Rant of the Exiles

Poetry is an accident on the freeway Poetry is frustration A dreadful inconvenience An obstacle that prevents you  From getting where you want to go  As fast as you expect to get there An interruption to your regularly scheduled programming A careless intervention  Into your carefully structured life Your blissful reverie broken Your mobility halted or slowed Forced to tail the bumper of the car in front Forced to gaze upon someone else’s destruction Forced to share in a collision Poetry is a journey delayed Poetry is personal invasion The worst and the best at once An opportunity to consider life and death An invitation to think about someone else  A chance to step outside yourself Or to think about yourself from another’s perspective Or to feel another’s pain Or to stop and help Or not Poetry is waiting Poetry is witness There are others seeing the same scene But they are irrelevant because ...

A fake letter-writing service matching men with "angels" reveals how we value lies over truth and to never underestimate the power of human longing. As usual, I'm late getting on the podcast bandwagon but I have listened intermittently to NPR over the years so that must count for something. The stuff on Hidden Brain is high quality but the Lonely Hearts episode is Stephen Curry break-the-Matrix-type-of-good. *SPOILER ALERT* If you listen to podcasts, I suggest listening to it first before reading. If there's little to no chance of you tuning in, read on.  In Lonely Hearts, Shankar Vendatam narrates the story of Jesse who developed a romantic correspondence relationship spanning a decade with Pamala. Or who he thinks Pamala. Rather, it was a chain-smoking, middle-aged, snake oil salesman in Moline, Illinois named Don Lowry. And unbeknownst to Jesse, Lowry was sending copies of the exact same letters Jesse received to men all across the country. The...