Dear Pro-Lifer A Question - 20150918

Do you realize the abortion debate in America is used to marginalize thinking humans into single issue voters to mask what politicians do with the rest of your vote behind the curtain of your abstention of volition?  This is mainly done to perpetuate a patriarchal system that streamlines the idea of women into valuation based on birthing chattel as a uterine mechanism in the service of males in the equivalent of a cooking pot.  Women become defined by bodies rather than permitted to be complex.  There is a reason the closest reasonable answer a Republican presidential dais can come up on which women’s visage to put on the ten dollar bill is Rosie Parks or a suggestion of his mother or wife.  There is a reason the issues of paid maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, child care assistance, and supporting women’s health care providers are serviced by cricket chirping silence.

The idea of a complex woman standing out directing, contributing, or foundationally consequential to the history of American humanity has been so repressed that the best the leading Republican candidate can muster is his daughter’s name or a comment on how beautiful or pretty a woman is, as if physical traits of a man’s perception of attractiveness were relevant measurements of worth. 

The Pro Life movement focuses on in utero terminology and viability predominately under the guise of religion as a false address of moral concern where no fiscal or physical action point is generated post birth to support the birthed human on a systematic scale commensurate with the dominate social concerns most parents would seek out abortion in the first place. 

Abortion is about the parental ability to support a child emotionally, fiscally, spiritually, and mentally.  No great society can substitute for a parent on a macroscopic level and function with the same prowess as genetic self-interest provides.  The Pro Life movement is not correlated with funding the children thrust into the foster and adoption systems on a commensurate level or even a significant fractional level of the dollars that are tithed and harvested by political and religious groups to market the idea of creating a fishermen’s net of crimping laws to marginalize the options a woman has to choose or access abortion or reproductive related healthcare services.  The flare gun of the patriarchy active in the cognitive distortion is blatant. 

A significant number of Republicans in Congress are threatening to shut down the government again.  This time it is not the Affordable Healthcare Act, but defunding Planned Parenthood.  This is despite no government funding going to abortive services.  This is despite the facts that sexual education, sexual health screenings, and birth control services not only prevent more abortions than Planned Parenthood preforms with self-generated revenues, but provides for the better health and well-being of the children who do come to term based on the election of his or her mother.

The government regulations over what a woman does with her uterus and vagina should be whatever the hell a woman wants to do with her body, particularly for the American party purporting to be most about personal responsibility and freedom.  It is such a simple concept summed up with yes a fetus is a human and we all agree that we as a society make choices of priorities including killing other humans.  Otherwise the military would not exist, capital punishment would not exist, and police officers permitted to kill people would not exist.  Medical procedures that are exhausted to perpetuate the life of some are not enacted for others strictly due to what taxpayers are willing to pay.  The idea of citizenship matters on who lives and who dies.  These are all illusions and lies we tell ourselves to feel good when head is set to pillow in an often capricious, unpredictable, and random world. 

To have the audacity as if you are morally good with your idea of god by creating this false crusade that asks you to do little more than campaign for this false catch-all for life in being anti-choice related to humans contemplating abortion or euthanasia is a false service.  It is as if signing up for a law that demands all people under forty to fly out to Iraq or Afghanistan to wage war when you happen to be forty one.  It is like a majority male-led political party knowing only a woman can choose abortion or not wanting to take her choice away. 

Being pro-life asks you to do nothing as a single issue.  Sure you may adopt and support foster services, but to do so and be anti-choice fails to connect the strain on the current systems and services on not only a national, but global scale.  One cannot praise a border wall or the barbed wire greeting card to a refugee and claim an absolute respect for life.  The Pro-Life movement is a costume for an absolute respect for life.  There is no absolute respect for life.  We all make choices, most of us based on our ego, self-identification, group-identification, that line where the volition of other starts to create a burden on our energies and efforts so as to make our life less pleasurable or free or arduous. 

The choice of abortion is just that for most parents; the option to make a life less arduous.  Please explain to the face of a parent who has been in that situation how my right to choose made your life more arduous and please do not have the audacity to attempt to speak for the unborn. 

