A Fibonacci sonnet: “Hindsight.”
September 8th, 2007
Greed. Necessity. Bad planning.
I don’t care. Call it what you want. Point is, some money fell into my hands.
I can’t claim I hesitated any to grab it once it got there. I also can’t claim to have the slightest idea what to do with money once I do lay hands on it.
Now, you might think that my God-fearing, church-going childhood would give me the sort of personal character that would keep me from making off with ill-gotten gains, or trying to make off with them.
But you’d be wrong, and though it would break my poor mother’s heart to hear it, I have to confess that my baser passions — for drink, for fast women, for cars and horses and Cuban cigars — took over my better judgment and led me down a path that I cannot recommend to you or anyone.
Don’t let me give you the wrong impression, because I had my share of thrills, and if I had the chance to do it all again, probably I would dive right in like before.
But it’s easy to see the error in your ways when you sit in here with 20/20 hindsight to guide you. In here you have lots of time to contemplate the wrongs you’ve done. Way too much time to think everything over.
20/20 hindsight is a bitch.
Ahh, who cares? I’m here. Alive. Breathing.
~~~
[If it need be said, all of these things are fictional.]
December 13th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
[…] Countless examples from the world of art support the idea that tight contraints can foster great creativity. For an easy set of examples, consider the formal patterns of poetry; the haiku, sonnet, and sestina forms, for example, have provided a playground for poets as great as Shakespeare and Issa. One of my favorite constrained forms is the Fibonacci sonnet, in which you write a story with successive sentences that have the same number of words as the corresponding entry in the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. (I’ve composed a few of these.) […]