Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus on novelty, the rational mind, and choice.

"What is wickedness?  It is that which many times and often thou hast already seen and known in the world.  And so oft as anything doth happen that might otherwise trouble thee, let this momento presently come to thy mind, that it is that which thou hast already often seen and known."  -Marcus Aurelius

Nothing new under the sun, for all things of old, of novelty, elapse again and again, over and over, according to Solomon, some thousand years before Marcus Aurelius.   Death and life renews again and again, and only perhaps, in Buddhism do we see a common thread each time with a novel twist in terms of reincarnations, but the distinction there is granular, because the particulars, though different, are yet the same.

The duality between same and distinct, or new and old, leads us of course, to the great duality that is the Tao, the indefinite distinctive quality of truth.

"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial."  -Marcus Aurelius

You can, to some degree, choose your focus, direct the quill or till of the spirit towards the shores that we find most beneficent.  We have the choice when we are in conscious control.

"Of all the faculties, you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself, and consequently, not capable of either approving or disapproving."  -Epictetus

"But when you must write something to a friend, grammar will tell you what words you should write; but whether you should write or not, grammar will not tell you."

"What faculty then will tell you?

That which contemplates both itself and all other things.

And what is this faculty?  The rational faculty; for this is the only faculty that we have received which examines itself, what it is, and what power it has, and what is the value of this gift, and examines all other faculties: for what else is there which tells us that golden things are beautiful, for they do not say so themselves?"  -Epictetus

"All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.  But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them...."  -Marcus Aurelius

If I should forget thee, Parnassus.

The doings of a year: defensible?  We sort of float through, and yes, we can later summarize whatever misdeeds as purely justifiable.  In the diaspora, the dog-leg, the caboose, we have a Dennis Miller kind of hodgepodge of commentary, seeing as it were, ammonia-sniffers and so forth.

Malcolm X went to Mecca, the pilgrimage, and others, Parnassus, Sappho, Deuteronomy.

Volley.  Thunder.

The Lord coming out of the cave, Roman guards unawares, and the look on the Apostles' faces.

"This.

Changes.

Everything!"

I crossed my own Rubricon, and took my notchbacks and hindrances forth, yet without breaching the civic centrum, yet without thresholding zero, or cornholding the inflamed and enfamed and entitled.  We crossed forth into a country undiscovered, peradventure that the future was a time and a place unset, and we Sarah Conner-ed our little asses into something of a deadspin-freefall in which we just had to get our heads together, you know, to put it all, as it were, into perspective, and we couldn't just postcard the thing,

what a week was,

what a week coming,

the past passed, elapsed into the dustbin of history, and social media gears turning, and all that, the salad cat and all.

And I'm thinking, what would you do for a bucket of Honey Fried?

And, circumspect, I was, a kind of thought to oneself, a quiet moment, when another threshold held in advance, and it was all

all

-I was a thought to oneself?

The FAHCK?!?

Bartholomew, the Lord's rising changes, in fact, everything, and we live in the shadow of grace, in a place beyond conscience and reason, but not necessarily snuggled in a gunny sack, a pillowcase of mere sensation, feeling the sheets, and brushing fronds through the woodlands, we indeed live in a 

civilized society?

Beast, as it were, made civil?

Table manners and all?

Dress nice and eat your baked hamburger, Cheevers, for He is Risen.  Saunders was saying, "the secret is Prime Meat.  Can't skimp on the meat."  And the cuts were choice, and good.

A Risen for the season.

Ask the Oprah what the future holds.

 

Forthright MC: "Contrapunctus 1: The Art of the Fugue"

 

"Among the Native Negroes" Futnuckery/the fireballer takes up "Black History Month" (0r "Ten Minutes at 350)

The native people are so often, a downcast set, porters and livery workers, so much.  Of sex amongst the evening toad calls and crickets, it seems a sport, and the dialect between them is shared in radio broadcasts, such as popular music and the spirituals.

"Finally the Crock has come back....

to Mckinnon.

Hear me with your hearts, Lester Maddux Peanut Dome."

Cheesy Gah-luck Bread.

Whole grain, whole wheat our multi grain bread.  Bottom layer.

then butter.

then cracked pepper.

then garlic powder

then onion powder

then chili powder

then basil.

Then shredded cheese.

(shredded cheese is crucial to allow thermal venting to eviscerate the butters.)

10 minutes at 350.

