AT THE STOA

I wake up at 8:00 AM, put some coffee on, and go to the backyard to have a smoke. I look at the sky and try to gauge what the rest of the day's weather will be like while I wait for the coffee to be ready. Today, and increasingly this month, morning skies are blindingly bright. Today's a good day for drying clothes, at the very least - and at the very best, it's a day for basking for a while and being grateful for waking up. I love mornings like these.  The coffee's ready, and I put out my smoke. Time to start the day. I head back inside the house to take a quick shower, sweep the floor if it's too dusty, and wash dishes if there are any. The light shines throughout the house, and I am glad the landlords chose to have the walls painted white instead of yellow or blue or green or whatever else. I sit at my desk, where the sun filters through the ill-fitting but strategically-placed-as-an-afterthought curtains. I look for transcription files to work o...

While I agree with  this  review in that Joker is "an excellently crafted film," and while it did add its disclaimer that every interpretation of the Joker is nearly as meaningful as every other since the character is so chimerical, I would disagree about the article's overall attempt at the situationalizing and grounding of the Joker's character in social inequality and the resulting mass discontent therefrom. I by no means am claiming expertise in the comic books or the movies featuring the Joker. What one gets from him, though, straight from the 1970's of his birthing onward to this decade, is that he is not an agent of anarchy; he is anarchy. The movie, while using the backdrop of 1970's Gotham socioeconomic unrest as the larger setting to his actions, also puts those same actions within the purview of his mental instability as an individual. This saves the movie from situationalizing the Joker on solely a statement against economic injustice, and m...

"Thursday is Virginia Woolf. Then it's Anaïs Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734." You might be forgiven for saying that that statement, out of context, is gibberish. Believe me, though - even in context, it makes the kind of convoluted sense only a work of Palahniuk can make. I'm late with my review of this thing - it was published in 2003. It's set in contemporary time, featuring a man working in a historical museum job reenacting the 18th century, who gets his kicks from attending sexaholics meetings, pretending to choke in restaurants and cashing in on the idea that people, needing to be heroes, will be forever responsible for a life they saved, in order to pay for the bills of his dementia-stricken mother, who used to be an anarchist and claimed that we have reduced the world to symbols. In his mother's hospital, his sexual escapades come to a weird turn when h...

The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. We have created artificial lights to illuminate our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's darkness, to ward off being blind. The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons. The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast to its own oblivion. The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally see our creator in the eyes and tell him we fo...

We recently moved to rent a new house, as the one we were staying at - which is still under construction - lost the battle to mold and its cousins. Maybe we can move back someday, when, or if, it becomes done. I am in love with the light in here, and most days, upon waking up, I just walk around basking in all the beams that find their way from the sun 93,000,000 miles away uninterrupted into the inside of the house. It's days and times like these when I have trouble sitting down in front of my computer and just working, as the entire house becomes illuminated with sunshine demanding to be inhaled, basked in, held. The light comes from the bay window, which is facing the house beside us...     and lands on the stairs, beside which rest my mold-infested books. They deserve a good airing and sunbathing, but the beams don't quite reach them. Ah, well. A little ambient light might be good enough. The light comes in from the window in front of the walkway to ...