"You think what you want. As long as you think in our categories, we're safe," say the bad guys.

"Put a plus sign where we put a minus sign. Fine. Just stay inside our numbers and our idea of what numbers are."

"Someone hears a distant song, a new number, a new kind of number.

"They can't get the attention of the best minds, busy changing plus and minus signs in front of imprisoning forms."

Play it for the first time.

Sometimes I start paying attention to some art somebody created, writing, painting, song, for example. and then I want to stop paying attention to it forever. Sometimes I do. Shut the book, walk away from the painting, turn off the song.

This avoidance happens when the art is saying something true about reality that I don't want to be with, and saying it skillfully.

Even if I do stay away forever, the skill and force that made me run away have taught me a little more about reality, like it or not.

Better is what happens sometimes, I go back, take it slow, learn me. The creator and I live the same place, and it's best for me to know about that place.

It's not like I'm on a rocky planet that is life-possible distant from a faraway star. I'm here.

Would like to look at it from all angles.

Can't. Not enough time.

If not all, many angles should be looked at. Good to set aside a time to look at angles I'm sure don't matter.

Looking at angles that I can't imagine existing is good, but I need help getting there from luck or accident, preferably gentle accident.

Walking around outside, I wanted to have a shadow. I wanted the sun.

"We are turning, turning, turning," said the woman on the bus who knew how to talk to the child with her. With people relatively new to the whole scene, it's helpful to notice what they are noticing and talk about it.

"Turning, turning, turning," at the next corner.

When they got off the bus, the child turned around and around in one place, rotating on the rotating planet she'd learning to interact with.

Late Sunday, windy, chilly--most of the farmer's market sellers had packed up and headed home.

But a woman coming up out of the BART station with a child said, "Oh, the peanuts are still open! Let's get some!" and she and the child ran across the plaza.

I knew a guy who when he was up for the draft for World War II showed up at the draft place and didn't want to go. He didn't say much or do anything untoward. He was just there and he really didn't want to go.

They didn't want him around, and gave him some kind of exemption, and he didn't go. I bet practice in being clear and firm inside yourself about your own truth would help with that.

I knew a guy who during the Vietnam draft went to the draft place and when they asked for a urine sample, he drank his urine. They called him crazy and let him go. He said to get to the point where he did that, he did get crazy some. He is a high-energy, intense guy always.

I knew a guy who enlisted in the Navy after Vietnam because he wanted, he told me, "to get into the living quarters of community leaders in poor countries at night and slit their throats." I don't think that's how he put it at the time to himself.

So he enlisted and tested high and found that kind of work isn't what the Navy wants it's smartest to do.

He was in a computer room all the time on a ship. He had a weird Navy shift so his off time moved around the day because the shifts weren't designed to match twenty-four hours.

He didn't like it, any of it.

If being a Navy commando, he would have been out there in the general air and the general day and night and doing things he expected to involve courage and physical stealthiness smarts. The computer jig on a ship wasn't it.

He want to work room of the officer above him and said what he'd enlisted for and said he wanted out. He isn't burly, but he is really tall. He sat in the officer's room and really really wanted to be out of the Navy.

They let him out within a few days.

Again, previous strength of will seems indicated.

I like San Francisco about as much as I don't like noir films. Which is to say, lots.

On Friday, January 20, 2012, at the Castro Theatre as part of the Noir City film festival, two noir movies will be screened which show in detail what some of San Francisco looked like in the middle of the twentieth century.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, if anything.

"Dark Passage" (1947) has Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, whom I like. "The House on Telegraph Hill" (1950) has what the festival blurb calls a classic "woman in peril" plot. I don't like those.

Hmm. . .

More information at noircity.com

The show at the Club Six on Friday the 13th, 2012, featured, says the poster, "King Hopeton plus Clear Conscience, Counter Culture, and Highest Intention," a good fit for dancing into the three-day weekend of our only legal holiday to honor a social change activist.

You're the kind of person who could make everything better by giving in to being yourself.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday is becoming a day to do volunteering.

