Exocoetidae

Simple Machines describes his experience awaking from a dream. He discovers he can go to places in his subconscious that induce a childlike euphoria. The experiment has a surprise twist:

And then I "went" to one of these places (in my subconscious state, mind you) and it caused what I sensed as such an intense feeling of elation that it was too much, too intense, and not pleasurable -- so disturbingly so that it was enough to wake me up!

What is there about my mind that it allows me to experience a sense of well-being so intense that it was excruciating?

I wonder if our wiring maps our feelings in a continuous loop.

I once looked out from a 90 passenger tour boat scooting across the Caribbean where turquoise sun and flying fish are no surprise. My smile was nearly big enough to shade my eyes, impossible but not at all unlikely. When my brain arrived at Aphrodite overload, I realized later, I skulked away to our thrifty cabin by the engine room to ground myself in words on paper as paradise sped by.

Words on paper through the years have told me stories of tortured prisoners who reach a certain painless state beyond the agony. A woman told me once of running out her front door to a bleeding child who'd been hit by a truck. While she soothed and whispered him from this life to the next, he said it didn't hurt -- she saw a beautiful place reflected in his face.

I've written here before about the symphony conductor who suffered brain injury. Music that once charmed him was excruciating to his altered wiring.

Controlled euphoria, now there's a buzzword for the marketeers. Package a sound, a look, a taste, a feel, a scent that takes consumers to the crest of the wave but holds them back from Hades. Extravaganza makers accept the challenge. Arena rock shows take aim at the wonder bird, kick up the decibels, lay on the spectacle, song after song. Even after all that, the kids are OK, euphoria aroused and contained.

If you think elation's worth the gamble, race your wheels along the coast road, windows down, radio up. Belt the songs into fourth gear. The world is round, the ocean's wide, and even fish can fly.

Disambiguation

Vivid threads brush my thoughts since reading Memoirs of a Geisha. It's not her untamable yearning for a certain man that visits me, it is Sayuri herself, and the eyes through which her geisha culture asks me to see my world.

A geisha studies the art of filling the emptiness that haunts a man's unexamined impulses. She draws her clients out of their functionary minds with dance, music, ceremony, kimono, conversation, laughter and sometimes, if a man is worthy, the intimate touch.

Rock artist would seem as far from geisha as slug from silkworm, but look again. Performance rock elevates the listener to the region of complicit passion woven into existence, invisible to many. In the hands of the diva, her tools -- lyric, rhythm, sound, musicianship, choreography, costume -- dissolve into the audience's palpable pleasure. Like businessmen at a tea ceremony, listeners sip their own thoughts in the presence of the diva whose deference, like the geisha's, is to unquestionable beauty.

Peer review

Coldplay. Impeccable musicianship. Stunning visuals. Lush sounds. Infatigable energy. Flawless choreography. Expert production. Winning message (what was it again? -- oh -- right -- 'emotion - it's all good'). Friendly personas. 'What's not to like?' as I told the tipsy dancer to my right.

I liked it well enough. I liked my concert companion. I liked the spectacle. This morning when I went for the paper, I did a little Chris Martin scamper in the grass, so I guess it changed me. Got me lighter on my toes. What if Chris sprained himself doing one of his leaping knee slides? Ouch -- tour hiatus for sure. See how the show awakened my compassion? What if the fan behind us, beer in one hand, cocktail in the other, lost his equilibrium, or his dinner, in our laps? See -- Coldplay really got me thinking about intimacy and trust.

Quicken Loans Arena, the Q, is a well oiled pleasure engine. The rafters groan with techno borg enhancements, the cavernous UFO scoops up humans, snaps us into numbered pods, tranquilizes cerebellums with massive waves of light and sound until we're synchronizing nicely. Community. That's a good thing, no? So why do I feel like I just woke up from a funky dream?

The Coldplay boys are not to blame, they've earned their fame, the humanoids adore them. I'm the one who bucks the norm, likes a little warmth in all that playfulness. But hey, I'm an alien myself, guitar enamored troubadour who'd rather be the purple cow than see one.

