* If there is no way to escape, the way that you escape may not look elegant, but there you are, breathing and somewhere else.

* One block over, there's a quieter street.

* I guess. You guess. And so we go forward.

* The man who wrote a book about going on a pilgramage to Mecca and my friend who went to the 1992 UN gathering about women in Beijing had one identical reaction to their experiences: shock at how much shopping there was. Both places, Mecca and the conference were set up for lots of shopping and people did lots of shopping. People that the man and my friend were with did lots of shopping and both of them were shocked at that.

It's crowd control, for one thing. You call all these people together, and what are they to do when they aren't doing the main events. Shopping fills the time.

* Being alive is complicated. It has a lot of parts.

* I don't want to be imaginative and compassionate. I want to go with my knee-jerk growl.

I don't no. I yes.

When I'm in losing my temper mode, I'd good at thinking of things to say, but there are problems with quality contol.

He observed the Sabbath by seeming dead. Sabbath goes Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. As told, he died Friday around three and when women went to look for his body to take care of it in death very early on Sunday morning, his body wasn't there. One of them met him, though she didn't recognize him until he said her name.

Holy Saturday. What to do on holy Saturday? Say, well, you never do know.

Jesus sat around on Easter Monday going, "That was interesting. What now?"

They didn't use a dropcloth while painting the building a light color.

So the sidewalk was spattered some time later with little drops of white-yellow paing, and one bigger spill about the size of a dinner plate.

The bigger spill had lines in it from dirt filling in wrinkles in the dried paint. Someone with a Magic Marker used four or five more lines to make the blob a portrait of William Shakespeare.

In a way, it's all an invitation to dance; it's a matter of hearing it.

China Galland wrote a book where in she visits different parts of the world where eight year old, and such like, are being raped for the profit of adults. She visits various child pornography places.

While there, she talks to activists working to stop this, also invokes the goddesses of those places.

She also works on her own being raped as a child and confronting the rapist.

What impresses me most about this book, is that she invokes the goddesses and for me, they show up.

I mean, the book takes on several impossible tasks and one could pick out it. But the goddesses show up because they know what is important. Showing up as a human, taking on the world's pain, distant people's pain, one's own paing. The goddesses say yes to that.

Her basic thing is life is that she's smart. No, her basic thing is life is that she's loving, and smart with it. Put it all together, and sometimes it spells "ouch."

The stars exist and also your hands. The news is good. Atoms dance.

Gock. Must gock more. Must find out what gocking is.

To ancient Greeks, laurel is the poet's reward.

There's these guys hanging around with each other, and they are all about bravery.

They are not being brave right this second.

What do we the people of the United States of America do? Too much.

* John Bergert wrote that all advertising is for one idea --the idea that the choices offered by advertising matter.

He wrote it in the very good book "The Art of Seeing," and used the word publicity, which is British for advertising.

I call writing magaziney when it presents whatever topic it presents in a way that will not interrupt the advertising, will not make the choices in advertising seem trivial. Not all such writing is in magazines.

* My instinct uses all kinds of cover stories to get me out the door. I have to do this or that, and I have to do it now. Then I walk out the door, and I know why I'm out and about.

Sunset over the Pacific, sort of. Sunset forty blocks from the Pacific with light shining through all that's been having good times with all that water. Heart lifting sunset.

**[Tuesay added name of friend and name of foreword writer.] She thanks her friends in a flavorful way at the beginning of the book. For example, she thanks, Safiyad Godlas, an artist friend for not only making stop and smell the roses, but making her notice the precise and many colors of each rose and how the petals flow together.

The book is "Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam" by Amina Wadud. Professor Khalid Abou El Fadl, the man who writes in the foreword that people who are without power can't have a full relationship with God because they don't have the power to choose that relationship.

Putting those together it could be like this. God makes us complex, multi colored, multi petaled, and God wants us to show up like that. Relating to withered, fake simple, tramped on plants is not what God has in mind.

I pay too much attention to humans, given how much else there is.

Empty paper shopping bags are rarely found in treetops.

Everything is the same until it's different.

Experts rarely predict the moment of different arriving because they are busy being busy inside the same.

I pray, pray, pray, and the answer, answer, answer is wait, wait, wait.

In this time and place, when little children, kids under five play, the girls tend to make relationship noise, like talking to the toys and causing the toys to talk to each other and talking to humans they are playing with. The boys tend to make action noise, like running toy cars into each other and making sound to go with that or knocking over a block building they've built and making sounds to go with that.

A prestigious and expensive part of physics at this time and place involves running small things into each other so they break into even smaller things.