Raw Wounds: "Nuthin says lovin like simpin' for the coven."

They all came to hear Brocrates, and Paulcibiades lay at his feet, trying to appear beautiful.

"Thou art fair" he said.

"We may all have to cover you so nothing unusual happens.  Dogpile."

Spermlord and Assmaster, Spermlord looking like a character from a Brian DePalma movie("I'm Benny Blanco!"), had their annotations, and revealed a noxious odor from some of the commentary crew.

Had he been drinking?  Heavy drugs?

They were all about the art and telling of new things, and they even let the Apostle Paul speak to them, for they were good for a story, the hearing of something new.  Regal moments of bliss, stealing a moment and so forth.  "Put em in a box and see who rises to the top."

"A man is a featherless biped."

And Kevin, just like Brocrates, walked in with a plucked chicken and said, "behold a man."

Alcibiades trumped his own purity, anal virginity, his natural fluting, how he made pleasant sounds in the Avis shitbox Malibu.

Reasonable people would just light it up and leave it beside the road, like some of ours do, but Brocrates was, too, about the natural classification and questioning of things.

Thoreau on the "now", and myself examine the ever new meeting place of the future and the past.

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."

The nicked notch swatch stirring rod of time, that great axial protuberance, knitting along the fabric of all, intermeshing such things as the idle philosopher, the taxidermist, an Instagram influencer, and the odd newsman, here and there.  I too have stood at that nexus, future ahead and past squarely behind, and the great needle scraping along at 78 rpm.

I remember once, sitting in 87 degrees, the bird screaming less than 24 inches from my elbow, and a giant Motorola console player going with an instrumental long play on the wrong speed.  With no vocals, I had not a reference to know it was at the wrong speed, and it made rather Hawaiian sounds seem rather pop foppish; it traversed the breadth of time and thought between Chet Atkins and Herman's Hermits.

The bird was sociable, and at varying times and circumstances, it was difficult to tell if he went about in complaint or conversation.

"You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.  I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate."

"To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself!"

To be intelligent and circumspect, to learn from the past.  To be free, to untether from the past.  If I could at once focus my time and energy on the turkey oak in the corner of the lot, and that which, I was a fluster with a lizard crawling in my pants leg.

It wasn't the charming Geico lizard, either.

There was kind of a nexus there at the pivoting point of now, right now, and you could feel, as it were, the folding of something like a newspaper, even after the bird died.  I didn't go about like Thoreau, asking strangers if they had seen him; but there were veritably people I could have asked.

I was under a friends car, looking from the front suspension, ball joints, constant velocity joints, MacPherson struts, and all, towards the rear stabilizer, fuel tank, catalytic converter and all that.  It was more suspect than circumspect I thought, and I was being identified about, as it were, I was some sort of fugitive, that too, after being referred to as a Mexican expatriate: it was but to take it all in, as if I were an engine expelling love and light, or hate and bad jokes, when I had been served a diet of sin consciousness.

There had been fish tacos, I suppose, was a time and place, a cratering or something, a lady in yellow, and all.  State Troopers.  As Fahreed says, "a friendship with no limits".

"Sometimes I think I should get on my bike and go."  Trading the Schwinn for a Huffy, the road gear, for mountains, or a self-contained electronic universe for an uncomfortable facsimile of both the real and the imagined.

The Scatterverse.

And the proprietary concern, "keep them turning the pages", as of the popular novelist, but I can afford to tell my ending early, and write long scenes of love and warm bathwater, perhaps.  "I could tell you all, up front", but you can walk with my too, as the tale elapses, not unlike the elapsing of life of rather average length.

"It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it."

Forthright MC: Mad Dogs Timmed and Burning

 

 

Classic street preacher.

 

 

Classsic Mad Dogs and Englishmen

 

You ever choose whether to give a fig? Or a care?

"I think therefore I am" he was saying, and I'm thinking, you can be, still, and not be sure, too, Little Cheever.  You really could.  Generally forking around, borehogging tater tots like the Pygmy that was left out in the cold.

Oh, Cry Me A River.

"I hit that sh*t like a starving Pygmy." I was bragging to Tammy, later, and she's like, "I know how you does", "and all."

It was Aurelius, last of the Good Antonines that reminded us that man is a social animal, and inclined somewhat to politics.  Where Epictetus threaded the needle reminded us of the ruling reasoning faculty, like looking upon gold and having to consciously decide its beautiful by choice of reason.  Those value judgements thread us back into politics, the shuffle, but the social reasoning, do we bring down choice or emotion into our social interactions?

