There's a paragraph in the only Stephen King novel
that I've read that describes a small town in Oklahoma during the daytime in
early summer. He concludes the paragraph with this sentence: "and
stretched above the town was the portion of sky that (G-d) had allocated to this
part of Oklahoma. "
I have been thinking about what G-d allocates to all
of us. Kind of a funny topic for someone who professes to be an atheist. But we
are all allocated things to do in life, whether this assignment comes from G-d
or from ourselves. What we make of this allocation is what determines the
purpose in our lives. And when our lives end, it's how we handled these
allocations that will determine whether or not life has been satisfactory.
Lots of changes here at socialsmoker.net. I've landed
a job--probably the most boring job on the planet: I process data for a team of
actuaries. It's kind of odd to be doing this, and my skills as a data processor
are quickly returning. It's clear to me now that they hired me partly because I
have the patience and experience to convert their disjointed data requests into
data sets that meet their firm actuarial requirements.
Some of my life is sad, too: just recently, my mother
had to put down her dog, Miss Daisy of Winslow. She was a gift from my father,
who died in 1999. We also got word from our municipality ordering the
destruction of a large elm tree on our property due to disease. The tree has a
caliper of about five feet, and I found myself unwilling to condemn something
that was older than I to death.
But on to the blog--a couple of notes to explain
things to the casual reader. The numbered poem entries are part of a series
that I am working on that relates to poetry in a modern society. In some cases,
they have separate titles, but for the purpose of this project, those titles
are replaced by the numbering system.
I also have one other series of poems that I am
working on, titled 'The Thing About Flowers.' It's still very much in progress,
and I have not fully decided where it is going, but I have already generated
too much in this project to ignore it. The poem entry that precedes this entry
is what I currently regard as the 'opening poem' of that series.
and now, a confession:
