wreathes on the family plot. It's that underneath the smile in the pictures was the fleeting memory of time, the eyes like cups once full of life now empty shot glasses in a bar where Death is that one customer that never leaves.

In all those years that fate granted him he sought to answer this mystery that only he had ever faced. What is life when living is all you've left to do? He gained appreciation for the dying. "Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale" (Bless'd thou, my Lord, for our sister physical Death) he pondered under his breath, mimicking St. Francis humble words, one of the earliest poems in Italian.

And as he saw the fear, respect, and envy pooling in the eyes of those around him, in the shallow smiles formed by toothless gums in his great great great great grand children, he realized that, like Bilbo Baggins in a book he read a long ass time ago, he must flee to the ever more populated mountains, or to the depths of the sea.

The morning after he turned 273 years old, looking in his early forties, as planned, he boarded his favorite plane, a tiny Grumman hydroplane he called Grace after his eighth wife, who left him for a half-French half-Peruvian and sixteenth Cherokee named Jean Pedro Almand-Gutierrez.

He flew it down to what had once been the Amazon rainforest, but had, in the first century of the second western millenia, been turned into soy bean fields, and which was now, in the year 2211 ce of the Former Gregorian Calendar and Chinese Year of the Pig, one big-ass favela stretching all the way up to New Orleans.

Needless to say, as the sun rose in the velvet East, and as the universe gravitates towards cliches, Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" played on the tape deck of the plane as it faded into the horizon heading South beyond the sharp line of the Sierra Madre...

Magic Pill

Meet your lover 1000 over -- yours: the magic of the first encounter.

Time stole it, but you've stolen Time -- yours: the elation of the first week.

Memories consumed by chemical fire -- yours: the comfort of a single month.

Yours: your beautiful lover.

Over and over.

Again and again.

Once, twice, thrice.

me: define: intellectual masturbation

me: deriving pleasure from reading, then writing?

Andrea: no, just bullshitting peopel with accrued trivia and schooling

me: hahaha

blood on grass

Lights on.

A lies on ground, inert, dressed in white, facing the sky. Two onlookers stand around, a

few feet away.

B1: what do you think happened to him?

B2: I dunno… I saw him fall… I think he’s dead.

B1: he just fell?? You mean from a plane?

B2: no… I didn’t see anything… the sky was clear, and this white dot fell from the sky,

and now he’s here…

B1: who do you think we should call? How… what would we say happened?

[man’s toe twitches, catches B2s attention]

B2: (slowly steps closer to the body, murmurs) I… I think I just saw him move…

B1: (whispering) no way… (Raising his voice) there’s no fucking way that man could

have…

B2: (interrupts) LOOK! I’m telling you I just saw him move!!!

B1: (steps closer, next to B1)… no fucking way….. (Voice trails off)

[man twitches again. Moves foot… B1 steps back, afraid. Man turns on his side facing

them. Opens his eyes… The eyes are white.]

B2: (spills out a stream of every known obscenity, beginning with the word ‘holy’)

[A stretches left hand out towards B’s… Something terribly hurts him, he twists in

pain and holds his left shoulder with his right hand… Same pain penetrates his right

shoulder… He screams… in silence]

B1: (noticing the pain in the man’s face, wails in a mixture of sympathy and disgust…)

We have to do something...! (fear doesn’t allow them to move)

[B2 simply stares, shaking.]

[Man drops left hand and uses right hand to touch his back… He screams again… his

hand comes out smeared in blood. In a paranoid fashion, blind, he desperately tries to see

something around him, but is incapable of it. ]

B1: He’s bleeding… look at all that blood on his hand…

B2: [in anguished voice] We must help hiiim… there has to be something we can do…!?

[Man tries to stand, but is unable to, as if the legs are made of concrete. He coils and

slivers like a serpent. Two red blotches symmetrically mark each scapula (each side of

the back). He relaxes.]

[B’s remain silent as truth dawns upon them.]

[A minute of silence…]

B2: an angel… dude.. it’s an…

B1: ...angel... [shocked] is there anything we can do?

[Angel begins to tremble, even though it is warm outside. Heaven’s warmth is that of the

sun’s heat. ]

B2: he… he’s blind…

B1: paradise lost.

B2: how can you lose heaven?

B1: you betray god, or perhaps through a bureaucratic mistake.

B2: or he wanted to live again.

B1: no… (begins to cry).. no… no… no…

B2: what?

B1: this… this might be… the end of the world…

[a second of silence, as the idea sinks in… B2 begins to cry as well… sits on the grass,

watching the angel twitch in the cold]

B2: He’s suffering so much… Look at him.

B1: I know… there’s nothing we can do… not for him, not for ourselves…

B2: damn you, B1, there’s no reason god would kill us today… what kind of god would

do that anyway?

