Thought-Drive

Shrek said ogres are like onions. The other day, at lunch, I was given pause to wonder at if maybe that applies to people, thinking creatures (thereby capable of dreaming and lying), in general. A former co-worker and scholar, called me, called both of us, "theoriticians." I didn't so much ask him what it meant as try to decipher its meaning from context. And just in case he was waiting to publish that word in his thesis on educational theological philosophy, my bad Rufus. Something else he said is how I got to thinking about onions, making references to Disney movies, then switching to doctoral theses. He said to me: "When poor people say they want money, what they mean is infrastructure," and went on to describe why. I believed him, because money in and of itself will do nothing for you. It's a place holder for what we want to buy with  the money. We want enough to buy everything we want and need, and enough beyond that to purchase anything we might want...

"You're a man of the mind" said of me by my mentor. A co-worker, looking over my shoulder the other day, seemed shocked, too, that I enjoy watching football. She wondered aloud at why, because I've showed her my poetry, and revealed to her some of the crazy inner workings of my mind. She called me a good writer. Last night, in what might have been his last NFL game, executing what might have been his last throw as a professional athlete, Brett Favre did the first thing coaches tell young quarterbacks not to do. I found that fitting, the story of his beginnings and his possible ends (and if you know anything about what he's done in the past year, you'd know why I say possible). The man has been playing the game for longer than I've been alive, 20 years in the pros. He made a crucial mistake at a crucial time, and it's true that the sport is a team game, "but the storyline of this game was Brett Favre," said one of the commentators. Which I...

So I was in the kitchen the other day thinking about my political leanings: you know the ones on your facebook page which you can choose to either hide or display, and if you display it you can write almost anything in the blank from "democrat" to "I don't believe in politics." A long while ago I actually looked up the definitions of the words democrat and republican, what the bases for the political philosophies mean. And the decision I ended up with made me a little sad. The other day I read Frederic Brown's cold war short story "The Weapon" in which he writes, in punctuation of his introspective doom-saying "only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot." I'd advise reading the story, it's short, uncomplicated, and prophetic, and if you already have, then you would know that I feel just as badly about calling somewhat an idiot as the main character of Brown's story would about saying the same about his son. Bec...

Today I spent some time with my mother. If you knew me, that might be more of a profound statement. In any event, she talked, and I listened. She talked about her life, her regrets, and how everything had sort of come full circle. Full circle. How so, I thought but did not say. At my job we have this book, the title is something like "Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot." I read the first few pages, but the title didn't stick with me nearly so well as the message inside about genius, intelligence, and practice. The book talked about the brain making connections, forming literal pathways of association that helped speed up recognition and response. So, in short, I guess the more one practices, the more prolific one becomes at a given action. So how does rationalization work? Hindsight, they say, is 20/20, because after we've made the mistake, we can much better understand what we should have done. And even further removed from hindsight? After we've made s...

"Back to work today officially (short meeting on last Thursday) and we kick it off with a light bit of purgation. Yesterday, I wrote the email I was dreading, and I even sent it. Pause for noting how odd it is that email has officially usurped 'snail mail' (I am aware that I'm late to that party). I told my mentor, my literary father as he said it, that I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. I guess it's a small thing, now and later, but I feel like there is a chasm between serious writers, those who are respected and win prizes and get their books made into movies staring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington and those others, who most notably have scantily clad women and dragons and hardly any minorities at all on the cover (okay they have that in common). And honestly, for admitting that I wanted to sign up for membership in the second group I was a bit shamed.  I might have talked about, or dreamed that I talked about, a similar issue with Frank M...