When I think of the Spirit hovering over the deep, back in those Early Days, I can't help but look back on my heritage as even then it squirmed in the stardust. With nostalgia etched deep in my DNA, I imagine reeling there with my great-great-grandprotozoa, in Eden's lost volcanic vents, where microscopic Adams and Eves, their greedy celia flailing, lurch toward forbidden protofruit and learn to blame each other. I picture myself as one of them, just moments before they realize their nakedness and, in shame, first cover themselves.

I want to tell them not to be ashamed. I want to tell them many things. But alas, they are protozoa, and I am late for work.

ode to all forgotten

I can't remember you.
I can only remember how you felt, cool on my skin,
The way you waved in the night,
like nothing blown through wintering pines.
I can't remember you,
You many lost hours
Which I, as a child,
Spent doing
I don't remember what.
Forgive me, lost hours, when I cannot resist
the urge to envision
trenches dug in sandboxes
which the Good Lord saw fit to stricken
from existence before they began.
Forgive me when I remember
the glistening gray arch of a land-drowning whale,
her silence when I touched her, dying
on a beach that never was.

After so many promises,
Forgive me
for never coming back,
For remembering her,
And forgetting all of you.

Joyride

I've been scarce lately. Sorry about that.

Last week it was due to a bookish streak. Every free hour I found I spent in a bum-rush on ecotheology: the study of the poor world, the world's poor, and the story of a mysterious God with strangely hidden loyalties to both. Feeling euphoric -- but recognizing my own flaky history of bold, forgotten promises -- I devoted my life to yet another One Big Cause. All in books, of course. All inhale, no exhale. A voracious consumer of others' anti-consumerist passions.

Then at the end of last week, it was time for a world-shift. Beyond this great, comforting refuge of books, Ms. V got her head stomped in and the dark beauty of her life left me speechless, feeling inept and angry, thankful and dumb.

No more Leonardo Boff. Instead, more prayers for for a tiny and oft-forgotten mother saint; more prayers for inevitable messes; for fridges full of dull, church lady-made PBJ's, prayers that each one might find a fervent angel to guide it to the hungriest mouth. That each smashed baloney-and-cheese would be chocked full of Popeye's spinach, to help its eater face the stares of incredulous children and condescending loft yuppies.

Then, this week I withdrew from blogging and books. Not out of protest or change of heart; just out of sheer busyness and the burned-out, stale-smelling wholeness of social services.

On Saturday, the new guy in the program -- let's call him Jimmy -- stole our company car and peeled out toward Oklahoma. I'd driven him in myself just a few days prior, down from the City to the Farm, where formerly homeless men -- my brothers -- now make it their sole ministry to help newcomers "take charge of their lives" and "get back on track." The trouble, as always, is defining the track. Some get centered. Some steal cars.

On the two-hour drive to the Farm, I tried to look past Jimmy's talk of "titty bars" and his bitter, perhaps even haughty judgment of Lazy People, as if they were a burden too great to bear. I hoped Jimmy wasn't racist, told him so, and was not quite comforted by his assurance that he was not "racist" but "prejudice," in a way that had nothing to do with race. I'm still not sure what he means.

Whatever else there is to say, though, it wasn't hard to see the middle-schooler in Jimmy, just wanting to get along. Wanting not to get picked last in basketball games. Wanting to get picked up by God's fat fingers and dropped down in a better world.

Just prior to our drive across Missouri, Jimmie's story included ten years on the street, one night robbing houses and stealing a car, and then eight more years in the Texas state pen. Where he was going in that stolen car I didn't ask. Maybe Oklahoma, same as now. It makes me wonder what he thought he would see.

At the gas station, on the way to the Farm, Jimmy was fresh enough out of prison to have never seen a Nutrageous bar. Maybe someone else can tell me why this sears itself so deeply in my mind. Something of Jimmy's demeanor made me think of "Red" Redding, with his stilted grocery bagging and his "So was Red" etched above the doorway in Shawshank Redemption. I should've known Jimmy wanted to go home again. I guess I missed the clues. The day before he peeled off, Jimmie told me he wanted to dedicate his life to writing letters of assurance to prisoners. He wanted, he said, to let them know that someone on the Outside knew they were there. Maybe he really just wanted to receive those letters himself.