Silver palaces

He eulogized the bad boys,
James and Jack,
but Marilyn was sacred.
Her sultry innocence
regarded him through tilted windows
hung on tacks
that pocked
the adolescent's lair.
A girl who breathed his air
and hoped for more
desired in vain.
She came no closer to his pen
than moistened hands
to sighs of platinum
in velvet seated night.
Mortality denuded him,
he burrowed in
delusions of the screen.

Every girl on earth
can bow to Marilyn,
her rival from beyond,
a feminist unblemished.
Once a daughter walks the halls
of headless boys
enamored of the goddess,
she is free.

To love the holy rites
of imperfection.

To offer them
unblinking
to a man.

Egret's brood

The furrows in her father's brow
who held the plow?
Botox he never knew ye.

Gott sei dank
with his beloved Jane to care for
doctors found recalcitrance's boney shadow
strangling his heart.
Just in time they told him
just in time
their science and the blade
would save him from arrest
and certain death --

Arrest for what
this Christian man
and why?

The temptress was cholesterol
his appetite desired her
Delilah to his samsonite
her time bomb peaceably begrudging him his days.

Good the surgeons pacified the terrorist.
Good the husband lived to tend his sweetheart to her grave.
Good the father's hand
implanted rows like wings
across the brow
as herons glide
from tree to tree
remembering
their path.

Emily

Wren of a girl in a gauze dress
tramps the wilderness
in the wry company of words

Beauty queens of boiler plated armor
serve her up on beds of ridicule

They ache and dine
on emptiness
to party out their feigned desire

In this age
a poet swathed in muslin
could be hallowed
but the paparazzi shutters
find her not

Diminutive Ms Dickinson
slips between
the misted evergreens

Boys with bras

Put a guitar in a woman's hands and let her play. If she gets good, damn her with feigned praise à la Patty Larkin's ditty, Not Bad for a Broad.

'Girls with guitars' sounds like 'bros with bras' -- not what you'd expect but, hey, kinky's cool, it's still a free country, man. Let 'er play -- she's not hurting anybody and it looks kinda sexy, no?

Pop culture says there's no such thing as bad press. Janet Jackson's name recognition got a respectable jolt when her body amour faltered on the football field. OK, maybe not so respectable, but the jolt was real, ask a zillion bug eye witnesses.

So, is the female guitarist blessed or cursed by the music writer's ubiquitous chant: gee, the dame's got a strat strapped around her gilded frame so what the heck, let's write an article about THAT!

More pop wisdom: sex sells. My elderly dad expressed amazement that a mini skirted glamour girl at the auto show knew all about transmissions and fuel efficiency. Huge convention hall, car lovers agog over white wall tires and shapely legs in good working order. Sexy makes the world go round, that's show biz baby.

Maybe.

Then there is art, and tools that fuel the art, hands and minds and guts that use the tools well. Listeners who respond to the depth of a performer's skill honed over decades thank the writer who plucks the genderless nerve with imagination and skill.

Last night at band practice I fumed, 'if I see one more 'chick with guitar' article I'm gonna puke! When you see a woman player, do you think Oh my God, I can't believe she's got a guitar in her hands?'

'It's just an angle for a story,' says the elegant bassist. 'It's a stupid angle.'

'When I see a female guitar player,' says the eloquent drummer, 'I prob'ly think I want that guitar.'

Thanks, amigos. I needed that.

Groundswell

A spine doctor's personal alternative to work induced stress is running.

The solitude creates an environment for quality thinking. I can't do anything else when I run.

The president of a design firm who works 70 travel heavy hours a week, turns to high speed biking for release.

Some people drink, some smoke, some carouse -- I keep myself active.

A musician I know has lost 30 pounds in 2 months keeping himself active with weight training, biking, swimming. He packs it in around a full course load, household duties and art projects, the latest involving digital photography, photoshop and paint on fabric.

When I work on something with my hands, I think about things differently.

I swim in water or in air. The air swim happens in performance when listeners have brought their solitude to bare. They come for the music, nothing less. Composition, practice, recording, marketing -- all this informs a moment of release that may last an hour or more. Intimacy gathers in a hall of strangers wrapped in the sweet sweat of a song, unwinding.

Fife n berry

Andy Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday,

Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions. Don was special. There's nobody like him. I loved him very much. We had a long and wonderful life together.