I am susupicious about spending much public money on something that seems to live out the small boy drive to run things into each other into another realm.

A history of science I'm reading records both the history of science by intellectuals and the accompanying craft traditions where people where using scientific laws to make things for trade. They didn't think of formulating the laws they knew well intellectually.

Progress in science went faster when the intellectual scientists and the craft tradition people had some kind of contact. They often didn't for class sneer reasons.

I wonder about the hidden craft tradition of keeping the whole thing going. The naturalist Ed Ricketts said that if you look at people as a species it looks like the species has a species characteristic of going to war. This species has it built in to periodically turn on itself and kill many members of the same species.

The will to destroy and the increasing cleverness to create means to destroy is discouraging.

There seem to be some other species characteristics that keep this species from destroying itself, from tearing down every city, from burning every farm.

I think part of that is an open secret cract tradition of keeping going. You know part of it. To the extnt that you can and do act on it, thanks.

I don't know if codifying it would help. Codifying kills some things.

I am drawn to saying lets spend the money it takes to build a linear accelerator on this. But I don't know what this is. I do know that pouring a lot of money on something tends to make it more like the loudest, most obvious parts of the existing culture--things there are already too much of.

But there may be other ways to go with it that we weren't able to do before when so many of us we stomped on and shut up because of some category we were in. Not that some of us are less stomped on and shut up, they might be more things possible in living out the craft tradtion of not killing everything.

"Man of Flame" is a play about Van Gogh.

Myoshi Juro wrote "Man of Flame." Takizawa Osamu played Van Gogh in the first production.

Osama the actor had a copy made of a chair that Van Gogh used, and he sat in the copy on stage.

The theatre director and thinker Tadashi Suzuki disagreed with the chair.

He thought that a Van Gogh written by a Japanese playwright was a Japanese Van Gogh. He thought a Japanese Van Gogh would sit on the floor. Very likely he would sit on the floor on "a frayed and dirty cotton cushion."

--ideas and quote from "The Way of Acting: The Theatre Writings of Tadaki Suzuki"

That look. "When good war movies are listed, "Two Women" is not on the list. It is wisely known to be a good movie, and it takes place during World War II, but when people are talking about war movies, they don't talk about it.

No combat, I guess. When two guys in uniform rape a woman and her 11 year old daughter is that combat? Such things in the area of combat are not rare.

Renata Adler wrote that it is not possible to make an anti-war movie because film always says yes. Whatever context of words and ideas has been created around the fighting, when the fighting starts the camera and the audience says "Yes" said Renata Adler.

"Two Women" doesn't get into detail about the rape. The character Sophia Loren plays is knocked out for the rape. When she becomes conscious, she and her daughter are lying down on the dirt floor. She looks over at her daughter and realizes that her daughter has been raped and her daughter was conscious for the experience. She looks at her daughter.

That look says no.

At this moment my country can start wars at will. The period of getting the public in the mood to do this is giddy and odd.

During the 1991 war on Iraq, the short one, I was talking to a friend I often talked to in the coffee shop. We often talked. She hadn't told me before that she had helped with returned World War II soldiers in the VA hospital who wree really messed up right after the war. I hadn't realized before that "basket case" is a term for someone with no arms and no legs. During the 2000's war on Iraq, the long one going on now, I read about a man with one leg who had false arms and a legs so he can move around. He looks to be in good shape, actually--he clearly works out.

Then they just laid. She didn't talk much about them or her time with them. She got a version of that look and looked out the window.

"Speak, so you can speak again," is something Zora Neale Hurston said, and the name of a good book about her.

There are things she knows about quiet. She knows, for example, that quiet exists.

He's talking about when people have experienced something and then someone tells them their experience wasn't what they knew it was but different. He's talking about when people go with that and take one someone else's words, contrary to what they know from experience, as truth. He calls it "the voluntary acceptance of other people's errors."

That's in "The Cancer Ward" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, chapter 31, "Idols of the Marketplace." He's talking that way because he's getting operated on for colon cancer tomorrow. Usually he just thinks like that and stays quiet. He is of the opinion that he has gone along too much and it therefore full of shit.

She said, in effect, "We're supposed to feel sorry for Anna Karenina but she was free. Why feel sorry for her? She freely loved and freely killed herself. What about us--torn from our houses and locked up for years in camps for nothing, our lives gone. Who will tell our stories?"

Educated Russian talking in "The Cancer Ward," by Alexander Solzinitsyn, where he tells, glancingly, some of the stories.

Because I am thankful for the rain, I spiritually need to walk in it even when I don't practically need to walk in it.

While you're making the change, you may not look your idea of graceful.

The healing of my heart, and then I'm smart.