and they had thought all news was about the President.....

Newsnation's Crown Prince of Show-Hair Leland Vittert greets Chris.  "Bitch, please", he says, then takes a long sip of his chocolate milk.

Dan Abrams said it, I reckon, that Newsnation quests for that large blotch of America that sits near the middle of the political spectrum, and this while the others are deadleft or solidright.

It's a broad swath, if they can catch the attention of the masses, and the hiring of Chris Cuomo seems a nice catalyst to garner them attention.  We'll see how Chris does at his new home, what he can build towards that "middle".  Raping and pillaging aside, I enjoyed his work on CNN and thought he did it with a hint of that Italian Lamborghini drama, through commentary and interviews, and pretending that Don Lemon was a likeable person.

But Don visited him during his distress.  So.  The Thorn In The Paw and all that.

It's just the hope that the "news product" isn't milquetoast or lukewarm, but actually speaks to the middle.  And for one, I've never thought a newschannel should just be all about a President, and I've burned-out on 1/6 long ago.  And I for one have no yen to see Hunter Biden's "private" laptop photos, which were released to the public by a PC repairmen who obviously can't be trusted with customer property.

The same people that flip over Hunter's homemade porn wouldn't say boo on the Trump Kids having offices in the White House, or Jenna Bush or any of that.

*I defy Harris Faulkner to document that she has taken even one journalism course in her lifetime.

*Showing footage of Jan 6 interviews from three weeks ago doesn't qualify as "fresh content".

*I'm still a Shep guy, but Vittert does indeed have that good show-hair, and despite being on two national news networks, probably still has potential to do yet more.

stoicism, the tao, and a new kitten arrives.

Maybe early in our lives, those first months, we lack something of that spark of consciousness, and mostly, we don't retain those memories.  Or so we think.

We are the stream.

We were the stream.

And then.

We learn and take on information, and we become like the stone, and the stream in part is that information that has seemingly weighed us down.  We are in turned being acted on by the stream, being worn smooth.

Being worn smooth is maturity in its many splendorous descriptions.

I saw two kittens, me the first human they've seen.  They didn't blow and hiss, but stared, as if in wonder, and I spoke to them, soothingly, or what passes for soothing from me.  I wasn't singing Body Count lyrics.

Somewhere in the indefinite space between innocence and experience, then, thought and action intermingling, charcoals on a page to be smoothed by time.   I suspect that without any fear, the Tao would have been with the innocent one, and myself, the experienced one, seeing the little animal, was having a realization of the Tao, and the Tao itself, something to which you might point distantly, but never touch.....

The cat was in my flower pot, a rectangular thing lying on its side, under the edge of a shelter.  It was a perfectly little resting place for the animal, but these oblongs, we know them too well.  I've seen relatives placed into the oblongs, and I've seen fire and rain.  I thought that I would see you again.

*I had asked too, that if the low man had elements scattered within that reflected the sage, would the same be said of the sage?  That something of the low man might be reflected in the sage?  My there be something?  A bowl of breakfast porridge?  Does the low man take the early hours for its proper beginning, in the lonesome half-dark slow-brightening thoughtspace between proper day and night, or does the low man sleep late?

Further, is the sage perfect in diet?  Advanced, knowledgeable, or simple?  Somehow I think the sage is not a perfect plate of spatterings of this or that, but a simple thing.

For instance, a woman in the old USSR reached the advanced age of 112.  She had a wood stove.  A small cabin.  Every morning, and they asked, what did she eat?  Oats along with a spat of pan-seared uncured sausage.  The sausage looked quite like dried sausage found around the southeastern U.S.

I have moments paradoxically of such self-denial and reward.  I think we all do.  Do we suffer through some penance and then later reward ourselves?  Like being nice at work, or talking to a tedious relative, or something rather adultish in the modern way.

The kitten will soon venture further away and may yet find itself at my door, where I can lavish loving care upon it, and of course, plenty of food.  The cats here like warm milk, and generally distrust anything particularly cold.  And for that, I don't reward myself, as that's not exactly a chore, an act of compassion to a pet.

But the cat showed something of the Tao in its blue eyes, and for a moment maybe there was a kind of wonder shared by us, maybe, something cosmic, beyond the cat looking upon a novelty, and beyond my realizing the novelty of a new cat, but something of the Tao passed in between, something of the real stuff of life, that push-pull cosmic gravity tug between innocence and experience, what some call the unfettered uncontaminated infant state and my own person, who wins and loses at various things, and maybe in some ways, 

trying to unlearn some things that I had picked up along the way.