I call her my giant begonia. Wing span one meter plus. Jolly green leaves veined in deep salmon. Every time I get near her with pruning implements, I see she's given birth to more pale bloom babies at the furthest reaches of her solar plexus; I leave her to nurse her young.

It started out innocent enough one spring when Barbara, my botanically gifted neighbor, plunked a pot stand of flagrant foliage on my porch like so much ripe squash. I carted the monstrosity up to my tree house, left it for dead. Goddess knows, the tooth fairy must have shed some star dust on the grand dame. She thrived in my abandon, thrust her downy petals into summer's watch. A wistful Barbara told me the lady had never blessed her former mistress thus in all the years they'd lived together. I began to understand the allure of the unlikely lover.

Don Knotts died last week. He was the hyper inflated underling, least likely to thrive, late bloomer cast on the shores of a sit com unaware of its destiny: to unfurl the pink extravagance of this comedic hero. Barney Fife transformed Mayberry into the best vaudeville stage TV itself might conjure. Perfect chemistry on a summer's night, fans held a flutter, laughter caught high in the rafters of somebody's chicken barn eight miles south.

My parents, especially Mom, loved the Andy Griffith Show. When I was too little for sit coms, I drifted off to the sound of laughter downstairs. Deputy Fife, blustery, insecure, homely, endearing fool that he was, held my mother spellbound and neighing in the palms of his gigantically scrawny hands.

Pray

fold the paper
fold the hands

Reporter in Baghdad
her deadline
is past.

Inmates, Kabuli,
have captured
Block Two.

Paris has kidnapped
and murdered
the Jew.

Sunni jihadis
have tortured
the mosque.

US extremities,
innocence,
lost.

fold the paper
fold the hands

pray

Macon's lament

George Will says conservatives are happier than liberals (he's got research to back him on this) because conservatives

acknowledge the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of bold government undertakings are apt to be larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.

Conservatives take comfort in this. Meanwhile, conscientious liberals deprive themselves of the simplest delights, even automotive ones, because

there is global warming to worry about, and the perils of corporate-driven consumerism, which is the handmaiden of bourgeoisie materialism. And high-powered cars (how many liberals drive Corvettes?) are metaphors (for America's reckless foreign policy, for machismo rampant, etc.). And then there is -- was -- all that rustic beauty paved over for highways. (And for those giant parking lots at exurban mega-churches. The less said about them the better.) And automobiles discourage the egalitarian enjoyment of mass transit. And automobiles, by facilitating suburban sprawl, deny sprawl's victims -- that word must make an appearance in liberal laments; and lament is what liberals do -- the uplifting communitarian experience of high-density living.

Will calls Liberalism

...a grim and scolding creed. And not one conducive to happiness.

Recently, foreign oil workers got caught up in bold government undertakings:

Macon Hawkins, who was one of nine men seized by heavily armed militants in the restive Niger River Delta a week ago, told reporters yesterday that U.S. President George W. Bush and the United Nations need to help resolve the standoff between oil companies and the people of the impoverished region.

"They get nothing out of the oil, and they produce all of the oil," Hawkins said as he sat on a small boat among hooded young men armed with machine guns and one rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "They're tired of it, so they're going to fight, and they're going to fight until death."

Despite his captivity, Hawkins appeared to be in good spirits:

Hawkins, who said he was from a small town in Texas, said he would turn 69 on March 1. Asked what he wanted for his birthday, he replied "freedom," and laughed heartily.

Hawkins' hearty laugh would seem to pose a conundrum to George Will's happiness theory. On the one hand, the Texas oil worker has a firm grasp on the consequences of bold government undertakings. On the other, despite his consequent capture, the man is laughing heartily. Both hands place him squarely in the conservative boat.

But then there's Mr. Hawkins' comment about giving Nigerians a piece of the action before they demand it, to the death. This is sounding more like the automotively conservative liberal lament, affability notwithstanding.

This is the beauty of research and statistics. Whether Hawkins or the Nigerians are granted independence anytime soon, they can be seen as the insignificant tail of the curve, hardly a challenge to the great Law of Unintended Consequences, flapping unperturbable on George's orwellian flagpole.

