The world is a strange place, full of lengths of hope and strange gleamings and gleaning of knowledge from faroff places. Things seem somewhat the same, but so many years have passed, and many more will pass,....but finally the getup and the stairs have come to a landing, and the world moves, on , the lamp affixes its beam, and I can think enough to worry about good pens and finding a desk from which to write. It would seem to me that it would be okay to run my own translation business, focusing on japanese and arabic and that kind of thing, but actually that sounds kind of dull. I guess I really don't have much interest in doing much of anything other than sketching and karate, and writing long and disconnected sentences.
I was just starting out for a walk and the rain starts dumping down, which just figures. That's just the way it is, I would guess.
I was the smallest in the room...
I took the smallest chair
So positioned...
to catch the mint
that never ceased to fall
-dickinson

I continue to be amazed by the vision and durability of vision of Whitman. He really said it all about america, about the amazing possibilities of this country and each individual, and about individual freedom and living life to the fullest. His life wasn't particularly remarkable. He slowly got more crotchety, and spent most of his time partying, but he did work as a nurse in the civil war.

song of myself:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the lock from their doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is donw or said returns to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me
the current and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I giv the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
of on the same terms.

--this says it all to me. To accept nothing which any cannot have.

excerpts from leaves of grass

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents
the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
-leaves of grass, walt whitman, 1855

How the flukes splash!
How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!

Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same.
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, mee, all precisely the
same.