Sidetracked Charley

Some days Are so heavy I want to hide Let  it all squeeze me into the earth.   This has been one of those weeks. What seems so very clear to me seems so absurd to others. And what they say seems to make sense to them but reaches no connection in my soul or heart. Clearly there is a disconnect. A total failure to communicate. So why is everyone continuing to talk? I want to ask them what they want for lunch. Pizza or hamburgers? That is where hostage negotiators begin. With the simple stuff. Coke or Pepsi. But in this day and age I fear even those simple questions are not simple. Asking them could lead to bigger verbal wars. I know people in the south which define friends on the basis of Coke or Pepsi. You are obviously a northerner and ergo an enemy if you like Coke. And where do I, who likes water or coffee, fit in that paradigm. It classifies me as a bleeding heart liberal an acquaintance recently pronounced and I felt absolutely no reason to continue the ...

Ghost Orchids Facebook has this term they like to use in the statistics on a fan or business page. It is engagement. Posts I make on Binford-Bell Studio  are given information on how many peopled were reached as well as how many reacted to it. And then how many people were engaged with that post. Reached means they looked at the post. I have some trouble contemplating just how FB knows that but I have begun to pay attention to it because the variance between that number and those who reacted (took the time to press an icon of like or love, etc) seems critical. If I was to compare it to a booth at an art fair reached would be those who stopped to at least look and reacted would be those who nodded approval or just smiled. And engaged would be those who walked into the booth and asked about a specific piece hung on the booth wall. Clearly engagement is to be preferred. But basically Facebook members are drive by shooters or bombers. Bombers - people who share without comment an...

Patchwork In the beginning of my participation on Facebook there was a limit to the number of characters in a status message. We were all thrilled when they relaxed that limit of 120 characters. But at the same time they eliminated the Note or Journal option. Some of us went back to other platforms to do our journals and then link them to our FB pages. Others made longer and longer status messages with no break for paragraphs (note there is a way to do that) which were difficult to read. Obviously FB wanted us to stay short and sweet so they introduced the special backgrounds which only work with 120 characters or less. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I even spent inordinate amounts of time editing my message so it would fit in their arbitrary frame. I even discovered that you could push the limit by when you picked your colorful background. In short, I am good at playing to the stage presented. Then there were those cute little icons. Not just the thumbs up. We asked for ...

There are phrases to which there are no replies.  Make my day   comes to mind.     I remember the movie scene quite clearly and I cannot remember what the addressee said if anything. The reply to Paul Newman's, "What we have here is a failure to communicate," in Cool Hand Luke was a hail of bullets. Whether it was the bullets or his memorable line the conversation was clearly over. Most conversation stoppers in real life are not so memorable. But "I cannot eat gluten," generally halts any conversation about where to eat lunch. It is usually when I choose to go back home and fix myself something to eat. On almost all menus there is something a reasonable person can order which is not based on gluten but the mere fact someone brought it up while everyone was joyfully wanting to continue the day with lunch is not a good sign. Her chosen topic at lunch will be the evil of gluten. Mother always said to never talk about religion or politics but frankly they ...

Communication was easy once. Besides what was there to talk about? You walked up to another person and either threw down your club or threw it at their head. But as times went by it got a bit more complicated. "Honey, I told you to fix the stairs." "Yep," "So you going to do it?" "Not inclined to." And so with the introduction of the mother-in-law was born the third party negotiator. I did not say necessarily independent. Everyone has a dog in the hunt. King Arthur introduced the concept of the shape of the table. Have you ever followed one of those openings to peace or truce negotiations? Weeks can be spent on the shape of the table. You could argue they are not fighting during that time if the third party made a truce part of the prelude to the shape of the table. There are not that many shapes. Could we just universally decide on round and go from there? Which brings us to language. Sometimes this is why the war began. And th...