Thoughts on the film: Human - 20150917

Mass Iraqi graves, live bodies trucked to pits 120 degrees lined nameless, sixty-three sites in southern Iraq alone, eight million dollars found buried in the garden of Saddam Hussein’s personal secretary, adulteries buried in sand; injustice bribes traded for basic services or monomaniacal dictators capriciously stinging death’s scythe for the inference of transgression to indicate usurpation to the absoluteness of what is to be an Earthen god.  Wars raining death upon the Poor squished ants scurrying out the hill done nothing but to be human attempting existence pressed to the brink from birth so that death is accepted.  There remains no fear for living is a manner of perdition imbedded to the spirit soaking so that the torture of any transition between breathing and not is but an exhalation of release into succor.  This fearlessness terrifies the globe. 

The screw tightened to make a woman prostitute her body to feed her children.  A lesbian engage in sex with a man unwittingly transacting H.I.V. to present appearances of a heterosexual norm to her elders.  A boy raped by his father, beaten and marginalized until deciding the maw of the street is a safer chamber.  The callused hands of a sugar cane worker chopping reed upon reed until there is pay to eat for the day, but never two days, so in one missed equates to death.  The choice between medicine or food is incalculable discretion of a human squelched into the animal pit, disposed and incinerated into the pyre.

A solider and an insurgent eyeing scope line to vision endured to shake fear in the conflict bigger than their bodies reverberating the universe to please cessation enacting death.  Family land razed by a corporate interest corrupting the eco-chain so that starvation becomes the logo on the plant separating a stomach’s livelihood via a stock price.  Rice, medicine, oil, sugar, cocaine, cattle, opium, eggs, and the industries of fire and hurricanes hustle for bodies to churn the butter. 

Syrian desert storms quashing the tide of Arab Springs, Said’s Orientalism spraying pestilence empathy of who deserves to live, to be heard, to be understood beyond a strutting sand-zombie coming to root a  Euro-job for a place to avoid bombardment as if a choice remains in countries like Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, or Syria torn apart by war.  Not my problem like a battle flag belief of lines so that no one is a citizen of the world when viewed in the macroscopic whitewash.  Only in papers and mathematics of safety zones, winners and losers and rising tides with necks long and not long enough mapped out into the armpits and nose hairs of the Earth tightened waistband of the equator flushing heat and diversity of species into a monoculture of consumerism. 

The price paid for Bangladeshi fabric or a Chinese assembly line of bottles inspected like a Ukrainian bribe for a pass to urinate without being beaten into quarantine imprisoned without being rolled into a rug and flogged.  Orwell’s 1984 head cage of rats gnawing at the ear lobes and nostrils of humanity pecking out flesh.  The news-speak and regurgitated power expectations of who has and who has not and how the resources are motivated to comply to activate the daily machines of trading the time one has on this Earth for the time of another.  We trade labor for equity, the privilege to eat, to sleep without ample threat of death imploding the roof or buzzing the window in a pinprick of blood sloshing the pillow.

What is a proper justification for war in this vat of injustice?  Which god is watching and for what purpose?  What is the purpose of this Haitian isle enslaved and raped into a French cholera outbreak defecating in the streams of drink?  What is Putin’s sledge and oil drill peppering Crimea into compliance to pay the tithe?  What is the tax deduction for the pulpit? 

The immigrant sings, “AaaaAhhhAaaaaAhhh!” crossing the border in a ship of 110 bodies taking on water praying for Italian grace.  What is the smuggler’s lament?  What is Trump’s xenophobic wall?  Who wears the Mockingjay? 

The simple look of one into the eyes of another, “I see you. I hear you.”  This drive to contribute to the pile of bodies struggling and helping and killing and loving and holding and destroying and witnessing the grand circus is the undulating bond of interconnection.  This is to be, human.  

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/human/

Take the Pill - 20150915

Refusing to submit to psychiatric medicine is like an atheist staring contest with god

I don’t want the pill to ease the burden; the relief from Simon on the march

It’s like the last remnant of Christ pumping through the blood in my brain

The trembling aneurism ready to burst in a shrapnel blast of thorns

The depression and the cherry on top smirking that if god is there; fuck god

I want whatever this blessing is I want to drink the bottle straight, no chaser

No tonic water, just the booze-cunt raw slurp it in the two a.m. narcoleptic fevers

Nothing to ease the focus of the altered me; I want to be a disaster

I want to rampage in this isolation like a wolverine tearing apart pig pens and mutton chunks