The Montgomery bus boycott started without being particularly led by the ministers, but they were the leaders of the community, and they and others expected them to assume leadership.

Women were important in starting the boycott impulse before the meeting because white bus drivers routinely screamed at black women to move who were sitting in what the drivers thought was the wrong place. It wasn't a matter of asking in a normal voice.

On the evening of the day Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move when screamed at, the meeting of black ministers and other black leaders about how to lead the already happening event boycott in the church King was minister of. This meant that though other people at the meeting of about seventy people could and did slip out, he had to stay to the end.

He was a new guy in town, and this appealed to some of the others as a reason for him to lead, so there he still was and he was new. The task was tough and not utterly without danger.

So, he became the miniter who was leader of the boycott. Various subsidiary reasons for that could be perceived by King and other thinking like him as how God worked out God's will on this occasion. That isn't necessarily wrong. God is good at working with conditions like that, especially among people who are all the time invoking God, and or the greater good, in their lives.

In the day leading up the the meeting, flyer handout was going on, to encourage the leaders in their meeting that night to continue the boycott, make strong demands, to not knuckle under.

No Xerox machines then, so having a way to make copies was power not everyone had. Jo Ann Robinson, a woman who had been screamed at by a bus driver and who was a political activist, had a friend who had access to a mimeograph machine as part of her job at Alabama State. A mimeograph a copy maker where you had to make a special kind of original for it to work. Jo Ann Robinson made a thousands of copies of a flyer to lead to the leaders, and made sure they got around.

That kind of pressure and the been around guys sort of said, yes and how about the new guys leads, and the new guy said yes to the situation, and to God.

--information from "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" by David Garrow

Twenty twelve twice has the "tw" sound which is fun to say and which will be said more often in 2012 than some other times.

Subway seems to be going the path of lots of locations. They've opened a Subway shop at 6th and Howard, with views of outdoor art.

Catty-corner across the intersection is the building with furniture which seems to be stopped in the middle of falling out of windows--actual furniture, actually attached to the building.

The first floor of the furniture fall building has much graffiti on the street level.

Straight across 6th from the Subway is the changing display of focussed, very good graffiti art on the side of the 1 a.m. Gallery. Each usually unified artwork on that wall stays a good little while, is replaced for a short while by shiny black paint, and then the shiny black is replaced by new graffiti art.

All of which would be something to look at while eating at Subway.

Depending on which way you walk to or from this corner, things can get crimey. Alertness is good. Coming along Howard is more common-sense like that coming up from 6th and Market, two blocks away, sometimes called the most crimed intersection in the city.

Another day. The sky gives light. The Earth gives green. Same old manna.

Two white horse heads, side by side, slightly turned toward each other, made out of paper by someone who knows how to crimp and how to plan crimping, are looking our of a downtown display window with colorful scarves tossed casually around their necks.

Many display windows these days say, "Retail for Lease." Many others say, "Sale." It is fine to see the tradition continue where artists currently working for stores offer routinized urban passersby surprise.

You can get reviving fresh air from inside yourself by taking a new route when you walk around your brain.

There could be a musical where the micro-organisms making dirt that grows good food could sing, along with the humans.

The lovers, above, sing, "Oh, joy, us!" and the little rotters beneath their feet making healthy soil below out of old plants sing, "They couldn't live without us. We joy life, too."

Do what is needed in a straight line, quietly.

While on planet, look at stuff.

While on planet, smell.

While on planet, feel how different planet parts feel.

The Earth is tasty in many different ways. Let it know that it can speak to you, if it wants, in ways you haven't heard before or heard of.

Lightly, gently, softly, standing on the sidewalk, he's playing the accordion--an accordion doodle from the heart.

God is okay, working within bizarre self-created constraints stylishly.

She doesn't mind how smart I am.

She doesn't mind the direction of my smarts.

She seems to kind of like all that which makes it easier for me to let my head be and not hold onto it so tight.

If a cross street crosses a street in a good mood, the cross street mellows out some.

copyright 2012 Anne Herbert All rights reserved