234. Let Me Build You a Patio

Let me build you a patio, as we call it in our patois. A lump of dirt will do to start. After I have leveled with you, I will arrange stone and mortar.  I will perspire, grunt, and imagine.

Shards of blue and red ceramic plates and cups, green glazed pieces of pottery, the occasional brick. These I shall include. I am no patio purist, slavish about slate.

It's a jazz patio. Up for that? Riffs and notes. It will drain in the right direction, don't worry.

Yes, it will be lumpy and curious, stout and eager.

My patios never speak. They listen.

People will envy the fact that the patio is solely yours, inimitable,  and not at all like that other patio and that other one and all the sameness-patios. I assert this.

The patio will be as useful as other patios. It will be maddeningly whimsical. It will be this, and it will be that, and most of all, it will be done, on Earth and not in heaven.

This is the patio-package I present to you.


2014 hans ostrom

233. The Game in the Village

In the village, the game has been played for generations. The stated purpose of the game is to discover the rules of the game.

Each generation, all players, and all moves within the game support this purpose. As rules are discovered or invented and thence incorporated officially into the game, players adhere to the rules as they play. But none of the rules or the play may inhibit the discovery or creation of new rules.

Basic particulars of the game include the following: As few as two as and many as seventeen players may play the game. Each player gets a small stick, a red wrist-band, a geometric token, ten words, and twenty two-digit numbers.

Play begins when one player grasps his or her tongue and tries to say one of the ten words. Play continues.

Eventually one player wins--but when, and how, and why? Such larger questions, if one may call them that, live at the heart of the game in the village.


hans ostrom 2014