Gnashing teeth red dripping blasphemy in the rape before the sunset

Defiling the muddy pits with a dervish pain debauchery that this is what love does

This is the knees on the rice in the corner facing the wall spewing in Latin

The hell-whiskey of father coming in demanding the plates immaculate

And thrusting them bolt-like to the kitchen tiles having the children sweep

The canine feces on the shoe trucking through the carpet sliding the wretched stench

Visceral into nostrils reminding the derelict nature of time’s cascade

That there does not have to be reconciliation before the reckoning

All the repentance, the foster, the Malaria bugs nesting in eyeballs

The Aids victims fornicating unabated tolls ringing from Notre Dame

Drop dead into the chalice melt into the vinous brew

I drink it; I drink you stare back and grin never breaking eye contact 

Sex Now

The infinite connection of the universe inversed like a belly button

Convex to the concave protruding like repulsion to replace attraction

The smell of vaginal fluid conjures the taste of death

Grave tubes and rape of enjoyment chaos itself breeding in the seminal vesicles

Bloody engorgement like plastic explosive packed into the luggage of an airplane

Colliding into the side of the Tower of Babylon crumbling inferno

Assured permanence faulty as eye contact read, inferred, and castrated

From wanting to participate the fear breeds its own monster

Inhabiting bones lurking under dermis sensitive to the shift

That all the bodies look like bodies and the gray ache of indistinguishable

Love making dissects the universe into a NASCAR wreck

Corporate stickers and smooth curves designed for aerodynamic slick passage

Lubricated for the wind and the gawk campers to ogle the frames revolving in circles

Waiting for the sturdy men to shake their fist at god in the victory lap

Undestroyed and vibrant

Sex induces peristaltic shivers that everything that devours a man lurks in her folds

The wanting, the darkness, the birth of his replacement

The music fades into deafness, the voice into dumbness, the skin into numb blue glacier

The up is never worth the down, the fear that the worm will crawl out and infest

Solitude itself as if alone is never alone again

The memories will rape incessant

The arias of trust will pound an anvil chorus of nails into a coffin

One will be buried alive wailing in the hot gestation pit cradled for the cuckold’s brood to feed

Bones and entrails mealy for the crab queens and owl goddesses to pick flesh

Smacking beaks with eyes unturned just munching as the popcorn is not worth detaching

Uninterrupted view of the cinema sparking in celluloid and lit magic

Kernels in oil until the heat prompts explosion and all to the mouth is a puff of air

Trading destruction for consumption and a man wants to live

Or does he 

A Poem for the World on Nine-Eleven 20150911

The heat of summer lingering in that alien taint of foreign land

Homs breaks in the aperture of shattered glass and ramshackle stucco

Odd collections of education pasted in rebar and concrete mortar amusement

Stateside swimming pools and Jurassic World global gross box office thumping

And some kids are not going back to school this autumn

Outside al-Assad civil war and rebellion and the Reagan orthodox of chaos and order

Fundamentalism and fascism with the will of the people in the fulcrum of a playground seesaw

Lit up in the firefight of Damascus scatter smoke ISIS and the roaches in the bag of wheat

Scattering out into a crumpled kitchen with no electricity to bake leavened bread

Ba’ath Party routines of towels left in a cabinet to set foot on an oil slicked floor

Segregating coagulating ink blots in a bombardier painted Rorschach test of global empathy

Puddles of blood twenty two and a half million Syrians, two-hundred and fifty thousand dead

Eighteen million in country with forty plus percent displaced and four million more refugees

Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan for most and a few thousands trek mercenary night-boats

To bankrupt E.U. bailout Greek isles and the world media goes ape-shit

Trump is bloated chicken-wig pimping Mexican walls and New York is still picturing

Phantom airplanes colliding with the ghosts of buildings in cake-dust zombies unloading at Ellis Island

We are watching a Neanderthal bed a firecracker in an ant hill over Arab Spring pots boiling over expediting his own extinction

Four years later of domestic gassing nameless masses and Aylan Kurdi washes up on a beach

Smugglers and rape, Afghanistan, Eritea: Bomaye! Bomaye! Bomaye!

