Sitting in cafés in Paris was cool when everyone was allowed to smoke Gauloises and Gitanes and talk about Existentialism. Now the health fascists have banned the practice the conformists have won the day.
---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: That's what it says on the steet sign across the road from where I'm sitting. The Street Of Hope. Cool. And the password for the free Wifi at this cafe is 'cafe'. That's cool, too. And they have Westmalle Tripel. That's just WAY cool. What can I say? I am easily amused by little things. But still, doesn't sitting down in a new cafe to write in and discovering that you're literally sitting on the Street Of Hope sound like a *sign*? Maybe what I should write about, in this new writing cafe, is HOPE. OK, here goes. Hope. I still have it, in spades. Despite what has been said about me on this forum and others in the past, I am *not* at heart a cynic. I know few people *more* hopeful than I am. And I see ample reason in the world I see around me to *be* hopeful. It's really not such a bad place. Get over it, if you believe it is. This world is full of great beauty and great art and great love. And these things are there even in the darkest corners of supposed hopelessness. And what you focus on, you become. When I find someone who's invented a new artform, as has Elena Divina with her Cyr wheel in the videos I posted earlier, I focus on that, and I feel more hopeful. A world that can produce that is FAR from hopeless. It's like the ending to Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose Of Cairo." Cecilia (Mia Farrow) has had a bad day. She's on the street, homeless after telling her abusive husband to fuck off, and finding out that the other man she'd fallen in love with is fictional. She has nowhere to stay, and nowhere to go, and has very little money in her pockets. But she finds herself standing in front of a movie theater, and spends one of her last coins to go in and watch the movie. And up on the screen is Fred Astaire. And suddenly there is hope. Because no world that has Fred Astaire in it could possibly be hopeless.
