Monday, May 28, 2012

Game Show

Looking back, looking forward, being presently here I feel perched between past choices and many yet to come.  Contemplating beginning, middles, and end lends to scrutiny of options taken.  Sitting in yesteryear’s future there is no way to know what would have become had I chosen differently.  I remember proselytizing pamphlets handed to me as a kid in which a person who seemed a game show host sits a man down to watch his life.  How interesting to think of life as a game show offering unseen prizes if we choose well.

The noun game show is defined at dictionary.com as “a television or radio program in which contestants answer questions or play games of skill or chance in order to win money or other prizes.”
I did not stay in my home town for college.  I could have investigated compounding interest in the eighties.  Eventually I took an option to move to Maryland.  Could have stayed home and rented a movie the night I met my husband.    
I’m feeling like a player in a global “Let’s Make a Deal” episode.  Remember that show?  People dressed up, assuming characters to get attention.  Folks waved signs and brought stuff to trade.  The unknown behind doors was sometimes wonderful, sometimes a zonk.  In tense moments contestants were offered something in a box instead of the door.  The host always got a kiss from the ladies. 
My game show feeling, unlike the sixty minute TV event, encompasses the on-going nature of life.  We get multiple sets of hypothetical doors to choose from.  The options keep coming and our life path unfolds.  I’m working to toss out the idea of anything being a punishment or reward and endeavor not to dwell on the mysterious, unopened doors.  We keep playing until we win the gift of being the kind of person we want to be.


Let’s Make a Life

search your purse for a teacher or nurse to guide you
heal you or worse, convert you to carrying a coin sack
and several pair of sandals shluffing heaps of supplies

what lies behind each door offered as prize temptation
wishes you take to make everything really right and end
daily happiness fight with one well-picked winning ticket

door number one could be a snake with relentless hissing
about what you might be missing without dissing dainty
forbidden fruit hanging lushly from above a vacation spot

another way is left to say behind a velvet curtain, compelling
yet untelling of what the soft supple drapes might conceal
maybe a red-hot-diggity  deal sizzling, steamy, expensive

slide aside wooden panels, decide as they glide that the shiny
new car will take you away, far from the start toward finish
gleaming garishness full of leather scented assurances

bounty or bust behind different doors dangling mysterious
possibilities that relinquish others but regret  nearly nothing
worse than living or laughing at an empty seat after the hour

still time to trade, karmic cascaded choices made to honor
yourself in knowing you take the best  option at each given
moment over time selections arise so that you need nothing








Monday, May 14, 2012

C

Did you ever have an assignment, project, or report that you simply did not have any inspiration for completing yet you had an obligation to get it done?  In actuality you wanted to do it but the work just wouldn’t get going, get cracking, get flowing.  You deem it totally unacceptable to shirk the thing.  In hopes of making something out of nothing you begin offering words to the mission, fleshing it with what little you have and perhaps hoping to ramble enough to fill the space on the paper you were given all the while holding hope for the benevolence of the evaluating reader to give you a pity C for some variety of effort. 

C is defined as a symbol at dictionary.com (yes, it’s true – look it up!).
1.  the third in order or in a series
2.  (in some grading systems) a grade or mark, as in school or college, indicating the quality of a student’s work as fair or average.

Maybe it happened in Senior English your last semester of high school.  Maybe it was during a science lab your sophomore year of college.  Maybe it transpired last month when evaluations of first quarter performance were due.  Maybe the task was last week’s projected plan for an increase in company morale.  Maybe it was this week’s lesson plans.  Maybe it is at this very moment my blog.

Struck Dumb
Seriously, munificent, evaluate mercy
on the emptiness of my mouth mind
south in a state of rare, undetermined
speechlessness have not a thing to say
Even after typing over two hundred
words, the absurd reality, is I have still
said nothing of any meaning, shall
speechlessness surely begin this day
I offer four more lines of type holding
babbled hype a visual façade of work
longer growing below mere mediocre
speechlessness permits silence give way



Monday, May 7, 2012

Winner

I happened to be in a restaurant during the Kentucky Derby Saturday.  Everyone at the counter on one side of the place shouted and cheered for those beautiful horses galloping their hearts out in a giant oval.  I’m guessing no one in the tiny band of locals at a small watering hole in South Carolina personally knew the participants.  Nonetheless, folks love a winner, a first place finisher. 

Dictionary.com succinctly defines winner as a person or thing that wins; victor.
If we ourselves cannot BE the winner we enjoy the next best thing:  supporting the victor.  It’s fun.  It pays for a lot of college bottom line budgets.  It gives camaraderie.  It feels good to see folks prepare, compete and win in a contest.  It also offers an opportunity for people to act negatively toward each other, to boo, call names and say things like, “In your face.” 
I’m contemplating whether this winner-loving attitude bleeds into our everyday approach to life?  Are we competing to affiliate with the champion in a race, cheering for our chosen pony, denying anyone else’s performance at the finish?  Do we even know who these metaphorical ponies are?  Do we manufacture hate toward those who connect with a group other than our own? 
I am undoubtedly a slow trotting pasture pony inclined to say, “I dunno” in response to a lot of questions.  I have no desire to start a smack-down declaring any one idea, club, team, or group right, wrong, good, bad, winner, looser, animal, vegetable or mineral.  My interest is introspection.  I’m not saying join in supporting any one thing.  I’m not saying don’t speak out for anything.  On the contrary, I think it is good to be passionate and connected to what you believe or enjoy.  Root for a team that you dearly love to see triumph. I think competition can be healthy and beneficial.  Don the hat, t-shirt or button and go for your cause.  I simply noticed a lot of folks got highly heated about horses running on TV and maybe, just maybe people get carried away with cheering or jeering and getting all worked up about winning without thinking about what or why we are yelling.
Quoted by The Associated Press after the Derby the second place horse’s owner said, “That’s the only time I’ve run second where I’ve been happy because he [the horse] ran his race.”  Amen.


Marathon

race to final place with fast and furious pace
pounding hearts and fists insist that the right
rests in the best way, the one say truth and life

can there be only one path on a planet or sun
full of things  to know and hearts to show just
how much foul we inflict or endure, each pure

wanting winner of what might be a bit better
would that we want everyone, daughter or son
to arrive hereafter in whatever order they can