Mother and daughter

LOVE WILL song

Love Will, with Nimiwari's vocals, arrangement and instruments by Lamar Pecorino, song and produced by Larry Piltz

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ooTFV_MUhcLdrPb0y1AF5xLvQcZmm_K7/view?usp=sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZBLAmdULkQ&feature=youtu.be THE DIFFERENCE Pro-death sentence? One of the Ten Commandments says otherwise (and the others imply otherwise), as do our consciences. Vengeance ain't mine, even though schadenfreude is of familiar acquaintance and a guilt-ish pleasure when the karmee feels so damned deserving. Still, the two are not a strained 'both-sides' question. The only question these days, and maybe ever, is how many people have to suffer and die when a choice is possible. Right now, a choice is possible. I'm writing really about the current coronavirus pandemic. A very large but minority subset of humanity lacks the courage. spiritual maturity, or just plain impulse control to unfollow the path of unnecessary - and in this case totally unworkable - herd immunity. They'd rather get it over with and let likely millions of people unnecessarily die, with prolonged horrible deaths no less, than, well, just plain try to ease the suffering and prevent the extra dying by using proven measures of prevention. The difference between the pro-death sentence subset and the majority people of compassion and patience is courage. We've got it. They ain't, at least not when it comes to some of the most crucial matters of the heart and soul. The difference may be a complete accident of birth or fate, such as we know such quixotic determination, and we're the ones both cursed and blessed with this particular courage of insight and action, but we have no choice but to live up to it, live with it, and act upon it. It's not an impossible dream to enact love and peace in our lives and in our world, but it is incumbent upon the compassionate among us to suffer the uncompassionate, or seemingly less so, whom we shall always have with us. They do possibly have an advantage though. They often would by and large be glad and many even giddy if we were the part of the herd that disappeared, while if they were the part of the herd that disappeared, we would grieve and agonize over how it could have been different. The Difference makes all the difference and makes the world livable and enjoyable, for all, even for our friends who it seems rarely stand down from their harsher shorter-sighted views of the world. It takes all kinds, we know, but both sides are not equal and some things are not negotiable. However, good things are possible, and that's no dream.

The Flight Attendant and the Tumbling Turtle of Turtle Cove

The Cats and I were walking the woodsy trail alongside the cove to the small floating dock. I was in the lead. They were moving along as the feline spirit moved and accomplishing their typical various goals of grazing select grasses, sniffing suspect drooping branches and cone-shaped holes left by browsing armadillos or possum, and malingering with purpose with occasional forward progress made. They've been known to dart ahead of me or keep up with my patient pace, but this wasn't one of those walks. They eventually caught up to me but not before all the excitement had commenced and the drama concluded.

Suddenly something ahead of me caught my attention. At a medium distance, it looked and sounded like a 10-pound rock tumbling roughly over and over down the steep shaded rocky slope to my left. I wondered why it had suddenly fallen, if maybe a deer had brushed up against it as I’ve seen happen, or if eroded ground beneath it had finally given way.

Surprisingly, it was a turtle, its shell now lying almost evened-out flat with the dusty ground contiguous with the harder-packed trail, with the critter's nobly-shaped head and soft neck protruding out the front. It must be in shock or stunned, I thought, because normally it would be hiding entirely inside its shell with someone as close to it as I was, about one foot away. I looked closely for wounds or a crack in the shell but could find nothing except maybe a scuff or two. It seemed turtle had escaped a more debilitating fate.

Turtle is one of the numerous red slider turtles native to Turtle Cove, which its beautifully hued red horizontal racing stripe on each cheek divulged. It's a small adult, likely a female, who might have been trying to find her way back to the water after laying her eggs, or maybe she was still searching for a great spot for a nest. Either way, the hard pounding jolts she felt while piggybacking on gravity’s way down the slope, the partial hollowness of the shell providing the loud thunks, interrupted whatever mission she had been on.

Given her condition, her state of shock or mere dazedness, and because she's probably just shaken up and only a little bruised, I decided she most needed to get back in the water. That cool quick immersion would uncloud her head, I reasoned and hoped. After that, she could decide what she needs to do next. It’s still her life, after all. Turtles pretty much live in water and right beside it. There’s nothing like pleasant familiar territory and creature comforts to buck up one of nature’s unlikely little miracles

I picked her up, with her aerodynamically shaped head and slender neck a fuselage sticking frontward out of her shell, and carried her at a quick pace in front of me waist-high, her deeply dark and clear eyes peering directly forward. She was virtually flying through the air, and she seemed actually amazed though was probably more stunned still than anything else.

