Fools Rush In (Semi-Obligatory April Fool's Day Post 2010)

He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see...
John Lennon

‘Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind...
William Shakespeare

...this old king had three daughters....two of them...one with a name like a venereal disease, the other a dead president...filled his eager ears with empty flattery...stroked his vanity with ridiculous lies...fed his ego with pretty crap...which, as it turned out, was exactly what he wanted to hear...so he split his kingdom between them...

...the other daughter...named, apparently, after a character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer...told him the truth...unvarnished...a bit harsh, perhaps...and got nothing...was banished...disowned...

...and they don’t call this stuff tragedy for nothin’....suffice to say the story turns out very VERY badly for everybody involved...particularly that foolish old king...

...but isn’t he a bit like you and me?

Not So Mellow...

my yellow in this case is not so mellow, in fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me
Jimi Hendrix

...yellow is the color of the sun and, yes, the color of piss...the color of light, and life...though, yeah, I know, light is really white, in its purest form...but we live in an impure world...even though a banana really is, sometimes, just a banana...

....yellow slapstick banana peels...yellow is the color of my true love’s hair...well, not really, but it’s the color of my hair...at least I try to keep telling myself that, even as it's increasingly invaded with distressing grey and white...so, in that sense, yellow is youth...though also jaundice, and cowardice...and my somewhat cowardly golden retriever, Duncan...walking in the grass, sniffing yellow dandelions, chasing after yellow tennis balls... my good friend when no people were...used to lie in the driveway outside my dad’s office, on the other side of the garage from the house, by the lawn where the dandelions were...one of his patients would crouch there for what seemed like hours after appointments scratching the dog behind the ears and talking to him...my dad said she teased him that Duncan was a better psychiatrist than he was...to which he replied, “maybe he is....”

...yellow, for some reason, I associate with Buddhism...maybe it’s all those golden Buddhas...or the Flower Sermon...though who knows if that flower was actually yellow, though I might think of it that way...or perhaps, I fear, some lingering racist association with yellow people...as if there really were yellow people, or black or white or red people, rather than bogus divisions created out of some deeply yellow fear of the knowledge that we’re all simply shades of some indefinable human color...which may look something like sadness, which I think is also yellow...as, of course, is joy...and candle flames, like I’d see in the windows when we’d sit in silence Christmas Eve at the Quaker Meeting...

...yellow journalism, yellow fever...mellow yellow...yellow corn...waves of grain I’ve seen generally tending, I think, more toward yellow than amber...mustard seed...school buses...yellow submarines...doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?...daisies...sunflowers...the yellow rose of Texas, whose image seems a bit tarnished at the moment...yellow desert sands...yellowing pages of books and old thoughts...Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, representing repression and madness....when life gives you lemons make lemonade, but if the lemonade isn’t any good, maybe you can get a soda or something...

...the sun’s out today, for what seems like the first time in forever...though I can’t see it from here...yellow in blue...coming across if you’re not actually looking at it as clarity...but to look directly into it is to go blind...