The God Who Loves You
Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures,
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college.
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a life-long passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.


******

The morning bore terrible tidings of the impending unsolicited cheer in the form of a jeep adorned with caricatures of prancing reindeer. Words ran alongside garish red ribbons - Sison of cheer. (shudder)


******

Mary: How much do you love me?

Mrs. Tilford: As much as all the words in all the books in all the world. -Hellman, the children’s hour

******

I am that I am, your late and lonely master,
Who knows now what magic is:- the power to enchant that comes from disillusion.- WH Auden

Because the above quote has always served as one of my long-standing ideologies, I have always been a sucker for illusionists. magicians, underworld/ otherworldly capers.

I'll definitely watch The Illusionist. The movie seems promising.

I, admittedly, am not very good with movie critiques. This is because I firmly believe that critiques should have a certain sense of objectivity or a set of guidelines that give a coherent format to an analysis. I detest people who say that certain movies do not do justice to its subjects. I guess that's why it's a movie, for christ's sake. From time immemorial, the main goal of movies is to entice, to hide truths, to exaggerate realities. If everyone else made movies that were true to the form they represented, then who the hell would watch them?

******

Words are green eggs and ham:

As You Say (Not Without Sadness,) Poets Don't See, They Feel
Karl Shapiro

As you say, not without sadness, poets don't see, they feel. And that's why people who have turned to feelers seem like poets. Why children seem poetic. Why when the sap rises in the adolescent heart the young write poetry. Why great catastrophes are stated in verse. Why lunatics are named for the moon. Yet poetry isn't feeling with the hands. A poem is not a kiss. Poems are what ideas feel like. Ideas on Sunday, thoughts on vacation.

Poets don't see, they feel. They are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators. The poets go up and feel the insulators. Now and again they feel the wrong thing and are thrown through a wall by a million-volt shock. All insulation makes the poet anxious: clothes, strait jackets, iambic five. He pulls at the seams like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half. Poets think along the electric currents. The words are constantly not making sense when he reads. He flunks economics, logic, history. Then he describes what it feels like to flunk economics, logic, history. After that he feels better.

People say: it is sad to see a grown man feeling his way, sad to see a man so naked, desireless of any defenses. The people walk back into their boxes and triple-lock the doors. When their children begin to read poetry the parents watch them from the corner of their eye. It's only a phase, they aver. Parents like the word "aver" though they don't use it.

******

Proverbs according to Dennis Miller by Johnny Carson:

1. A rolling stone. . . if not acted upon by any force will keep rolling in a straight line at the same speed.

2. Every cloud has. . . water vapor that has the potential of producing ice crystals or raindrops, depending on the Bergeron or coalescence process.

3. The grass is always greener. . . if it receives an adequate supply of C55H70MgN4O6.

4. A penny saved. . . if doubled every day for two months would be worth more than the combined GNP of the industrialized nations of the world.

5. A bird in the hand. . . is dead or alive, depending on one’s will.

6. What goes up. . .will stay up if it has an escape velocity of 11.3 kilometers per second.

7. When the cat’s away. . . the mice will play cautiously if it’s Schrodinger’s cat.

8. People who live in glass houses. . . are surrounded by a strange hybrid of solid liquids or liquid solids.

9. Nothing is certain but death and. . . Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

10. There’s a time and place. . .but not before the Big Bang.

******

And now, a joke:

What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is every night?

A widow.

******

Urban Legends 2

You will be shocked to find that there are people who:

"have been working on restaurants for 7 years now"

"have a desktop on our house since we were in elementary level."


Lewd-icrous!

"I came in UPLB. A year after, I got pregnant."

"I did everyone there."

"I did the liaison officer there."

"I do room attendants well. I worked in the wines. I like going around the bushes."


Does this remind you of annoying poets who exhibit confusing syntax?


"doesn't speak my mouth"


It's nice to have a strong sense of self-awareness:

"i'm very nice. very gullible."

"i’m very oblivious and cool."

"I am quite peculiar in some different ways."



Sige nga, are you this rich?

"I have a train at that Call Center"


Words for the week:

infective representative

Definition: STD victim who works in a call center.


emphathetic

Definition: Someone who, when told about a problem, wrings his hands and wears a sack cloth for days while whipping himself into a frenzy with a thorn-laden lasher.


turd (could be third. who could really tell, though?)


Used in sentence- "I am the turd siblings in the family"


Definition: Someone who has low self-esteem. Either that or s/he has a ridiculously strong sense of reality.


******

All I Want for Christmas:


In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather by Alfrredo Navarro Salanga

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Mooring of Staring Out by John Ashbery

(it's either one of these or a pair of socks. teehee)


******

I and the Griffin went to Powerbooks last Saturday before watching The Prestige. Even though I always do get a bit insecure at the onset everytime I step into Powerbooks, that sense of inadequacy wanes when I actually look around. There are really a few books there that I can consider a good read. Most of them are your run-of-the-mill, oh-i'm-so-literary-and-boringly-rich editions. There are shelves and shelves of pure balderdash and surface-glitter. It gives me the chills. The classics are expurgated versions (weak tea). The Filipino section is pitifully comprised of two shelves of uninformative loquaciousness.

It's funny what supposedly adroit people consider important these days.


*******

It is still best to end things with a song:


Some Journey
Suzanne Vega

If I had met you on some journey
Where would we be now
If we had met some eastbound train
Through some black sleeping town

Would you have worn your silken robes
All made of royal blue?
Would I have dressed in smoke and fire
For you to see through?

If we had met in a darkened room
Where people do not stay
But shadows touch and pass right through
And never see the day

Would you have taken me upstairs
And turned the lamplight low?
Would I have shown my secret self
And disappeared like the snow?

Oh, I could have played your little girl
Or I could have played your wife
I could have played your mistress
Running danger down through you life

I could have played your lady fair
All dressed in lace like the foam from the sea
I could have been your woman of the road
As long as you did not come back home to me

But as it is, we live in the city
And everything stays in place
Instead we meet on the open sidewalk
And it's well I know your face

We talk and talk, we tell the truth
There are no shadows here
But when I look into your eyes
I wonder what might have been here

Because if I had met you on some journey
Where would we be now?