Rant #1

From Boulder to Kansas City 98 degrees and 100% humidity up at 4am no traffic, addled with heat and no sleep, I'm at the airport again. Flight attendant sleepy too with the optimistic welcome, "have a pleasant and profitable week." I sincerely hope so. Through Denver again and out to San Francisco. It's foggy and cool, almost half the temperature of Kansas City, same humidity. I'm riding BART into the city for the first time ever. Why don't other cities adopt better mass transit? I talked for an hour on the plane with a Cap Gemini man about how fucked up our priorities are. He was born in India, living in Missouri, slowly working south to the Cayman Islands ;). I also had a discussion with some United Airlines flight attendants. These people are up in arms over the recent $860M bonus awarded the CEO while the employees have lost benefits and their retirement fund. Sadly no one trusts the government to do the right thing any more. Where are the heroes? We should form a democracy, screw the republic. Healthcare costs are killing us, killing productivity, killing competitive ability, demoralizing us. How ironic. The dream of America is dying on the vine, so much promise, so small our expectations. We must rebuild our infrastructure (are we living in a third world country where we expect the bridges to occasionally collapse), we must not surrender our opportunities, we must bolster our poor for the next generation of heroes, or where else do we go? Our perfect picket fence lives have expired. It is time to reinvent ourselves...

Art is Everywhere

I arrived at the KCI airport early this morning for a week long trip to the city by the bay. I bought my Starbucks latte and not able to take it into the gate decided to walk the concourse. I found a myriad of curious circular tessellations while following the little cross patterns on the floor. Here are a couple of them... No, I wasn't on acid, just tired :)

Kansas Highway

Sparse trees stand straight,
hardy pine against the wind,
cottonwood soft in the gulch.

The grasslands roll,
sturdy but soft too,
losing ground, always losing ground
to cornfields abutting the sky.

Silent tractor smoke plume
like a lonely astronaut,
barely tethered here
to this strong earth.

Alongside telephone poles in rows
and drainage ditches,
martian silos and oil dereks,
and signs of how far we have to go
are manicured overpasses.

It's 80mph here all the way,
all the way to the Atlantic,
I suppose, on another summer's day.

copyright Tim Wolters 2007