The Truth about Teeth

Here's the best argument against Intelligent Design I know: teeth.

Seriously. If I were in charge of the universe, I would NOT have given humans just two sets of teeth. What the heck is the point of losing baby teeth at six, when they're hardly even broken in, and then letting mankind muddle through with just one more set of teeth for up to NINETY years? Do we need them any less than sharks?

Roald Dahl had all his teeth removed at 21, opining that they were more trouble than they're worth, and was a loud and frequent champion of that decision for the rest of his days.

I often think the man had a very valid point.

Seeing the Future, and some of the Past Reverberates

OK. I cry at movies. Almost any movie - even He's Just Not that Into You, which I saw with Nina today.  Ridiculous, I know.

The other thing that never fails to elicit some emotion is seeing my friends' children grow up. I cried watching Colin Ramsey "get married" when he starred in his high school production of The Sound of Music, for instance. And tonight I was lucky enough to see Eliot Bailen's boys perform at the Bitter End - just 19, freshmen at NYU. Daniel looks so much like Eliot, and had such a great command of his show (David was out of my line of sight), and their band was so... tight. It just swept me back to the 80s.  Who remembers what the cover charge was at JPs and Trax?

Past=Tense

I spent a part of the evening re-reading How to Prepare for the Past and came to many conclusions:

1) I really like it, 28 years later.

2) It's not a book

3) It's uncomfortably personal

I think the only way I was able to pass it around to friends, back then, was to completely forget what I'd written.  Can I post it here? Should I post it here? If my children find their way here, will it make them more nervous than they already are?

So, tomorrow, I think I'll start patching in the less cringe-worthy bits.  In the meantime, I also found the poem I wrote and then read at my brother's wedding, and I will post that, because I still really like it, even though the Merwin influence is enough to whack you over the head and drag you into a cul de sac:

Legend

This is where the legend starts

And the moon, reflected in any river, mirrors

the face of the one you will love

longer than memory

Longer than the tail of the wind

caught in the trees at the river's edge

This is where fire begins

And the name you write in sand

that cannot be erased by water

will be the last name you hear

This is where the last time

We said goodbye is sleeping still

And what words we couldn't find

Lie awake beside it, counting stars

I tell you this

As if we were children

What I'm Reading

From: The Little Book, by Selden Edwards:

"...when people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they abandon faith in the culture of their fathers and flounder... We're watching the first signs of the unraveling of what our fathers still believe in - the rational rule of science and order - and we have no faith."

The book is largely set in late 19th century Vienna, and that's the culture unraveling in the paragraph above. But...

Blog to the Future

It's REALLY late and I just spent the entire evening updating miles and miles of attractions around the country.  But, just to get started...

Years ago, Brian Cullman wrote a song called "How to Prepare for the Past," - he got the title during a moment of dyslexia in a bookstore when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a workbook called "How to Prepare for the PSAT."

He told me I could steal it and write a novel.  I did.  It's in my drawer.  I wrote it while I was working at MacNeil/Lehrer, and I repurposed a chapter when I took a writing course a few years ago - it holds up surprisingly well.  I might add some of it here.

But meanwhile, I'm assuming the statute of limitations on using the name extends to blogs.