Another Day, Another Theft

Green Lake, when will you be worthy of your dozen Trotskyites? Another Notebook was lost in the line of duty. We wonder if and when vigilante justice is justified.

But we've been thinking about the importance of simple things. A short paean to them was going to be included in today's post, but all the blue words were stolen. It's just you and us, kid.

We came to this project simply (book on a bench), took it conceptual (importance of place, embodiment, empathy, moral distance), and have returned to the simple things: always have a pen attached to every book, lock each book in place with metal wire, get to each book at least every other day. Absent these simple things, all the conceptual importance is just Yoko Ono fluff. (Writing of Yoko Ono fluff, alpha once saw a short film she made in which a sequence of naked butts on treadmills occupy the screen. One extreme close up after another for 20 minutes. Some butts were repeated, particularly one with a strange mole on the right ass cheek. The film became like a Where's Waldo book, where the masses of jiggling flesh were the fantastical Bosch-like locations and the mole on the guy's mole was Waldo. Your eye became trained; you cheered its reappearance as an anchor in the morass of, well, ass. Perhaps alpha should have studied physics.)

Back to simple things. Pablo Neruda understood the importance of the little things, for example, his socks, or an onion, or a tomato, or a delicious pico de gallo served in a tube sock. He wrote odes to these things and they would start off like this:

Onion,
crystalline sack,
your beauty formed,
petal after petal,
of luminous scales
that increased you
and your belly grew with dew
in the mystery of the
dark earth.

Which is getting pretty deep on an onion, even for us. Still, we owe an ode or two to cheap Bic Pens, and metal wire. Keep it locked.