Catch a Falling Star

Okay, I know I claim to be a conspiracy theorist when it comes to aliens and 9-11… I am… totally loony and tinfoil-hat-wearing… can’t let those men in black read my mind, right?   But those crazy ideas are based on facts that I have uncovered and investigations into the obvious and admitted manipulations of those facts that have come out over time… from credible whistle-blowers and witnesses.  What is going on in Texas right now is not that, and not my fault.  I don’t adhere to any Alex-Jones-2nd-Amendment-FEMA-death-camps sort of conspiracy theories.  President Obama is NOT planning an attack on Texas with these routine military exercises involving Green Berets and Navy Seals.  The crap thinking that motivated Governor Greg Abbott to activate the Texas National Guard to oversee the military exercises is stupid-headed paranoid Republican propaganda.  I am trying to make humor here out of scary Texas political poop, but this is too wacko to even joke about.

To totally change the topic and talk about something else, I may have inadvertently changed one of my collections that feed my hoarding disorder mental illness…  I was very poetically snapping pictures of the sunrise when I walked the dog every morning and calling that “collecting sunrises”.  But I started taking other dog-walking photos, like cloud shots and moon shots and sunset shots.   Uh-oh!   More time lost to collecting things pointlessly… or is that how art happens?  the artist finding certain observations to be spiritually and creatively fulfilling… and tries to share that fulfillment?  Or when you consider the Avengers Coke cans… is it clinically a concern?

Okay, let’s switch again…   Friday night my daughter, the Princess, was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society.  This happened at her middle school, Dan F. Long, home of the Falcons.

They had this wonderful candle-lighting ceremony filled with wonderful things.  I experienced several of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “spots of time” in which there is a transcendent moment that carries you far beyond the daily dose of mundane.  The first one was when the Falcon orchestra, complete with cellos and violins, was playing a waltz.  The principal was in the hallway with his young daughter to greet the parents and friends attending the ceremony.  The two of them, the extremely competent and hard-nosed black principal and his pretty little black daughter began to waltz together, not even thinking that some of us seated in the cafetorium might see them do it.  I couldn’t help but think, “while Baltimore burns…  if only we had more of this!”  And more wonderful things followed.  The NJHS faculty sponsor was a teacher I subbed for a decade ago.  She is a determined and bubbly little woman who impressed me once upon a time with her detailed planning and sharp methods.  This little woman could throw big bad trouble-making boys around the room (metaphorically of course) to get her point across and make lessons happen.  I saw her in action.  She was tough and ambitious in spite of being small and always smiling.  And the Princess was inducted with a candle ceremony (a potential disaster waiting to happen in a middle school setting) in which she was in the middle of three rows on the stairs… and no one set anyone else’s hair on fire.  And we’re talking seventh-grade nerd-boys standing with a lighted candle behind seventh-grade girls with long hair!

And finally I wanted to share with you the progress I have made on cardboard castles.  I have made all of this so far with my own two arthritic claws using Ritz Cracker boxes, Honey Nut Cheerios boxes, tape, scissors, and glue.  I have only glued fingers together once and managed not to accidentally cut off any necessary part of my body (fingernails don’t actually count, do they?).  Why am I doing nutty stuff like this?  Well, I’m retired.  What am I supposed to do?  Sensible real-world stuff?  Get real.