in the land where "the pursuit of happiness", along with the life and liberty (I suppose because these two are minimum pre-requirements to pursue happiness?) were declared to be unalienable rights. Since I am still an "alien”, a legal one, I may not be able to make a full fledged claim to these "unalienable rights", as yet.

But if I change to human from alien, and theoretically speaking, manage to amass a modest fortune of say $10 million, and if this GOP engineered minimum wage bill passes, I will not have to pay the darn "guvnment" any of my money. But on the other hand, if I, theoretically, end up as a moderately ambitious waiter (who is also an aspiring writer) - it has known to happen; PhDs becoming waiters - in a moderately expensive restaurant, where people who are more successful in the pursuit of happiness would dine, any tips I may then receive, under this bill, would count towards the minimum wage.

O! Senator Frist, how many psychological incentives you provide to motivate lazy bones, like yours truely, to really, really pursue happiness, to hit that $10 million mark, and not turn to waitressing. Brilliant use of your Harvard Medical Degree, sir, if I may say so. Now let's turn to what is an essential book for both of us, sir, the Bible (even though you read it for divine guidance in order to effectively pronounce on sick people like Terri Schiavo for TV, while I read it, in the KJV version, for literary inspiration), and consider Matthew 19:24:

"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

Gosh darn it. Surely, Mr. Jesus was joking?! Ok, back to work. This is why I find reading newspapers to be a satirical and comic activity.

so described Walt Whitman himself, i.e, a kosmos, i.e., me in his "Leaves of Grass". Of course in the next few verses:

"Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest."

he also gave a pretty accurate summary of who I am today , sans "breeding". For that I will have to wait for the "touch" that will lead to:

Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields, Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

Yes, the touch of a woman who waits for me:

A woman waits for me—she contains all, nothing is lacking, Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself, In you I wrap a thousand onward years, On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America, The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers, The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn, I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings, I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now, I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now, I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

...

Or maybe not. Maybe I will just be a stepson of Manhattan, and will bury myself in some smoky New Jersey town like Hoboken, across the Hudson River from the gilttering spires of Manhattan, and maybe the loveless I too will breed, if only words, like this writer has done, drunk on New York, when I get there in a few months time.

Pablo Neruda wrote many odes to many elemental things such as an onion, a dictionary, a telescope, a suit etc. But he forgot to write one for the glance, an ode for which I need to read tonight. So I sit here at my table, pen poised over paper, priming the gears of the mind, the engines of the heart, hunting to say something simple about the glance, only to return to a dream that woke me up this morning, that dream of passing by a glance at a café, doubling back, back stepping to check if this was the glance, the glance that I seem to be on a chase for some time now, a glance hanging from the tip of an eye getting into a railway compartment, a glance caught sideways across a room in which someone is teasing a raga from his throat, a glance encountered when one eye flutters open for a second during lovemaking and the other eye receives it like the mouth of a postbox, a glance at dusk reflected in a shop’s display window, a glance crossing the road at a zebra crossing or zipping by in a car in the opposite direction, a glance that will blanket the open eye like sleep or forgetting, that glance whose glance I am chasing with this meager net of words like a butterfly in an endless field of insomnias.