Someone's Poem

"My love for you is so sublime,
words could only make it less.
It's what I feel but can't define,
it's what I know but can't express."

Howard Joseph Pearsall

"A thousand mile journey begins with the first step."

"I Found the Moon"

My granddaughter, Sofia, with the help of her mother, called me excitedly tonight on the cell phone from her home in Washington, DC. "I found the moon Grandpa! And it's right outside my window. We don't have to chase it in the car!"

Four weeks earlier, she and her mother--my beautiful daughter Mishi--had visited my me and my wife in Pacific Palisades, California, for their once a year July/August vacation.

One night during their two week vacation, as our family was driving back home from Santa Monica, Sofia had seen from the car window the nighttime moon, high in the Los Angeles sky. It was round and white, and it seemed to hold a particular fascination for her. Sofia is three and a half years of age, and I suppose all the world is wondrous and mysterious at that age, new and discoverable daily.

The next night, while sitting around the house after dinner, Sofia looked out the window to find the moon; but the moon wasn't visible in the sky. We live behind the hillside. She was disappointed. She wanted to see the moon again. I told her to finish her ice cream and we would get in the car and 'chase the moon'. We'd find it, I assured her. It was somewhere. Her eyes lit up.

We put on our slippers, I got the keys to the car from my pants pocket upstairs, and in our pajamas we went to the car. We drove a short distance, up the hill, overlooking the high school...and there it was. The beautiful full moon again, white in the distant sky.

Sofia was delighted. Her smile lit up the car like the moon lit up the nighttime sky.

The next night, at home, Sofia looked out the window again. But once again, the moon was not to be seen. Sofia was undaunted; and determined. "We've got to go in the car and chase the moon Grandpa!!" she emphasised. So we got in the car again, drove up the the hill again, to the same spot as the previous night, overlooking the high school. But this time: no moon; I had forgotten it was it was earlier in the evening than it had been last night. The moon had not risen yet above our horizon. "Its not there" she said. She was so disappointed. I was crushed. I said, "We'll have to chase it some more." So we drove rapidly across the village center to the road leading up the hill to Will Roger's State Park. And...as we ascended the crest of the higher hill...there it was, the moon. "The moon, Grandpa!" she screamed. The smile across her face was worth a thousand journeys across a million villages in all the world.

Sofia is, as I said, is only three and a half years of age, and many, many, new things are entering her consciousness every hour of every day. The world...and especially a cross-continent visit to Gammy's and Grandpa's...were filled with many daily new things: the wave-breaking ocean, sandcastles in the sand, Rustic Canyon swimming pool, Santa Monica pier and its Merry-Go-Round. For the rest of her visit, she never spoke of the moon again.

A week later she was gone. A huge hole appeared in our hearts.

Three days later she called. She told Grammy how glad she was to be back in Washington, at home, with her beloved 'Papi', with her dolls and her friends in the park. She listed the friends by names: Anya, Norma, Carmen and Josey. At the end of the conversation, just before hanging up, she said: "Don't you and Grandpa forget me."

When I got home that night, when my wife told me about Sofia's worry about our forgetting her, my heart skipped a beat. The opposite was more the case. What if we died soon? Would she forget us?

Tonight, when her call came, telling us she had found the moon again, I stopped worrying. It seems memories, deep in the heart, like moons far in the sky, may last forever.

All is Forever

There was an article in the LA Times recently about the molecular process operative in the conversion of sights and sounds into memory (how molecules create new memories and re-kindling old memories). One of the thoughts (among the many, many that the articles struck deeply in me) was that, since smell was nothing more or less than the entrance of outer odor molecules into the nostrils...from whence they activated other molecules of the human system to create new human molecular synaptic formulations along the molecular nerve pathways to the human brain, etc...thereby creating new memories and activating old memories: molecules, molecules, molecules...ALL is molecules. Which led me to thinking further: perhaps the spiritualists and religionists are right: we never die. We just become different molecular forms...perhaps these molecules become so small they seem non-corporeal (non-physical) but are nonetheless eternally physically existent in the universe. Angels and life-forces and spirits are simply forms of re-arranged universal life... minuscule molecules obeying the Law of the Conservation of Matter: matter doesn't disappear when any universal form (such as the human body or driftwood) disintegrates; it just becomes transformed into something new. Science and religion are interdependently right; or, as I was taught in my Catholic Catechism about God: the molecular universe "was, is, and always shall be": one, universal and eternal.

