Life and Death: Simply Put–Here or Not Here

Everybody, everything has its process, presence and absence.

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15 times in the past 25 years

The number of times Trump has changed his position on abortion.

So why should anyone believe him now?

Isn’t the Devil a proficient liar?

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Former Sports and Entertainment Star

finally has his peace long after the infamous, media-frenzied Bronco chase on an L.A. highway back in 1994. (“Where were you when….?”)

O.J. Simpson, aka O.J., social pariah and convicted felon, dead at 76, who, ironically, requested a drink of orange juice from police as they surrounded him inside his house.

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A Caution to Everybody

Dazzling & bright
eye m just visiting
yr loco galaxy

a whimsical bit
of cosmic mass
from `somewhere else.`

Entering yr atmosphere
eye plunge comet-like
thru clouds of destiny

sidereal satellite
of the last 1/4
my magnitude unlimited.

Don`t look 2 long
at my radiants tho`
lest eye scorch yr
site 4 good–

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Eclipse (poem version)

The last thing I expected with the last major daytime eclipse was to write a poem, or rather have a love poem write itself in metaphors of the eclipse. The Oregon allusion was to my daughter’s trip of a lifetime there during the eclipse; in retrospect, things she said and saw got into this poem.

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Eclipse prose poem (from last total eclipse)

You were such a long time coming, but better late than never. A moonshadow that quieted birds and chilled the air. Startled I was at the hole above that opened in the clouds. Your dark magic enveloped me and released our night-side, then blinded me.

It’s not every day one gets totality like this. I took off my glasses and looked directly at you: your prominences and primal flares– a lifetime of love in what seemed like seconds. Corona moment.

All light and my life changed then, all plans and limits. No diamond-ring affect, still I’d stake my vision on what we truly were then. People cheering… it was suddenly o’er before I could catch another glimpse of you.

Mostly it seems we spend our daze looking down not up, living slivers of human events. But as I recall, you blacked out the sun and melted lines to any known bearings, causing outages and disruptions. It is thus I remember you well, your beauty and mystery, moving on, passing by me on an empty field in Oregon somewhere, feeling lost for words to say all that knew just then, of sun and moon.

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Remembering “Bud”:

what Marlon Brando’s closest friends called him.

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Ingmar Bergman: The Last Great 20th Century Artist?

It is in the film genre that you will find the last best of pre-Covid Art; Swedish filmmaker Bergman (1918-2007), for me, epitomizes what a great artist used to be/mean.

He made over 60 important films and directed 170 plays on stage.

His best works include:
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
The Silence (1963)
Persona (1966)
Cries and Whispers (1971)
Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
Saraband (2003)

In my opinion, he represented life, death, and male-female and parent-child relationships better and more accurately than any other filmmaker I can think of. He was simply a brilliant Master of his craft on-stage and in film. He was The Shakespeare of Film. No other director has or ever will equal the genius of his artistry as a filmmaker.

If you want to get to know this creative giant better, the documentary Bergman Island (2007) and the DVD boxset of Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema are recommended.

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from Carson McCullers’ “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”

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Thank you Danielle and UCP

for the current power outages in the province. “The Alberta Advantage” again, right?

Thank you for nickeling and dining Alberta’s power grid.

We know you have more important things to do like building an arena in Calgary or building a new hospital in Edmonton, or sending overflow patients to Leduc motels, or destroying mountains with coal mining.

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