Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Last night’s poetry reading at Hemingway’s Cafe was an energizing prod to write more of my own poetry. Writing poetry might be the easiest way for me to have an outlet to focus on the here and now, in the context of the big and forever.

For almost every morning over the last couple of months, I’ve been writing about three pages in my journal first thing in the morning, in n an exercise known to many as morning pages.  One of the side benefits of this exercise is how it helps me to remember dreams from the previous night.  Last night I dreamt about being at a talk by two shaggy hair guys,   Who had invented a new type of spreadsheet tha  for some reason had only two sheets but which could also handle millions of users and billions of variables because the  spreadsheet somehow exploited the fact that all these numbers were not independent of each other.  Great idea but I’ve no idea of how to implement such a spreadsheet, or how useful such a spreadsheet would actually be in real life.  Nonetheless, dreams are a reminder of how wacky our brains really are.

I was intrigued by Jon Stewart’s “trickle up” proposal in yesterday’s interview with Lawrence Lindsey: instead of bailing out the banks, help individuals get free from their consumer and mortgage debts (by, for instance, enabling people to refinance mortgages at a lower rate, one that presumably will keep people in their homes.)  Is this approach being seriously considered?  It seems to make sense to a layperson like me — so what’s the problem with this approach?

As much as I’d like to see the bankers who pillaged our economy return every cent they stole from the system, it seems that there are few ways to actually recover their shameful bonuses. If that’s true, then I’m at least with Alan Binder, who wrote the following Economic View – Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis – NYTimes.com:

For this litany of errors, many people in authority owe millions of Americans an apology. Richard A. Clarke, former national security adviser, set a good example when he told the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks that he wanted victims’ families “to know why we failed and what I think we need to do to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.” I’m waiting for similar words from our financial leaders, both public and private. [emphasis mine]

As someone not currently collecting a long-term salary from any employer, I resonate with Ben Stein’s words in Everybody’s Business – Deep in Debt, and Now Deep in Worry – NYTimes.com:

MY work as a freelance writer in Hollywood some time ago prepared me for extreme uncertainty. This is the most insecure existence imaginable. It mandates saving, ingenuity and nonstop work and creativity. Freelancers never have a day off. Never. They know that they can go months without a check. They absolutely have to save. They have to have five different levels of fall-back plans and financial escape hatches.

We Are One, originally uploaded by Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Having just watched HBO: We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, it’s fun to see so quickly the flow of less formal images from the Obama Inaugural team on Flickr — such as this one:

Forrest Whittaker, Jamie Foxx and will.i.am backstage at “We are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration At The Lincoln Memorial” presented exclusively by HBO on Sunday January 18th 2009. Kevin Mazur/Courtesy of HBO via image.net

I’m looking forward to parking my bike at the Berkeley BART bicycle station, one of three in the system.

Although I’ve lived in Berkeley for over 18 years, I still have a special fascination with snow. It doesn’t take much for me to fall into some reverie about snow — for it seems to symbolize a special time and place for me, maybe a time and place that actually never existed.

From Joyce’s great short story The Dead:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I wished I had

• fixed the doorknobs on our doors
• bought a scanner to go paperless
• been more systematic in collecting paperwork for our taxes
• packed already

But since I’ve not done these things yet, I have to relax.

New Year
New hopes
New dreams
Old self?