Maybe that's the kicker in middle age when that Mid Life crisis hits for the man, or the menopause for the lady.  We had spent so much time learning things and picking up skills and doing, then we realize how much is vanity, and then the realization we should drop some of that learning and simplify.

Drawings from the week so far, 07/27/22

 

Some sketches I put up for sale.  Above is a rose and below is a budding sunflower.  I really took to the pencil, using either an HB graphite sketch pencil, or a Papermate mechanical pencil with a comfort grip.  No matter either of those I use, I have my Staedtler white eraser, anyway.

I've also been building a small mountain of colored pencils, but so far, not much experimentation with those.  The mountain is the variety, such as "Colors of the World" and a few other sets, 24 and 30-pencil sets.

My Etsy shop, sketches. 

You can donate to the site tip jar by clicking this link, if so inclined.

a show pilot: "Living Just Enough For The City" 101: The Meeting.

 FOR THE DURATION, KATRINA'S VOICE will be filtered as if she were recorded on a telephone, but on screen, she's in the room with the crew.


CONFERENCE ROOM

RAWLEY: Impressive resume, extensive study and internships.

KATRINA: Thank you sir.  I think I have a lot to offer this company.

HOYLE: Right, right.

GREER: You've given us a lot to consider, Miss Watson.

HOYLE:(CLOSE ON his greenscreen CASIO digital watch) My bowl of beans is calling me.

GREER: We'll look all this over.

RAWLEY: What are the beans calling you?  Did we decide anything?

KATRINA: Well....

The sound of a startled chicken fills the room briefly, an "alarum"

GREER: Lunch break.  You pegged it almost dead-on, Hoyle.

RAWLEY: Dinner's on.

KATRINA: UHM.  Thank you all so much for your time and consideration.

RAWLEY: Whatever.


BREAK ROOM.  A sex swing, like a giant hammock is in the corner.  There is an outline of a black pentacle in a red blotch on one wall.  Otherwise, its tables and chairs and people eating their lunches.

RAWLEY: So we love Katrina.

HOYLE: Right, right.

GREER: Let's kill one of her pets and put it on her doorstep.

HOYLE: Right, a definitive statement of our feelings.

GREER: Steal her mail from her mailbox.

RAWLEY:  Forensics on her garbage.  Maybe we'll look up and hit on some used feminine hygiene items.

HOYLE:(with potato chips)  We might.  Push her away. Coming on too strongly.


KATRINA approaches.

KATRINA: Uh, hi, again.

GREER: (to KATRINA) still considering.

RAWLEY:  It's all process, you understand.

KATRINA:  Oh, sure, but my car, outside.  It won't start.

HOYLE: I'll help get it going.  Come on, miss.

RAWLEY:  Mister Fraudwrench.


PARKING LOT

HOYLE has retrieved a jump box from his SUV, and hooked it to the stuff under the hood of KATRINA's SUV.

HOYLE: Miss Watson, if you would, get in the car and be ready to turn the key when I ask.

RAWLEY(muttering to himself):  Getting the big panty cred.

HOYLE(walking by Rawley): None of this even matters.  Juice him up, bebe.

RAWLEY: AWW YEAH.

RAWLEY flips the switch on the jump box.

The airbag in KATRINA's SUV deploys, pinning KATRINA to the seat.

RAWLEY: Still wanna be on the team?  We haven't even killed any of your pets yet.

KATRINA:(muffled) What?  Help me.

HOYLE looking sideways at the airbag.

We see HOYLE from the back, hear a zip, and he starts fucking the area between Katrina and the airbag.

GREER: Well.  I guess we've made our decision. Welcome to the team.

KATRINA: Well, thanks I guess.


SOUNDS of HOYLE grunting.

SHOT of cityscape, Hoyle's grunting builds a pitch.

THEN a howl breaks across the cityscape.

THEN the chicken screams in terror.

GREER(off screen): Well that's lunch.

HOYLE:  You can turn the key now, Miss Watson.

The so called "Turkey Oak".

 

What this is?

Like Marcus Aurelius, examine it severally, ask "what is it in and of itself?"