B1: the kind of god that tears the wings off angels and let’s them fall…

B2: (thinks for a minute) no… something isn’t right…

B1: what better explanation do you have?

B2: fuck if I know… this is unreal… I think I’m going crazy…

B1: no you’re not! Nooooooo… or else I wouldn’t see what you are seeing. Insanity

doesn’t usually work in pairs, unless we did some ‘shrooms… or acid…. Nooo… we

really are here, and that angel really is there, dieing. We have to help him.

B2: HOW? HOW? HOW?!?!?!?! HOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!!!?!?!?

B1: SHUT UP!!! Quit screaming!!!! Calm the fuck down!

B2: [unintelligibly screams]

[B1 launches himself towards B2’s face, trying to cover his mouth… B2, furious,

sees it coming and grabs the hand, throws B1 to the ground, and starts choking

him… The Angel grabs B2’s foot, which sends B2 screaming off B1 in fear.]

Character Development

Character Development. Who am I? Who is he? Who is she? Forget the

appearance. Character does not rely on appearance, although appearance influences

character. Vanity is a characteristic; a defect. Part of character, nonetheless.

Each character has a past. Develop a past for each character. Whether they were

born into a poor, rich, or middle-class family. What were the parents of the character like?

Or did the character grow up an orphan? If he had, were they abusive, lenient, gentle,

respectable, vicious, lazy, paranoid… how were they?

Think of episodes of life which might affect the further decisions of the character

you are trying to develop. How were the grades in school of this character? How did he/

she get along with the rest? Think about the genetics and its influence in behavior. As a

writer, one must have a firm understanding of experience. Firm. Were one to misrepresent

a character, the character would lose credibility, and the story would always miss

something. It is the reason Dan Brown sucked and Henry James was praised. The

characters in the story must leave a long-lasting impression in the mind.

How does the character speak? Why does the character speak like that? Did it

grow up on the streets, among snobs, is it trying to fit in or is it part of a complex

developed from the repercussions of shyness? If the character is deaf-mute, was it born

that way, was it the product of an accident, or is it just acting that way?

What is the characters perception of reality? What are its philosophies? Is it

thoughtful, materialistic, apathetic, or insane? Develop a mind. The mind is the self. The

appearance is simply a vehicle for the mind. The mind is responsible for the actions in the

past, for the past, and the actions have molded the future decisions for the mind to act

upon.

For a character, you must develop the mind, the past, and the surroundings.

Characteristics must be emphasized throughout the story to burn the created character into

the mind of the reader. Without character development, the book will always miss

something.

Pioneers

Instructions

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/03/19/arts/design/20100319-museum-slideshow_6.html

If you cannot see the purpose why these three pictures were placed together on the same page, please close your eyes for a second, open them once more and reconsider its purpose.

If you cannot understand why evolutionary followers believe we descended from monkeys, please see the three pictures presented in the link. Please observe the similarities between the bone structures, the placement of bones, the sockets, between humans and apes.

If you fail to see similarities in the bone structures, but rather rely on the differences in size, intelligence, and Biblical history, please take a second to review the pictures above. Repeat action until you see the similarities in bone structure.

If you think, "Ok... the apes bone structure resembles man because ape was also created by God." Please review Bible to find where a female ape was created from a male apes rib. Repeat as needed, for every animal in the animal kingdom where male and female genders exist.

The Laughing Jew

NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/middleeast/17mideast.html?hp

Here, again, is an example of the US position in the face of Israel's insolence. The decide to build on Palestinian land while Joe Biden is visiting the country, them possibly making a statement and he trying to get a working relationship working between the foes.

Done in all insolence

From the NYTimes:

"Last Tuesday the Israeli Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in Ramat Shlomo, another part of East Jerusalem, acutely embarrassing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was on a visit here. The move infuriated the Obama administration, coming soon after it had announced the start of American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian indirect peace talks, the first in more than a year.
Mr. Netanyahu apologized for the timing of the announcement and called it a mistake “done in all innocence.” But he has not shifted regarding Israel’s insistence on its right to continue building in all of Jerusalem. "

AMERICA the ophtalmologist trying to correct two blind eyes. We need a deo ex machina like old times to step in and stomp on civilization pick them up in arms impregnate a few for demigods for his entertainment so perhaps we can have more shows like hercules or xena on tv instead of this god awful war of sticks and stones and a well trained well armed well funded israeli army.

Israel has a bomb. It is a big big bomb. Back from the good ole days of proliferation. I sit and roll my hand into a fist and place it under my chin one foot reclined onto the side of the stone where I sit naked, thinking: Man, we've seen the things these human beings have built, created: lollipops, cotton balls, genetically modified thornless roses, and here else they're pasting metal, screwing screws, encasing plutonium in cute little bubbles, capable of reminding the world of those two Japanese incidents mentioned semi-proudly in American history books.

