Showing posts with label rainy days. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rainy days. Show all posts

Monday, May 4, 2009

Rain, Conflict, and Green Tea


rainy day, dream away, let the sun take a holiday...
Jimi Hendrix

...or else just sit around feeling miserable...there are days when it seems like conflicts spring up out of the dirt like weeds...watered by incessant rain...make ya wanna run home and hide....then, the worst conflicts are generally those experienced alone...and most disagreements are actually about something entirely different than those caught up in them think...maybe most agreements are, too....often we tend to drift from one argument to the next, never really plumbing the depths...never finding out what's really behind any of them...

...is it closed minded or judgemental to tell a friend his dislike of dogs is a personality flaw?...I say it with a smile, at least....my friends at the coffee shop were running down their latest rude-customer stories while I finished up a mug of green tea I’d let get cold...making me realize how quickly I’d be fired if I had their job...and that I should tip more....I used to try to get elite college students to write papers on an issue that matters to you....how bad the food on campus was tended to be the most pressing...and I couldn’t disagree it was lousy....but they’d also talk about how rude the servers were...though, whenever I forgot to bring my lunch, I’d end up standing in a line with ten or so undergraduates, not one of whom would say please or thank you...sometimes barking orders like particularly irascible drill sergeants...acting like their privacy was being violated if the guy behind the counter interrupted their conversations to say excuse me, sir, do you want fries with that?...

...Henry David Thoreau, after starting a forest fire by accident, saw it from a distance, finding it a glorious spectacle if one can part the burning from the burned...or so I read in the New York Times Book Review...I can remember somebody saying something similar about footage of the first space shuttle explosion, back in the 80’s...some people like to use a flower as a symbol or metonym of life...others use war in much the same way...William Blake said everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth...and he was probably right...