Ester's sister's wine casserole

Today I'm vacuuming -- first time in weeks. It brings me to tears. If I hadn't set out on the mindless chore, I might have forgotten Mimi, the woman I met yesterday when I told stories at Judson Park. Little kids and their moms sat on the floor, the elderly occupied couches and wheelchairs. Teddy and Kathleen could not be sure if my puppets were as intriguing as the ant colony traversing the carpet. The ants definitely got the staff's attention. Judson is a meticulously clean facility and proud of it.

While the young ones passed the cookies, I greeted the elders. That's when I met Mimi who looked as though, were she more agile, she would rather be pruning begonias. So I didn't expect her eyes, swimming behind thick glasses, to widen and shine into mine. 'So glad you could be here,' said Mimi as she must have said hundreds of times in her life, and just as true. Of course, she reminded me of my mom, who exchanged her wheelchair for wings over a year ago. The kind, quiet woman with a gentle hand in mine; I couldn't cry for Jane in the middle of the day room, though I'm sure Mimi would have understood. But here I stand the day after, wand in hand, poking at blurred lace and faded sills.

I bring this up because it's in vogue to debunk the routine. Creativity is hip, career trajectory is cool, networking on all fronts, now that's hot. Oh, really? Define exotic: excitingly different. Define different. Elaborate on exciting.

Drummer Bobby Sanabria grew up in the South Bronx. When Maestro Tito Puente showed up at Bobby's housing project with his Latin Jazz, the boy had an epiphany: here's how I will spend my life. He travels the planet, making music. Exotic? Excitingly different? Any musician will tell you, to be good enough to globe trot your music, you practice. A lot.

I have a theory. Routine's not the demon. The real challenger is choice. Every minute brings a slew of possibilities. Routine is just a choice you make to organize your day into a reasonable subset of choices lest you go mad. Kids and the elderly often have choices made for them. And we, the middle dwellers, do the best we can, sculpting our flutes from the tree of life.

So I wave my wand, make a choice, my epiphany c/o Mimi and Jane: to play the exotic instrument of graciousness every day. If I do end up being tended by strangers, as many of us shall, I plan to be so practiced in this skill that it never leaves me.

So glad you could be here. May I pour you some tea?

Burning bushes

The Institute of Medicine, federally chartered to conduct research requested by Congress, noted that service members are often exposed to prolonged loud noises -- from guns, rockets and other weapons, plus heavy-duty vehicles, planes and ships.... By comparing the hearing of those who had served in Iraq with the hearing of those who had not, researchers concluded that soldiers sent to battle zones were 52.5 times more likely to suffer auditory damage.

Ball players suffer chronic injuries. Miners get black lung; their dugout is deeper. And soldiers, if they survive, often come home to a less audible world.

As more is revealed about the selective hearing practiced by this executive branch that led soldiers to its war, I ask: can we the people tune in to reason and integrity, or are have we been permanently deafened by our leaders' raging fictions?

You say terrorism's real as coal dust, somebody's got to step up to the plate for the sake of the citizens? Terrorism is real. We are told not to question our government's motives or means in this conflict. Why? Because it is the government? If terrorists are lurking in the bushes, the best defense is prolonged loud noises -- guns, rockets and other weapons, plus heavy-duty vehicles, planes and ships of state?

You may be right about terrorism lurking in the bushes. And, just as plausibly, terrorism is the bush menagerie, perpetually aflame with black gold, imitating the gods.

Limping olympia

When that race was over, her coach Peter Foley covered his mouth with his hands and fell to the ground. Her friends and relatives stopped waving their American flags.

It had happened in 1986 when friends and relatives and the television public watched the Challenger explode. Victory roared up to an airless gasp in one millisecond of techno-phantasm, spiraling off into blue screen.

Fast forward 1.5 decades. You are living out the American dream: love conquers all and eco-military prowess conquers the agape holdouts. A co-worker murmurs in the hallway, they think we're under attack, two planes just rammed the twin towers in New York. Lips frozen mid greeting, brain torn up in impossible meanings, you follow the coach to his knees.

Lindsey Jacobellis was supposed to win the gold. For us! For all the non-snowboarding klutzes who love to stand on that top block with her, our white smiles and sculpted bodies quivering in the wind. It's a tradition by now which, Ms. Jacobellis has found, you mess with, you bring on the scorn of the masses. She has been grilled, psychoanalyzed, insulted:

Lindsey Jacobellis had gold within her reach. Instead she went for one last roar from the crowd, stupidly trying a flashy trick when all she needed to do was slide down the hill.

