Red Hurts

I saw something so ironic today, and very quick. The day ended with bright and overcast skies, and as you moved backward, the clouds became sterner and lower until at the earliest hours, windswept fog swept the highways dangerously slick with rain. I took a break at noon, and after I had washed and dried my hands in the restroom at the Holiday Inn at Fisherman's Wharf, three men came through the door in quick succession. As the third man entered the cramped quarters, he paused to hold the restroom door open, as if for my benefit, though blocking me from a clear shot at the trash! Then he moved directly in front of the basket to crank out a long length of paper towel for himself, I guess for, well, who knows? Now what's interesting about this temporary blockade, from a supposedly "considerate" person, is that an unconscious part of him, I could see, saw what he was doing! "It's a little green eyeball that has a whole universe in it," my teacher said yesterday, and I wondered most of the day what that could be. Then I saw a picture of it! It's on the back of a dollar bill, the green eyeball over the pyramid! "Annuit Coeptis," the uncut reverse of the Great Seal of the United States reads, "Novus Ordo Seclorum." [Rough translation from the Latin: "A new succession of ages are upon us; The Eye of Providence is favourable to our endeavours."] Except when it's the third eye of the fourth man inside a Holiday Inn restroom!


Trends and Everyday Events in

the Early Twenty-First Century

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Richard Ames Hart

Saturday 24 May 2003