Play battleship in the Mediterranean for a stock price and hold the Euro

While Putin and Xi Jinping fund a proxy to show what happens to uprising

Stem a tide in another nation’s blood to prove that if Russia or China is willing to fund al-Assad

To put bullets into the bellies of his own; they would be open and have done the same

If anyone came for their heads and so the viscera of powerful men clench fuels of control spent in fear

While ISIS spins in a slide scale dervish whisking fundamentalist theistic rhetoric

Throughout like chaos itself splintering minds and bombing hearts

America is willing to stay clear because the old lesson of Vietnam forgotten fourteen years ago today

With xenophobic NASCAR revving USA! USA! USA! is suddenly recollected to

Play with the shits left in the kitty litter in Baghdad and the urine soaked sheets waving goodbye in Kabul

For red rover, red rover, Putin come over and smack the fuck out of ISIS birthed out of our bush

You can have Ukraine just don’t make us enter the game, because the Dow is up, unemployment down

And America is war-weary and the sounds of bodies leaping off towers had a cinematic ending to the trilogy of helicopter seals shooting Bin Laden in India’s splinter Islamic appendix

And we, we got nothing for this, but staring up on a google search for a few names and a tomb-less lurch

Of bodies crawling out our own insides to see one humanity and yet abide

The way of is, the way of was, to let the water flip over the boat of distraction before it gets to us

A Fortnight of Years - 20150908

September eleventh approaching fourteen years like two weeks of media inundation

Recycled zombie dust storm metropolis desert fumigating the haughty scale

Of Tom Wolfe’s bonfire decadence and Ayn Rand’s innovation towering like an anti-Mecca

I did not know what Wahhabism was, Al Qaida, or the rancor of a paper tiger unfolding

Wet-eared to corporate America rescaling with Enron pissing puppy yellow squirt shit

On the newspapers in the Arthur Andersen kennel I was twenty-two breathing in the miasma

The epoch of airplanes whirling hijacked kamikaze in the Pearl Harbor of my generation

I still believed in Jesus

The rebarbative zeitgeist slung jingoism to the airwaves

Conspiracy theories and panicky church-house drunks fizzy-lifting drinks

For glass elevators and ceilings busted like an asbestos piñata of innards and lawn-mowerish ash

Rictus reactions to popcorn screen crawls munching a guess how many kernels in the bag death-count

Old Testament wrath and Muhammad mutton retribution to the Shepard

Stupporous like a prolonged epileptic fit into year fourteen still misunderstanding Pakistan 

I go back to a peristaltic moment in the guts of women and men peering busted windows

From high enough to know there will still be some thinking between the release of feet and the ground

The squeamish debate of burning alive and leaping suicide

I think of the faithful, the legally bound against self-murder

As if god was watching promising an eternity of burning if one elected to forgo

An interminable enfilade of minutes to scorch dermis engulfed in flame for the jet-fueled air launch into the New York sky         

What must it take for a human being to decide, “This is the better option.”

I imagine the true fear is not the ground, but the falling, the vulnerable knowing you are falling absent Parachute or remediation, but to close eyes or stare the concrete and open the maw to bite rock

The truly damned are the indecisive; those debating jump or burn and suffered both

Tumbling in charring bombardier frying in some god’s holy chrism

Faith like an anchor to paradise or perdition guided the acrobatics of the day    

20150906 Backbone

Some nights the bones of your back crawl out

Like a malcontent centipede of vertebrae tickling the Titanic

To evacuate the subway train of chugging subterranean

The beast is hungry for a vertical spine and all this supine positioning

Belly to the sun bulging in a U button to the sky god

Daring the bastard to “Just do it.  Take me you fucking sadist!”

Makes the standard bearer of the body a refugee

The bony shrapnel taken for years mushy clogged in disks

Is embarrassed that the eye shadow of a photograph could make the mind

Fret about appearances as if all this dancing was not an illusion

The straddle-step “Where do we go from here?”

