Cath1123 inspired this blog. Her comment on my When Worlds Colloid journal page included "what were you trying to say?" So I took a good look at the image and the words, and had to admit: By golly, this is NOT Immediately Obvious. What am I trying to be, Rude the Obscure?

Many of my journal pages have that Huh? factor. I have a feeling that people who want to know what's going on with my images will benefit from a thorough analysis of this one, so I'm going to do my best to describe how this page came to be, in correct chronology.

When I started the page, I had no idea what I was going to do. Often when I have no idea, I doodle. This time round I happened to doodle eggy shapes all stuck to each other. That's a fun, easy doodle, and sometimes amazing patterns occur.

Suddenly I remembered that the word COLLOID had something to do with bubbly stuff. My Webster's II said "suspension of finely divided particles in a continuous medium" so now I had a handle on the title, and quickly the George Pal movie (fun to watch late at night after enhancing the brain with Pain Go Bye-Bye Juice) WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE came to mind; & it worked, if you think of "finely divided particles" as little worlds in their own right.

I added a nice subcolloidal Date, and then wondered about an appropriate verse. Thought it would be good to relate colloidal dynamics to the notion shared by many, including the current President of the United States, that things like sunsets, puppy dogs, and, yes, beautifully arrayed clumps of eggyshapes, demonstrate that the universe was CREATED by Intelligent Design, and didn't JUST HAPPEN.

Well, the word for such a school of thought is Teleology. When I learned that word as a freshman at Glendale Community College, in Philosophy class, I hung onto it like a puppy dog at sunset hangs on to a colloidal Squeaky Toy. I just knew it would come in handy one day. And THIS was the day!

For practitioners of Teleology, the world is chock full of such treasures. Hey--Teleology and Treasure both start with a T. So I decided my Acrostic, the first letter of every line read vertically, would spell TREASURE, and the first word would be . . . Teleology . . . ?

Not quite. The word TEL e o LOG i cal is better; it's dactylic--one accented syllable then two not. (When you aspire to be the future Poet Laureate of the United States, you need to know such things.) So now I had a template for my poem's meter, and the complete first line: TELEOLOGICAL.

Teleological WHAT? Gotta start with an R. How about Ratatouille? It's tasty, it's a mixture, there are no meat products in it, and it's a wonderful movie from the totally reliable folks at Pixar Animation. French words aren't accented on certain syllables the way English words are, but ignorant Americans like me (even after two years of college French) accent them away at their heart's content. So we MAKE it fit the dactylic.

Problem! not ENOUGH syllables! --Well, that never bothered Billy Joel and his Cadillac-ack-ack-ack-ack and Heart Attack-ack-ack-ack-ack. Oowie, gonna stick an -ou-ee at the end.

Now I need something to rhyme with the first line. Logical, modgical, you can run but you can't dodgical. Old stodgy folks like me tend to the stodgical--STODGICAL! Oh KAY then. Gotta start with an E for the rest. EVIL OLD STODGICAL--that's it! And it fits--I am addressing a way of thinking I regard as seductive and yet outmoded and wrong. (Need a whole 'nother blog to get into that.)

Fourth line came quick. I flashed to high school Latin: Absum, abesse, afui, afitus--hope that's right. Got a creaky memory when I ask it to go back almost 40 years. I'm not here, to be not here, you never saw me, Being Unhere . . . where we get the word "absent." "Afui" always sounded like a sneeze to me. Even though my poems are nothing to sneeze at, gonna put it here: because to me a sneeze is an accident, and to me, though I don't KNOW, I SUSPECT the Universe DID Just Happen, and the Universe Maker is Absent. (See Carl Sagan's intro to Hawking's A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.)

The last four lines came in logical progression from the first four. Wanted to address the whole Holy mystery, so started line 5 with variant of sanctum sanctorum, with a tip of the hat to that timeless classic Aura Lee. A twist of the cliche "upsetting the applecart," which heretical thinkers like me certainly do, advertently or otherwise, with those darn "Rigid-faith moral" folks, who will STILL be upset even if you provide them with the Grapple Bar that will make your facility Morally Handicapped Accessible.

But from this divisive Idea Battlefield still comes TREASURE.

After I did the poem, I looked at the page and found it unbalanced. Big gaping nothing along the bottom, mainly. So with a little help from the Ballroom Blitz Girl In the Corner, a little more doodling, and that Get Out of Jail Free Composition-Balancing Signature, I was done, done, done.

--Hey . . . (hey hey hey)

Anybody still here? (here here here)

Is that an echo? (echo echo echo)

Did I make of myself a Schmuck?? (gary gary gary)