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CHILLIN’ AT CHIPOTLE

An example of the cups being used by Chipotle as part of a new series that includes writing by authors like Toni Morrison, George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer.
An example of the cups being used by Chipotle as part of a new series that includes writing by authors like Toni Morrison, George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer.

 

The following 26 questions by Jonathan  Safran Foer were found on  drink cup from Chipotle in Ithaca, NY. The story behind this thoughtful Disposable Literature campaign can be read at chipotle-experiments-with-disposable-literature.html

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1.  What’s the kindest thing you almost did?

 2.  Is your fear of insomnia stronger than the fear that awoke you?

 3.   Are bonsai cruel?

 4.   Do you love what you love or just the feeling?

 5. Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or do you look at your young self?

 6.  Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent?

 7.  Do you walk on moving walkways?

 8.    Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it?

 9.  Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter?

 10.   Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone?

 11.  How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life?

 12.  What would you tell your father if it were possible?

 13.   Which is changing faster, your body or your mind?

 14.  Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis?

 15.   Are you in any way angry at your phone?

 16.   When you pass a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither?

 17.   Is there any thing that you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it?

 18.  If you could be assured that more money would not make you the least bit happier, would you still want more money?

 19. What has been irrevocably spoiled for you?

 20. If your deepest secret became public, would you be forgiven?

 21.  Is your best friend your kindest friend?

 22.  Is it in any way cruel to give a dog a name?

 23.  Is there anything you feel a need to confess?

 24.  You know that a group of crows is called a ‘murder of crows’, likewise a group of buzzards is called a ‘wake of buzzards’ – but what is a group of ravens called?

 25. What is it about death that frightens you?

 26. How does is make you feel to know that the answer to 24 is an “unkindness of ravens”?

 

 

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BRIEF JOY

big-sky.jpg

All joy should be brief

And unequal to

The hard headlines

Hardened hearts will not abide

The soft bed of inertia

 

And when the loud lash

Of man’s inhumanity hits

We’ll bear it in solidarity

Take up the fight readily

Against the ebola of greed, fear, hatred.

Fight the idea

That a life of dreams

await to be plucked

From suburban hangars of desire

 

We will not drive our fancy cars

Through the ghettos of the homeless

Fearing the hollow men who stand

At the intersections of history and early death

– Death by the popping sounds of 1000 door locks

Protecting soft lives 

 

Joy should be brief to prepare

For the fall from grace’s rim

From the summit of kindness

Where the air is too thin

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CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY – NORTH: A Bed Sheet Sign on an Overpass

Slide1

Through what strange porthole do we

    Drag our outsized dreams

    All the while cursing its size

    And not the size of our schemes

What is right and what is wrong

    Unruled by the heart

    Vaguely menacing headlines

    Parading news as art

There is order in the forests

    Though no king or queen abides

    We fear dark hard silence

    And the mute in life’s asides

Outside margins there exists

    The right for us to grow

    To a fullness that disturbs the gist

    The city’s turbid ebb and flow

 Pare not your life to other’s whim

    Live the largeness of your dream

     Ignore the porthole its jagged rim

     That rips and disesteems

For me, I shall look for clues

    Sometimes a lost endeavor

    To a freeway sign – not a ruse

    “The worst ancestors ever.”