Two hours after Jimmy left the Farm, the car ran out of gas. He left it there on the roadside, basically still intact. Then, three days later, when he was assumedly many miles away, he called to tell us which interstate, what mile marker, and that he'd left just enough gas to get it to the next station. That third part might've been wishful thinking: in the tank was nothing but fumes. Still, the guys all agreed at Thursday's Bible study that Jimmy's call was "almost noble." He wasn't the devil himself. He'd just made a dumb choice. Who hadn't? We prayed for him, and admitted we were still a little pissed he'd screwed us over.

Later in the day, the sheriff called to tell me they'd caught him, and thanked me for confirming Jimmy's middle initial and date of birth. And at that moment I felt strangely complicit on all sides -- in the theft, in the arrest.

Now the week is over, and I've hopped back into my own Stolen Car. A weekend with my beautiful wife. Books. News of the election. Idle talk of revolution. Tennis on the Nintendo Wii. And walking back out with the pups and the all-seeing moon.

Mother Theresa

Last night I followed our dogs into a moonlit backyard, feeling like Mother Theresa.

Not the mother saint. God no. Not that side of her.

I mean Mother Theresa, saint of doubt, who for fifty years stepped out under her own Calcutta moon, strained her old eyes to see God in its light, but found the light too thin. Found only rock. Craters.

"If there be God," she prayed in those times, "please forgive me."

This morning Ms. V, my thin, frail, elderly friend, and the closest person to Saint Mother Theresa I have ever known, lies unconscious in the city ICU. Yesterday, a mentally-ill homeless woman -- one of ten thousand she has helped in her life -- tried to kill her. Left her unconscious, shattered bones in her face, bleeding in her brain.

We're not sure why. We're not sure what will come of this.

"If there be God," Theresa prayed from her Dark Night, "please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul" (Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, 2007).

I am no Mother Theresa -- not even in my doubt. God, seeing my weakness, spoon feeds me the smallest rare doses of Mystery.

Not so for Theresa. For fifty years she felt no divine presence in her life: not in her work; not at the Table. That's quite an exile for one of God's most faithful. Even wayward Israel was only in the desert for forty.

"How painful is this unknown pain," she continued, "I have no faith."

Yes you do, Mother. Otherwise, it wouldn't hurt.

"Tested Faith" was probably a dumb idea. Your thoughts?

Matthew 19:13-24, or, The Child Becomes a Young Man

My grandmother loves telling this story. The story is of a kid, maybe 5 years old. In real life the kid might have been my father.

In this story, the kid has a few toys. Not many, but probably enough.

One day the kid is taken over to a friend's house to play. This friend has toys. Rooms full of toys. Trucks and trains. Soldiers. Lincoln logs. And for as long as the boy is there, the toys are his, too.

With that thought heavy on his mind, the young king surveys his new domain. At the sight of all the toys, he is beside himself. Awestruck. Tharned.

For a long while, the young king who might've been my dad simply can't move. What toy to play with first? How can he possibly choose just one, and fall to the dire sin of neglecting so many others? Could God ever forgive him?

The odds seem fearfully low.

And so the boy that might have been my father hatches, at last, a plan. First, with the force of sheer will, he shakes himself free of the spell; turns from stone to boy again. Open armed, he sweeps across the room. He will pick them all.

He will love them all. No Lone Ranger mask will go unworn. No Howdy Doody left unventriloquized.

And yet, six steps in, his plan is not going well. His arms are hardly big enough for Howdy Doody alone, much less anybody else. And so he manages, only painfully, to gather another four or five toys. One cowboy and Indian each, he reasons, might just propagate themselves later. But what about the baseball? The bat? He snatches a tin horse by its hoof. It remains in his custody, precariously at best.

***

The boy who might have been my father starts to cry. At first a choke. Perhaps a hiccup. And then the White Silence before, at last, the levy breaks. For a long while, the kid lies victim to uncontrollable sobs, unable to say what, by now, is practically redundant anyway.

"I can't hold anymore," he moans. What's worse, he knows that the dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of toys he's left behind aren't the final dour report on his failed responsibility. Even the horse and Howdy Doody remain unloved. At best, the're just ... held. And not a Velveteen Rabbit sort of "held". More like Abu Ghraib.

The boy, once again, is beside himself, but this time without his initial joy. He is unsure which curse to ascribe to himself: Either the toys are too big, or his arms are too small. In either case, God is cruel.

