I’m trying out some of the practices of Marie Kondō. It’s not all fitting perfectly into my life, but it is helping me get through piles of accumulated “someday I’ll need.” That was so congested that I could find nothing in it, review nothing—well, we’ve been making progress. 95% of it has left the house. Yay. And the 5% that I’m really glad to find have turned up. From that, anything I can digitize I am digitizing.

One delight is a memory of a theatre class at nerd camp from 1991. I remember none of the surnames of the people involved here. The lead was Noah, RJ was probably an advisor, and I think I played Peter the daffy psychic. But the poem stuck with me for the last 27 years, and perhaps someone else will find it by looking for this text:

The Upright Man stands straight and proud
He knows his mind and speaks out loud
His iron will, not tarnished or stained
But iron rusted the day it rained
His noble thoughts fall on deaf ears
Again he speaks, though no one hears.
Confronted by indifference, he knocks on other doors
And should a soul be listening, it draws back and ignores
He preaches words of honesty, of bravery, and fire
But finds himself a cast-away upon a sea of ire
Yet once again he shouts and screams, as angry storm clouds grow
Then lies there, bloody, broken, tamed, the Upright Man layed low
The man now lies beneath our feet
Trodden on, trampled, and finally beat
His iron soul a leaded weight
That sank him in a sea of hate
Rusted to his very core
The Upright Man, upright no more

You can have a nicely typeset copy of Upright in PDF or LaTeX, or the partial scan. And if you were involved, get in touch!