The White Rolls-Royce Stretch Limousine

Saturday night a white Rolls-Royce stretch limo was in the right lane when I was in the left.  It was a beautiful thing. Gleaming white, dark windows, spare tire cover on the trunk, emblem on the hood.  You have to wonder who is inside when you see a car like that.  Who could be worthy?  I wanted to think it was a celebrity who'd come from a performance at the Arena, going to the airport, but it was too early in the evening.  More probably some tacky couple was on their way to the Woodlands to dance and get drunk. 

Some years ago I saw a creamy brown Rolls on the Harveys Lake road.  The license plate had something to do with Andy Warhol, who'd already been dead a long time. I've wondered ever since who owned that car. 

Evil Serial Killers

Saturday at Barnes & Noble on the bargain table I saw a book called "Evil Serial Killers," and thought, "as opposed to all those good serial killers out there?"  The only supposedly good one is Dexter, a fictional character on HBO.  Is the author making a distinction between evil killers and mentally ill killers?  Couldn't a case be made that all serial killers are both evil and mentally ill?  Maybe evil and crazy are the same thing.  Nevertheless the word "evil" in that book title is seriously redundant. 

Plastic Containers and Paranoia

There is no uniformity among the makers of plastic containers so that the lids of one container will fit a container made by a different company.  Two plastic sandwich-size containers, to the untutored eye, look exactly the same.  Yet the lid to one is, in some subtle way, the wrong size for the other. 

Competition cannot explain this.  It is pure chance which containers I buy the next time I shop.  I'll probably end up with a third kind that doesn't match the other two.  And I'm certainly not going to bring the lids of the containers I have at home with me.  If I were that organized I wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't have time to write about it.  I'd be spending hours obsessing over plastic containers, much as I am now. 

What can explain this?  The logical answer is that the containers are not made by different companies, but by the same corporation under different names.  It's an evil corporate plot designed to make us buy more containers, and blame ourselves for not remembering which kind we already have.  It's a devious monopoly designed to take advantage of the thousands, nay millions, of tiny ways a lid may differ from its accompanying bottom.  Where are the anti-monopoly laws?  Where is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? 

Blue Dress Dream

Last night I dreamed I was looking at the side of a blue dress with a narrow black sash, dangling from the waist, not tied.  It was not an attractive dress, rather cheap-looking jersey, in a blue similar to the "Save Now" shade at the bottom of this posting window.  It would not have looked good on me. 

Ulysses Chapter 3

I've been reading the Gifford annotations for Chapter 3  - which I did read first - and find an alarming number of theological references, Thomas Aquinas and Arius, among others.  Somehow just reading the chapter it did not seem so religiously oriented.  So many people, for so many hundreds of years, have argued over how the Christian god is divided up, which parts are more divine than others, which came first and from where.  Mobs ran amuk over these questions and people were burned at the stake. 

Yet I think if I lived back then - I imagine myself as an artisan, skilled in some sort of handworking - I would not have cared anymore than I do now.  I think it was all political, really, a question of who you felt more personally comfortable with as your bishop, for example.  Many questions in Congress are equally trivial yet arouse such emotion.  It was a struggle for power back then, as it is now, and all that fruitless speculation about the nature of the Holy Ghost was just an excuse to take sides.