The whetted tongue to dare ask for a drop of water in this lake of sand

The gall to scald this skin in the rays of a friend’s death to camouflage a busted heart

To conjure sympathy to swallow the eviction with want rather than resentment

A spine can only take so much before the jellyfish coagulants bubble out the blood stream

Seep through the dermis into the eyeballs and melt the façade into a pathetic lump

Writing and wanting or expecting or hoping or dwelling or recreating reality

To just get by, to tread water for a phantasmal shoreline in owl feathers and redwoods

Harboring a siren that is indifferent but willing to devour a carcass if given the opportunity

This spine will have none of that, slipping ship before landfall

The postmark and send signal and sonar without the chiropractic play-toy

No, there is no kindness there, only scary as was told and ignored

For such fallacies of hope and dreams and turtle foolishly stretching neck

The world slumbers and wakes sot in amnesia to forget the raw ache of love

Hear not the siren song for she was never singing, only the crash of rocks

Fishing for foolish invertebrates too slow to evolve in tidal pools

Swishing the origin of all life: the strive to connect, to be seen in form

To witness and be witnessed

Close your eyes my son for there is no one up or over there to see you

Only the echoes of blackened shadows    

20150904 The Liability is Void

I do not owe you anything

No measure of my love or affection should be predicated on debt

For if so the fissure will only be a disservice to both of us

I am whole

I am beautiful and know that the foundation of me is not defined by my mistakes

Or the pain I have endured or caused, but by the autonomy of my divine celebration

I am a gleaming intrepid beacon bellowing New Orleans

Every day from here on forward I will not sink into that pit

That lonely trauma is a bola wrapping my ankle like a devil’s tongue lasso anchor

I am magnanimous bombastic survivor emitting the luminescence of the now

Defined not by the tenacity to perpetuate, but the tenacity to be

To embrace this moment with possibility like a smiling gaze soaking the audacity to exist

I exist platypus-like swimming, breathing, and laying where it is home

In the nest of choice breathing, being in the breath

Loving as I so choose 

20150901 Buddy Pope

Release from Pope Francis the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy is on like priests to twelve year old boys.  The release for the Promotion of the New Evangelization is a marketing campaign straight out of George Carlin’s doorway of Planar Indulgence forgiveness in Kevin Smith’s Dogma.  The letter mentions pilgrimages to the Holy Door open in every Cathedral.  The Door of Mercy is open at the Jubilee Churches.  Buddy Christ is alive and well people.  Got to up the numbers; the gray hairs are dying off and without let’s say women who have sex, homosexuals, or divorcees, the men in dresses would have no one left to play with as they hand out the god cookies. 

The opportunity for great amnesty is here for those who still want back in the good pile before god smites like heathens like a mofo.  According to the pope Francis you can get your dead friends and relatives in on the act.  “In the great mystery of the Communion of Saints the merciful Face of the Father will free them of every remnant of fault and strongly embrace them and all you have to do pray them back into the good pile even if they never gave a fuck or didn’t want to be in it.  We can pray them back into the flock under these new doorway specials like a retroactive coupon.  Well isn’t that some shit; even if after I die my former Catholic stamped at baptism ass might get yanked back to the yoke Christ if some random person were to pray me back in if I happen to croak during this one-year only window Jubilee.

Now get this the headliner of the festival, the big stage Metallica-esque thunder guitar, Pope F says forgiveness can’t be denied for those who seek it but because some priests are assholes and refuse to forgive abortion peeps he has conceded discretion to the priests.  Wait what?  He has conceded discretion?  So wait so first he says it’s bullshit to not forgive, then pimps what amounts to some water cooler bulletin encouragement to quit the pompous judgmental shit they shouldn’t be doing anyway, and still tells these faith-overlords it is still in their discretion over ‘those’ who have procured (abortion) who are contrite. 

I would assume ‘those’ implies men too.  The media might use the word women, but fuck isn’t that the biggest bullshit as if a man is not always involved.  The great patriarchal scape goat of oh it was her choice and so in this mythical world of sin there is not another made up linked chain of culpability for reality.  It’s all crazy, but nah the biggest bullshit is Pope Argentina doesn’t say you have to forgive if you even want to call abortion a sin.  Abortion is not mentioned in the bible.  To call abortion murder is a matter of question and the question is not is the mass of developing cells a human, because we kill people all the time and those killings are not a ‘sin’.  So fuck if a priest knows how to sort that pile.  I don’t know the environmental, birth control, and homosexual commentary by Pope F have been better, but this is chock full of some marketing bullshit. 

All I know is if there are some banished angels making their way to New Jersey to walk through the forgiveness arc we are all fucked.  Alanis Morissette couldn’t save David Foster Wallace, but maybe she can still save the world.  Fingers crossed.

