I need a Jacques Derrida Finger Puppet

And a Michel Foucault.  And Schrodinger's cat.

I have the Kierkegaard already.  My rogue's gallery needs to feel complete.

I am only telling you this because sometimes desires need to go unfulfilled.  And I don't need them in the same sense I need a cup of coffee, or time for lectio divina, or a shower (I do need a shower; trust me).

What I really need is to spend more time among better thoughts than those I generally find on the interwebs.  Too much time sloshing around in the sewers of the national Id is not good for a person.  Universal literacy has not improved the human condition as much as we were told it would, and it is all too clear that if gunpowder were brain power, most people couldn't blow their own nose.

I am not speaking of anyone you know; nor anyone I know, for that matter.  Something there is that does not love a wall, but something there is about the intertoobs that is closer to mind reading than I ever want to get.  Harlan Ellison wrote a story once about a mind-reader who "stalked" women by entering their thoughts.  He enjoyed their darkest fantasies, their deepest secrets, and then he came across the hero of the story, who led him right down into her mental dungeon, and there locked him in and threw away the mental key.

I sometimes think of internet comments like that, only as a maze where I'll wander and wander, never finding the minotaur (sweet relief!) or daylight.

I like puppets.  Puppets represent something good in the world, something human.  How many other animals make figures in their own image, just to be able to stick them on refrigerators?  This is surely what sets us apart.

That and our ability to contemplate being, and turn "existential" into an adjective applicable only to a threat that, thus modified, is far more serious than life or death.

And puppets don't behead people for propaganda purposes (remind me again why we execute prisoners or bomb places far away from us), or turn people inside out just because petty power plays are enjoyable to them.

I like books.  I like puppets.  It's the simple things that matter most.

Maybe I do need some puppets, after all....