Author: Mike Hoffman

Down and out semi poet who is down and out in the Low Country of South Carolina after living in Atlanta which is not to be confused with the south, the old south or the new south. Atlanta was a global metropolis with all the pluses and minuses that comes with that. The low country, low because it is low, 8 feet above sea level, is not Podunk but once you get to Podunk, turn left. I try to chronicle a small part of all that through my daily haiku for you.

7.8.2023 – no matter how good

no matter how good
you feel, the morning won’t be
as it is right now

I know how you feel.

If I were walking, I’d be a foot off the ground.

It’s like just falling in love — you want the sensations to last forever.

You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

W. P. Kinsella in the book, Shoeless Joe.

Going back to my roots, I have started listening to books on tape, welllll, audio books on my drive to work.

It is a shame really.

I live in a coastal paradise.

The drive through palm trees and across the intercoastal waterway as the sun rises out of the Atlantic Ocean should be enough of a daily treat that I would never tire of seeing it.

To be sure, I greet the visual aspect of my twice a week commute with pleasure that far outweighs any that I might have felt driving into the city of Atlanta.

It is my co-drivers.

The people I share my experience with.

The people who I would gladly banish to far off Mongolia if I could.

Bill Bryson once wrote something along the lines that God planned for Mr. Bryson to spend part of his day with the dumbest people in the world and that God arranged that by bringing the dumbest people in the world in their cars to drive along with Mr. Bryson to work.

I know what he means.

The frustration of yelling at drivers who marvel at things like a traffic light changing.

These people find this so marvelous, they sit and watch it for several cycles.

I need to escape and I use audio books to take me away from these people.

I can lose myself in the story and find myself at work or at home and much angst-less than without the audio book.

I also happened to be gifted three Audible credits for Father’s Day and because of this, I discovered Audibles free list.

I returned to audio books with an old favorite, Shoeless Joe.

I love the book and the choice of words in the writing but I also like the reader, Grover Gardner and I have searched out his books as he reads with a voice I hear in my head when I read.

Anyway, listening to Shoeless Joe, the writing in Shoeless Joe has been much on mind

W.P. Kinsella can turn a phrase with the best of them.

Mr. Hemingway wrote that to write about an experience is such a way that the experience became part of the collective consciousness of the reader was what it took to be a writer.

Mr. Kinsella writes about common things in our collective consciousness in a way that makes me stop and say to myself, Yup, that’s it.

Mr. Kinsella even starts this passage with know how you feel.

And he does.

If I were walking, I’d be a foot off the ground. It’s like just falling in love — you want the sensations to last forever. You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

Romance.

Being in love.

Being happy to see someone.

You want the sensations to last forever.

You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

But the feeling doesn’t last forever.

In the morning it won’t be a good as it is right now.

Love stories start with romance.

The romance or maybe the romantic feelings don’t last by the love story can go on.

Romance is a hybrid world.

A land maybe of make believe.

The land where, for a while, dreams can come true.

A land where feelings can’t be sustained.

Because in the morning it won’t be a good as it is right now.

I am remined of Orson Welles in the Third Man with this famous speech.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

7.72023 – sensed deep in his bones

sensed deep in his bones
natural state of universe
was endless summer

Though he had never lived in a truly warm climate he always sensed deep in his bones that the natural state of the universe was endless summer, though he had only heard rumors of its existence.

He had heard of places where the grass was eternally green, where snow was spoken of with nostalgia by people who had not endured it for years.

But Miami, and Florida, that tropical green finger with the angelic aura of white sand, was so perfect, so magical, the possibilities of baseball so endless, that its mere existence almost caused Sandor to acknowledge the possibility of a God.

From Butterfly Winter by WP Kinsella, 2011, Winnipeg, Enfield & Wizenty

7.6.2023 – deep embarrassment

deep embarrassment
only after did I learn
of the monument

I recently read of a video that captured a tourist in Rome carving his initials into the bricks of the Colosseum.

The tourist in question has announced that, “It is with deep embarrassment that only after what regrettably happened did I learn of the antiquity of the monument.”

The feller made the effort to take a trip to Rome.

The feller made the effort to see the Colosseum.

But he couldn’t tell you why he made the effort or at least that the effort was not made due to the antiquity of the monuments that fill the City of Rome.

I am reminded of the short piece,

One of my favorites was “Demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres” in comedian Steve Martin’s book Cruel Shoes.

Mr. Rivers was raised in the city of New York, had become involved in construction and slowly advanced himself to the level of crane operator for a demolition company. The firm had grown enormously, and he was shipped off to France for a special job. He started work early on a Friday and, due to a poorly drawn map, at six-thirty one morning in February, began the demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.

The first swing of the ball knifed an arc so deadly that it tore down nearly a third of a wall and the glass shattered almost in tones, and it seemed to scream over the noise of the engine as the fuel was pumped in the long neck of the crane that threw the ball through a window of the Cathedral of Chartres.

The aftermath was complex and chaotic, and Rivers was allowed to go home to New York, and he opened up books on the Cathedral and read about it and thought to himself how lucky he was to have seen it before it was destroyed.

7.4.2023 – people determined

people determined
correct what perceive to be
injustice, error

Now, some 180-odd years later, we can say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

We’ve made it.

And not because we have not come through some rough, indeed perilous, times.

The history of each of the amendments to the Constitution, including the first ten, our Bill of Rights, is invariably the story of a self-governing people determined to correct what they perceive to be injustice and error.

In fact, one might say that each amendment added to the Constitution was an attempt of the American people to expand and extend the blessings of self-government and its manifold benefits to an ever-wider circle of our citizenry.

John Henry Faulk wrote that back during the Watergate Era.

He wrote:

“… the office is invariably bigger, more important, and a lot more permanent than the officeholder.

The powers that go with the highest office in the land, the presidency, are awesome indeed.

But they belong to the people, all the people, still.

The man who holds that office and forgets whom those powers really belong to does so at his own peril.

As we have seen.”

What Mr. Faulk would have made of what is going on now is interesting to ponder.

Yet all I can come up with is that I understand why the Children of Israel “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, When we remembered Zion.“

During Watergate, Mr. Faulk wrote, “Now what’s causing all the confusion?

Why, the fact that we’ve got a prominent citizen, a man that has held the highest office in the land, suspected of some felony crimes.

But, he’s so prominent and held such a respected office, that we don’t know whether he even ought to be indicted, let alone made to stand trial.

More than that, it’s going to hurt a lot of people’s feelings if he is put through the wringer.

It’s going to hurt a lot of folks’ feelings if he ain’t.”

And that was all based on Watergate.

As Former President Obama said of Mr. Trump and the battle of the birth certificate, “Remember when we thought that was as crazy as he would get?”

It all reminds of something else Mr. Faulk wrote in his Pear Orchard series:

… you know, that there worries me a heap. By God, it seems that people don’t quite know what it’s all about no more. Them that talks loudest is the ones that seem to know the least.

All quotes from The uncensored John Henry Faulk by John Henry Faulk, 1985, Austin, Tex., Texas Monthly Press.

This is the flag I ordered through the office of Congressman John Lewis before he died.

I have a certificate that the flag once flew over the Capitol Building of the United States of America.

It used to mean a lot around the world.

… used to.

It used to stand for an American people eager to expand and extend the blessings of self-government and its manifold benefits to an ever-wider circle of our citizenry.

… an ever-wider circle of our citizenry.

It can again.