AT THE STOA

Reading one of the stories in Ray Bradbury's We'll Always Have Paris  put me in mind of a lot of things, things mainly concerned with endings.  I have to confess I don't understand why he is considered a superb writer, and in my defense I might have been reading him wrong, if that is any defense.  He's okay, but he leaves me hanging, un-proverbially, in the sense of "is that it?"  But there's this particular story (which I didn't finish reading) that launched me into imagining another story (which might turn out to be what he really wrote). Imagine that when one dies, he can still persist for a time, although apparently not in the same form and hence capacity as was his in this life. I don't refer to religious belief in an afterlife; imagine him knowing simultaneous to his being aware of his continuation, that his continuation chiefly means continuing to generally experience, and experiencing those things he hasn't from before.  Bradbury list...

We bought Jason Mraz tickets as soon as we heard he's coming here, remembering all too well the fiasco with The Script concert tickets being sold out about -7 seconds before the announcement came out. So we paid online, and left the tickets unprinted for about two months. We almost didn't make it to the concert - it was raining, and not only in the meteorological sense.  But we did one better than Rihanna and chucked all umbrellas out the window, pulled up our bootstraps and raced through P. Tuazon half past eight.  Understandably the only spaces with free parking were located midair. When we entered through the yellow gate three things immediately greeted us - a fantastic light show, the backs of teenagers who for some puritan reason kept shouting "Wordplay!", and space just enough to stand and stare at the screen, as the dome was nearly regurgitating people. He played more than a dozen of his old and new songs, making the it about 50 pesos a pop.  T...