Tag Archives: photography

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Not weird

This is not weird in Port Townsend during the Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race. This is normal. It’s coming in nine weeks, get your feathers and costumes and bright colors, build your sculpture and practice the mud bog and the water race! Most mediocre wins! Check your breaks, load a teddy bear, bribes for the judges and practice your moves for the Kinetic Ball.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: weird.

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In deep

Time to return
again

Human, pfaugh
I give up
I don’t want to be one
I can be anything I want to be
I want to be a mermaid
again

I sink into the sea
and down to the depths
scales and tail and breathe the sea
the water cools the burns
my charred burnt skin
and lungs

Such a fail again
every time I try
to be human
yes, legs, I can do that
it always makes my voice hurt
but those damn wings
come with the legs

It’s hard to hide the wings.

I don’t know how
but they sense them
even when I hide them

It really pisses me off.
It’s the broken ones that show up
though now I think maybe
they are all broken
they all wander around
pretending they are ok
using lies to try to appear nice
hating parts of themselves
calling those parts unclean spirits
and casting them out
DEMON! DEVIL!
over and over

I try to pretend they aren’t there
the cast out
and I am human too
but the demons kneel and lay their monstrous heads
in my lap
crying
cluster round me
begging for my help

I always fail.

I try to stay present
with the person and the cast out
but eventually I can’t stand it
and I say something wrong
and the stupid human thinks I am the demon
and casts me out too.

I wait and hope.

I wait and hope with the monsters
with the rough beasts.
“You have wings,” say the demons, “Help us!”
“I can’t.” I say, “The humans must help themselves.”
The monsters weep and wail.
Finally I am sick of it again.
I send them home
and I go home too.
I have failed again
and must endure falling through the atmosphere
my feathers and skin a burning star

I am sick of it.
I give up, Beloved.
I am a failure.
I can’t do this.
I must go to the sea again.

Here is the trench, the deepest part of the ocean
I stop swimming and let myself sink
Slowly the light disappears
I am in the ink black

Slowly the others appear
glowing
in the deep

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: liquid.

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Indiana Jones is a terrible archeologist

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: a 2023 action/adventure film, the last gasp of the Raiders of the Lost Ark series. At least, I hope so.

I saw this with my daughter. I think it is awful, though if you want to see people blown up and killed, well, ok. SPOILERS.

Harrison Ford plays an awful person. A horrible archeologist, since he destroys tombs with no regard for history. A thief. A killer. A bad father, a bad friend, a bad God-father, a terrible husband. He goes to friends for help and barely notices when they are killed, though he is happy to point out to his God-daughter that SHE is not compassionate either.

It’s all justified by saving the world from the Dial of Destiny, only this time we don’t see this supposedly world changing item filed in a warehouse. It’s left sitting on a bedside table at the end. Yeah, maybe in the next movie one of the kids will play with it.

Indiana Jones is so awful that he wants to get away from himself, by staying in the time displacement. The Dial of Destiny is mathematical so it is not magic. Really. Science. Thank goodness it’s not a mathematical anti-aging device so Indy would live on.

They make him younger in the earlier scenes, ok, that’s sort of cool from a technical perspective. Just wait until everyone has that technology for Facebook and dating sites. Running atop the speeding train? Yeah, my suspension of disbelief already done failed, sorry. Tons of people killed in the first ten minutes, but since they are Nazis, we ought to be good with that. Except I am not. And he and his friend walk off with half of the precious potentially world changing power object? Which makes the friend crazy and so Indy ends up with it. Filed on a shelf at a college. Indy can’t keep a promise to a friend, either.

What about the romance? Give me a break. Ick, frankly. So he has to have the perfect female who turns a blind eye to all his destruction and killing and theft and very very bad archeology? Because “he is saving the world”? Ok, maybe she has dementia by now so she’s down with it. The perfect female for this scumbag: I think that search is really the about the anima. The search for the perfect partner is within, and we project that on a person who has some aspects of that internal perfection. That is falling in love. Really loving someone is withdrawing the projection and loving them anyhow. Indy’s movies represent much of our cultural disrespect and scorn for women. He has an undeveloped anima who is a sexy figure who will let him do anything he wants. And welcome him home. First thing I would do is destroy the “mathematical” dial, give him a good kick and leave. My work is done, out of here.

My ending for the movie would have Indy and his God-daughter hauled off to jail and fight in court for the next decade over who killed the people at the university, and all the things that he’s stolen and destroyed catch up with him. Mirror the ending of Raiders by having him carted into a gigantic jail with thousands of cells, to disappear forever. His wife finishes the divorce and she absconds with the young thief. The young thief decides that court and jail really don’t look like much fun and straightens up. Now, that’s a satisfying ending!

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: movie.

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Enemy

A friend and I are talking this morning and he is talking about praying daily. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. That turns into a discussion of enemies and ourselves. It’s easier to have an external enemy identified than to deal with ourselves, isn’t it? Here is today’s poem.

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Enemy

Do you have an enemy?

Do I have an enemy?

maybe I have no enemy
I have people I have forgiven
I have people who I have asked to forgive me
I have people I have forgiven
but keep distanced
no reconciliation
possible if they continue abuse
blind and deaf
saying “We are righteous!”
over and over to each other

A book teaches me
asks what are you most proud of
in yourself?
Three things:
strong, smart, tough.
The mirror is what you fear the most
weak, foolish, vulnerable
I shy back, hate the author
and he is correct
at least for me

Like the sutra
sometimes I am weak
sometimes I am foolish
sometimes I am vulnerable

When there is a person
or people
I want to hate
What aspect of myself
of my past
of my psyche
are they bringing up?
Are they stronger, smarter, tougher?
Are they weaker, foolish, more vulnerable?
Why do I want to hate them?

It’s easier, I see
to hate another person
and cast them out like a demon
then to look in the mirror
and see the aspect of myself
that I long so much
to hate

That demon
once cast out
will return with seven more

Mirror mirror
on the wall
tell my why
the angels fall

if an angel gets it’s wings
every time a bell rings
each time we hate another, as well
an angel falls heaven to hell