In an exploded view, details merge and blend into splotches of color, making my cellphone camera seem like an artist's palette.  And so much, nature is our forte, our reason du'tre.

In this photo the view has been exploded somewhat, like 200-250 percent and cropped to look predominantly like gibberish.

But this specimen lurks near a farmer's field, uncomfortably nestled between rows of crops, and the wild unfettered pines.

Note how each leaf is just a singular spit of color, and it combines to make the whole piece.

"gone fishin'", on wiling away the afternoon watching my cork dip.

I tromped down the roadside, coming up to those granite boulders they use, the road people, some kind of anti-spoilage abutment or something, and I was going in a line next to those down past the milkweeds and other things.  The poke salad and stuff, flower-tassels like fingers reaching to grasp the air.

I come to the crick, by and by, a spit of clear water, run almost like the old dishwater would run in the extra line back in the day, clear and true like the brutal honesty of barking a shin or something.

There was an old bent-up trash drum, a democrat campaign ad, and an old tire, looking maybe of the old era buick lesabre or pontiac bonnevile kind, replete with the white stripe, and that with its own tiger line of dryrot running through it, real and true.

A brim had apparently committed "suicide by fisherman", and lay kaput near the edge of the weeds.  And me without my "sportsman gloves", I stuck a twig in its lazed mouth, between slack long-dead jowls, and lifted it, then flecked it into the clearwater, thinking somewhere down the way, a bottom feeder would have it.

I got the queerest feeling on, and got to glancing around, kind of addled, to eventually spot a turtle, seemingly looking at me askance with its yellow eyes, taking in every movement, every sound, every little footfall, rubber on creekbed, even while trying to pretend my person, as an interloper, was like The Man Who Was Not There.

And yet.

I hadn't even dipped my little earthworm in the clearwater yet.

Now I say the water was clear, and it mostly was, clear enough, for creekwater, but you could tell it was like some sort of really thin, weak tea, something watered down-like, as an iced tea maybe left in the hot car, where dogs and children would perish, the iced tea, the ice melts and it too, is no longer quite the same, like trying to tie the shoelaces of a heat-dead child.

I peed in the shade around the trees, the canopy of weird wet-spot hardwoods, big old sumbitches, like some maples and other, some stuff we don't usually see in our regular old sandy spits of wounded and dying dreams and so forth.

And the turtle was apparently having a kind of reflective moment, sedentary, profound, monolithic.  Part of the bad side of me thought to pinch its little tail between two fingers and fling the turtle dead into the middle of the creek, but I know the old story of the rabbit and the briar patch, and I thought the beast might like that.

I'd leave it in wonderment, such as I was partly in wonderment in return.  And I would also have my own sedentary turkey-leg moment of reflection, such that, as I began my day's fishing, was anyone having sex with the female supervisor?  Darnell the Lesser had a quip that amused me a lot, "I know who ain't."

But were they?

Penis and vagina chuck-a-ducking along in some dark corner, or even ankle to ears or what not.  The fish, as it were, had no answers, and in fact, it was only commentary, even their silence a commentary, mouths blah-ing along, pulling water, processing oxygen from water.

They would taste good rolled in meal and cooked in hot fat; consolation from the universe, perhaps, and it was a consolation that had to be enough, and a mystery left for another day.

It was like the discarded chapter of Bram Stoker, the so-called Dracula's Guest.  A freaking vampire pookah flea-flicking its tongue at Harker and all, the white snow, and all, that, and the encroaching night as relentless as anything, in league and conspiracy with time itself, an agreement, a back room deal to have its own portion of the harvest.

Or even, after the catch, dipped my pointer finger in the water, then abruptly sink it into the turtles unsuspecting meditative anus, just to see if the turtle could make speed, and those and other idle thoughts on a hot afternoon by the crick.

Anyway, a bucket of supper sitting in some dubious water.  

What it would amount to.

In the final analysis.

And a shit-flung excuse for an afternoon.

Bollocks Spray and Appoplex. On Being and Nuttingness.

The universe is there, I am there, and I and the universe are both there, waiting and watching, glancing at each other now and then, probably to just to prove to each other, and ourselves, that we exist.

There was a sub-condition of Being, this "Being On The Web", and not necessarily using a network Poker app, or playing a FPS on the phone, or even re-enacting Monty Python scenes along the local streets, but a condition of silence, uncodified, a kind of spray like flotsam of being.