***

Even then, perhaps, the boy had an inkling of a third possibility. A third curse that, in fact, might haunt him and his progeny for years to come.

The little boy's prayer is almost proof that the thought did cross his mind.

Grandma has never mentioned it -- has always just let me read between the lines. I know he prayed it, though, right there and then. I can even see a glow from heaven cast askance upon his ruddy, tear-stained cheeks.

"Lord, it'd be a bitch to sell all these toys. Amen."

Carnal

In this photo, featuring Jasmine's trademark "sated gargoyle" pose, the bit of white fuzz on her upper lip is not cotton.

Not in her world, anyway. It's antelope guts.

She's just enjoyed another kill. For the last week, said "kill" has generally involved eviscerating a beaver puppet that Jen found God-only-knows where. Presumably at a beaver puppet expo, but I still need to ask her: Why was she there?

I am loath to admit how often Jen and I go around picking up cotton, rawhide, and any other odds and ends we're willing to sacrifice to the Stuffed Beaver cause. Stuffed Beaver, as a puppet, is ideally made for the exercise. Into the puppet go a whole chop suey of household items. Then, presto: they're living bone and innards again, churning in the gut of a very unhappy Pinocchio.

If Pepper finds the beaver first, she tears right into its handhole with a feral passion, occasionally abandoning herself to a beaver-shaking fit. (Even over the inner din of her ecstasy, you can watch in these moments: her ears invariably perk for the sweet sound of beaver-bones breaking.)

Jasmine, meanwhile, is more methodically sadistic, like Hannibal Lectre brooding over far more legal but perhaps less movie-worthy diversions. Beyond said innards mentioned above, Jasmine likes best of all the plastic "squeak" of a squeaky toy, which, about as often as Christmas, makes its way into the toy-o-the-month. In dog-toy world, this is the archetypically visceral, throbbing-heart-in-the-hand of a B-movie villain lifeblood of re-stuffed beaverdom. One rarely sees her eyes filled with such luster as in these moments: the more pained-sounding the squeaking, the wider the eyes. In such cases, neither she nor Pepper will stop until one of them is sprawled out, bloated, burping squeaks.

All fine and good. So here's the question. If Jasmine is so happy to tear another innocent life limb from limb, and this is so seemingly a part of the God-given natural order, what the hell did some forbidden fruit have to do with introducing pain into a perfect world? Wasn't it already there by mid-morning on the Sixth Day, when God said Let there be dog and beaver, Bam Bam and Dino, lion and lamb?

"Tested Faith"

All right, I'll admit it. Lately, late in the night, I've been sneaking out of the house. I've started a new blog.

But rest assured (I'm sure you're so distraught): I'm not ditching this one. I like the ad-hoc creative rambles I partake in here. I like the utter lack of control I have over the subject matter. I like how the posts own me. Idiot Dreams has been like a creative birthing process every few days. And like a good blog-mama, I do love my ugly babies.

But at the same time, I've been aching to dwell more on the Big Unmentionables -- politics and religion, among others -- without feeling like I'm pulling screetching U-ies thematically. You know: "Red Stew" one post, and Captain Soapbox pontificating bullshit about Wall Street the next.

Don't you think it's better this way? Please do stop by.

Red Stew

Jacob came out of his mama with Esau's ankle in his right hand, typing "red stew" into the air with his left. Try the latter. You can too.


Jen slept in late this morning, waited till I was good and hungry. Then got up and made french toast, which she knows is one of my Scooby snacks. The oil in the pan sizzled, as it does.

Jen opened up the freezer, rustling the sausage packaging with Pavlovian flair. As if she'd just thought of it, she paused her humming and brought up the DMV. "Jetta needs new tags," she said, as my stomach gnawed its lining in the den. "Uhhhn" I captively replied, sipping day-old coffee.

"Want some breakfast?" she asked. "Uhhng" said my belly, furry and red.

White Males for Justice: League of the Naive

Yesterday at the public library, Jen joined two other speakers -- Mary Ratliff, president of Columbia NAACP, and Eduardo Crespi, executive director of Centro Latino -- for a public forum on racial equality and social justice. Rev. Heather McCain, future priest of the burgeoning Columbia Hope Church (Episcopal), was the heart and effort behind the whole affair, and a hearty round of thanks goes out to her.

