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There will come a time in the not distant future when words will be rendered unnecessary, when thought will be freely transmissible, when distance will become a lost dimension. That day will be one of mourning, much as we mourned the death of the Underwood Champion, joined in death with the Royal Standard and a…
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TIME OUT
You could feel the tears embedded in the email “We didn’t know she had only three years.” She is 84 and failing in so many small ways that the prognosis comes with great pain, but barely shock save for its delivery. So we cherish the remaining days and cast the estimate aside.
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HERE
We greet as long lost friends, having never before met save sharing a place a decade apart. I strive to cling to what was there in that place, she, fueled by the frustration, has turned away just because of it. I go home to my words, she to her art, and we know our paths…
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WALKING
Today was downright exhausting, and my hour long walk along the river left me dripping and drooping. It wasn’t different than most days, same time, same place, and the usual 756 miles, according to my old friend Orion, who was watching from his usual perch, unseen, as he prefers it by day. When I was…
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DIMENSIONS
It is far less a matter of space for we have that in profusion if mostly always beyond reach, but unnecessary anyway given our pervasive fear of being alone while always trying to define our particular uniqueness. The universe has a vastness we can never hope to grasp and so we turn inward, where space…
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CHECKOUT LINE
Time seems frozen in the checkout line stuck between the Mars bars and the tabloids, you wonder how Liz could survive a total body liposuction, and further details of how OJ killed in a moment of lust. The old woman in front rummages in her change purse certain she has the eighty seven cents, the…
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SAYING, NO PLEASE
“Every once in a while,” he says and the screeching in my head drowns out what follows. I know what he means of course, that is the easy part, but the gulf between meaning and saying is so broad I can stop and count the traffic of ideas floating by, each seeking its own purchase,…
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ELEMENTAL, MY DEAR
In the elemental scheme of things we humans are, at best, middling. We are minute in the scale of the universe, our time not even a glimmer, and as we age, time contracts, but only in the shortening forward direction. But pity the poor hydrogen-7 isotope whose life is likely over in 30 yactoseconds, absorbing…
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COSMOLOGY
Our purpose is to understand and then explain the order of the Universe: the logic of the neat array of stars from our centrally located observation deck, the galaxies as so many fractals seeking to hide their organization. We have no ability to control and lack the mechanisms to make all but the most minute…
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UNDER THE WEIGHT
My shelves grow heavy with volumes of words I wish I had written, neatly bound up in books that stare at me, at once bidding me welcome and challenging me to enter. One shelf is set aside for books of pages, blank, on which I have written each day now for three and a half…