A Dern I could opt not to give, or yet more and more the opposite, clutching my pearls, pawing at my handbag, holding my little dog so tightly its eyes are about to pop out of its head.

I can choose.

Tammy.  Y.

I felt something, some element of the horizon orientation, and there was a stirring, kind of a building, percolating, catharsis that wasn't.  "What is it, in and of itself?" I ask, but it was half-formed, a foundation without walls or roof, and nothing was all I could come back with, but perhaps some transitory pieces.

And I got my little ass straight, behind knowing that.

"Have a quiet moment with your advisor." Look, Cheever, I tell my advisor what's what, not the other way around.  "Just make it happen." I'm saying.  "You're the one with the Human Resources coursework."

There was a thing, and there was bling.  I saw some of that gold plating, though, gawdy as I don't know what, mirroring and lustering and just deeply, so plastic and without purpose or point, looking good, but perhaps not being precious, as if to say, "there's a lady who's sure, all that glitters is gold."

It's like, opting where to put your eggs.  I know dudes that put there's eggs in old spackle buckets.  There are Puffer Fish that clean their unhatched eggs, every day, by rolling them around in their mouths.

Freddie Hubbard: Straight Life.

In a flash, in a blaze

transmogrified by the miracle

of modern alchemy

to bygone days...

Perhaps, he had, "cleansed the doors of perception" a wee too squeaky clean, and what he interpolated and synched-up as "unburdened perception" was something of the order of random noise from the universe.

 

1. The Straight Life

2. Mr Clean

3. Here's That Rainy Day

A haphazard foray into a cleaner, unfettered state of mind might make a man susceptible to so much of the random noise of the universe, million dollar radio telescopes and all, schizophrenics blogging.

*Don't f*ck up, now, Vladimir.

Freddie Hubbard tried to capture the bluesy doldrum of clean living, finding, while drug-addled, they had wrecked their existence, all the trappings, home gone, job gone, girlfriend a relentless bore, and such other.  A kind of relentless rhythm of its own to sobriety.

*The frazzled terpitude of self-serving individuals.

The blues guitar, a Gibson or Epiphone, ringing out and then melting like snowflakes of tiny hailstones on a spring day, looking rather superficially at the blues of the newly-sober, and that relentless rhythm banging out a newly seen truth which is the seemingly rather hard and harsh world of those newly-sober.

 

Three chords to stardom.(KRU propaganda dust-up)

 

Three chords to stardom.

"I know, I know, I know, I know, I know

I better leave the young thang alone..."

The Outlander had multiple denominations of Outlandia currency, Crooners, on his person, when they found him.

*That girl from High Point, NC, had near about got her stuff straight.  Which, incidentally, is no small feat, her being a classic Karen, a worry wort of the highest order.

*Another from Shallote playing kick the can on a Sunday afternoon.  Marginally dignified.

Valentine's Day 2022: Poe, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson.

"make the most of your time, while you have rosebuds." -they told me, on the precipice, the free-standing edge of corporeal being, a temporary vortex.

Sherwood Anderson's group of unsavory-types, working stiffs, as it were, and pastor thrown in for good measure, berating himself and looking at a reading girl through the window.  She good nude and he forgot himself.

Edith Wharton wrote of a cruel prank played on a rather ditzy friend, as we all have ditzy friends, and are sometimes in fact, ourselves, considered by someone under the velvet scarsdale, to be, the ditzy friend.  A letter sent to the ditz, that some NBA player that she hadn't slept with yet kept one of her instagrams as a phone wallpaper.

She was enraptured, perhaps, but the narrator saw no sign, and thought it hilarious.

Many moons and cymbal booms later, the ditz was nothing but a single mother, and the narrator recounted the tale, partly in triumph over the lamentable ditz, but partly, I guess, pity.

But the situation turned.

The fake love DM had been returned to the husband by the Ditz, narrator not knowing, and the narrator admitted they had met in secret.

The single mother part.  The baby?  The narrator's husband the sire, and that peculiar issue tearing the soul out of the self-righteous narrator, proud and ever so haughty, as of the set that Jay Gatsby was trying to get into, and just like the Daisy he was trying to get into.

