Theme Variation

                   
                                           
                                           
The world is. . . .                                            
                                                       
                                                            
Well through ill, the journey of my life has/// been a piece of cake;    
but, I tell you:  You would not want to eat it.  Recently, I have    
found myself often re-imagining incidents in my life based on the    
old saw:  Knowing what I know now, if I could live my life over   
again, I would. . . .  *** Reflecting on this, I have arrived at two   
conclusions:  1) "Knowing what I know now" cannot be substituted   
for knowing what I knew then -- 2) "If I could live my life over  
again, I would" do exactly what I did.  Even if I grant that all my   
choices were made/ selflessly, I could only have made them as the   
wisdom I had at those moments moved me to.  I am a creature    
of a continuum of present moments exiting from and entering into  
present moments, and the excellence of my memory and/or ability   
to devine the future notwithstanding, the best I can do is the   
best I can do at the moment of each choice because I am not a   
perfect being.  "All you who are without sin cast the first stone."
                                                                    
So, the idea that I should not fuss over a choice I have made           
because the past is past is inconsequential.  I am not a Fatalist.
In spite of the barriers against it, I know it is possible for me   
to improve, and to that end/ re-imagining an event which cannot    
be changed is not without value.                                   
                                                                   
About my memory:  My memory tends to be tied to the traumatic,   
to those occurrences which impact my emotions.  I do not have    
a strong rote memory.  Only the first line of the poem linked   
to above remained available to my consciouness.  Therefore,    
when I read the entire poem earlier today, I was shocked by   
a reference to a mythical being in it.  A verse I included in   
my 1982 Alden St. Cloud First Pick, a verse written when I    
was in high school, appears to have been directly influenced   
by that poem.  A mere twenty or twenty-five copies of First  
Pick were printed, and since I no longer had any of those 
copies, I have picked that book apart, placing what is in it   
in other books.  Being a selected and new book, most of what
is in it is from yet other books anyway.                     
                                                             
About my IQ:  My first recollection is 117, but I have    
scored as low as 100 and as high as 150.  Big deal.  The   
only important test of that nature I did well on was the
1984 GRE I took at UF in Gainesville, Florida.  I was 43
then, and had been motivated by a lawyer I knew to seek  
a degree in Accounting.  In preparation I took several  
computer and accounting courses at the local college.  
I also studied rigorously for the exam.  This is not    
the first time I have written about this online, but I
scored 740 on the Verbal section and 630 on the Quant.
I was accepted by the University of Florida's Fisher   
School of Accounting but I couldn't even muster the   
energy to make it through one semester.  So I thought--
since Donald Justice, whom I had missed at Iowa, was
conducting a workshop at UF--I should try to get into
the university's Doctorate in English program.  With
help via a letter from Marvin Bell, I was accepted.
However, unknown to me until after the fact, I chose
to take a course in non-Shakespearean Renaissance    
Drama, a course presided over by that department's  
most difficult professor.  Not that that would have  
made any real difference since even though I did get
through the semester, I knew I would not be able to
muster the energy to continue.  The drama professor
said I should continue writing poems.  My spurt in   
Accounting, alas, had me in the stock market; and   
the GRE preparation had me into heuristic delvings
in mathematics.  I wrote some papers and a tome on 
the latter, and I built a tomb in the former.     
                                                  
Back to the GRE.  Online is a site which shows the IQ    
(using 2 measuring methods: Wechsler and Stanford-Binet)
and also the Percentile a GRE score approximates.   *  
Rather silly, but hey.                 
                                                          
Onward is the only direction: which means/ ever, ever   
closer to being no longer Earth-alive; which is why I say:    
      Death is the only life worth living.              
                                                        
                                                                      
                                                      
                                                     
                                                    
                                                   
                                                  
kh00016