Centro Latino
NAACP

Jen did an incredible job -- all three of the speakers did -- giving clear accounts, both personal and statistical, of racism and social inequalities right here in Columbia. Hate letters. Nazi marches. "Preferential treatment" from police (statistics show it's even worse than we'd expected). Scapegoating of Latinos for "stolen jobs" and economic crisis. (Note that hate crimes against Latinos have risen nationwide almost 35% in the last five years).

Remarkably, I was the only white male at the event, and a pretty clueless white male at that. "Progressive" as I fancy myself to be, I don't think I've ever done much more than bitch and moan about racial inequality. Why? Why the pervasive, gee-wally white male complacancy on a matter that we're so complicit in, if only for that same complacancy?

One factor, of course, is isolationism and ignorance. I say one factor, because the two terms are effectively redundant. I as a white male rarely think of myself as such. First, I don't like the implications: I don't like associating myself with the elite group I am, de facto, a part of: rich (at least by worldly standards), white, heterosexual, educated, employed, english-speaking, non-immigrant, able-bodied males, inc. Now that's a drawer-full of silver spoons.

Aside from making me feel spoiled and guilty, this sort of privilige isolates me from steady recognition of what life is like for minorities, because I simply can't empathize with what it's like to be discriminated against. I've always just been discriminated for, and so all my avenues for empathy wind up goose-chases. The best I can do is think of how I'm type-casted as a Dumb American whenever I go overseas. It's a thin thread to hang by, and not much of a headline: "American Tourist in Kilkenny Offered Pint to Sing John Denver's 'Country Road.'"

Motivational speaker material it is not. Which then makes me feel in turn false, presumptuous, paternalistic and naive for wanting to get involved in issues of racial equality at all. Yesterday, I finally realized that such a response isn't so much humility as it is outright sloth. It's time to overcome some inhibitions here and get plugged in somewhere on the matter. But this much is crystal clear: from my own position of isolignorance, the first step in becoming "active" in racial reconciliation isn't activism at all. It's self-education. Years of it.

On that note, thank God I kept my mouth shut yesterday. Frustrated with my own racial isolignorance -- and fueled further by the utter lack of other white males at the event -- I had half a mind to announce a new organization, hatched just that minute and founded on one resounding mantra: "I am priviliged, clueless, and responsible."

The phrase would be chanted at the start of every meeting and muttered with every secret handshake between members of "Rich White Able-Bodied Heterosexual Educated Protestant Non-Immigrant Males for Social and Economic Justice" -- an organization dedicated to building self-awareness of and taking responsibility for one's own privilege and complicity in an unjust social system.

Ah, how well-intentioned!

The idea is perfect. Not perfect to follow through on, of course, but perfect fodder for the back of some grown-up version of Highlight's magazine (remember Goofus and Gallant?). Can you spot the ten reasons RWABHEPNIMSEJ would be ill-conceived? The first answer's provided for you. Have fun!

1. Crappy acronymn.
2. _____________.
3. _____________.
4. _____________.
5. _____________.
6. _____________.
7. _____________.
8. _____________.
9. _____________.
10. _____________.

Simeon Stylites looks at 30

Simeon Stylites' pathology was vocational.

But it hadn't always been this way. Growing up, Simeon never worried about growing up. In fact, Simeon was convinced he never would grow up -- his certainty of this ushered in by an early vision that he'd die -- really die, irrevocably -- at 29. He wasn't clear on how it would happen, but was fully convinced it would not be in a high-speed motorcycle crash on California's coastal Highway 1, or being eaten alive by the sharks that waited in the craggy waters below.

These sorts of visions, after all, would just have been flights of fancy -- the drama too heightened to be real life. If these had been Simeon's visions, they would have been proof enough that his imagination had simply gotten the best of him; they would have cast a suspicious pall, in fact, over his death-at-29 prognostication altogether. In contrast, that Simeon's own death-visions were always blurred, vague, but invariably mundane for all that -- a car accident, perhaps, or a surprisingly early case of testicular cancer -- reinforced, at least to him, that he was in fact going to die within the decade.

And so, Simeon Stylites never did bother making plans for what he'd "do" someday. Why come up with some grand orchestration for a life that would end so soon, so tragically? Simeon reasoned instead that time would be better spent smoking marijuana, writing music on crumpled napkins, watching un-slept sunrises. As far as that went, his early 20s seemed so far to prove him right.