Fathers and Sons

"We think our father fools, so wise we grow; our wiser sons no doubt will think us so."

A Definition of Civilized

CIVILIZED: the ability to live beyond one's own ignorance and self-absorption.

Hubris

Regret is arrogant; it presumes the past is--or was--subject to your modification.

Bars

Bars serve two purposes: numbing and joining: to be precise, numbing in order to join. 'Hi. My name is...What's yours...?' Melt fear. Liquid resolve. The weekend awaits.

The Need for Burkas

Why do Muslims demand women wear Burkas?

I believe the rationale is the same as to why boxers were not allowed to have sex before a big fight: Jihadist Muslim men feel the need to conserve, concentrate and channel their testosterone into nothing else but revolution. A women's skin seduces their concentration. Revolutions need testosterone; physical fighting requires it. Sex--seduced by unclothed female flesh--wastes the chemical flow necessary for fighting.

Think of the hippie battle cry of the 1970s: "Make Love Not War". It is the same concept coming from the opposite direction: The 'Love Children' who issued that motto wanted men to channel (get rid of) testosterone in sex, in order to preclude the desire to fight in war.

Jihadist are simply reverse love children. They want war instead of peace.

This difference RE testosterone emphasis arises from this: 'Hippies' of the 70s could afford to waste testosterone--to make love and not war--because they already had 'things'; they came from the middle class (they already had, and were destined to inherit) 'goodies'. On the other hand, Jihadists--who believe their destiny is to serve the poor--they even often even "walk-the-walk" on poverty; similar to Mao, Fidel and Gandhi living in the hills during the early stages of their revolutions); they primarily demand of themselves physical revolution (war) to achieve their political/economic revolution...and therefore need a lot of focused testosterone to achieve their goals: whether it be killing capitalists with focused suicide bombing (and saving the 70 virgins until later...in heaven...when the fighting is successfully over) or overthrowing Harvard educated and Western oriented (read: $$$$) kingdoms such as Saudi Arabia.

In this regard Jihadists resemble many other former revolutionaries, who touted Puritanical social/personal doctrines while focusing their energy on fighting: the Russian Communists of the 20th Century, who killed on behalf of the poor Proletariat against the rich Capitalists, and whose female Comrade-attire was very sexually conservative (their outfits made them look like men) and the British Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans in the mid-Seventeenth Century who, while trying to wrestle control from the King and the Nobility, kept their women in hats and nun-like garb.

Burkas follow the same tradition: to enable warrior men to keep their eye on the donut (revolution) and not the hole.

On the Road to Vegas

Marion was a tall woman: 5 foot eight inches. She had a lithe body. It moved like a panther suckled by snake, coiled, ready to strike at any minute. It made her sexually desirable. The aphrodisiac she offered was confusion: did a man want to dominate or be dominated by her? A man moved toward her with anger mixed with lust mixed with light-headedness.

Paul was equally tall...but he seemed much shorter. This effect was a product of his mass. Shoulders, neck, hips, buttocks and legs were fat-less. Each muscle curved into another, like a series of waves swelling into one another during a Atlantic storm. When she rode him, she rode a squall. Top or bottom, it didn't make much difference.

The night they died, she was on top, seated on him, He was driving the car at 90 miles an hour. She was stuck his lap, her skirt thrown high over her back and shoulders, her taut belly tight against the driving wheel, her hands covering his. His unfastened pants were down around his knees. He looked at the dashboard, smiled as he remembered the speedometer had hit 80 exactly when he had entered her. They rode harshly along the cement road clashing against each other it seemed halfway to Vegas. The truck came at them at the moment of climax. She ordered him to continue. He obeyed.

The fireball could be seen at a distance of twenty miles.