Waxing Metaphysical

There is a very real possibility that we have all been fooled. You can test this by eating a piece of cheddar cheese and a fresh strawberry at the same time. Very few people are brave enough to try this.

The Easy Key to Dreams

Reality bites. So stay away. Live to dream another day.

Avoid the Cajun Crab (flavored) Dip. Avoid lists of steps to take. Instead...

Rest your brain on the burnished aviary of the day. Reach for the poetry in the unkind cry of an angry crow. Instead of putting in your contacts, roll a grape between your fingers until it pops, and savor the skin.

Use verbs to help you. Mix and separate them from the petty adjectives that fawn upon the haughty nouns.

Beware the adverb, masquerading importantly.

Or...

Window shop at the cold spring beaches, imagining the silicon shore as fractured glass. Dip into the world-skimming salt sea and soak in centuries of water rime dust slime.

Walk in the street behind a school bus and bring yourself to the train depot before 1946 was a memory.

Fan yourself with a branch from a living, green tree, and listen to it speak to your soul.

.... Because you see, cleverness and playfulness and chair-walking aren't what make the rivers run. It is the seeking, seeking for open water, searching blindly but sincerely for the droplet ideas that sparkle on the surface of the mind.

[Unedited post from sleep journal 19]

We sometimes have to take things seriously, as when the icecaps are melting.

Where is the controversy in this? Is the melting of icecaps a fiction, and is the hole in the ozone layer a simple phrase in the newspaper?

If we assume the two phenomenon above actually exist, then we at least start from some sort of fact. The rest becomes curiouser and curiouser, as interpretations go wild.

Interpretation has a way of getting beyond the facts and burying them, whether we are talking about ecological data or the prices of stocks and bonds.

Really, when you think about it, we have so little to go on.

This tends to make extrapolation and interpretation the news of the day, rather than the facts, of which we have so many, that most of us go into overload. In come the talking heads to tell us what they think it means. The winning talking head is crowned the Expert until the next batch of data and the next crisis.

I was tickled a few weeks ago, when the stock market dropped and commentator Jim Cramer was called in the calm investors down. Can you imagine Jim calming anyone down?

But we stray from the real topic which is Unreality.

The March of Alex Wurman

How fitting to tell you about the composer of the music for March of the Penguins in the month of March.

Alex Wurman writes some extremely nice music. He is also capable of writing music that doesn't appeal to me, I have to add, but he gets paid for creating movie scores. So I guess the producers call the shots.

BUT, when he is in high form, such as the score for 13 Conversations About One Thing, or March of the Penguins, or others, you will hear some wonderful instrumentation. Mr. Wurman constantly is finding new ways to use the voices of musical instruments.

I strongly urge you to visit his website, www.alexwurman.com