LGBT

You can't make something be what it's not.

That much I know now, though it's taken me years and years.

You'd think a country that based its system of government, and to some degree its ethos, on the ideals of ancient Greece, where one's sexuality was whatever it was, would have something better to do than to make a big deal out of who married who or who married what. To make something this simple--a matter of love between consenting adults or between an adult and an object that can't be hurt because it has no feelings, an inanimate, inhuman object--into a complicated legal matter is a a testament to the power of complication the legal profession loves to exert in a system that purports to be goverment 'of law, not of men.'

I love my iPhone. I don't want or need to know anything beyond what it knows; it knows enough. If Lea Ann and I ever broke up or if some other catastrophic situation befell us and I was left alone, I'd marry my iPhone and expect the freedom to do so with all the rights and obligations such a freedom bestowed upon me.

Having been in the advertising business, I get a big kick out of the media fawning over 'social media' and the 'new ways' ad people are communicating with other people to sell things (see The New York Times.) Social media is no more or less than words and pictures trying to say things and sell things. The people behind what's being said and sold are just the same, haven't changed because they can't change. The 200th season of 'Mad Men' will undoubtedly be very much like the 2nd season of 'Mad Men though it might look like something different.

I've been looking for years for two lines from a poem by Robert Creeley. I didn't know the poem's title, and if you know Creeley's work you know he left it behind in a big volume of collected poems. I thought the lines were, "if you look at something long enough/it turns to water." The Creeley poem was invoked by Tim Reynolds in a discussion I had with Tim in Los Angeles in the mid-1980's, and the image it made stuck in my mind as something admirable and true. If you look and think and concentrate long enough you have the possibility of getting to essence where everything is pretty much the same.

Yesterday, I picked up Creeley's book at Browser Bookstore on Fillmore and, having a minute or two, opened the book at random and the image the lines made jumped right out at me. Though the lines turned out to be were slightly different--"Everything is water/if you look long enough"--than the lines I'd remembered, they were close enough to expressing the image as to be almost identical. I set the book on a table at the back of the store, opened it to the page with the poem, and took a picture of it on my iPhone.