Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better moving of the will."
This quote is the short version of the original one Ben quickly adopted and memorized. I didn't really think about it twice until he did that. It's not unusual behavior for him. He's a real card. He knows all the latest jokes that he carefully memorizes. He knows all the words to the country songs over the last forty years. He drinks Budweiser and Black Jack, and confesses, if you press him, to his love for a fundamental version of Christianity that currently goes by the label "evangelical".
Rhetoric is a indeterminable word to me. I know what it means, and yet I don't. Here's the link to a website that has a page full of famous people's descriptions of what rhetoric is:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm
This is what I love about the internet. If I really wanna become an accomplished pundit on rhetoric, all the materials I might need to make that happen is just a click away. There has always been a part of me that regretted not taking enough time to consider studying how to be a librarian in college. I didn't take a single class in librarianism. I avoided it as if it was the plague. I thought being a male librarian might not suit my fancy. I thought I needed a tougher cover story than that. I was right. But now, it doesn't even matter anymore.
I became aware while I was in college, after four years in the Navy, that if I did use my GI Bill money to study what librarians did for a living it would serve me well. It would have worked out fine if I had followed through. I might have been a valuable enough researcher to attract deep-pocketed customers, but it might have been a real stretch for me to put their needs before my own. I am is a jealous god.
It's easy for me to recognize that a trained librarian could produce the study materials I might need for any particular project in a much more efficient and professional way that anything I might institute, but the internet search engines, specifically Google, obviated my regret for not manning up to learn logistics in a bookly way.
I'm really impressed with how I've evolved in getting the best search results I can get by what I type into the dialog box and hit enter. I just start typing keywords in no particular order. I don't use any punctuation marks to separate the words, I just type in every word I think might relate to the topic at hand and take my chances. The more related terms or expressions I can type on the entry box the greater the chance is that I'm gonna get a lotta pertinent hits in the first five result page links.
Today I searched for an author by typing down as many of the words of the lyrics of the song. I typed in four words in the lyrics I though were in the same lyric line. Maybe the first twenty links on the results page produced a multiplicity of sources for the author's name and all the lyrics whether the web master had a right to offer them up or no.
So, when I checked the mail today I saw that I had received a letter from the VA Hospital. I sort of expected it to contain the logistical information about my next appointment. My doctor kept asking me questions about my trip to Washington with the idea of scheduling me with an appointment after I returned.
The letter wasn't exactly about an appointment, and yet it was informative. It was the results from all the x-rays they did on my body. It told me that the results for rheumatoid arthritis were positive, and that I was going to have to go to the VA Hospital in Durham because they had an arthritis clinic there. I don't know what any of that means except that this diagnosis puts me in another category of patient. I have something definitively wrong they can pigeon-hole me with. My regular doctor seems to have already ordered some more radiation treatment. I've been told radiation is one of the only therapies they use. I don't know how it works to improve osteoporosis.
Finally having that talk with my ex-wife after 27 years apart is still haunting me. Just call me stupid, but I didn't really feel the separation that severely. Especially when we started talking as if no ti-me at all had passed. At least that's my perception of what happened between us. She was just as appealing to me as ever.
I wanted to kiss her. She's a great kisser. At least she was. I didn't kiss her. I just kinda wanted to for old time sake, but I knew the whole time we talked, that we'd both go back to where we come from alone. There was never any doubt about that. No quarter. No quarter. I know how she is, and that she wants a whole lot more from a man than I got to offer. I guess that's how I ended up a shaman (shamed man, wounded healer) living out in the woods on the edge of town by myself. I knew that twenty-seven years ago. She told me to my face. Why would she not? It left an indelible impression that I've never bothered to challenge since. No blame.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
