Dear Judgy McJudgerson,

It's true, we all judge.  You seem to feel all people are judgmental, so I wish to note a distinction between appraisal and judgement.  We greet each other and various situations with biological instinct, myriad social and cultural ideas, and personal experience.  We use these to evaluate people and situations.  This period of appraisal helps us decide how we feel, what we think, how we might act.   It is often a short route to judgement.  The opinion is formed, and we carry on accordingly.  Some circumstances require a steady stream of appraisal with thousands of judgements, big and small, filling in it's dimensions.  In the best of times we leave each other a little room.  

Figure it out,

The D.L.

 

Dear ghosts of violence past,

Where are we? East 76th? 77th? I know Jill and I passed Hodge on the way to her house. We talk on the right-side porch of it's narrow worker's frame. She may be chewing something.

The street fills with a rush of bodies. Jill's father (only remembered sighting) steps out of the screen door behind us. Her brothers are in the fist of men, and they fight suddenly, fiercely in the relative quiet of the afternoon. Our hearts pounded faster with their hearts as they pounded each other, waving their arms clumsily, but often, with cruel and meaty contact. Jill's father passes us, walks into the center of this throng and it seems for a moment that everything inside that circle of men is waving, showing itself slowly, showing it's circular patterns. It's musical arcs. Her mother opens the door in her suspicious, straight-backed way. Her shoulders slump. She is completely closed and a little electric. She looks thickly smooth, golden.

A nail poking through thin board hisses, and flattens the time shift. The nail finds an ear, tears through, pulls- it bleeds. We touch our ears. Jill's mother runs forward and the face of the lost ear blurs.

Enough! More dreams of flying.

The D.L.