So say the pundits: All you needed to do, NASA geniuses, was get those O-rings seated right before blast off. All you needed to do, CIA honchos, was coordinate your vaulted intelligence with your potent mainframes. And all you had to do, Lindsay J, was slide down the hill... you robbed us of our gold with your last minute tricks, wounded us with your pride. And if there's one thing we can't stand around here, it's hubris.

Ask Jack. Ask Jill. Ask the Greeks. There's tragedy at the foot of that hill.

Delusion and grace

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

Albert, did you leave us a theorem, a formula, an equation for solving the mystery of compassion? A theology professor once told me knowledge changed behavior, using the example of grass. Ever since he learned how slowly a patch of grass regains vitality after feet press it to the ground, he could not bring himself to cut freestyle across the quad. He was a principled man, more disciplined than I or most mortals. I know or can know in a key stroke how many babies die of AIDs or malaria in the time it takes to finish this sentence...

This is the kind of discussion that makes you twitch and turn the radio to a happy song in a major key. It's more fun to enjoy life than embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty, right?

Unless you choose to explore your world. Yes, one of the most self indulgent vices turns out to be the most humane. Real art, the kind where delving is second nature and honesty can't help itself, sets you on a course of no return. At first you find out the accumulation of stuff holds no allure, except for the materials of creation. Then you notice you have nothing to say in pleasant conversations about the us and the them. You lose your ability to interpret that language. Gradually you rearrange your work and play to cram so much creativity into the horn, priorities shift. And finally? I don't know the finally, I only know I have fewer boastful, envious, competitive reactions to life when I'm bringing new songs into the world. I can't say why, but I do know this is taking me toward a wider embrace of the people, the nature of my planet.

Albert's not here to advise or dissent. Except in the artist sensibility of his bequest.

Talisman

A dream. A mountain girl in a weathered schoolhouse. She is pretty and plain of clothing and hair, unbothered by fashion, blocky of build but not ungraceful. Her teacher is a poet laureate, a Shirley Jones kind of disciplined beauty with cropped hair and regal cheeks. The dame is sure of her talent only so far as others revere it.

Two gents, white haired, patient, sit in the classroom, observing the girl. One tells the other he is captivated by her writing. Both speak of her as of the Christ in second coming. The first man is certain that, when her writing ripens, she will be a master. Her thoughts are otherworldly, her words natural as her hair, pure as her mountain skin.

There is more adventure. The young woman would rescue her kin in a helicopter over which she has ungainly control. It becomes clear she is a kangaroo! -- loping, flatfooted, tail a-thwap against the hardtack earth in her cumbersome rush to save the weak. I awaken early to this sweet image of birth and recognition, duty and innocence, torch passing and gravitas.

I often dream less hopeful. I flee the nights' calamities, I search for burning answers. I wake up spent. Is the mind a reflection of the world? Jung's collective underworld, perhaps? Is a savior coming? Is she here, evolving? Are we not as doomed as nightmares, in the mind and in the news, portend?

Stay tuned to the sub subconscious. She will lope across this dearth and save your soul.

Darrow's sorrow

Don't be my knight in shining armor.
How can I love you if you hide away?
Armor will not protect your lady
from lovers' sorrow by light of day.
-- words & music © Susan Weber

In muted awe, two small boys stare at polished exoskeletons in the museum's famed armor court. Even stallions wore protective hardware, back in the day. A helmet cannot speak, eye slits cannot weep, chain mail does not groan its stories of frustration and defeat. As agonies of labor fade away when babies slide into the brightness, these knights in shining pose survival of the fittest's bloodless testament to life.

