daily post

Tales of Derring-Don’t

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Take my advice—I’m not using it.” I can tell you to keep calm. I might insist that you keep calm. But as someone who can introduce stress into the least stressful, sweetly innocuous, and even pleasant experiences in life, when I am confronted with the parts of life that others find truly stressful, I hunker down and find the effort deep inside myself to make them yet more stressful.

In one of my lesser achievements in the field of stress management, I gave myself a black eye while tying my shoes. These were boots with leather laces (I am not a cowboy) and such laces take a little effort to yank into position. While securing my “half-knot” on my right shoe, the length of lace in my left hand broke and I clocked myself in the right eye. At the time, I was 34 years old, not eleven.
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A Rule of Four

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Wikipedia disambiguation page for the commonplace partial phrase “rule of three” lists nine items. Actually it lists 10, the tenth not being an example of the concept of the rule of three in day-to-day life but the title of a play; it may have been added by an editor simply to amuse himself or herself. (It was not me.)

It would be a perfect example of the rule of three to have three sets of three things make up the possible definitions of the phrase; it is comic to have 10 instead.
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‘Despair has no wings …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

To be is to despair and to despair is to remember the thousand tightly missed connections and not-yet completed conversations that will reveal themselves eventually as never really begun. The Surrealists got despair, perhaps better than most. They adopted Existentialism’s finer frustrations and rendered them with comedy, joy, and horror in sometimes strange proportions.

The comedy of coincidence and the tragedy of imminent abandonment dominate their work. Everyone is always alone, and this fact is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying in Surrealist Art.

André Breton, the founder of the movement, defined Surrealism as larger than a philosophy, deeper than mere art, an example of pure reason. His definition was both narrow and enormous, and it left his fellow writers, thinkers, and artists with the notion that they either were or were not Surrealists, whether they thought they were or not. If you said you were, you probably were not. The Surrealists did not reside in a safe and amusing world interrupted by slightly sad moments and then dinner; they lived fully in a horrifying and hilarious existence that demanded full attention, especially to one’s unconscious.
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