Lincoln Park, Washington Square

What a week of teaching! Two new classes starting at NYU, two days in Lincoln Park, a teacher workshop, meetings. So thankful to be with no meeting, no work tonight. So loxed out, I watched a cheap bio pic about Michael Jackson

It seems so long since we got back from Italy. Italy was like a restart on the computer, somehow, a lot of rough edges smoothed, things that seemed tangled smoothed out. You push the restart and problems disappear.

Like the old depression treatment of shock therapy, only delightful
instead of traumatic! Yesterday, in Lincoln Park, NJ, I saw a woman in a pink
sweatshirt with a waddling little gray old dog that squatted in some
dirty snow. I found it moving for some reason, the sad tragedy of
this country, people stumbling along, thinking somehow they are righteous
and have the right to stomp on whoever.

In Washington Square, in New York, when I go to teach
there, the big Judson Memorial church keeps on its message board the
count of American service people dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, well
over a thousand now, but also over a hundred thousdan Afghanis and
Iraquis. The question is: for those other people we don't count (Saddam
is beaten, full speed ahead!) who are dead or whose families are dead,
was it worth it? I doubt it, but the real point to me is, why did
the people in Washington, riding on the ignorance of the pink lady
with the fat dog, get to decide?

The rawness the sharp edges here in the United States are just blowing
me away, the new homes in the developmets are are attractive– spacious,
but the sharp edges are what I keep comparing to the buildings seen
from a distance in Tuscany, on the train from Rome to Florence. But
even in the cities there was a roundness of the the cobblestones the
piazzas, the old stone work in Florence.