positing possibility

Seven posts in one day invites a comment I shall not be so rude as to make, which if I were to articulate it, might be a bit of braggadocio (is that how you spell it?) echoing back to my youth, my so-called salad days, whose statements are prone to excess and pomp anyway -- and which assume a form of fiction in the latter years.

Some Sententious Sentences on Sentencing

"Jesus wept." It is said to be the shortest sentence in the Bible. I first heard it as an exclamation from my friend Jeannie, from Enid, Oklahoma. Since the expression has biblical origins, one can get away with it as a mild expletive. You can almost hear the sigh that accompanies it. But what else is there to say about sentences? And to whom do I say it? Well, for starters, you can very legitimately start a sentence with "but" or "and," despite what Mrs. Rivers told us in seventh grade at Burdick Junior High School in Stamford, Connecticut. You can also end a sentence with a preposition. It's something you can live with. You can also decide to boldly split an infinitive within your sentence -- and do so with grammatical impunity. The other point I want to make about sentences -- I know, "sentencing" in the heading lured students of criminal justice to this blog under false presentences -- is that, despite a muddy river of digressions, or appositive phrases, or recursively recurring and redundant recasting of words to the point of annoyance, a perfectly grammatical and "correct" sentence is not limited to the soulful brevity of a lachrymose redeemer, but may also include such meanderings as incarnated in this sentence. So, I have said it before and will proclaim it again, "A run-on sentence is not one that 'runs on and on and on' in the impatient reader's mind; a run-on sentence, also known as a comma splice or fused sentence, is a punctuation error -- an error that has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of words or syllables in the sentence, be they running, walking, trotting, sprinting, galloping, sauntering, crawling, or strolling words. I'm done.

December Night's One-Sentence Meditation

Call it a day on the verge [as Merriam-Webster puts it online: Etymology: Middle English, rod, measuring rod, margin, from Anglo-French, rod, area of jurisdiction, from Latin virga twig, rod, line Date: 15th century 1 a (1) : a rod or staff carried as an emblem of authority or symbol of office (2) obsolete : a stick or wand held by a person being admitted to tenancy while he swears fealty b : the spindle of a watch balance; especially : a spindle with pallets in an old vertical escapement c : the male copulatory organ of any of various invertebrates 2 a : something that borders, limits, or bounds: as (1) : an outer margin of an object or structural part (2) : the edge of roof covering (as tiling) projecting over the gable of a roof (3) British : a paved or planted strip of land at the edge of a road : shoulder b : brink, threshold] between rain and ice, inundation and danger, gray and black, leading into this vespers of frank thanks that, well, it is almost over, and I still draw breath, which sounds like mere survival but rather celebrates a prevailing, as in prevailing winds, billowing pulse and possibility.

December Night's Walk One-Sentence Meditation

On a still, snow-crunching night with bright Orion's Belt (Three Kings or Three Sisters or Three Nothings or Three Anythings, take your pick) guiding us, the dog and I walked Burnet Park and its islands of nightshade green, its light show dotting the Happy Holidays (Unnamed) landscape of snow and ice and memories of June, both of us delighting in the jingly-jangly clip-clop clop-clip symphony of horse hooves, children's voices, and five ladies with Slavic accents in a cigarette-smoke-wreathed circle bidding us good evening.

a litteration situation

Walking illuminates life at a slower, detailed scale, and along Syracuse's West Genesee Street, with its largest former car dealers shuttered, I witness the lonely signs of the Great Recession, ending my pedestrian promenade at the joyfully libertine Freedom of Espresso on Solar Street, but not before seeing the detritus of American consumption, the litteroti of careless consumerism: cigarette cartons (why so many crush-proof boxes of Newport?), a cereal box, a can of Arizona ice tea, lottery tickets, a squashed plastic water bottle, and so much more lessening the landscape, aching for trash cans either missing or brimming over.

one-sentence meditation upon a sympathy card

Commissioned by my wife to buy a sympathy card for her sister-in-law's father, someone I had never met (well, not for him; he's dead; a card for my spouse's sister-in-law and her family), I ambled into the Hallmark Gold Crown store (sure, I did in fact recently join the retailer's crown rewards [trademark but not i-capped on the thingy I got in the mail] program) at Carousel Center mall, destined to be Destiny USA, or Arendi, or more precisely likely predestined to be a cavernous echo of the last of our swollen appetites (appetites are so pre-recession), I browsed the variegated racks of offerings as displayed by signs, like highway markers or exit announcements (after all, an exit is what made me enter this retail outlet): Retirement, New Home, Get Well, New Job, Birthday, Thinking of You, Encouragement, and realized, albeit whimsically if not flippantly (and shared as much with the mother and daughter or mother and sister near me, garnering a nervous chuckle), that all such markers are but synonyms for Sympathy, conceding that our Buddhist friends are right in saying that all things are connected.

A Sentence of Patinations

Across the street from our new downtown office sits a cathedral (sits being an apt word, for a cathedral is the seat of the bishop) whose pale patina from the copper roof installed several years ago has pistachio-stained Montgomery Street, having oozed onto the sidewalk peopled by panhandlers and politicos alike, whispering intimations of greenery onto stale concrete, holding a paten of eucharistic morsels for anyone willing to offer their emptiness as two naked palms and a tiny pang of hunger.