I'd give almost anything to know what she's thinking, or feeling, as she flew along out in front of me. She turned her neck right and left and back again, looking for familiar signs to try and help make sense of what was happening to her. She seemed to briefly catch sight of me, which could cause alarm, but most importantly to her, when she looked back to the right and slightly downward through the line of cypresses, she saw the silvery wetness of the cove stretching out glistening almost as far as she could see.

From the moment she first saw the water - until I gently set her down on a flat limestone rock directly on the edge of the shore and she immediately leaped down and into the water - she had kept her head turned directly toward the cove and never took her eyes off the water, knowing she had found her salvation. She knew, just knew, that if only she could get back to the water she would be okay, and there it was, beckoning, no matter how strange things had become for her in the last brief interval.

The whole interlude, from tumbling down the rocky slope to her split-decision, once set down on the rock, to quietly plop down into the shallow depth, lasted only about one minute.

I think her instantaneous, sure-footed leap a few inches down into the cool cove water made me almost as happy as it made her, though I know it's impossible for me to truly walk a mile in her shell. Congratulations, little friend. You made it back to your cove harbor, your haven, partly the hard way, partly at the insistence of a taller power, and finished with a splash entirely your own.

Thought Xperiment @JEWanon #jfds;lfjrjfsdr

There's a fluid stasis
as the basis
for those thoughts
that hound and chase us
reduce and trace us
and would erase us
and debase us
if not waste us
real head cases
that mentally race us
instead of pace us
and embrace us
and truly face us
in our places
of oasis.

No my country's not made of good people who make sick things up and stick by them because they know it scares and intimidates everyone else. No it couldn't be..We're better than that. We're not total nazis yet. Are we? ARE WE?

THE MENACE APPRENTICE

The Menace Apprentice

is a fate that's not meant us

just a mistake life's lent us

come to divide and rent us

an unreality show star

whose known wide and far

for his inimitable genius

for lying and meanness

and the smoke and mirror

make his confusion much clearer

a mental hologram of blubber

fool's gold and used rubbers

The Eternal Dolt

a dodo in full molt

a pitiable ignoramus

who will die trying to shame us

loves the suffering he causes

accepts only escape clauses

feels nothing but threat

even his saliva's flop sweat

he's a blob of self-pity

what he touches turns shitty

he's all about the teardown

and meltdown and beatdown

mad clown with a shit crown

he's a nervous condition

of demolition absent contrition

a public masturbation of dissipation

his excitation now a capitulation

to his fear of a fight

a scared dog with a bite

drowns in the hate he's sown

with us in the splash zone

and a pandemic he's blown

it's your very life he'd own

he's an exploding supernova of gall and bile

the only space force we'll see for a while

a dark matter show of hook and crook

of deny steal lie plunder and rook

our suffering his happy place

good ol' larceny and bear mace

he and his axis of weevils

their role models medievals

minds in constant upheavals

I may yet believe in evil

Larry Piltz

April 14, 2020

Five Pulitzer Winners Walk Into A Bar In My Amazon Dream


I realized tonight I've known five Pulitzer Prize winners. They are described below, not in chronological order, but with attempted aspiring candor, wit and cleverness.

The first one I'd known had been a high school friend and a fellow member of the school choir, she as celebrated and accomplished pianist and accompanist. She won her Pulitzer in 2005 for Biography and Autobiography with a Willem de Kooning biography, co-authored with her husband. I took heart when she told me it had taken ten years to write it. She and I at the earliest had been fellow participants in, I think, a local 4th or 5th grade patriotic speech competition. She recited "I Am An American", and I recited "The Gettysburg Address". I believe she won the competition, despite my earnest gratifying Lincolnesque performance (if Lincoln had had the larynx of an elementary school boy). She was a most talented girl, which is a vastly understated compliment. She is an excellent person of highest integrity and is sweet, kind and charming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalyn_Swan

The fourth Pulitzer winner I'd met, Lawrence 'Larry' Wright, I met in Austin because I knew his equally brilliant wife from a helpful but now somewhat embarrassing personal growth seminar called Insight II (I demur from describing the exhaustive energetic hysterics of its Limiting Characteristic Theater; that's all I have to say about that). Larry won his Pulitzer (Those words put together in that order!) in 2007 in General Nonfiction for the book The Looming Tower. He wrote for Texas Monthly at the time I met him in about 1988. I was impressed when meeting him even then, and his ego was not at all corrupted by his talent and his already gathering reputation for insightful well-crafted writing. Talent wins out sometimes. That Larry can write! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Wright

