Snow and Staccato Thoughts

11am Sunday 2/16/14

At my corner. Snow.

More snow.

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Before I got to looking at this snow,  I walked around a young man in front of my apartment’s pine green dumpster. His music was clear through his hoods, hats, and headphones. The repetitive chants of a rapper’s meditations form and slice through the dry snow air. The voice has been altered:  it’s lowered, and injected with bass. The beat’s been slowed down. There’s something both unnatural and hypnotizing--incandescent even-- going on. The pull is like a moth drawn to zapper light, a zapper light being held by the hallowed arms of Sylvia Plath. Like a poem I think I get.

“I get bad bitches and bad money.”

I fluttered around him. I stepped from the slim deer path of packed down ice, a path of name brand boot prints and un-name brand breeds of paw prints.

I clean my corner and take my seat. I get to looking.

***

Why is everything I take in related to education today? Related to the classroom? This week at ACJ (Allegheny County Jail) my students (eleven men ranging in ages: 20’s-60’s) explored figurative language, simile’s and metaphors.

•    The Splenda snow, my students would dig that simile. They’d dog each other and get into a discussion about the taste of sugar.“Splenda tastes like shit,” one would say. Tastes like         shit, another opportunity to highlight the similes of our everyday speech. What does shit          taste like? I might ask, encouraging them to use more similes in their explanation. 
•         The Floam snow. There’s a culture/era marker. I’d have to check for understanding of this simile. Pictures help. This would be a good segueway into a discussion about the audience.

***

This snow has been trying my patience.

My thoughts on snow right here, right now:

 Snow the shape shifter: How it comes with force, with community, with the masses, demands its place to rest. How it melts, changes it shape and travels to those tiny veins of the unseen, the unconscious, freezes, unfreezes, calls attention to its expansion and contraction. How it calls attention to the blocked, water proofed, barricaded, impenetrable places of the soul. How it points its liquid finger at stunted growth. There, there, there, work on that, make that grow.

Snow the enforcer of absolute thinking:

White or black

Hot or cold

Good or bad person

Good or bad student

Good or bad teacher

Good or bad writer

Real or fake

Love or hate 

Snow the encourager of staccato thinking:

(See above and below format of this blog entry).

***

Somewhere during my writing the young man has left, taking his music with him. I feel a sadness, his bus hadn’t yet come, did my presence scare him away? Associative rhyme:

Good morning Mary Sunshine, why did you wake so soon? You scared the little birds away                    and shined away the moon.

To wake up is to scare the little birds away.

To wake up is to scare others away.

***

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Blog snow like, like, like...