Well, everyone has one. India has one. North Korea has one. France has a few. Britain. Etc.

I mean everyone. The phrase at hand "Don't do onto other masses what we wouldn't like done onto us (at the hands of the few governing, of course)"

It is amazing they haven't made pocket sized a-bombs. Each one of us carrying one of those little Plutonium balls in our pockets, fully exercising a twist off the second amendment.

SO: Based on Murphy's Law those bombs will go off sometime. You know it won't be you or I that will be responsible. Possible, the domino theory will not be whose turning red or blue, but rather, one goes off here, the next one goes off there, and there, and there, and there until no one is left to utter a simple sweet word as 'om'.

Hamas throws stones at the Police.
The Police beat Hamas.
Hamas throws stones at the Police.
The Police beat H mas.
H mas throws stones at the Police.
The Police beat H ma .
H ma th o s st n s t the Police.
The Police beat H m .
H m t o s n the Police.
The Police beat m .
m o n the Police.
The Police beat
the Police.
The Police
the Police
The Police
The Police
The Police

Socioeconomicpoliticoreligiocultural myopia rules at the end of the day.

Meta-article: Nigerians Recount...

I see: An article recounting the mass murder of 500 Christian Nigerians by Muslim tribesmen. You can e-mail, send to phone, print, reprint, and share this article with family, friends, and acquaintances. 10 men sit on the ground of the picture, two framed pictures in the background portray two angles of the same child- a girl in a puffy white dress. More pictures hang pinned onto panels on the wall. A few of them stare at you, most stare off to the side. Many of them appear to be military. There is a possibility that it is one or a handful of men represented in the pictures. Many wear military uniforms, from pins to berets with indeterminate insignias. If the world were reflected by what is seen on these pictures, the phrase “it’s a man’s world” wouldn’t be far from the truth. The oxymoronic essence is not apparent: the military- symbols of restrained, constrained, destroyed childhoods repressed by uniforms and strict thoughts: the child below, unaware of a world where there is need for military, free in the little white dress barely discovering the world around her.
The men on the floor, detained as guilty, offer different faces for the camera. To think they were once children… Yet, to see and report was is seen is not to assume pasts or presume futures. The truth: Two men, two women, one stick, one short knife resulting in three dead one living, a crime.
I often think the dead don’t worry, the dead don’t judge, the dead don’t suffer. The living do.
I see: A web-ad to ‘PACQUIAO-CLOTTEY: THE EVENT’. The sport: BOXING. Here, in an article about 500 killings, is included an ad to a boxing match. Pacquiao and Clottey both stare at you with the same grim, intense look as some of the men in the picture below. Our souls deep inside wonder what have we done to create a world where faces must thus look at you.
The other ad, showing a dirty Caucasian man with a look of anguish on his face appeals you to click on the box to play a snippet from HBO’s ‘The Pacific.’ The Subject: War. More precisely: WWII. And what did we do, as readers, to ask to be furthered directed towards death?! Isn’t war about death? Some would say war is more about ideals. Are we better because of it? Some would say yes. However, I must not indulge in speculation, rather speak of what I further see.
I see an ad that simply says CYRUS, July 9. It holds no appeal. Good luck getting my accidental click. Slightly down, off to the right, an actress from “The Miracle Worker” also carries an anguished, insane look on her face: the shivering lips, the disheveled curls of the hair, the square chin, the exposed lobe…
Focus back on the article, you read about the weapons confiscated- “14 machetes, 26 bows, arrows, 3 axes, 4 spears, and 44 guns.” (Play chess for chrissakes!)To think that these had often been used as tools rather than weapons; as tools for hunting, tools for clearing the ground for agriculture, tools. But I forget, tribal was is as old as sand. Tribes have been dispersed and urbanized only fairly recently in history. Tribes still persist in some areas, i.e. Afghanistan. Tribes, once romanticized by their sense of communal support, by their long folkloric traditions, by their unique languages and habits, now struggle to remain as tribes in the face of global urbanization (globalization), at the hand of a new world order- yes, I said new world order, meaning not the apocalyptic, deliberately conceived rule of one central world government, but rather a gradual loss of specific cultures developed by isolation exchanged for a modern, interconnected eclectic culture blending in the most prevalent languages and cultural habits (Nihau where hello stood, forks were chopsticks stood, soy where barley stood), or the Darwinian rule applied to cultural survival as tied to political powers and economics.
Like a thief in the night they stole into cots and shot and cut without mercy.
Like the Trojan horse they waited till nightfall to turns dreams into nightmares.
Will it be eye for eye? We will see.