20150831 Punch

Sometimes what we need most is a punch to the face,

Firm, jarring, dental dislodge,

Proboscis violet flushed and hung like a red umbrella. 

The numb shock of where did the rocket fist generate

Launched out of the vestibule of errant fury

Hirsute knuckle aligned wrist to radius and ulna bashing

Twirling tornado of agendas as if blame had a god damn thing to do with it

That moment sinking in the black haze dissipation

That it was your own clenched ego holding on to the past

Huddled digits booming in across the bow

Throttling round the revolution of the planet a year later

Cataclysmically to release your fingers to let go

By breaking their grip upon the nutty confines of your cranium 

20150830 The Day After

I do not have joy.  There is a lightness that is missing, has been for years.  It is not a person; it is not anything it is sentences I can hardly formed like a mutism frocked in threads of stutter to attempt to form the breaching decay of explaining the smiles I do have to mask the ones I do not.  Sometimes I see the type of laughter or rejoicing or feral unadulterated joy rampaging off lips so that teeth look like rapturous predators wolverines of ecstasy capable of devouring the pittance I can muster in a quarter of a lick.  The quick way as an amuse bouche to breakfast tempting morsel of a happiness vacuumed crumb like in the nook of a grin manifested hourly for tourist quotidian the way a professional furry costume of Goofy does at the mouse palace in Florida.  I can’t smile, not the way I want to, just released because I need you.  Whoever you are if you even exist I need you.  My battery has been left uncharged for too many years and I need to plug into the current I was intended.  It makes it worse that I felt like I met you and all of them just bask in the silent boundaries of me numb to wanting any of them because why, why would I want to embrace anyone who will only eat me alive, morsel by morsel grinning in joyous rapture ear to ear. 

20150829 Katrina 10

I went to the K10 on the levee this morning for yoga with New Orleans.  I was not sure how I would feel leading into today I repressed, not wanting to open my eyes.  In the moment of the morn I stared into the sun a bit.  Here are some words I wrote before and after a practice with some fellow humans. 

Pre yoga

All pushed too much into a capsule of time as if life was not an extrapolation of the antimonies of doing and being fluxing in dance.  I remember the heat drowning in the cacophonies heart bellowing the boundaries reestablishing the wan of chaotic disbursement assurances that entropy ruled the wager.  The still-grind technology of man’s grip of toes against the floor that Orleans was New Babylon falling.  The tide of slavery cresting in broken levees mold-spore diaspora speckling shock waterlines undulating tumult.  The bodies stare boldly shim-sham glue shingles swirling like eye brows shaven off bustling wildly as if to stare into that face one has double-take.  The prompt of this is human wanting to be seen, but struggling for the foundational construct of assumption.  The trades of tears and laughter piercing packets of eggshell licked to index fingers reassembling above the water.  The fragments inundated, fissured, and drunk, cackling to be fearless.  This city is not fearless.  We cry daringly like turtles bolting green necks to be in the moment of now seeing the sky ready to eat us alive singing to the clouds anyway.   

Post yoga

Some days are the waning, this is a day of wax, burgeoning palpable from the caked tone of ache faith in the acceptance that no one is ever ready.  The sunrise stalks in a blind battalion lemon drop tongue film roll flipping suggestions for grain or sugar at the wake to stow in catacomb ant hills.  Preparation absent readiness, some days cycle not in mastering distance between a then and in now, but acceptance that there has, is, and always only a now. 

I lay my body to the work of the mat, gray neon flower unfolded across fresh cut New Orleans levee grass.  Bodies in a gird perpendicular lines, this ego’s chance askew 42 degrees facing the CBD across the Mississippi.  Coast Guard and tugs moving the water. Sun glint side angle into triangle humming like bees in breath.  The poetry of witness, ants scour trails pitons into skin bites and tickles sparkle in the darkness.  Eye is closed tasting the darkness on tongue, savoring the decade in stitches of mulch, wandering in river breeze.  I am on their turf, the space of dreamed hills flushed and reborn, timeless carried stillness in absolute motion, boundless dirty on dry levee. 

___

I wrote this in my notebook watching the water.  I read Marrero a collection of poems by Kataalyst Alcindor from beginning to end quietly soaking in the pace.  I met a woman named Sherry and a gentleman named Aziz.  Talked, real conversation, both about philosophy, being human, writing, art, a good start to a day of letting go, evolution.