The third Pulitzer Prize winner is Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist for the Austin American-Statesman when I worked there at the City Desk from about 1984 to 1987. He had won his Pulitzer in 1982. He was the lanky friendly bearded legend (way back before not-shaving was compulsory lemming behavior) padding around the newsroom as if he were merely mortal. Ben was quiet and unassuming and had a wicked and sharpened sense of diabolical humor that gave incisive hilarious hell to people who well-earned it. Luckily for him, Texas politicians even then were especially mock-worthy, as were the national 1980s Republicans, and the Pulitzer committee likely especially enjoyed Ben's fearless skewering of them and of their precious cherished right-wing delusions. I was city desk assistant and, among other celebrated duties like 'hand-populating' the template with temperatures from around the country and world and calling area funeral homes to gather the names and information about the most recently Hill Country deceased and writing their obituaries for the afternoon/evening edition of the daily paper, I also received and solicited public information and then conveyed it to reporters and editors and other staff including Ben, the gentle giant with a mighty set of drawing pens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Sargent

The third Pulitzer Prize winner, Raymond Bonner, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of writers while on staff with The New York Times. He also won first prize in 1985 for 'Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador,'' in the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Awards program. Bonner was a NY Times reporter when I met him in 1982. I had called the NY Times Washington bureau office because my Austin neighbor's ex-Marine boyfriend had a hot story to tell and hopefully sell. Bonner and another NY Times reporter, Philip Taubman, Jr., son of a senior NYT editor, flew the next day from D.C. to Austin to secretly interview the ex-Marine, who had been one of the earliest pot smugglers across the Rio Grande into Texas and had contemporaneously in 1982 been a part of the CIA's then-secret operation to create a right-wing guerilla army (The Contras) in Honduras along the border with Nicaragua. He scouted landing zones for C-130 Hercules transport planes.

The two reporters and my scary new friend and I spent two days scouting isolated locations around and outside of Austin where the interviews were then conducted. I was taught to conceal my activities and not be followed. My friend's story was to be part of a larger story being written about other ex-military people also taking part in that covert operation. By that time, Bonner had already made journalistic history with a 1982 NY Times story that first exposed the weighted fist of oligarchic capitalist genocide and oppression in Central America at the hands of the American-trained, American-supplied, and American-denied El Salvadorean Army El Mozote Massacre in which 800 to 1200 fleeing civilian peasants including children were hunted and killed in the countryside in 1981 by that army’s Atlacatl Battalion, whose officers (and other members) had been trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia in Columbus. Bonner continued in the same journalistic vein with a lifetime of equally intense and historic other reporting elsewhere such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Indonesia. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Bonner

Lastly, the second Pulitzer Prize winner I'd known was a journalism professor at Louisiana State University whose Advanced Typography class I signed up for and dropped in 1973 after coming to terms with the fact that I had no interest in typography whatsoever, advanced or primitive.  James Shoaf Featherston won his Pulitzer in 1953 as part of the reporting team for the Vicksburg Herald's coverage of a 1953 tornado in Vicksburg, Mississippi.   Much more famously, Featherston was the Dallas Times Herald reporter on November 22, 1963 who, immediately after John F. Kennedy was shot in his motorcade, secured a witness (Mary Moorman) for the police to interview and himself later testified before the Warren Commission.  Also, in the 1950s, Featherston covered Emmett Till's Mississippi murder trial for the Jackson Daily News.  It's remarkable his Pulitzer Prize was not given for either of those but for coverage of a tornado.  He probably assumed he'd peaked early until the Emmett Till trial and the events of November 22, 1963.  

The dream was that I win a Pulitzer. I've wanted one since I first learned what a Pulitzer is. So I majored in journalism in college, where I dated a woman last-named Pulitzer. She was a real prize, actually, but not THE prize, and I wasn't convinced I wanted to 'win' her, nor had she shown evidence she'd want to be 'won' by me.  Since then I've come to understand more fully that someone actually needs to write an especially outstanding cohesive series of articles or one really gigantic blockbuster of a news story to win a Pulitzer or a book.  There's always a catch.

Anyway, that's a Rubicon I super duper likely will never even locate let alone cross. However, having been exposed to actual Pulitzer winners will serve me well if my writing stars align well enough for me to essentially win what would be for me the journalistic lottery. I'll be able to name-drop as I awkwardly negotiate interviews, and perhaps I will have learned by osmosis how to behave accordingly. At least I've gotten close to the Pulitzer Mojo of the five Pulitzer winners I've known and met, good people all, and my life's been elevated and enhanced because of them.  I count that as a win. And finally, here's the Amazon part of the dream.
https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Urban-Primeval-Larry-Piltz/dp/1530871085
____________________________

Coming Eventually....how as a Little League shortstop I made an unassisted triple play (without any help!) with the bases loaded, and of how in one game I made all three outs - AT BAT!!! - in the last inning of play. A true hero's journey.
____________________________