cliff notes for life...

so there we were...the wonderful women of my writers group...on a hot tuesday morning...lamenting the lack of real reading in schools these days...handouts not books...abbreviation over interpretation...and as it were, all things that hold our attention longer than the millisecond it takes to tweet...or post...or snap...time moves faster...our losses multiply...are paraded on social media for impersonal empathy...and then buried deep...i joked that it's almost like cliff notes for life...should we really sweat the small stuff...or even big stuff...when it will be something so easily forgotten in the time it takes to microwave your morning java...but then i had to pause...and the sadness was real...some student this fall will read "the grapes of wrath"...in twenty-five snippets or less...the rapturous beauty of americana swept away like the dust bowl that roared almost a century ago...some school district will put that mad dane "hamlet" on a shelf while drilling common core or other standardized bullshit that no one will remember years from now...not like my memory of the passion and joy passed from my teachers...even during the lean budget years of the seventies in the city..."twas brillig, and the slithy toves. did gyre and gimble in the wabe"...i can still hear the delight in our recitation...close my ears and smell the textbooks...musty...heavy in my hands...ah, life is short enough...burn the cliff notes...bonfire of insanity