IR Rrrrrrrrrrr

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8558347.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/world/asia/08china.html?scp=2&sq=china&st=cse

US-Israel-China

Where is the glory of AMERICA? WHERE IT BE?! See here!?
They will do what they want to do because we are not as large as we used to be.
We will wave our index finger at them, vicariously through Rice or Clinton or whomever, and they will insolently nod at our boldness; they will nod and think how pathetic we look waving that finger up and down in that “do this and do that” fashion, meanwhile staring at the holes in our pockets, at our liquid money dripping like piss down our pants onto some cracked floor.
Rename ourselves America the humble; no longer America the proud.
Who is proud?! I have heard the proud sing the National Anthem drunk in a frat boy’s basement! Now THERE’s your source of pride. THERE ARE YOUR GMS, YOUR FORDS, YOUR CHEVYS, YOUR JEEPS. THERE YOUR MASSIVE F250s COMPETING FOR QUICK ON THE FAST LANE, while the rest of us sweat and pray sweat and pray oh god please don’t let those idiots crash in front of me!
I have seen the proud grow heavy at the anxious munching,
The proud complain about the diversity of language,
the proud refusing to believe that things
are changing,
can change,
will change.
Rename ourselves America the humble, and work towards raising the land once more, once more to the land our father’s remember, a land of freshly paved highways, spearheading technology, producing, exporting, having the authority and SENSE to REASON, having the patience to once again rediscover our neighbors, having the ability to understand that reality is not you nor I, but we and us. US.

El callejon de mi abuela.

Era en el callejon de mi abuela donde las cenizas
se tiraban y estrechaban
Dispersaban y mojaban
Y de vez en cuando los chiquillos
Alli mismo orinaban.

El callejon encajado :
Entre un muro de ladrillos
De la Ferreteria de los Yuja-

Al otro lado,
el muro de barro
Lleno de huecos y recuerdos
De oscuridades y memorias
De ecos de sonidos ya olvidados.

Desde alli, los desfiles pasaban
Como pasan los pajaros
Por veces volando
Bajo un cielo nublado.

Nos trepabamos al muro
Sostenidos del tejado,
Las tejas vestian de moho
Y un opaco anaranjado.

Cuantas lluvias aguantaron
Cuantos soles descarados
Cuantas noches sin luna
Cuantos gatos alli posaron.

Callejon de mi vida,
Callejon de la memoria,
Donde las cenizas se tiraban
Se apagaban y dispersaban.

time and time again

How curious, the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindi and the Evangelists and the Catholics and the Buddhists and the Jainists, and on and on and on into sects and cults and on into time. Talk about cats and tigers and ocelots and lions and juagarundis and bobcats and leopards and cougars. How about the time that sifts between your fingers- 1000 years, 2000, 3... all onto 10 and 20 millenia. Who will hold the truth in 20 mil? Will we have understood by then the core concepts of ethics, of morality? Will we have learned by then that the sun is the sun and the moon the moon and without the sun the moon doesn't shine, the earth becomes ice and nothing matters? What will the words of the prophets mean when the sun blows? what is a god without life to praise his name? if one day, and one day it will, all goes silent, will the om resurrect from the universal buzz? Somewhere else, I suppose, someone else will seek salvation, and the eternal balance will be left undisturbed.

huh

Japan loves the Beatles.
Yoko married Lennon.
Yoko married Lennon.
Yoko married Lennon.

oda

En la soledad nace y muere la esperanza…
Escribo solo lo que se, y lo que se es solo lo que he vivido, y el resto resulta una mentira… Solia dormirse sobre el banco largo, la mujer mas fuerte que he conocido. Encendia los cigarillos uno por uno. Jamas le conte el tiempo que tardabase en fumarlos. Solo Dios sabe en que pensaba; solo El comprende sus sentidos. Seguro lloraba a menudo; yo jamas fui testigo. Eran sus besos sobre la frente como la noche: dulces, humedos, sencillos. Bendecianos al despedirse de nosotros. Sus palabras olian a flor de palma y claveles indios.
Marcabase una cruz con los asperos dedos. No le resplandecia ningun anillo. Su vestido quizas algun dia fue blanco, pero el humo de las noches de trabajo hace mucho lo rindio amarillo.
En los ojos rebosaba la tristeza,
Se mecia lentamente, como un pez en claras aguas. La dulzura de los besos en la frente dejaban rastros de melancolia tejida por la despedida. Contaba las horas en silencio, y en silencio gemia. Para las mujeres fuertes es muy dura la vida.
No la vi morir… Excepto que en mi corazon, en el pesar de un latido, en cierta ausencia de luna nueva que la noticia empozo en mi espiritu. Solo Dios sabe cuanto la amo. Solo Dios.

La ame y aun la amo.

Lo sabe porque me espera,
Sentada sbore la verde banca,
Viejas manos, voz clara, vestido que alguna vez
Supo de blancura, besos en la frente
Con sabor a luna:
Dulces, humedos, sencillos.