Here is the outfit that may save your torso from extinction in the Baghdad games today:

helmet 3.5 lbs
helmet cover .2 lbs
ballistic eye wear .2 lbs
outer tactical vest 8.4 lbs
front and back protective inserts for tactical vest 10.9 lbs
side protective inserts for tactical vests 7 lbs
M-16 rifle with attachments 9 lbs
gloves .3 lbs
magazines with ammunition 13.7 lbs
pouches 1.9 lbs
knee and elbow pads 1 lb
green smoke grenades (2) 4 lbs
hydration system with water 6.3 lbs
first aid kit 1 lb
combat assault sling .4 lbs
bayonet 1.3 lbs
fragmentation grenades (2) 4 lbs
earplugs with case .1 lbs
radio 1.1 lbs

Seventy four point three pounds. How many babies could you carry to their mamas' breasts if someone said this battle's over, shed your armor plate, rejoin the living? Maybe just one, you, the knight who dare not cry so long as tournament kings have summoned curators to hold their banners high.

You don't need armor plate to
be charming in this place to
close the space between us if you choose to.
Don't be my knight in shining
Don't be my knight in shining
Don't be my knight in shining
be my knight for real.
-- words & music © Susan Weber

Banyan

When I was smaller than just about everything, I reached up for the cup on the TV. Grabbing me, my hand, the cup and (quite loudly) my attention, my mother averted a scalding and a scarring more vivid than this memory. I was astonished, as I dangled in her trembling arms, to see the cup brimmed with black coffee when just yesterday, hadn't I picked raisins out of the same cup, set on the table my Grandpa made?

'Be careful' is the prayer good parents speak to childrens' dreams and dangers. Strapping gas masks on his children as scud alarms blared, my Israeli friend said, 'the worst fear a parent can feel is not being able to protect your children.' We build our fences tall and strong around the innocent.

To err is human; even air can suffocate the child. Howard Hughes' mother warned him the typhus would take him if he strayed into the village. The only latitude she left him was up -- his safest love, the sky. He who feared the ordinary door knob engineered commercial planes for earthbound citizens, that parents might tremble anew.

What does it take for a person, or a people, to be free? There is a banyan tree on a virgin island. Its branches dangle earthward, taking root. This tree with a thousand trunks will never leave its real estate. It is worthy of a picture and a picnic in its shade. At dusk, the sun adorns it with a silver tiara. Protected by the government, it shall never be a mast or a guitar or plough or a girl's small table, holding raisins.

Brainbeats

One spring day, a coke in hand, sunglasses on my nose, I go to the zoo with second graders. Mid bus trip, my mind slips into surreal waters; children, parents, movements, sounds become more fluid. Kids lean over seats and teachers laugh at the wide highway, driver hunched and steady -- we are immersed in the opulent dance.

I have this feeling another time with a crowd of New Yorkers steaming full throttle down Broadway. Our symphony moves from light to light, beat to beat, rest to rest, with each player's unique touch on the instrument.

I wait with a sick child in the emergency room. I used to work here. Nurses and doctors buzz past each other, or stop to discuss, buzz to the next bedside or chart the night's fandango on a giant board. Or is this a team of coaches splashing game plans on the wall? When I was the suited worker, I was too invested in minutiae to feel the game unfolding.

I'm in this zone again with three artists painting images and sound on a canvas known as Crooked River Groove. We know and do this job: perform our music on a stage. Our live audience consists of engineers who document our show. Four cameras roll across the studio, the sound board hums. I find a silent grace in the TV crew's concerted movements. Their calm intensity draws me out beyond the bounds of nervousness or self-regard. Their sphere of creativity incapsulates and magnifies my own. Our host, Professor Wiggins, tells us we've done well connecting with the electrons -- a worthy phrase for all the times where time is nearly still, slow motioning the neurons in our minds to span millennia as every true performance tends to do.

Dot matrix

A woman goes to work, to school, to dentist, grocery store and church. She takes her kids to lessons, calls her parents from the waiting room or her sister from the car. On the side she's filming documentaries on the homeless, sending screenplay rewrites to an LA producer. Her husband stirs the soup and shovels snow or paints the house.

In a non flick of the keyboard, her life is changed. An email she's about to delete stops her cold. I'm watching you is the subject; she starts to read, prepared to sift through bogus hype and a link she won't pursue. Instead, the sender is uncannily acquainted with her life, noting every detail. For however long it takes to read the swimming text, she does not breathe. When a parched white rasp escapes her throat, her eyelids pinch to black denial. How long? How much? How possible? How wrong... how... wrong... how...

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about."