Leonardo Drawing
The Odds
If you’re a person given to gambling,
What odds would you lay on the following:
A grizzled dude straddling his big Harley
Presents his better half as his “old lady”?
His better half (who sports a lovely tan)
Calls her bewhiskered partner “my old man”?
When you put salt and pepper on your snack
You shake the white stuff first and then the black?
Extremely educated persons need
To start each sentence with the word “indeed”?
Down on the farm where simple ways are dear,
The people say “yonder,” not “over there”?
In the metropolis where hipsters reign
“Aw shucks!” is not how they express their pain.
The odds are fair that the above are true.
A word of caution is, however, due:
If ster-e-o-types give you great delight,
Beware of barking dogs that also bite.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
Wikipediaphilia
It’s a boon to have fingertip access to all knowledge. I can quote from the Critique of Pure Reason hands down. But many times another person pivots continually to smart phone in order to referee a fact fight during just a conversation.
I’m increasingly happy to luxuriate in ignorance. A really fine strand of thought isn’t necessarily advanced by going granular on specifics.
“In Praise of Dreams” by Jan Garbarek, the Norwegian saxophonist, features a piece called “Cloud of Unknowing.”
The phrase “cloud of unknowing” has a bracing resonance. Unknowing isn’t the same as ignorance. A cloud of it contrasts with, say, a “cloud of indifference.”
Perhaps the two clouds pit fecund uncertainty against incurious certitude. Perhaps one is conciliating, the other pugilistic. Perhaps one fosters circumspection, the other opprobrium.
Perhaps I Googled “origin of universe” and the search god returned “not found” from the stomping grounds of unknowing. But perhaps it returned an Okefenokee of conviction from where doubt goes to die.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]