I could have bored you all with "Dems Ditch Biden In Growing Numbers" thing all week, just to burn a little content creating time, but I decided to talk about Being and Nuttingness.

To not exist, it was said, was to be in error, and to be alive, one simply had to ask the question of whether he or she was alive, and by virtue of asking, sans an answer, the query resolved into truth, unlike the absence of being, which reduces to error, and that in a universe growing complexity.

Meanwhile more adults fall to dementia. 

Maybe more people on the party payroll.

They too, falter in the face of universal chaos and increasing complexity.

Ever notice how things revolve around central masses in nature?  The sun, the universe, and all?

Kind of that central praxis of show hair, and the stickwood of thought and intention, rays of light therefrom.  Buttocks.  Meanwhile, my own twitter has become a porn app for some reason, that despite flagging crypto, web dev and other subjects flagged, earmarked, and doubly stuck to my preferences.

The adults fell to what?  The party payroll.  Oh.

Meanwhile people are getting paid in dementia accounts.

And probably the coolest thing of the week, the James Webb Racist Stratosphere Comb, had 18 refractors, gold-plated, and some genius pointed them all at the same thing, thought, and then, only then, did they try to decide.

Which image.

Belonged to which plate.

I wouldve timestamped each, but I'm not an engineer, and surely, there is a date code somewhere in this thing, a galactic "born-on" date, and an expiration guarantee.

18 reflective surfaces pointed at the same little star spittle o'er the firmament, along the reaches of deepest sky, and then too, a broad old "deep field" thing with a ladies slipper shaped galaxy, or should I say, it was "bent light" from the galaxy, not that the actual galaxy was warped or whatever, and that, millions of years ago, as the light hurdles itself intensely across the otherwise lifeless void of eternity.

The old NASA party game of deciding which image belongs to which lens, and someone walks by me and says, "what do they say yours taste like?"

Why, my bitter heart, Cheever.

Don't you know?

All the bitterness, and some pouring out at the seems in that mule's feedbag.  But I say not that the bitterness comes and goes, like the forming of wines and vinegar, a kind of interstitial fermentation about the thoughtmeat, the thinkgood, in which time and circumstance coalesce into me pointing at something.

But one of several personalities reading Camus or something even weirder, and that between moments when the other personalities are in control, Carmen Miranda, and all them, Wayne Lee Ray.

Drawing of pencil sketch: The Flash.

 

Druwering: pine tree trunk suspended in outer space, devoid of landscape.

 

a pine tree with its crazy mush-armor of bark fragments.

a novel fragment: The Goddens Dependents prologue.

This is the prologue of one of my several "planned novels".  I am sometimes amazed at how cold and cynical my writing voice really seems; I'm not such a butthole in real life, but c'est la vie.  

Pivotal to the whole family's story is the unexpected pregnancy of Maya, the eldest daughter.  A set of circumstances is set off that does them all immeasurable good.  

She was wearing big old black sneakers with sensible non-slip bottoms, and the rest of her Chicken Place uniform except for the hat; this is as she walked down the road, still and having always been a living breathing wet dream of a woman, every bit, from her broom straw hair to her little death white feet with the toenails painted red.

She walked along Jefferson Road East, along a lonely empty stretch of the country.

A deputy came along, slowing his police car to a death crawl before lowering his passenger window to say hello, but it wasn’t saying hello really but kind of a casual interrogation.

Don’t think for one second those guys were allowed to pick up walkers from the roadside, but here he was anyway, as real and stupid as anything, not knowing yet he was already ensnared and some hidden repressed part of him was already daydreaming about very hard sex, nudity, sweat, and the exchange of fluids between the two: the walker and the innocent deputy.

She was walking to her job she told him, walking to pick up a paycheck for her family of deadbeats, not in the hopes of rescuing herself, but kind of a treadwater hope of just living with a few extra cans of peas and beans in the house, and nothing much else after the adults had at her wage, which they could claim as some sort of rent, or maybe even, stretching decency, recompense for years of care during her childhood, though she was then as she is during the time of our action today: not a demanding soul, not that, capable of living on almost anything, like a perpetual motion machine that men couldn’t help but stare at and want to touch or hold in their own hands.