But by his late 20s, the whole game had changed. The visions of a premature death had almost entirely been replaced by a prophecy more daunting still: a 30-, 40-, even 50-year wilderness opened up ahead of him, just past the guard rail that had always kept him safely on the younger side of 29.

"Crap," said Simeon Stylites. And at that, he started walking into the expanse, beginning his frenetic search for vocation.

Noah Prayer

Ike passed over our house last night, living and oblivious, Texas-sized. Its 800-mile slug trail, once a daunting wall of water at the coast, had since tapered down to ankle deep.

Around midnight, I took off my shoes and stepped out into our backyard, a modern Noah-figure with the sweet calm of deflected responsibility. God never told me to build no ark; if he did I wasn't listening.

I'd gone outside with lesser objectives -- namely, to investigate one particular drip, pounding just outside our back porch door. Most drips are quaint; the recognize their place as one among billions. This one was clearly malevolent.

Sure enough, where the porch overhang meets the compound asbestos, a steady trickle of water was weaseling through; already the wood over our doorway is rotting. I should've taken a picture of the giant wolf spider, holding its ground on the pucker-painted rot, or the spider-shadow my flashlight made on the door.

After wading around to check out all the more suspect gutters (they were holding up well, I'm thankful to say), I almost stepped on a garter snake who, I assume, had gotten the memo on the Ash Street Ark. Racing by my feet, he zipped up onto our porch, not caring anymore that I was a giant.

Suddenly I could feel the suffocation. Suddenly I realized what Ike had really left behind: an 800-mile trail of desperately drowning ground-dwellers: snakes and worms and groundhogs, bat-blind moles, all of whom were trying to keep their heads above water while Jen and I watched Saturday Night Live lay deliciously into Sarah Palin's snarkiness.

But again, I ain't no Noah, and I ain't no angel host. Looking back now, I wish I'd done differently. I picked up the snake and brought him inside, but more to freak Jen out than to offer asylum to a legless refugee. After getting the desired response from Jen, I dutifully brought the snake back outside. Then, istead of leaving him on the porch like I should have, I tossed him back out into the ankle-deep rain, where he curled up for a moment and then shot off toward other arks.

God forgave Noah. God forgive me.

Peace?

At today's peace rally downtown, we got a little visit from Republican counter-protesters.

Actually, a pretty big visit -- they easily outnumbered us: flag-waving, slogan-chanting, McCain-adoring Republicans.

Which struck me as a little funny. Counter-protesting? It's not like we were holding Obama signs -- that would be protesting apples to apples. Instead, what we got boiled down to this:

Peace! (No, McCain!)

Peace! (No, McCain!)

This would hardly seem to help their cause... right? But then, gauging from their reasonable volume of supportive horn-honks and relatively low MFF (middle finger factor) from passing drivers, maybe I'm just out of touch.

Or maybe I'm just mad. Emboldened by pretty good conversations with a couple of them, I tried at one point to extend a friendly gesture to another whole gaggle of them on the northwest corner.

Getting all mushy and aisle-crossed inside, I walked up to introduce myself. "Hi," I said. One responded with this witty retort (retort to what, I don't know): "Do you even wear deodorant?"

I probably wouldn't have cussed her out if ...

a couple of weeks ago, some old bastard hadn't driven by and yelled "Get a bath!" at Ben, a mentally ill, long-bearded member of our little Wednesday community. But he did.

And it wouldn't have struck quite such a nerve if Ben wasn't within earshot this time, some six feet away. But he was.

Yes, my speech was ... well ... unfiltered. Yes, I was holding a peace sign. Yes, I see the irony.
Yes, I'd do it again.

Turf War

All this reel-mowing lately (you know, that whole one time) has inspired me to share a recent Elizabeth Kolbert article from the New Yorker.

The article, masquerading as a mere book review, is hardly that. And even to say it touches on the origin, (ab)use, and future of the American lawn is vastly inadequate. I'll just let you see for yourself.

Give it a read, and get out the swingblade. Or better yet, just watch your backyard jungle grow.

Satisfaction is a Freedom Lawn

Lately, our old reel mower has gotten about as much attention as our garden.

