When I first heard of this I thought it was hoax.
Part of me still hopes it is.
I hope Brooke Greenburg is happy, but to me at least, suddenly aging doesn’t sound so bad.
As it has been said before . . . sometimes all it takes for a fresh perspective is to pause and consider the alternatives.
I make it a strict point of personal policy to avoid controversial subjects whenever possible, with two notable exceptions:
A. I have given the matter a great deal of forethought and have concluded my input might actually be of value.
or
B. I really, REALLY want to.
Welcome to a “Case B” situation.
Michael Jackson is dead.
Love him or hate him, he was equal parts influential and controversial, flamboyant AND reclusive (no mean trick), and he has definitely left his mark on this age.
But let me make one thing VERY clear:
I didn’t know him, and I don’t really know of the stories told of him which were true and which were false . . . when that kind of money is involved it both makes you a target for fraud AND gives you the means to buy silence. From where I’m standing I honestly can’t judge the matter, and I’m not even trying.
BUT.
Odds are YOU didn’t know him either, and just because you loved his music that doesn’t make him a good person. Maybe he was . . . but YOU DON”T KNOW THAT.
Because you didn’t know him either.
Silence, and a candle for all those people in your life you were once close to and now . . . for one reason or another, you’re not anymore.
Today I saw the sun, and yesterday’s work was fine in today’s light . . . just a touch incomplete.
Yesterday was just one of those days.
(Hardly a stellar observation, I know, but I also pulled my shoulder a bit yesterday, so I’m reserving the bulk of my typing today for continuing to polish Chapter 9.)
Today has been one of those days that I’ve gone over what I did today and, honestly, I don’t like it very much. That’s hardly surprising because I didn’t like it very much when I was working on it today either. I know my draft for Chapter 9 is good, and I know that somewhere in there is a good completed chapter that’ll be found after a good polishing . . .
But, honestly, it doesn’t look like today is the day I’m going to find it.
I suppose I could wax poetic about how the day itself has been so . . . grey, a grey that has devoured this day since the sun failed to rise this morning, but that would sound too much like I’m blaming the day, I think.
I’m not.
It’s just a grey day . . . they happen.
Even so . . .
Here’s a candle for the sun, so perhaps it can find its way into the sky tomorrow.
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.”
– John Lubbock
Someone I know told me today she seems to have misplaced her happiness, and asked me if I had seen it.
“As a matter of fact, I have!” I told her. “It asked me to tell you it just popped out for a rainbow, and will be back soon.”
Silly, I know.
But she smiled . . . so I don’t care.
It seems that someone has written a story nine words long that, thanks to a rather inventive inking process masking the words, will take a thousand years to read from start to finish as the words reveal themselves one a century over that time period.
I just don’t have a joke snarky enough to add anything to that.
So I heard the other day that once again someone was trotting out the theory that goldfish are incapable of feeling pain, and putting that theory to the test.
While it seems unlikely to me that any organism would survive long without such an important tool as the ability to feel pain (and, as I recall, there are some case studies to back up my assessment), I’ll grant that the very nature of science sometimes is to take an odd sounding question and put it to the test.
With that in mind . . . personally, I’m more curious if the people who think that goldfish are incapable of feeling pain are capable of feeling pain themselves. I’ll be putting this to the test as soon as I round up enough test subjects, volunteers can contact me via this site.
Candles & Curses 