arrested

My eye caught this billboard ad:

Caption:

"We know where you're coming from."

Profile of a person, with a shadow of a soldier in the background.

Arresting and provocative.

Kokonuts vs. Kokonuts

I have just read about Daniel Bejar and Daniel Bejar in The New Yorker. One is a musician, another an artist. The artist has made himself look like the musician and as an "art" project in real time in real life is playing on the same-name identity. His project is called Googleganger, with those two dots over the a.

All of which got me thinking.

Who, after all, is Pawlie Kokonuts?

And if I used my real name, would it really be me?

Who is me?

This is what employers and education officials don't seem to get. They warn people to be careful about their online identity and online representations, but who is who? And what is what? What is real? Why can't anything online be considered the mere fictional fabrications of a virtual persona?

This is nothing new in literature, going back to Truman Capote's non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood," and the same with many works by Norman Mailer. Frederick Exley wrote "fictional memoirs," featuring a character named Frederick Exley. But he wasn't Frederick Exley the author, was he?

So, who is who? And what's what?

Deep questions.

Less Than An Hour

More than the blink of an eye but less than an hour. The bagel with cinnamon and raisin. $1, for one day old, toasted. Two pats of Land O' Lakes butter. I can't open the packet of butter. A half-inch or so square, the kind of butter a diner or coffee shop gives you, the kind often, but not always, sitting in a container with some ice. I cannot finesse my fingertips to bend the corner of the square to roll back the foil covering. Is it age? Is this a sign of a budding neurological impairment that is simmering within me? Is it butter-packet-opening faulty design? I try using my teeth. I want to rip, smash, destroy the butter package, a la Tony Soprano, because of the horror of those earlier questions. It opens. Magic. The bagel has cooled to the point of losing that magic moment; the butter sits there, unmelted. I refuse to open the second package of butter. Calories? Revenge? I force-spread the butter onto two sides of the bagel. I Skype with my brother for more than 19 minutes. I eat the bagel, now cold, crunchy, a day old, with ice tea.

staggering

According to Reuters,

"Analysts believe the powerful earthquake moved Japan's main island eight feet, shifted the Earth on its axis four inches and unleashed a devastating tsunami."

Staggering beyond imagination.

Lord, have mercy on Japan, all its people, and all their loved ones around the world.

Humbling, to say the least.

snowMarch

blindwhite particulate crystalline settling aftermath do the numbers
paths buried cars hidden ground missing depth guessing wonders
chunk block rock tock tick smack snow snew sown strown
alabaster albino vanilla creamy lumen beachtide flake wake

no question about it, or is there?

The Planet* gave me some space for words and musings, mostly questions.

Thanks, period.

* as in Planet Valenti

My Winter Vacation

jet engines tropical breezes cirrus clouds Cayman Brac jerk chicken Stella Maris curly-tailed lizards lapping waves engines of the sea kingfish cumulus emerald turquoise snorkeling sea eggs fine sand starlit Milky Way Cayman Brac sandals Pollard Bay caymanite ironshore booby babies rolling Caribbean Sea purposeless glad sea Sister Islands blue tang irrational fear floating brain coral conch Mexican Train toast tea Cross Road United Baptist soldiers hermit crabs almond trees coconuts Caymanian Compass Peter's Cave Skull Cave Spot Bay Stake Bay West End Spotland Plantation Tibbetts destroyer wreck coral reef Brac Reef bluff road Christopher Columbus Park seamen's shrine Cat Head Bay blow holes aloe groves loaves of fish what a dish Buccaneer's Inn reef cove thatch palms hammocks sway the Bight the light Temple Beth Shalom Bamboo Bay Cotton Tree Bay what the hay Cayman Brac coral reef dildo cactus dung lighthouse dap me up give me dap jerk chicken mockingbird Cayman Brac parrot tambourine prayers hymns One Love flat sea conch shells algae Grand Cayman SPF30 football soccer cricket Gaelic bluff balmy breeze almond trees gruntfish synagogue surprise Miami mon one love Cuban Coral Isle projects Philadelphia Cayman Brac rhymes with back not with Bach one love where the pix why not this words instead