Two excerpts, for the full article, see the notes


"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

"External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.

Those are the people we want to be."

this is not a ten stepper essay.  You are, and you admit it, full stop. Addicted to HP.  No help here.

but to answer the question...

the writing of a poem,
no matter what your style,
eye dropper word selection,
slow methodical,
or furious expelling, frying oil
until crescendo is achieved
is clearly a fulfillment of
a ****** type of need.

Afterwards,
after words,
when you repeatedly
check the number of likes,
it is just you asking me

was it as good for you
as it was for me?

Usually, eventually,
the answer is a
quiet, soft spoken,
very few reads version of:

"Uh, just let me sleep"
which means you will try again
in the the morning suncomeforth.

weekends these days are what weekends are supposedly meant to be...days of pleasured nothing that fills you with intensity.

The intensity of just living easy, is hard to learn because it is kind of forgiving yourself for not working harder which is guilt melting like a glacier - slow but not too slow.

but eye stray from the topic.  with nothing planned, we drift from morning bed to breakfast (3 poems done before that!),  to what to do and because we never would, we did.  Go see Furious 7 in an empty theater, on a Saturday afternoon.

Awful. Noisy like when your ears hurt cause of a passing ambulance.   Lines delivered in a not how to act corny that all just fall  short of incredible bad funny hysterical....ugh...and the car chases are just ok.   So return home to I get my once a week home cooked meal in a city that never stops eating, or closes, and delivery is 24/7 and almost instantaneous (Chinese is instantaneous) (Fyi)).

before you know it is 8:30pm and we fall back into bed to watch old movies we saw years ago and remember fondly (Mr. Hollands Opus, Hairspray, It's Complicated).

Around 11pm, eye just turn sideways and am gone.  

she wee hours watches, till around 2am, but then eye awaken, and find her almost always, hand in mouth, tablet lying on her chest, and her glasses on...eye shut the TV which means finding the remote hiding in the sheets and isn't always easy. Tablet transferred to the night table.

But the glasses, that is last, hardest.

With two hands, while out of bed, indeed, standing surgeon-like over her, eye remove in one fell swoop her glasses and she does not stir, mumble, utter, groan or notice.

this successful stealth operation is the high point of a perfect day.

Those little scrapes and cuts that eye obtain just from living; often, no, always, unaware from where or wince, or whence....they came, and more oblivious to their invisible departure...but I do notice this:
their stay, for they overstay their welcome....unlike in my youth, these scratches would barely pass the night, and be gone before the next morn....

now I do not know when they come or when they go,  but stay and stay and stay. For the skin repairs itself so much slower when you are older....and you think just a little how it ain't no different with the heart cuts 'n scars, fresh and old.  Same,  you get older, you notice them, can't exactly recollect when you earned them...but
you feel them hanging on to you, as if they came with you when you were new in the showroom.....but didn't show up till whenever

What day of the week do you change your sheets?

a question of import,  revealing much of human frailty, arrogance, and your friend's secrets - their most personal weltanschauung

my sheets are (not by me) changed on Friday afternoon, in honor of the oncoming Sabbath. The Sabbath begins according to tradition on Friday night (every day begins at nightfall) since god,  the Lebowski dude created the world, per Genesis, it was done in this order -
"and there was evening, then there was day."

so I figured that an offer of a day of regularized rest deserved clean sheets on the eve of its conception.

some of you who agree with view may prefer Saturday afternoon/evening, since your sabbath occurs primarily on Sunday, and in many parts of the world sabbath is coincidentally purposed for laundry anyway.

that said, you may very well change your sheets on whatever is laundry day in your mansion or dorm room.  However, I defy you atheists to deny that you think when slipping in between two fresh sheets, "there is a god"

eye sometimes go to bed wearing an old hoody. It has a metal zipper  to close the front and the zipper is always cold, unpleasantly so, on my bare skin.  After awhile though, my body temperature warms the metal just enough, that it is no longer a cause of discomfort though the metal still remains inherently cool to the touch

While science can easily explain this I guess, I felt this to be a major miracle.  That flesh pliable and heart-heated to 98 degrees could conquer the molecules of metal that were made in China struck me as extra ordinary (always two words, please!) and nothing short of a personal intervention by a personal deity

When I put the hoodie on at first I would think
******* (that's cold)
When I awoke, cosy and warm, I would think
******* (that's so cool)

having studied philosophy in Cleveland,
I knew that the logic of the situation,
what I had experienced was not an
interregnum, but the invisible intervening handiwork of god, who, also knocked my glasses from the nightable to the floor,
just cause she/ he was in a bad mood, on account of having to come such a long way, just,
to reheat me
one more time.

Ha ha on me.   eye still have a full head, of laughing hair...


eye am vain like you, and though advancing steadily with daily doses of aging, and since I am titanicaly nearer my God than thee, i.e. the finish line...end of days...whatever...having a nice head of hair is a happy happenstance for nothing "ages" an immature person faster than a lack or absence of hair....

some say it is all genetic....could be...but my theory is different...I laugh at myself all the time...my foolish words, my creasing vices, my dastardly prejudices, are absurd in extremis...and am in possession of a willingness to be the **** of my own humor to bring creased smiles in others's to the fore...

though serious, I don't  take myself seriously...and this self disrespect means I laugh at my own pomposity, posterior and peculiarly peculiar peculiarities.

So I laugh a lot as I am one of those idiots who reflects on the state of himself and goes, eye eye eye!

the laughing releases a dosed vial of special testosterone which makes my hair grow and since I fully expect much sorrow and to be living homeless, on the streets, in my end of days, the fact that I will have a full head of hair as I go down into my grave makes me laugh which releases....

ha ha on me