There was a boy in Winesburg, Ohio that took up writing for the local media, having a knack for the written word, at first.  Such is the way, you know, but do they care about the local community?  It keeps me out of the post, that so much of what elapses, transpires, transgresses, and perspicates doesn't hold my interest, except maybe that the Creech girl makes good cheesy potatoes.

The novelty of love, of time, and marked by dreams and visions, desires, something in the popular conscious.

Always time-stamped, it seems, clouded and perhaps corrupted by other happenings of the time, be it an industrial boom, or a doldrum or something.

Pockmarked by the age in it which it is conceived and then too, when it is realized.

To the time, to make the most of its maidens, while there are rosebuds.

To the IH to eat topsoil and crap money, while it may, that there are rosebuds, and maidens, and a long good night encapsulates, blanketing all in silence.

"She wished only to be supported, loved,

and in fondness seen,

in that good Society"

Hill, that is.

Gas stations that serve food;

as many churches as there are people.

Ripsh*t and bust d*ck, you know.

Looking in her window, she was reclined on the bed, and it made him inclined, having a fit of religious fervor in which his bespangled, buttfuddled Theologically trained brain, burst into poetry.

Sherwood Anderson, then, did not invent the popular trope of the bad-guy Preacher, but he worked one that had a human moment in which the "singular experience" flowed through God, God and a woman, a kicked-in a window on a woman in her stockings.

The character had forgot himself, in this rapture.

And the boy, to write for the post, and the singularity, and the precipice of a temporal vortex.

Gatsby tried to pick a rosebud from someone else's garden, and took a swan dive into his own water feature.  He made the most of his heart-doings while their was money, as was the upward-push that beguiled some of the men like Hemingway and F. Scott, the upward-push and the somewhat-fantasy of a life of ease.

"Oh I sent him a message back, and we did meet.  So its okay.  But I have my daughter in my life, as a nice little reminder."

"No harm, done, then."

About of the old Edgar Allan Poe, then:

"Who saw thee on that bridal day,

    When that deep blush would come o'er thee,

Though happiness around thee lay,

    The world all love before thee."

Or yet, the most of the page, while there is still, ink:

"And I said--"She is warmer than Dian:

  She rolls through an ether or sighs--

  She revels in a region of sighs:

She has seen that the tears are not dry on

  These cheeks, where the worm never dies

And has come past the stars of the Lion

   To point us the path to the skies--

  To the Lethean peace of the skies--

Come up, in despite of the Lion,

  To shine on us with her bright eyes---

Come up through the lair of the Lion,

  With love in her luminous eyes."

a hundred quiet interstices.

If Vlad Duthiers was on the premiere of the Reading Rainbow reboot.

But he is.

He wouldn't just phone it in, toilet sounds in the background.

"Rodney, did you just--?!?"

"'scuse me sistah I gotta take a sh*t."

Amanda Gorman reading in a somewhat robotic voice, a regular cadence that is emphatic and deliberate.  In her poem she's thinking about her own place in the world, and that's relateable, but she's thinking of us, too, as so much of this struggle is common.

(not her)"I felt rather slipstream."

They talk so much of mindfulness, Eckhardt Tolle, the now-deceased monk Ninh, how to embrace the current to do the things that you know true and right, explode all of the "ifs" and "buts"

Edgar Allan Poe and writers of his era, in the Arkham house style magazines, predominantly, spoke of "a singular experience".

That if you bit into a stick of Extra gum, and got the flavor real horrorshow, you balls might window shade your chin, and next thing you know, you're singing out the experience.

Should've fired a warning shot, there, Rodney.

What of the infinitude of getting caught up in the now, drinking the juices of the present moment?  Drunk on power, corrupts absolutely.  Nobody of his worth, worth his salt.  Casting our pearls before swine, perhaps.

On Walden Pond a million subthreads collide in his brain to produce Walden or Life In the Woods(link to the free electronic version on Project Gutenberg), but he also captured more of the spirit of the now, writing of a boating trip along a river, and writing of a foray into Cape Cod.

A hundred quiet interstices of nature whispering per second, and our commonality with our fellow man and nature becomes ever so clear.

Some of the candy and nuts, those "ifs" and "buts", of the wise to bide the time, or of Marcus Aurelius to embrace man as never disconnected from his fellow, sociable and beguiled to broach the common mean.

Another intersticial, to enjoy chocolates, with report of dark chocolate being somewhat of a heart healthy superfood, to have a morsel.

I do.

