I am proud of my obsessive creepiness.
It has matured over the years quite nicely.
Nay, my former creepiness
could not even hold a candle
to the nurtured version husbanded along so well
so carefully.

Okay, a silly little ditty you write when boredom with Google news reaches a profound level. The oracle at Delphi says, know thyself and you will know the universe. I think that's why news is draining. News, beneficial as it is, presents a problem. And not merely just the distraction of it that clouds the mind as we sip our morning tea, that in our hunger for the verbal we devour and in so doing lose touch with our own words, dreams and thoughts, as these require patience and quiet.

The tradition of liberal arts is that you're led to try a few things, and from that you discover your dream, what you're good at, what you like to do. Then comes the Treason of the Clerics. The teacher gets involved with the tickings of the outer world, politics, community, starts teaching about science as it relates to the goals of business and the economy. The teaching touts itself as being most useful. It will lead you to a well-paying job in the financial sector that enables you to manipulate intricacies better than those other ducks. It will lead you to a job crafting the bomb, the pharmaceutical 'cure.' Sooner or later, particularly without any kind of moral regulation, as to keep banking, let's say, transparent to the consumer's real needs, the house of cards falls down, becomes a meaningless free-for-all grab wanting to suck more people in. And that is the summary of the news today, basically all you need to know. And it applies to news itself. (Journalists, being pessimistic in nature, feel a need to follow the intricacies, follow the money, paid by advertisements as they are. And people sit back and listen, and don't really express too much of an opinion, because they too become obsessed with following the intricacies of what for instance bank greed-heads are up to in their connivances. Sitting back, the populous loses a sense of life.)

So avoid it, as much as you can. Go back to explorations of inner self and liberal arts, take up humility. Listen. Witness life as it really is. Examine it. Live it. Enjoy it.

Interesting, I thought I'd mention, the recent front page NY Times Book Review piece about Amurican Male Writers, and their healthily dirty obsessions, proceeding from the golden era of Roth, Mailer and Updike to the weakening of driving vision--based in the erotic, let's face it--of the more recent circumspect naval starers. Bravo, Kate Roiphe. Thank you for defending Eros and, in effect, the immutable sexuality behind it, of high chakra, mind-blowing transforming joy with the sexiest, most gorgeous high priestesses objectified as the physical vehicle of golden pink vagina light energy taking us back to the Big Bang and through all matter. Thank you. The original dirty bastards (Roth, etc., if not some of the very writers of the Bible, come to think of it) were followers of Einstein's joyful poetry, scribbling naughty juicy equations on a light-filled blackboard.

When does it, when do the kind ladies (many of them horribly exploited, no doubt, which is a worse crime than the worst) who reveal their anatomies in Internet photos, become the know-it-when-I-see-it Pornography, which is of course a term based on the Roman term for prostitute, no, as opposed to the enlightenment offered by the temple priestess? I guess if you have to ask, well, you too are a dirty bastard, thank you very much. One might conclude that journalists, like many, paid to keep attention focussed on intricacies, being by nature pessimistic, faithless, aren't really qualified to tell us what is porno and what is not. That would, in theory, be left to the most impartial and disinterested of observers, the 'fiction' writers who merely try to bring to us life as it really is, admitting it without pre-judgement.