49….

Deep spiritual thought:

“It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. Understanding your wounds can only be healing when that understanding is put at the service of your heart.

“Think of each wound as you would of a child who has been hurt by a friend. As long as that child is ranting and raving, trying to get back at the friend, one wound leads to another. But when the child can experience the consoling embrace of a parent, she or he can live through the pain, return to the friend, forgive, and build up a new relationship. Be gentle with yourself, and let your heart be your loving parent as you live your wounds through.”

-Henri Nouwen

Something beautiful/humor:

Elimination Dance (intermission)

Those who are allergic to the sea

Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs

American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters

Those who (while visiting a foreign countries) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem

Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs

All actors and poets who spit in the first row while they perform

Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool

Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert

Any person who had had the following dream.  You are in a subway station of a major city.  At the far end you see a coffee machine.  You put in two coins.  The Holy Grail drops down.  Then blood pours into the chalice

Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail

All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been “an urine sample”

Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers

Those who have filled in a  bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada.  (Une enquete sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)

Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book “The Mastery of Life’ in order to release their inner consciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul

Those who have accidentally stapled themselves

Anyone who been penetrated by a mountie

Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet

Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store

Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport

Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic

Men who have never touched a whippet

Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts

Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks

Those who have woken to find wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor

Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators

Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing, simultaneously the butane switches– one into each nostril– and so gassing him to death

Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont

Anyone who has been hired as a ‘professional beater’ and frightened grouse in teh direction of teh Queen Mother

Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis

Those who have come across their won telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal

Those who have used the following techniques of seduction:

-small talk at a falconry convention

-entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford

-making erotic rotations of the pevis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear

-underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad

Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law

Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point of a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with a dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a  study and looking intensely at one’s own book

The person who borrowed my Marvin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book thinking I wouldn’t notice

Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board

Anyone with pain

-Michael Ondaatje