But in about two minutes, she was in the car, and it did not take long before it was one lying on top of another, and the proverbial spider had came to the fly, and not the other way, because now the twenty-something deputy was in her family’s orbit, and might become known in some way to her father, and all that interaction was like riding with molotov cocktails or playing catch with live hand grenades.

He did not know it, but he was the trapped one, he was the one unknowingly stepping into a figurative grave, doing all but pulling great handfuls of dirt onto himself with a cheerful grin; he was working above her fitfully, as caught-up as someone could be, and it only had been a few minutes since he had first laid eyes on her. Time like that was irrelevant, and a stupid heart could not count the beats anyway.

He had feverishly pumped his orgasm into her twice in the few minutes before the radio blared about a Civil War statue damaged by an out of control truck, and they were asking for him by name and he was rolling around top of her, grabbing at his trousers, not even bothering to ask her to leave the car, and maybe later part of him hoped she knew they were talking about him on the radio, rebuking him like the voice of God, because he was off his beat, not in the right time at the right place for civil order.

However, he had been in the proper time and place for devilment.

As some say of indulging in those sorts of passions, “a minute on the hips...”

The Tetragrammaton Obamatronian Matrices: God in everyday life, and tails of the taco people.

 

 

People like Gregory of Nyssa and Origen the Heretic(before he was shunned, he was brilliant), talked of realizations of the divine providence in everyday life.  Gregory pointed to Moses, who saw multiple manifestations, theophany all, and even part of the supposed physical personage of God.  Of course, God's physical personage, so glorious that for a human to look upon Him, the human instantly falls dead because of the abundance of glory.

Anyway, there was the snake cane and the stone that issued water, but the one I always think of is the insolent donkey.  Man rides along on his donkey, and his donkey begins to verbally rebuke him, which, we all know is uncommon.

I imagine that moment of surprise, after the donkey had abutted him to the stone-laden wall a few times, and the man beat at the animal, the animal verbally dis-using him, dressing him down with a wit superior to man, not only not inferior, but heavenly in its recourse.

 

And here, in the earthen realm, we have such and so forth, things coming ahead and calling people, people tweeting, and people turning coat, turning tail.

My dreams, not as empty, as my bank account, seems to be.  Indeed, my dreams are free, even if the daylight is subject to the tyranny of the majority.

*You don't bust the flower, if you get the honey for free.  

And there I was, 22nd birthday, pollen all over the tip of my nose, my chin, running foolishly away from yellow jackets, with that fugitive despoil energy that comes from raw fear.  I pawed at the towels and bandages with pine sap all over my fingers.  My shirts was dotted with the fiendish yellow jackets, and pulled it over my head and flung that in the grass.

*If you like and you rung it, touch it to stop the dinging din.

There were people I would glance by at them in their pit.  I would spit on them, pee on them sometimes, and just generically stare at them.  They jockeyed over one another like a basket of puppies.  I would see them now and then as I would go and buy Always Save brand diet cola.

The Collier Bowl, the Orange Bowl, Bubba Green Bush, or what-have you, and all the while, I'm running pizza parlors and other things, using my computer for things that I can pass off as "advanced simulations", but actually just garden-variety bargain bin PC games.

As the say, even the meanest, even the average, even the ding-batted among us, they too may display a few elements each of the greatest sages, but no one alone carries all of that special spark, that superior gleam of intuition, originality, the very stuff of life.

A Fool and His Falcon.

I got the heads ported on my Falcon Futura and was thinking of switching out the jets in the carburetor.  It was a grocery getter, a stoplight nomad and a weekend funwagon all in one, and it made me wonder, beyond just porting in hopes of precision, more efficient fuel burn hence better performance and mileage, might I tune harder for more specific performance.

The heads got a middling run from the manifold, good mixture and all, a blend of top end and bottom end power, suitable for everyday conditions.

We had these funny little balls on tiny threads hanging from the rear window trim.  Also had the viable option of a style-matching audio head unit, but I wanted something not so stupidly PCB.  Two knobs.  Presets.  FM1 FM2 AM.  SAT option.  AUX.  CD.  And the dirtly little secret of the iPod controls which were actually for any plug in memory, and not necessarily an iPod or even an Apple product.

I fell asleep in the trunk of the old car over in the afternoon, had flies and stuff on my face, and that magic sand, coarse grains that stick to the forearms and elbows.  It was the old theorem, "if the arm touches anything outdoors, it will have a spattering of coarse sand grains after".