Just a bit, 60-80 calories worth, a good soaking of the mouth the gives a nice little burst of flavor, the dull roar of dark chocolate.

A philospher that rubbed vetinary meds on his ganglia and persimmons.

Ferdinand Sausierre it was that taught us about signifiers and connotations, not dipping into symbolic language, archetypal aspects, but the active, innervated figures of any form of communication.

Hederbohr Saint-Senz would go on to enumerate a five-part communications model, of ideas, what was wanted to say, what was said, what was left on the cutting room floor, and what was beamed into posterity.

As the solar body breaches the eastern horizon, I think that posterity is too much of a confinement; go suck an egg, Posterity, for I am about other business in the interim.

Snorting Ivermectin, perhaps rubbing some of the crushed up pill-gore on my scrotum.

They say, as if to deter me, "you're consumed by building an enigma".  And my response is that I'm just roiling and boiling along my chosen path.

 

An idea of moviefilm: Great Exhortations.

Now we come to, like, the rather seepy part of our story.

"What's your name and serial, boy?"

"Calvin Klein."  He said, hands over his privates.  "six double-five four three two one."

"Bend over." He said, pen light between his teeth.  The spark plug from the lawnmower was useless still laying to the side, and the class watching, all of it, a collection of useless things in the midst of process.

"Who is number 1?"

"You are number 6."

"I am not a number; I am a free man!!!"

Well, the De Lorean had us back in 2002, and she was 17 or so, wearing the shorty jean shorts, just lazing around, no targets in the area, and one done come woke, and was targeting, unbeknownst.  "We're among friendlies." But so far, a Grand Old Petting zoo, and not a full on smorgasmbord of carnal delights.

I liked reading the Old Testament, the fighting and the sex with the ladies.  Bathsheba, and all that, Ruth crawling in the bed to sleep like a prize pet at the master's feet.  I volunteered during the church service, too; played guitar.

Ralphus tossed a husband in the bonfire.

Times were good, "twas the worst of; twas the best of."

Diddly-Lee-Lieu and Diddly-Lee-Doo had to coordinate and so forth.

Outside, getting drowned in some cow water trough:  "I'm hard and shit; I done been institutionalized."

"Trump was wrong."

"Fahk!"

"Wax my Toyota, Biff.  yuk, yuk, yuk!"

"Hey you.  Take your damn hands off her, Biff."

"Knock the cover off the ball, Marty"

He done did.  Men chasing the threading filler inside the ruined ball, around the infield, as Marty runs home.

I played Johnny B Goode, and told them they weren't ready for it yet.  

But their kids would love it.

And if one of those kids ever sets fire to the carpet in the living room, smoking math, "go easy on 'em".

They were singing "97 Degrees in the Shade" by Hank Jr, over the loudspeakers, a touching tribute to Bobby Primo, unfairly cut down by his own hubris, laying out, as it were, through the outfield wall, for a wayward dinger, to rob a home run.  Doc Brown was there, near the end of the row, with the rest of the team, and all had the Wonder Boy Fighter Jet patch on their sleeves.

"Pants?" said Doc Brown.  "Where we're goin' you don't need pants."

Captain Rhodes: "Choke on 'em!"

French Onion.

The proverbial "they" were saying of the FB algorithm that it had "switches", like "dip switches" that could be pulled on or off, and I'm think, "I'm the chip, and you're the dip."

Put me in it any old time.

Nevertheless, advanced recognition software, and a vast database that eclipses probably any known dictionary, from the sophisticated to the vulgar, recognizing puns and various connections that go far beyond so-called "meta tags" defined by the poster.

But one blogger's speculation, and assuredly the vast dictionary array has been growing and evolving all through Facebook's active life. "Through the vastness of time uncounted; across space and time, and possibly, 

-reality itself."

As it were, cutting an amazing arc across the heavens, serpentine, schizoid, as it were, reminding of other times, flush cutting furniture hardware, taking a Joe all over the Andrew Jackson statue, and then McPherson saying the world had so much of it, there wasn't even a need to wipe one's Don after.

Ah, the purely imaginary contest between good and evil.

And, "for once in my life" I seem to know something they don't know.  A projected outcome 180 degrees from any semblance of reality, decency, moderation......

I danced hard for the singles in my g-string, but it wasn't as difficult as Erin milking the wrong gender of cow, then standing ungratefully under the spray.  Maybe my own row was less dangerous, in the offing.