They Arrive Unannounced

When, with little warning,
At one o’clock in the morning,
You get a great idea,
You should write it down, that’s clear,
But check it in the daylight
To see if it will play right.

Mortality

People say that life is short. Of course, compared to eternity, it's true. Our ability to comprehend time far outstrips our ability to occupy it. But, compared to most other animals, our lives are long.

The human mind can comprehend
Far more than it can occupy.
We take, we give, we love, we live,
Before we die.

And after,
I hope to be remembered, at times, with laughter.

My Father

RIP Jack Enright, 1927-2019

You might say he was not an easy man.
A prosecutor in his early days,
Something combative lurked within his ways,
Across his life, a long nine-decade span.

I don’t recall the day my life began,
But he was there, and in my memory’s haze,
I see him still, a giant in my gaze,
A loving father, head of our small clan.

His voice is in my head; his turns of thought
Are permanently burned into my brain
For better or for ill. His stories taught
That wits and guts should both be roundly brought
To bear when there is justice to attain.
Alas, I cannot shake his hand again.

Working on Sunday

After you've stared at numbers all day,
Watching them add and subtract,
You may feel just a little dismay
That most things aren't so exact.

A Sunny Thought

Behold the wild flower.
It grows on fusion power.

Parenthetically

A math rule we all hold in awe
Is called the commutative.
Some claim I’ve broken that law,
But those charges are putative.

Hoping Your New Year Is A Happy One

I prefer to plan ahead.
2019? Too near. Instead,
I'm forming resolutions for 2020.
Not finished yet, but trust me, I've got plenty.

Say Cheese

I came across an article claiming that cheese was as addictive as cocaine.

A very logical friend of mine pointed out that this would mean that cocaine was as addictive as cheese.

A scientifically-focused friend of mine pointed out that this was all about the dopamine - things we like tend to release dopamine in our nervous systems.

Here's something from me that's predictive:
Everything you enjoy is "addictive".

An example, just to be fair:
I'm super-addicted to air.

Vampires of the Creepy Kind

In reference
To bed bugs,
My preference
Is dead bugs.

Warmish

The artificial daylight of the street lamps in the city
Reflects across the puddles with a yellow-orange glow.
The trees are bare, the grass is pale, but somehow it’s all pretty,
And I’m just glad the rainfall wasn’t blankets full of snow.

Diplomacy Was Not

Diplomacy was not her strongest suit.
Her strongest suit was grasping the essential.
She’d lay the facts out with a sort of brute
Display of logic, taut and consequential.
And if you did not like it, you were free
To figure out a way to disagree
But sometimes you would find your dreams were haunted
By her conclusions, proven but unwanted.

Diplomacy is not the highest art.
It leaves the mind bedazzled but unsure
Exactly what was in the speaker’s heart.
Was it pure gold or was it just manure?
She told the truth she saw, from where she stood,
Believing that its power was for the good,
And while it sometimes meant she lost a friend
She lived for real, not having to pretend.

Aquaman

Monday night we saw Aquaman with one of my wife's brothers. I can't say I was crazy about it, but it wasn't bad. I'm just a bit jaded about giant CGI battle scenes. I like them, but in somewhat smaller doses, I guess, than the average movie-goer.

Aquaman is about an individual, scorned as an illegitimate half-breed, who becomes the ruler of Atlantis. I was thinking of telling people that it was a metaphor for Trump. But they might take me seriously. I suppose I could also argue that it was a metaphor for Obama. Butm again, someone might take me seriously.

But seriously, there's great appeal, at times, in putting an outsider in charge. I suppose that was actually going on with both Obama and Trump.

Under the sea
Or up on the land
The powers-that-be
Can get out of hand.

Ho ho ho

Plenty of empty seats on the train.
Where are my fellow workers?
Christmas Eve has struck again
And turned them into shirkers!

Semicolons

Semicolons have somehow dropped out of fashion;
They’re good at precision but poor at projecting passion.

Belated Welcome

I finally got an email from the Chicago Marathon indicating that I was selected for 2019. It wasn't a welcome exactly, it was an "update", but I'll take it. I was actually kind of worried about not getting an email from them - even though the website listed me as "selected".

I can list off the bad things about the Chicago Marathon.

1) it is slow to start, with 30,000 fast people in front of me. Really, it takes about an hour to get to the start line.
2) it is kind of crowded the whole way

I can list the good things too:

1) great crowd support
2) it is so darn flat
3) I don't have to drive far to get to it

I will tell you how it all works out in October 2019. Yeah, that's a downside too. You have to commit to the race way in advance.

Of course, you can run the same distance on your own
In your own neighborhood
But there are stoplights and no free Gatorade
So your time is never as good.

Gingerbead

I saw there's some silliness going on about the gingerbread man. Is he really a man? Should we refer to the cookie as a gingerbread person? Don't we have something more exciting to argue about? This seems so 2017. After all, we know from the famous nursery rhyme, that he identifies as a man. "Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me - I'M THE GINGERBREAD MAN!" Capitalization added. So is it written. So shall it be.

The gingerbread man, he likes to claim
His fast pace can't be beaten.
But every year, about this time
He ends up caught and eaten.

Forms

I ran into this online, apparently attributed to Douglas J. Steele:

There was a young man
From Cork who got Limericks
And Haiku confused.

I thought that was pretty funny. It helps to know that County Limerick borders County Cork in Ireland.

A guru whose humor was blue,
Wrote what he claimed were haiku.
They ran on too long
And rhymed like a song
And ended like limericks, too.

Passed Over

Oh sure, you may laugh,
But I was hoping to be the chief of staff!

Delayed

Something must’ve gone wrong
With the Lyft driver’s locator.
I waited and waited too long.
Now I’m catching a train much later.

Vortex

I'm puzzled. I seem to have been selected in the drawing for the Chicago Marathon 2019. That's not puzzling, since the odds are about 53 to 47. What's puzzling is that they were supposed to notify me, and they have my email address in their system, but the did NOT notify me. I had to log into my participant account, where I could see that I was listed as "selected".

Very understated. And I had to go ask for it. Where's my hyped up, "Welcome runner!" email?

Maybe my electronic welcome got lost in the space-time vortex somewhere. I realize they have many to send out.

On a completely different topic, I gave blood tonight.

There's always a need
For this stuff that we bleed.