The Great Scheme of Things

I know it's been a while, well, not quite two weeks, but now that I'm in the AARP category, I'm like Uncle Joe (from Petticoat Junction), movin' kinda slow. And, well, starting on the new semester, observing the High Holy Days and now Sukkot, and my 50th (shudder) birthday, along with my son's 14th, all take their toll. Do not ask for whom they take their toll, they take their toll on me.

But I do want to share some MySpace goings-on here, if I may. And I have to say that I have had some very distinct, and some downright off-beat honors in my half century on this earth, but this one has just blown me away. A poet called Voo has written a poem about me, which she has posted on her MySpace blog. If you want the background on how this came to be, you can click here to go to a post I put up on my MySpace blog where I explained it all, and from there you can find a link to the poem itself. Just remember to come back here for the rest of this post.

Or if you want to cut out the middleman (that's me) and go straight to the poem itself, here's a direct link to The Great Scheme of Things. As I wrote on my other post, I am touched, thrilled, honored, flattered, flabbergasted, humbled, overwhelmed, amazed, enthralled, embarasssed, grateful, and absolutely in love with the poem that she wrote. And once again, I want to say, Thank You, Voo! And here's the general link to her blog, which is called The House of Voo. I do want to recommend all of her poetry, not just the one poem she wrote for me.

Now, as if that weren't enough, on the very same day another poet, Daniel Yaryan, put up a post with the heading, Inspired by MySpace poet "Lance Strate"...!!! I'm not sure what's going on here, maybe one of those celestial or astrological things, or maybe some small cosmic rebalancing of the scales for turning 50, maybe the universe is just trying to cheer me up and get me to stop feeling old and tired. I just don't know. But I do know that I am doubly flattered by this, and wrote about it on another post on my MySpace blog, which you can read if you click here.

And once again, there's a link from my page to Yaryan's poem, or you can go directly to WE RETREAT BACK INSIDE. Either way, please do remember to come back here afterwards for the rest of this entry. As I wrote on my other blog, I am grateful to have played some small role in Daniel's creative process, and humbled by his generosity in identifying me as the source of his inspiration for this work. So now let me say, Thank You, Daniel! And here's the general link to his blog, which is called FUTUREMAN PROPAGANDA. I do want to recommend all of his poetry as well, not just this particular entry.

Now, regular readers of my Blog Time Passing (I think there may be 1 or 2 out there) may recall that I started my second blog this summer to play around with some poetry. I make no claims and have no pretensions about being a Poet with a capital P, or an Artist with a capital A, I'm just out to have some fun, and play with language even more freely that I do here on Blog Time Passing, where at the very least I feel obligated to make some kind of sense, and deliver some kind of intellectual content.

And the poetry I've posted has varied in content, some of it silly, some of it spiritual, some of it personal, and some of it media ecological. How could I avoid writing about media ecology, after all? If I forget thee, O media ecology, may my right brain wither!

So, there have been media ecological poems mixed in from the beginning (easiest way to see an entire listing is to click on the Writing and Poetry tag towards the top of each of my poetry posts. And just recently, I posted a trio of media ecological poems.

The first was a poem about blogs and blog culture, especially as it exists on MySpace. And as a play on the name of my MySpace blog, Lance Strate's BlogVersed, I called the poem Blog Versus (and this is the fourth poem that plays with that blog name). So, this was the poem that inspired Yaryan to come up with his own poetic take on the Blog Wars theme.

The second was a short and silly verse entitled Yo! Yo! Johann! Mainz Your Own Business! which of course is about Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.

And the third I called In the Age of Show Business, which is dedicated to the memory of Neil Postman. Neil passed away just before Yom Kippur began four years ago, and he was in my thoughts when I recited the Kaddish last Friday and Saturday at services at Congregation Adas Emuno.

I also want to acknowledge another, different kind of loss here, that of a virtual friend. I knew her from MySpace, and she often posted comments here on Blog Time Passing, as well as over there, and I enjoyed reading her own blog here on blogspot. For some reason unknown to me, she suddenly deleted her MySpace profile last week, along with her blogger blog, in effect eradicating her virtual presence, at least as far as I know. To be honest, I am worried about her wellbeing, and just hope that this withdrawal from the virtual world does not reflect something more serious in the physical world. And I do miss our exchanges of messages and comments. The friendship was virtual, the sadness is real.

It seems that there is never joy without some sadness present as well, but the compensation is that there is never sadness without at least some small cause for joy. And that, I suppose, is the way things go, in the great scheme of things.