RSS SPIRIT

Oh that





I walk down the street and try not to become overwhelmed by the sunset. I walk 3 miles west toward a falling sun at dusk. I definitely recommend a long west walk at the end of the day as you get to see all the colors and changes as dusk starts to smell twilight. I try and resist these photographic tableaus of urbanity at day's waning. The elevated train curls around a grand stone art deco monstrosity whose stone skin is lustrous with clear orange sun.

Later I still resist a meadow by the train tracks where a nesting bird flutters the same five mellifluous notes to his lover over and over. The cockiness of the chirp makes me think male. It is low lying river land here, in the sky in front of me a purple tinges yellow clouds, a silhouette of an old rooftop water tower, an aching arching light skipping over us on its way away for the day.

The sun is hidden at a six-way intersection. I consider the fact that my direct sunlight might be through. But as I turn up the diagonal street I remember the bridge over the highway. It will take me over the roofline and back into the sun. I resist its seduction futilely as I ascend the cement arch. That old devil orange ball hangs with prettifying clouds skittered around. It casts a last gasp warmth on me and a woman on a small balcony above.

The sun hits me at least 4 more times before I get home. On another bridge, then another, then in a crack between two buildings by the interstate exit. Each time resplendent and ridiculously beautiful. I pray to whomever for the typical things: money, family, love and every once in awhile a chance to graciously walk the sun out of the city and wish it safe return until dawn. (I will take its rise tomorrow on faith as I will be asleep upon its arrival.)

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Maybe it wasn't this crowded




So it took awhile for the 65 bus to come. I did not mind, the sun felt nice. Little did I know what lay in wait for me. It was, as the title suggests, a bus. A bus without pity and without conscience. 20 blocks separated me and a meeting, a business meeting. Then, well it started.

We got on the bus and blew right through the next stop. Foolishly I thought, "I am going to be early. Should I get a coffee? Or is it too late in the day?"

Our bus looked like many on the streets that day. But something unbelievable was about to hit it. And when it did, none of us would ever forget it. At least not until a couple days after.

A full sixth grade class waited at a stop ahead. A cry from inside the bus, a gasp, too late, they were upon us. Everywhere there were 6th graders and three teachers on a field trip. Yes, each kid had to insert a card into the machine. Yes, each kid was a reminder of the lowest level of Dante's inferno - junior high school.

Terror overtook me like a sundown in Alaska. I would be late, to a business meeting. I had no phone with me. And then yes, a gangly Polish kid with bad skin sat down next to me. Like refugees from a flood, oddly shaped people arrived from the front of the bus to escape the swell of 11 year olds.

If it were only the large class from CRR Middle School. If only. For there rained upon us, stop after stop, bus riders like a fecundity of cloggage. A gaggle of Indian women. Two hipster types. Old black persons in sharp looking chapeaus. A burly Hispanic man with wiry chest hair, a rash on his face and tattoos that looked to be from the Guadalajara Merchant Marines.

I wept. Inside. The bad skin, 11 year olds in every direction, the bus submerged in cars and trucks stuck in traffic, and yes we made every stop, damn near.

Then something arrived. Something some people call grace. It entered along with an extra-sized black man wearing a denim jacket, a shirt with denim pocket accents and a denim tie. It was around the same time I saw a beautiful 11 year old face, yacking at her friend. Right when I thought the Polish lankster with bad skin played footsie with me. Wait a minute, no, he was just shifting feet.

Outside the bus there loitered life so called, a foul calling indeed. People, i.e. hosts of pain, shuffled down the street. Inside the bus a new world was being built. It made me think of Michael Jackson. Mainly because the girl standing in front of me had a Michael Jackson nose, white version.

All of us traveled on a very special mother ship. Everybody felt it. Slowly we crawled, like hopeful monsters, toward a re-eden over an industrial bridge. Like Adam and Eve, hand in hand, an arc rowed toward an answer to our pleas.

The old black people with sharp hats got off first. Then the hipster boy and girl exited. Their artfully chosen shoulder bags crossed paths. The burly Mexican man made aggressive smiles and hellos at a woman as she exited the bus. A guy and I looked at each other and wondered if we were in another epoch altogether.

I was early to my appointment. Can you believe that? I exited a stop after my stop on purpose so I could walk a bit. How did such terror and joy inhabit the same bus? How did this unspeakable supernatural phenomenon descend upon us? The pimply Pole or the portly 11 year old Gameboy player might know the answer.


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Overblown emotion anthropomorphized






A picayune desire to pluck out the eyes of the driver of the white Escalade with a pick, or a pitch fork, whichever is closer. The fumes of noxious rage choke. Cough, assemble oneself and pretend for happiness.

Happiness actually arrives. A billowing flickering, a love struck insect at the first spring light. Wait a minute, is this even, could this even be happiness? Buzz contentedly to the next intersection. Others see this happiness, inhale it and become energized, made more robust, i.e. happy. To be filled with good tidings, an essential lubricant. It ensures that when we hop on each other it is a luscious lucubration.

This joy jumbles into a juggle, a jawbreaker of melancholy floats like a bee on the wind off the sea. It splatters into a gutter at a stop light. The people and their pain ensnare in an enervating web. So many who merely clench against the dark.

Out blurts a grief, a blow from the spasm of suffering. An infrared moan surrounds the intersection and heaves between gritted teeth. An impulse to flee and an impulse to help. This contradiction confounds the cranial goo and so another feeling insinuating in through an interstice of flow.

