Nonplussed

Is there any word more awkward than "nonplussed?"

Well, maybe. But let's deconstruct it anyway.

To be "plussed" would insinuate addition, perhaps an improvement on something that already exists. But who goes around saying "Oh yeah, I'm great today. Thanks for asking. I guess you could say that -- what with my new job and my wife and kids and all -- I'm really plussed at the moment."

So to be "nonplussed" would mean a state of not being improved. Seems kind of unnecessary, like sticking your hand up through your butt to pick your nose. Why go through the trouble of explaining what you're not?

It could have its uses. Perhaps the best means to point out to someone attempting to impart some wisdom or technical know-how exactly how much what they had to say didn't improve you or your understanding of anything in any way whatsoever.

Let's see.

What does this mean? ...

Precious cups within the flower
deadly petals with strange power
faces shine a deadly smile
look upon you at your trial

or this? ...




OK. How about this? Does this serve any significant symbolic value in your life? ...




Right. It doesn't. Maybe in context. But there is no context. It's meant to leave you nonplussed.

Unless, of course, it leaves you plussed, which is always great.

Glimpse Of The Great Unknown

We are not capable of limiting it.

We awe at it. Our eyes squint at its divine glow. We are whole when we hold reverent the untainted truth of it all.

The innocence of a child: Open eyes, rejecting nothing; a smile born of a yielding acceptance and unyielding honesty.

Its wordless realness is our comfort as we glimpse the unspeakable expanse.

It is within us all, obscured by understanding. The flame of the bearer of its message is put out, but its fire is unquenchable.

It is why we live. Larger than life, conquering death.

______

R.I.P.
Katie
Dana
Myrna

Sun Shines In, You Are Awoken

The icy sun with frosty glow is thawing, yet the approach of the fullness of light has yet to defeat cold's stifling grip on the night air.

White petals defy the inertia of sleep, breaking through buds on a pear tree, casting the illusion of snowflakes.

Will we follow and embrace new life? Or long for the illusion?

The air is barrenly cold. For now, we sleep.

K-Mart, The Beautiful Chaos

"Excuse me, ma'am, could you tell me where the bathroom is?"

"Sure," the elderly lady in the K-Mart electronics section says. "Just go right over there, past the furniture section, in the back ... you'll smell it when you get there."

And sure enough, we do.

Somehow, she knows the bathroom will stink. And somehow, we know this is OK with her and, it appears, whoever is in charge.

And it's OK with us. It's K-Mart. This is the way things are ... and always have been.

These days, K-Mart is stuck in a limbo of identity crisis.

K-Mart is not Wal-Mart -- with its robotic economic precision and onward faster/bigger/cheaper/crappier corporate mission statement -- nor is it Target, which polishes its image by marketing cheaply constructed clothes as more fashionable and durable than they really are. Target is for those who for some reason feel guilty shopping at Wal-Mart and feel soiled after just a few seconds in K-Mart.


There was a time K-Mart was what it was: blue-light specials on the Miami Vice apparel, bland popcorn, a 25-cent ride on the slowly revolving singing turtle, the absolute nirvana of a cherry Icee machine.

Those are gone. After years of declining sales, K-Mart has recently redefined itself in an effort to make money.

What that new definition is ... it seems as if K-Mart itself isn't sure.

Beautiful chaos reigns.

There is a sense of thrown-togetherness: batting gloves blend into calcium-enriched grape juice blends into toilet paper blends into televisions in a way that says, "we have what you need and only what you need and if you need more we're not for you."

We drink a hot, liter-sized bottle of strawberry-flavored water while shopping because it's a.) 50 cents a bottle and b.) such a K-Mart thing to do, because no one will hassle you because, well, it's K-Mart.

Beyond the stench of the bathroom, the grimy scent of a superstore-that's-not-a-superstore permeates, granting a sense of underdogedness.

Somehow, K-Mart doesn't feel like a monument to mass production, though it is. The toy section has the modern version of Hot Wheels with pimped-out "Playayzzz" brand stretch limos and tricked out racers.

They probably have them at Wal-Mart. Yet, they seem to fit more here, where a miniature tricked-out stretch limo is a perfect metaphor for the no-man's-land K-Mart finds itself in.