Which isn't much. See here the garden in question: above, a roving squash plant gasps for breath in a merciless sea of seeding grass ("whirl up, weeds!" as the Modernists would say)....

And yet I can't conceal my pride. Yesterday, I finally gave the old reel mower (sickle mower, push mower) the attention it was due, and over a span of two or three hours, mowed our entire 12,000 sq.ft. backyard.

It felt good. No gas, no fossil fuels. Just time, exertion, and swearing, in more or less equal parts.

I think my trouble has always been with this recipe. When attempting to reel-mow our front lawn, the ratio was usually closer to 1:1:3 or 1:1:4. And as one might expect, this has been a sure-fire way to flood my own engine:

Grip the handle. Curse. Gather inner strength. Curse. Pause.

At last, in an erratic series of lunges at grass, shove the mower for all it's worth, enduring with each swipe an uncanny sensation that the grass is really hair being yanked from the head of a friendly green giant.

Curse again, this time at the folly of bringing suffering into the world. Regroup; find the Zen within. Curse again.

Yesterday, though, I figured it out. I'd always been fighting intertia before. To use the reel-mower right, I needed momentum, and a steady flow of it. Putting the handle of the mower just below the beltline, like a jackhammer, I found that I could literally run across the yard with the mower. Meanwhile, the mower's own resistance propelled me upward a bit, giving the sensation that I was jaunting up to a high-jump bar or, perhaps more accurately, like I was prancing across the stage of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet.

I'm sure that's what my neighbors thought: There goes that prancing lefty, they'd say. Up to his eco-shenanigans again.

Meanwhile, I was trying on different imagery: that of a football player in training, pushing a practice dummy across the field. Hunh!

Try though I might, though, I couldn't shake the tune of that damned Nutcracker's Suite. I made a point not to turn around, lest I see sparkly dust in my wake.

In the end, though, it was all worthwhile. To survey one's own hard-won handiwork, and actually see a whole lawn full of churned grass and mow-hawks -- a lawn that looks for for your life like a disgruntled teenager made a half-assed attempt at cutting it with hedge-trimming shears, and to know, yes, I did this, and have the blisters to prove it...? Ah.

There is little sweeter in life.

pear tree gazers

Jasmine, our black lab, is a dedicated tree-gazer.

I'd say squirrel-gazer, but the squirrel seems optional; at best, he's the catalyst that gets the whole process going. In this case, he (the squirrel) had long since lunged across our fence into the neighbor's yard, airborne, barking epithets.

Pepper, the beagle, isn't sold on the tree-watching enterprise. Here, above, she's clearly faking.

But never mind that Pepper's looking at the sky. Her chin is up, and that's what's important; she's got good form.

"Anyway, the Big Dog is stupid," Pepper thinks, not meaning to hurt Jasmine's feelings, but unconcerned if she does.

Truth is, Jasmine doesn't care what Pepper thinks. There is nothing in the world right now but Jasmine, the tree, and one barking, bastard squirrel. Eventually he will return.

Maybe this time, drunk and buttered.

Stick Bug

If God hadn't wired my mandibles shut
I would devour you.

It was His little joke
to harness within me
a teeming pond of crocodiles.
It was yours to think
you could amble around me
like a tired dad at Disneyworld.

I am Shiva in your window.

Go back inside to your starving pups and supper.
Crank the cans,
Cut in the kibble.

Think of me.

In this slowest waltz
We are partners, you and I,
Clasping hands with our enemy reflections.
Yet, what you find so painfully still,
I, knowing time, call dance.
Here between us in the glass,
Stars wriggle like embryos;
Our touch is the birthplace
of constellations.

Newsweek Goes "Onion"

In the check-out aisle today, my eyes scanned over the spinning sucker-pops and tabloids until they landed, at last, on the most recent Newsweek.

I was intrigued. In giant words on its cover, the magazine promised to address a rarely-covered topic -- Namely: "What Bush Got Right."

I am such a rube.... They almost had me!

In fact, it wasn't till I saw that it was double issue that I realized they were pulling my leg.

Newsweek. Hooligans!

Less carnal and gauche than the feathery quill,
far flung from the weakness that pencils entail,
absolved of the typewriter's clacking and pomp,
no smack of the privilege that laptops instill.
Less pre-teen than texting while trying to jog
and lord knows, of far nobler blood than the blog