Body Parts

Despair Is Not Healthy

Despair is not healthy; anger is.

Despair is not motivation; anger is. In a healthy person, anger motivates and is transitory. It transcends itself. 

Bitterness Is Not Healthy

Bitterness is not healthy; philosophical self-humoring is.

Bitterness immobilizes and destroys. Self-humoring is philosophical recognition of our inability to change reality. It points to paths of escape. Self-humoring is the ante-chamber to hope.

My Mother-in-Law Is Difficult to Classify

She won't eat fruit. Not any fruit. Not in any form. Not alone or as an ingredient in a dish. That makes preparing our Sabbath evening meal, which I prepare and she shares with us, a culinary sudoku. I made the mistake once of preparing a Moroccan style meat loaf with fruit. Well, prunes to be exact. She about had a heart attack. I'm sure I could hear her artificial mitral valve cramp. She didn't finish the meal. Hence the following conversation this Friday morn between my wife and me.

Me: Your mother is a neo-Pythagorean.

(Pause.)

Me: Beans, but not fruit.

(Wife sipping coffee and perking up.)

Wife: Yeh. All angles.

Me: Well, she's not an equilateral triangle.

Wife: Maybe isolosceles.

Me: Um. Not a triangle at all. She's an irregular polygon.

(Pause. I'm thinking about dinner.)

Wife: Good thing she doesn't know tomato is a fruit.

Good Shabbos!

Gerunds Run Rampant!

So went my wife's morning rant about the state of the English language in our local newspaper, after we spent five minutes parsing a five-word summary of the weather forecast for California's Bay area. I am transfixed by the fantasy of little statues of gerunds suddenly springing to life, like Chucky dolls, and running rampant, destroying as they go. Maybe they would migrate to the Bay area and jump off the Golden Gate bridge, lemmings.

Ask Not

Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

Ask not who the bell tolls for.

Whaz goin' down man?

Who dat bell ring'in fo?

Drat da bell.

Dang, that bell don' stop.

Ding dong that damn bell.

Shit man shut that dam' bell.

You shut that dam' bell bitch.

I'm gonna shoot that fucking bell.

You answer it it's your muthafuggin brudder.

You get it you always hanging on that dam ringin' thing.

Is dat the fron' do'?

I ain't gettin' up again fo' no dang bell.

It ain't fo' me, that's fo' dang sure.

Shit man I always gotta do everythin'.

When An Idea Begins To Smell

Nothing convinces you better, that an idea you once promoted is wrong, than listening to your enemies expound on its virtues. Re: Lieberman and the expansion of Medicare three years ago.

Middle Age, Old Age, and Alas

A man knows he is middle-aged, when a beautiful young woman is not worth the trouble she causes.

A man knows he is old, when a beautiful woman says he is not worth the trouble he causes.

And a man knows he is very old, when he is insufficiently motivated to write a novel about the beautiful  young woman.

If Grooming In the Dark

Don't store the tube of toothpaste in the same drawer as the tube of "Desitin".

Reality Can't Be Captured

Trying to understand reality with language is like trying to stop an avalanche by lassoing it with a rope.

We understand the avalanche by getting out of its way.

Types of Man's and Woman's Autobiography

Who said and what is the source of the observation that the standard theme of a woman's autobiography is venturing out into the world, and the standard theme of a man's autobiography is triumph of the will?