Xenosthesia.com

Parades

In a simpler place, at a simpler time, a parade.

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Every day at rush hours, the work parade.

Nature’s parade (a duck mother and ducklings).

Greedy for a show, the people goad the fire department into leading an extended, loud procession. A parade of fire fighters, along with anyone who wants to follow them down the street.

Life goes on. Progress throws us a vine. We climb.

A parade of televisions, washing machines, lawnmowers.

Unlikely parades: robot, psychotic, introvert, eagle, and cactus parades.

Downtown, in an alley, behind the library, a chemical parade.

Nature’s parade (a forest).

Up a working man’s arm, the scar parade.

At the store, during the panic, a T.P. parade.

The line at Starbucks in the AM: coffee parade, zombie parade.

Automobile parade. Ambulance parade. Taxi parade.

Muscle parade. Meat parade.

Across upper lips everywhere, the mustache parade.

Parade of the office lunches, a long line of yogurt cups and Cup Noodles. Soon after comes the sticky note parade.

Empty streets.

Nobody parade.

Nature’s parade (clouds racing the skies).

In all the public places, the mask parade.

Online, the tweet parade.

Underground, the ant parade.

Endless, unstoppable, yet everywhere recognizable.

It’s a sad day when you see something like this. What you’re seeing in the photo above is a rear shock, which is supposed to be straight, but which is now defining a suspicious and unsafe angle. It means I jumped something a little too high or too hard, or both. It means the end of an era. In this case it means the end of life for my bike. The part would need to be remade, replaced, and they don’t make parts for this particular model any longer. The bike had a good run, a good number of years before it died. It’s a 19 pound titanium frame which, by the way, once had hydraulic brakes on it. Sometime in the bike’s lifespan I opted for a more reliable system of cabled brakes. All these great features are pointless to mention since the bike is no longer operational. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

Speaking of brake systems, I had to bleed and refill my hydraulic brakes on my other bike. Hydraulic brakes are so primitive. To do an oil recharge is like doing a blood transfusion. You have to pump the fluid from one set of tubes to another. The general idea is to remove all the air out of the system, but also to make sure you have quality oil in there, or in other words to give it fresh blood. Apparently, if you have any sort of exposure to a brake system operating with hydraulic oil, you can get contamination like dirt or air or water in there, and then the system doesn’t work right. So then you have to start all over. You have to remove the contamination. Huh! Contamination on a mountain bike! Ridiculous! You mean I have to avoid hitting anything that might damage the delicate brake system? You mean I have to use caution while careening off a near-vertical surface, a surface decorated with nature’s best rocks and trees? Sounds about as reasonable as treating a migraine with speed metal.

Does the sarcasm come through? Can you hear it? Can you feel it? I’m hoping the sarcasm translates through the writing. I don’t have much patience or respect for hydraulic brakes. More than once, with more than one bike, hydraulic brakes have failed while I was on a trail. Confession, of course, is that I did something reckless that caused the failure. In comparison, though, if I had done the same reckless thing with cables, the cable system would have survived. And of course, since I’m also confessing that I recharged my other bike, you can see I haven’t quite learned my lesson.

How does someone learn to hear their own sarcasm?

Whimper or Scream

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You were born screaming. What will you do now? Will you whimper? Will you fall on the floor and mewl? Will you cry out only if the scary stuff comes your way? Will you grow silent? What has life done to you? Has it taught you to be afraid?

You were born SCREAMING!!!

How else can it be defined? You fought for breath. You didn’t swim back into the womb. You came out and with your first breath YOU SCREAMED!

I don’t think it’s part of your nature to hide from the difficult things in life. To hide from the difficult is to learn little or to learn nothing. Turning away from the obstacles doesn’t make us stronger. It makes us weaker.

We need the tough times to make us love life. We need the trials to make us more compassionate for others who have those tough times also. We learn when to give someone a handout and when to give them a hand up. We learn not to mock someone who is going through a time of mourning, partly because we’ve been there and wouldn’t want that for ourselves, partly because we know what helps a person through mourning and what definitely doesn’t help.

If we learn how to handle a situation, we can also coach someone else through it. Is it appropriate to tell someone who lost their job how great your job is? Not likely, but you would know that if you had ever lost a job. Is it good to help a child climb a tree every time? No, because they won’t be able to do it on their own.

Guess who is the best candidate for the How To Quit Smoking seminar: the ex-smoker.

And who would you want to go to for tips on how to run a business? Someone who never had a business? Someone who started their own business? Someone who ran someone else’s business?

Regardless of your answer, you know the stronger, the wiser, the more adept come from the ranks of the scarred and battle-worn.

Color

You were born naked,

Except for a covering

Borrowed from your mother,

And red was your color.

The world caught you up,

Diluted you, washed you

To the pale-pink hue

Of a rock on a river’s edge.

Growing, evolving, floundering

Like so many before,

You discovered earth, to roll in it

So brown became you.

This new covering fell,

Billowed away in dust clouds

As you found the free sky,

Lived in it and stole its blue.

On you went, and upward

Climbing for a better view,

Until you could fly no higher

The day you turned grey.

A Writer’s Dream, or Nightmare?

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O magnificent pen! What joys you bring! Shall I wax poetic about thee, dear pen?

Nah. I’ll save it for poetry hour. However, now that I’ve weeded out all the readers who judge what they read by the first line of anything, I’ll get to the good stuff.

Did you know there are ball point pens that sell for millions!? Below I’ve listed a few opulent examples. The first in the list is pictured above.

Diamante by Aurora: 1.28 million dollars!!!
Mystery Masterpiece by Montblanc: 730,000$
HRH Visconti 42,000$
The 4 Seasons: 36,000$
The Caran D’ache 1010: 19,000$
OMAS Limited Edition: 16,500$
David Oscarson: 4,900$
S.T.: 2,400$
Graf von Faber-Castell: 2,000$
Conway Stewart Westminster Teal: 1,800$

And the most affordable among them all is …

Cartier Santos-Dumont: only 910$ for a single pen!

That’s amazing! Many of us wonder, “Who would pay so much for a pen?” If you found yourself wondering the same, remember that the Diamante by Aurora is covered with diamonds. That’s the reason it’s so expensive. The company only makes one per year. Probably not a shocking bit of information. They design it for the customer with input for whatever the buyer wants in the design. If someone wants a coat of arms incorporated into the design, the company will provide.

Now, if you’re sane, your inner voice may sound something like this, “Even if it’s diamond studded, isn’t it still just a pen? What if you open it up and it doesn’t work…do you get your money back? Is that the one pen you would steal from the workplace? What if you loaned your pen to someone so they could jot down a phone number and they walked away with it? And if that did happen, would you freak out, or would you be so rich anyway you’d just figure you’d buy another one next year? If you weren’t using your diamond-coated pen, would you stick it behind your ear? Would you ever even use it or would you stow it in a safety deposit box?”

Sanity asks questions and doesn’t require answers. All the answers would depend on the individual. The same is true for the answer to this question: Is a million dollar pen a writer’s dream or a writer’s nightmare?