The Note

T h e   N o t e 

Once in awhile, I run across this photo.

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I am going to use a cliché here and say that this photo takes my breath away. Because it does. I can barely breath when I look at it.* I'm not especially afraid of heights. I don't like to fly, particularly, but that has less to do with the fact I'm at 30,000 feet than the fact that I'm sealed up in an aluminum tube from which I can't possibly escape until I'm on the ground in Atlanta. (And then there's the guy sitting next to me in the airplane who wants to tell me how the President of the United States is a secret Muslim.) 

I can't remember if I've mentioned here before that I've been a psychologist for more than 30 years. It troubles me not at all to tell you that human beings are more inexplicable to me now than ever. This is not a comment on the status of psychological science. It's a comment on freaking unfathomable human beings. (Well, that, and it probably is also a comment on the status of psychological science.)

So, it turns out there are lots of people who are capable of sitting or walking on a narrow iron girder hundreds of feet in the air. Just, you know, working and hanging out. Eating lunch. Telling jokes. Ask me how some people are capable of such a thing and I'll just blink at you. Ask me how Cormac McCarthy writes that kind of prose he writes and I dunno. Ask me how a single mother with a very ill child gets through the day. Dunno. Bach? Don't get it. Raphael? No idea. 

Then we have these people who are supposed to be representing our interests in Washington D.C. Listen, I've spent a good bit of time having conversations with psychotic people. A patient who would tell you that the night nurses in the hospital were trying to force dead fish up his rectum. You know I'm telling you the truth when I say that makes more sense to me than the behavior of some of our elected representatives, not to mention the thinking of the people that voted for them.

All I know to do is to try to spend more time thinking about the lovely, heroic, loving, genius things that people are capable of. If you have a better idea, be in touch.

Here's issue 69, which consists of poems under 30 words. As always, I want to thank the lovely people—speaking of lovely people—who sent in their work. I love this issue.

Your baffled editor,

Dale

*Back to the photograph. Some believe that the photo is misleading and that these men weren't in quite as much danger as it appears. For an interesting analysis of the famous photo, try this.