Blinded by the Setting Sun

I found myself having to "go to the Mall" yesterday.  (There is only one Apple store within 100 miles, my phone needed a battery, which I am not "allowed" to replace and my "Apple Care Plan" had expired after two years.) Subsequently, there I was on the stretch of "Mall Road".  Stores to the left and right, new store construction happening at an ant's pace, condos smack dab in the middle of the stores, bumper to bumper traffic of over-sized vehicles containing phone wielding people having sex with their devices, all eyes only straining forward or lapwards, at least someone had the foresight to build a hotel in the Mall, just in case. 

Just in case.

Mysteriously (or not), as I was going the other direction on "Mall Road", heading home, a poem I had not thought of in a million years started playing in my head.  Why?  Why this poem?  Did I experience a moment of clarity?  Or just a blip in my aging memory (is the Applegate Care Plan nearing expiration)? 

You tell me.

The poem:

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    - Willam Butler Yeats, 1919

Sunday

In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down,
up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.

--James Wright

Ain't It So?

Really?

C. William Applegate

Seemingly from where sky meets land,
room fills with fresh scent of dandelion greens.
It is only a whisper, heard nonetheless.
“Billy, have you seen your brother Harold?”
Claude to Roger across the table,
“No Lulah, I haven’t seen Harold since yesterday.”
A second stretches to thirty.
Dandelion smells losing to mingling cigarette smoke.
Thirty seconds stretches to sixty.
Fresh catfish in the bucket, backyard.
Dottie sitting on a rock, waits.
Three yards and a cloud of dust.
Unyielding, Roger answers,
“The Union won’t settle for a nickel less an hour.”
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again,
“The Union won’t settle for a nickel less an hour.”

It all depends on where you sit.

6 a.m. Mass in Hinche, Haiti

Angels in the Dark

I’m sleeping on a simple cot in the Rectory.
Hinche, Haiti. 
Suddenly the night sounds of constantly barking dogs are overwhelmed by a hand rung bell in the steeple  of the Sacre Coeur church only a stone's throw away.
It is 5 a.m. 
More dogs bark. 
Roosters dotting the landscape begin their daily ritual. 
Hinche awakens in its darkness. 
And as not to have one forget,
allowing me to fall back into sleep,
the bell sounds again its call to morning.
It is 5:30 a.m.
To follow in what seems a timeless sense of space,
gentle voices of children can be heard,
singing hymns.
I listen mesmerized in a dreamlike state.
Voices from heaven I wonder?
It is 6 a.m.
Daily Mass begins in Sacre Coeur.
Darkness is giving way to lightness.
As I pray,
uniformed children of Carissade begin their walks to school.

- Steve Applegate



- Video by Ed Gerardo

Visit The Haiti Committee

Where were the grown ups?

Newspaper Article

By: ALEXANDRA PETRI | Richmond Times Dispatch
Published: February 29, 2012 

George Huguely V has been convicted of second-degree murder.

If this had happened a year later, it would still have been a sensation. Two graduates of a "Prestigious Institution," from "Nice Families," one sporting a V at the end of his name, caught in a miserable tangle of alcohol and strong emotions. Two lives destroyed by violence. It's an adult tragedy.

But it happened at college.

Watching the trial of the University of Virginia lacrosse player on charges of killing his estranged girlfriend, Yeardley Love, I was struck as much by what wasn't said as what was.

This was a story of growing up in a world where people sand off life's edges on your behalf. Where parents and institutions protect you not from mistakes but from consequences.

This was a sensational trial from a world of people who don't watch sensational trials, a world where the objection to murder is not that it will out but that it won't do.

It was a tragedy of lacrosse, that football for the wealthy. At one point the defense tried the argument that Huguely is "not complicated. He's not complex. He's a lacrosse player."

This sort of thing does not happen to people like this.

The setting, however, was a character on its own: the college campus, where hook-up culture runs rampant and you are expected to drink four times a week, where you can sleep with someone and he can come to the witness stand and say that you were just friends, and it can be true. It's a no-man's land in which everyone wants to have fun without consequence. Where people are just mature enough to act immaturely.

Huguely sent Love a handwritten note saying that alcohol was ruining his life. He choked her. He threatened her. Huguely's friends said that, at one point, they thought of staging an intervention because of his drinking. They didn't. Why would they? They were college students.

Colleges around the country are playing the part of those parents who host drinking parties. "Better here," they tell themselves, watching another car pull onto the lawn. "Better here where I can see them."
The University of Virginia's substance abuse prevention center notes that 71 percent of the school's students drink on a typical Saturday night, with 20 percent consuming more than six standard drinks and 18 percent consuming four to five.

Under the best of circumstances, drugs, alcohol, sex, sports and a lack of supervision can be a potent and bewildering combination. When things are going badly, it's impossible.

Where were the adults?

Davy Jones Dies at 66

This has to stop.

Are you a Hacker?

I am.

"The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo."

"Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time."

The Hacker Way.

(Hint: this isn't about Facebook.)