To Be or Not to Be, To Go or Not to Go

All poetry
is a journey
into the unknown.
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930), Russian poet and playwright

I work downtown and going across down is generally a pain. Going across town in the rain is even a bigger pain. I vacillated about whether I wanted to hassle driving across town in the rain to UCLA to take a poetry class.

I turned off my computer, and I was still standing around in my office, when a co-worker came by and asked why I had not left for class yet. I told her I was not sure I wanted to deal with traffic and getting home at 11 p.m. and have the alarm go off at 5 a.m. But she encouraged me and I went.

I wrote down the registration number, the instructor’s name, printed out a map to find the parking structure, I just forgot one little item – the classroom number. I got to the campus, hunted for the lot, asked a few people who looked like they might be going to an extension class if they had a catalog, no one did. I called the main office, which was closed. Finally, I discovered a campus bookstore nearby, which had the catalog.

I found the class and it was everything that I hoped it would be. It was a wonderful break from the corporate world. The instructor is intelligent or appears so, and the 10 students, who range in all ages, appear interested and interesting. I look forward to next Tuesday.

Tonight is Kevin Phillips at the downtown library discussing his new book “American Theocracy, The peril and politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.”