But where to flee, how to help? This friction of passion and plea cause heat. This heat swells a bubble in the loins. A wanting ripples and is excited by the passing of sweet young things. To flee into sensual delights would be out of sight. To line up a thousand beauties and one by one scrump them until the screams of paradise are heard at dawn. Oh it is a pain this lust, a lather of demon Xanadu where lovers wail and drool falls from the lips of participants.

Composure arrives on a shaft of light between two skyscrapers. Oh what foul sensualism overwhelms with insidious genetical notions. Lo, at the "don't walk" sign a light of Apollonian wisdom. A classical sense of passionate serenity - the clear wind of order and experience that allow life to radiate with quiet majesty.

Until the light goes green and the "walk" sign goes white and a mass scurry to the next bit of cheese. The thought of cheese incites a hunger. A wistful desire for Mexican food. Perhaps, if life decides to dispense mercy, a nice Mexican dinner will appear in the stomach later.

And so with rage, grief, joy, melancholy, terror, passion, lust, enlightenment and hunger in the heart the walk ensues. Red light, green light.


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To hoist noble, to enrich backers divine.









Brazil is the favorite to win this summer's soccer World Cup. They come in at about 3 to 1. Not bad odds for a Brazil team. But I put no money on the favorite this year.

Then come England at about 6 to 1. No thank you. For wear and tear reasons, I do not see them hoisting sterling this year.

Then in a clump of about 8/9 to 1 come Germany, Argentina and Italy. Here is where my money starts sweating with excitement. For it feels like I am basking under a beautiful sun in gorgeous Milan.

Yes, I love Italy and all things Italian, especially their defensive ferocity. So I am unfurling a moist stack of lira on Italy to win. At 9 to 1 they are a very attractive investment indeed.

Italy has a lot of great fundamentals that win championships. The defense I mentioned, but also players from a world class league, playing in Europe where they play well and do not forget that notorious Italian flair for dramatic finishes on large stages.

So I back Italy in bulk. But as I was scanning down the also-rans I noticed something. The U.S. is 80/100 to 1 to win this summer's World Cup. Why such long odds on a team recently ranked 5th in the world by FIFA?

I can think of a couple reasons that have to do with talent, and this from a U.S. soccer fan. But I really see U.S. as more as a 40/50 to 1 shot. Perhaps the long odds reflect a desire to get American bettors to take a chance on the home side.

Anyway, if you can get 80/100 to 1 on the Imperialist Yankee Dogs (who picked that as the U.S. soccer team's nickname?) I think there is voodoo in the air that justifies throwing a little fun time money on a long shot from Boise, Idaho (or rather the country that contains Boise, Idaho.)


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Love is just another course away





Love and food are both biological imperatives, to sound as sterile as possible. One needs to scrounge up a hambone for dinner and a love muffin for dessert. Something with a creamy center. Something that requires a 'slick when wet' sign. Love and food obsess us because of their necessity. Logically both fuel our imagination and dreams.

Women discern no practical difference between love and food. Hence, Saturday nights the bistros are crammed with men squiring women on the food, love two-step. Men understand preternaturally the food/love exchange rate. There is a reason the words meat and mate are but a letter-switch away.

But what food to eat that will efficate the consumption of love? Beans are straight off the list. Also food that gets caught in your teeth. Avoid food that may have gone rancid. Stick with high carbs for quick energy boost. Finish with chocolate. Nothing friskifies the love glands like sugar and cocoa dissolved in butter fat.

One could spend a lifetime creating an anthology of writing on love and food. It is a subject universal and never boring. When in Psalms they analogize a human body completely in terms of fruit, we have found a subject as old as the fall of man. We may have been tossed from the Garden of Eden, but there exists a key to return, at least temporarily: feast with your beloved then freak them until the dawn's red glare.

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For God and Life

Mexico is the country of all our futures. It is an over-rich culture ready to burst its piñata and spread delicious love juice all over us. Mexico possesses like El Dorado, the secret to enlightenment the Mayans discovered about 1300 years ago.

This is by way of saying, viva Mexico futbal. With an easy group and their typical commitment to goal scoring, Mexico might just go places this World Cup.

They give away something in the size department, especially against some of the more brutish European countries. But they pass well, play well as a team and in their blood is a need to score goals.

On the other side of the monkey barrel they will give up goals. Mexico in order to get to a quarterfinal or semifinal will have to win games 2-1 and 3-2. And we all know that scoring even two goals against say the Italians or the Germans can be a large-marge pain in el assos.

I believe that all patriotic Americans should root for Mexico (after the U.S. of course) this World Cup. They play soccer with the same vigor they use to come to America for a better life for their families. Not to turn a sports notion into a political one but my fellow crackers, please: insane immigrant impulses are what made America the wild and crazy superpower it is today. Let us welcome them, and cheer with them their country's soccer team (except when playing the U.S.)

Even for soccer aesthetes out there, Mexico is a team worth watching. Watching the Mexican soccer league on TV, one knows that Mexicans play with a passion and a vigor that always results in goal scoring opportunities (much better than blechy MLS.)

One can only imagine what would become of Mexico City and large swathes of LA and Chicago if Mexico conjures up some ancient Aztec magic and hoists the champions trophy in Triumphos los Incredibles.

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