شُفت زَرَقَان حواليه … إزْرَقِّيت
و حَمَار و صَفَار و كل لون بقيت
ليه الدُنيا ماهياش بمبي؟ و ليه قلبي
مش نقطة مياه ف حلة زيت؟
عجبي

يا شاعر…يا فنان…قصدك إيه بقه؟
و إنتَ يا بهلوان…إمتي تِبَطَّل تريقه؟
إتسأل العصفور عن غُنَاه…قال
و إيش يِملك العصفور غير الزقزقه؟
عجبي

Listen. Read.

… I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?

from The Black Cat, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. (audio/text — don’t do it!)

I’ve just come back from watching Into the Wild (trailer), which was absolutely terrific!, if for nothing else, then for the moving rendition of Sharon Olds’ I Go Back to May 1937 :

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

s: People seem to drive worse on Fridays.
z (after a few seconds of contemplation): People picked the wrong part of ‘bicycle’ to name the ‘motorcycle’.

Ugliness is a guest who wouldn’t show up without invitation, but, once invited, wouldn’t leave.

For a number of years now, I have been going down to the Farmers’ Market two or three Saturdays out of every four. I’d buy fresh fruits, vegetables, and some deli meat, and pick up some flowers that would last me a week, ten days, or even two weeks at a time.

I’ve just come back from the Market. No flowers in hand. I, however, have caught myself eying some potted plants.