You and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough.
We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely
welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:the mystery
which happens only and whenever we are faithful to
ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of
doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and
now is much too busy being a little more than everything
to seem anything,catastrophic included.

e.e. cummings; introduction to 101 poems

barbara est et barbara,
et mihi cara,
splendidus igneus, sol muliebris,
movens me atque, procul penitus.

I speak to you in this tongue, girl,
with the feigned voice of Cicero,
not out of some strained pretense,
but only so you'll know-
that I think that our days together
are as sure until the day I die
as seeing "Elvis Lives!"
skywritten in an ancient Roman sky.

Where have all the clowns gone...?

One poignant shift in observational happenings over the past several years: the clowns have disappeared. Where once I would catch glimpses of clowns in neighbors' backyards, in passing car's on the street, or even actually stationed on downtown street corners promoting commercial products, for the last two years--at least, as measured by my own personal observational samplings--the world has become a much more somber place. One more keen point: these clowns were all women. So the female clowns have all disappeared!

This situation reminds me of a period in my youth when it seemed as if for years I didn't see any Oriental women on the streets. It wasn't a situation I immediately noticed, i.e., the absence of a segment of society that never played a prominent role in my socialization. But one day, the eureka realization that I hadn't seen an Oriental woman for a very long. long time jumped into consciousness. I then quietly began an unmentioned personal hunt for the very next such woman in my environment. It must have been 1/2 year before I eventually saw one. And right then they immediately became ubiquitous once again--showing up everywhere and often!

How can you explain it? Statistically speaking, one might say that one individual's sampling is subject to a high degree of sampling error. This is comparable to saying that if I flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads 10 times-with no tails--that this is not so absurdly unlikely as 100 individuals doing the same thing with the very same outcome. In other words, maybe *I* wasn't "seeing" Oriental women and maybe *I* am not seeing the once manifest female clowns, but maybe others are having a less-skewed, more representative observational time of it. Nevertheless, I cannot know that. Unless I begin to ask around to see if anyone else has had similar sampling anomolies.

There is, of course, always the possibility that these two demographic groups did disappear for some reason or another. The Oriental women to reappear later like a pulsar making its round. Who knows about the female clowns? Who knows? There is, nonetheless, a lesson in this: one must live with one's own life observations and experiences, take notice of quirks and pattern changes, seek clarifications, but not become too paranoidly obsessed or invest too much significance in personal phenomena if explanations are not immediately evident. Augurs, in the Roman legion sense of finding hidden meanings in all the signs that abound, we should not become. Hence, one may sometimes have to learn to sustain personal confusion in order to allow for the world to provide elucidation! Or what the hell is the world good for?