I will keep pounding on this damn keyboard until I get my message through...Hey, do you hear me?  Are you listening?

While sitting in a coffee shop yesterday, I discovered a world as intriguing to me as that of any woman now in my life: a potted plant.  Yes, a potted plant.  Now, you may wonder if this is not just a snide way for me to indicate some tremendous and repressed anger towards women, some deeply gnawing angst.  Well, I must admit: not at all.  Women, for the most part, are still so intriguingly cool and totally interesting (especially here on Xanga).  It's just that this particular ivy plant growing in the window counter in a green 1-by-3 foot planter put me, for a moment, so fully in touch with my childhood's appreciation of nature that even my current feelings for womankind (which border, at times, I confess, from near total sublimation to infatuation) seemed slighted by comparison.  To be able as an adult to touch the sacred inner sanctum of one's childhood innocence is nothing less than a blissful blessing.  To be able to do so and describe the experience could be heroic.  So let me try.

Some of the first clear, clean, free rays of the day's sunshine were washing this ivy plant whose existence, before my eyes, was transformed from a mere visual recognition of an external worldly object into a conscious wave of joyful appreciation.  Where first I merely looked upon the plant, I then began to see the plant: its endless details of uniqueness, the variety of its verdant shadings that would baffle the greatest artist in a quest to recapture, the otherness of its presence.  In essence, I was no longer merely looking at and recognizing a plant, but revering its vitality.  And this opened for me a path of imaging and imagining that so faithfully recapitulated some of my dearest childhood's dreams that tears were near at hand.  See this ivy plant: now a vast forest with tiers of impenetrable canopies that forever shields the virgin nurturing earth from the onslaught of penetrating light.  See the vine sprigs exalting upwards in luxuriant expression--more are they than mighty masts of a great ship upon the ocean for they bear the living  sails of a most intricate and irreproducible  architecture.  Lo, the plant is a cosmic alien with each leaf an individualized expression of its abyss-stretching networked life system.  Each leaf is more than a metaphorical match for an expansive earth ocean--more at, each leaf is a stellar Extra-Federation battleship sojourning by timewarp in the unpredictable lattice-net of space. 

Of course, what was most entirely amazing was to be able to surrender to the freshness of this imminent moment so spatially near at hand.  Three feet between the plant and me with my full awareness awash with its existence.  If one could love a plant, that plant would have been in jeopardy of consummate worship.  In a moment of weakness, I could have made a sexual salad of it.  How refreshing to sometimes see the world (for this plant represented, without a doubt, a micro-totem fetish for all of the natural world's existence) from a radically alien stage of perceptual departure.

An unusual state of calmness has befallen me.  It feels like depression but not my depression.  Rather, it feels like I’m sampling some sort of extract of depression, the downside condensation of 1000 people stripped bare of personal details, physiological interactions, horrible outcomes.  Its practically a drug!  A most serene sedative is this extract of depression that’s empathectically-realized, yet personally inapplicable.  More so, when one feels physically well--as I do now.  Striving and stretching and dancing and balanced.

Slacking

Well, I'm back on the Fed job--the "day" job--and someone tried to stick me with some work the moment I walked in, but I turned it around, reasoned with the individual, and made him feel that it was his responsibility to deal with the problem himself.  I can be such a slacker.

I had a student once who adamantly maintained in emails with me "I'm not a slacker!"  But she was the cutest purrfect little slacker imaginable.  I could have learned so much from her--but I couldn't let myself ooze unprofessionally into those murky waters.

But I had yet another student who tried to drag me head first into those waters.  It was final test time and there was a set time limit for the test because...I promised to buy pitchers of beer for the whole class at the local bar afterwards. So everyone turned in their tests, but one girl was lagging, slacking.  Venus was her name and Venus was in trouble.  Time expired and I called for the test.  One more minute, she appealled, one more.  A minute passed and I called time again. Whimpering, she began to plead: "Professor, please, is there anything I can do to pass this course?"  I replied that that would be determined by the results of the yet ungraded final test.  But she blurted: "No, see, I flunked the test, look, look..."   And although I didn't want to look since I wanted to grade the tests "blindly" (unaware of the student's identity), she flashed so many brilliant white blank pages in front of my eyes that it was apparent that she, indeed, had taken the big grade plunge.  "Please, Professor, please...anything, is there something I can do, any thing."  The latter any was spoken with that most naughty intonation and luring sparkle of the eyes that sends a clear message to any man that sexual favors were just put on the table.  And, oh yes, she being the very last one left in class alone with me, should the door close, and the process of "grade remediation" begin, who would know, no?

But I had a date: pitchers of beer!  Even Angelina Jolie couldn't tear me away from that (though it would be interesting to have the opportunity to have her prove me wrong)!  So I snatched the test away from her (yes, that's all I snatched), tore my gaze away from her willing body, and bee-lined out the door...

AND...HELLO!!  Standing directly outside the door, out of view but with his ear pinned to our conversation, was a 6'8", hugely-muscular BOYFRIEND who gave me a look that said "you lucky motha fucka cause I would have kicked ya ass, and then me and my bitch would have demanded an *A* for the course from the Dean along with morals charges against ya--but what the fuck is wrong with my bitch that you just walked out on her ass??"

Like I said, straight for the beer and never looking back.