We long for the days of the blue-light special. We pine for its return, a return not likely to happen.

K-Mart will never be more than it is. It will assimilate into a finely greased machine; its elemental appeal will be lost forever, making it K-Mart no longer.

Like an art-house cinema, we wish we could subsidize the superstore so that it could make money being what it is rather than whatever it thinks it has to be to survive.

For now, even as its essence transforms, it is still a journey into a chaos underlying a deliberate order.

And bathrooms that stink to high heaven.

Handwriting

In the handwriting of a 4-year-old we see a glimpse of what once was.

The letters are methodically pieced together in all caps, clumsily yet deliberately, with the simplicity of heiroglyphics. A fluid hand stroke is an inevitable future, but not just yet.

For now, the hands that spell the divine are still gravitating into the order we create for them. Lines forming letters; letters forming words; words explaining ideas; ideas bound by the words we use to describe the indescribable.

So often we forget what they know intrinsically: It's the ideas that come before the futile efforts to explain them.

**

Mornings during the work week, my son arrives at pre-school in a perpetual state of fashionably lateness.

Every morning, without fail, she's there. Little blue eyes, little smile. She hears the commotion at the door and runs toward it. Payton is the first person Asa sees every morning before he enters class.

"There's Asaaaaaa! Asa's heeeeere!"

Through her grin is always a look of concern over whatever he might have on his mind that particular morning. He doesn't care much what's on her mind -- nor, for that matter, does he know if he should care what's on his own.

She cares enough each and every morning to say hello and describe to him whatever picture she has drawn or song she has learned.

One morning, the teacher explains, all the little girls gathered at the door arguing over who would get to marry Asa when he showed up. Only one, though, is consistently there.

**

This will melt away.

Years will pass and the lines will smooth as hands become more sophisticated and the words take over.

Further down the path of lives running parallel for a time and then diverging, they will, perhaps, happen upon a little Strawberry Shortcake Valentine's card with the purposefully and lucidly scrawled "To: Asa," "From: Payton."

Perhaps she will look and wonder what boy it was who had such a strange name to write. Perhaps he will look and tell his wife of the little girl he now figures had a crush on him.

We will never know, for the path isn't as conspicuous as the paths taken by the hand of a 4-year-old to form letters.

What we know at the moment is this: Here is a still capture of life's relentless progression. This is the smoking gun of togetherness. Two small people at the same stage of life sharing the challenges of learning an order they don't yet understand.

It takes root, one letter at a time, before the words grab hold and wring out the uncontrollabe desire to dash to the classroom door.

Arrogance Served On A Urinal Cake

Every person should, at some point in their lives, have to clean a public bathroom.

Some of us have.

Most? Who knows? Probably not.

But some of us have.

We plunged the clogged shit can at the Winn-Dixie. We mopped the pubic hairs from the bathroom floor in Big Lots. We Windexed the zit juice from the mirror in Burger King.

And, yes, we fished out the gum nestled -- just so -- atop the piss-filled urinal cake.

Shit cans clog; pubic hairs fall; people have acne and have to put on a good face to impress the cute little cashier.

But nothing screams arrogance like spitting gum into a urinal.

Where does the chewer think this gum will go? Will it melt through the porous holes of the urinal cover that's put in place to keep just such things from blocking the plumbing? Is there a urinal fairy (and is she the same mystical being who magically and improbably places pubic hairs on TOP of the urinal)?

"Someone" has to pick it out of there. That "someone" will do it.

It is a symbol of elitism, of a disrespect for those who carry out a necessary task. Spitting the gum into a pool of piss is but a delayed, unconfrontational spit to the face.

For some of us, it is a "we" proposition. So, too, is it for those of us who remember such monuments to human foulness as a teenage right of passage.

More often than not -- particularly in today's society where we castigate immigrants for crossing our borders yet fully yield our claim on the jobs that no one wants to do -- it is a matter of "they."

We/They/Somebody don't ask you to stop stinking up the joint or stop carving "Trisha Sux" on the stall or stop leaving the sports section on the floor.

We/They/Somebody only ask that you show respect for those who keep society from being nothing more than a pack of animals rooting through our own feces.

No icing needed.