Poem for Sunday, Lunch Fun, Drone

A Stone Is Nobody's
By Russell Edson

A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the
rest of his life.

His mother asked why.

He said, because it's held captive, because it is
captured.

Look, the stone is asleep, she said, it does not know
whether it's in a garden or not. Eternity and the stone
are mother and daughter; it is you who are getting old.
The stone is only sleeping.

But I caught it, mother, it is mine by conquest, he said.

A stone is nobody's, not even its own. It is you who are
conquered; you are minding the prisoner, which is yourself,
because you are afraid to go out, she said.

Yes yes, I am afraid, because you have never loved me,
he said.

Which is true, because you have always been to me as
the stone is to you, she said.

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After a relatively quiet morning organizing Google Music genres, I spent most of my afternoon at Lebanese Taverna and Baskin Robbins with Karen, Heather, Angela, Lena, and Teresa, enjoying food and catching up since we hadn't all been in the same room in months. It was a truly lovely day marred only because another good friend had lost a family member, and although it wasn't a surprise since the family member had been quite ill, I was sad for my friend and it changed the rest of our weekend plans. I had a bit of shopping that had to be done late in the day, but otherwise it was a quiet evening save for when I discovered that there were two Raikou raids in Cabin John Park, so just after dinner (leftovers) I went to meet some GroupMe friends. The Team Mystic group won both raids and I caught the Raikou both times! Here's a week of lunches out with friends:

















Then Paul and I watched Drone, which is a better movie than its reviews suggest. Sean Bean's character's white suburban Christian male life is built on illusion -- he thinks he has a good son who likes video games and a wife who loves him, though the camera angles and mirrors suggest otherwise. In fact he hardly knows his son, has lost his father, his wife has a lover, and his first-person shooter dream job is killing civilians in Pakistan. The confrontation over the drones isn't what's central, which seems to have frustrated reviewers who wanted a movie about the ethics of drone warfare like Eye in the Sky. I preferred the latter because the focus is so much more on the global cost, while the focus of this one is on the American, but both movies are about how dehumanizing drone strikes are for the people who perform them as well as for the people at whom they're aimed, and in that regard, this one works.