They were saying, maybe I could paint the car, but I was like, no.  It's a sleeper.  I mean, it doesn't look like it would tear your head off, and in fact, it won't and probably can't: it's Prince Alphonso In A Can, a heavier bit of metal than the newer stuff, as it were.

What I didn't have was the plastic Faberge or the fuzzy dice.  I had a religious air freshener dangling from the rear view mirror, but it had long since lost its fresh but odd scent, and there was a little tree wrapped around the pull-out light switch.  

The one on the mirror was an obscure version of "faith as a grain of mustard seed".  And I thought, perhaps I would need a kind of faith too, as I fended off the women from my grandma car.  

And I had the old problem of "why get a 289 when you can instead get a 302?" and then a week later the next phase, "why get a 302 when you can instead get a 351?"  But there was one solution that seemed uniquely suited to my needs, and that was nitrous, which would give an average level of performance otherwise, with a quick burst when needed, as circumstances dictated.  Such as, "is she wearing a tank top without a visible bra?"  "is she wearing jean shorts?"  "do I have to pee urgently?"

 

apply directly to the effected area and await results; calm like a balm; your butt

*If I followed the common course, I should reasonably expect to be just as miserable as everyone else.

If I have my own angels, then I too, have my own muse, which may yet lead me to a different furrow, say, Cole Porter or Miles Davis or John Coltrane for you, where I take to the clouds and roughage with Freddie Hubbard, time to time.

I tell you this, beneath the hair and pasty vampire skin, I am a nugget of confusion wrapped in a scattering of weird intentions, and confused of those too.

To decide a course then, is a propensity to open the door to the real possibility of failure.

I have but some time.

And your butt needs roughing.

*The immortals talk amongst themselves, and then only in a dog-whistle tongue that they only can understand.

If one must fall sedentary to a bad feeling, can one also fall sedentary to a positive feeling, and draw it out all the way to its very end, but slowly, not to push and strain at it until it is earlier wasted than the sedentary man.

And if one has reasonable expectations, one does not slam the door on surprises, but limp-eyed, must let the world come, and bid it not stop on his accord, but to elapse as it was meant to, our best course, to dignify whatever may and is willed from without.

*Him that would have the portion of another, partakes in that other's miseries, no?

I want to put a 2300 into a Miata, and I'm not the only one, but I relent as to the doings and bearings of such an operation, and think the car would be so unsettled and unbalanced, that I could only bring it true and right if I pushed the pedal significantly harder.

But its a "secretary car" you say.  I watch a racing series with spec Miatas, and there are no secretaries there.  Would you pigeonhole me, and are you on such good terms with the pigeon?  And what of all the secretaries that drive Camrys and Accords?

Or shoehorn a 2300 Ecoboost into the little beast.

They're in the catalog, you know.

Of your butt, I say this further, time and circumstance will put on you something that I could not equal at my most innervated, so there.  Or to paraphrase, "I won't get you, but God will get you."

The same Chinese generals and Mexicans that they made the deals with, will expect the term honored, from the best and brightest, so called, the better students, calling in markers, and expecting favor, where none was ever merited, and the dishonest better students say the enemies are within in order to pull the inspecting discerning eye away from their own misdeed and transverse.

I seen a pretty woman this morning, about ten years older than me, and noticed she had been staring at me.  She, a store employee, saw me browsing, and it was as if she wanted to see if I pocketed anything on the sly, and then as a I later passed by, she was happy, relieved and grateful enough to speak well-wishes to the man that stupefied her sour expectation;

for sour expectations then, I calm 

like a balm.

Seneca on happiness.

 "All men, brother Gallio, wish to live happily, but are dull at perceiving exactly what it is that makes life happy: and so far is it from being easy to attain the happiness that the more eagerly a man struggles to reach it the further he departs from it, if he takes the wrong road; for since this leads in the opposite direction, his very swiftness carries him all the further away.

...as long as we wander at random, not following any guide except the shouts and discordant clamours of those who invite us to proceed in different directions, our short life will be wasted in useless roamings, even if we labour both day and might to get a good understanding.

Now nothing gets us into greater troubles that our subservience to common rumour, and our habit of thinking that those things are best which are most generally received as such, of taking many counterfeits for truly good things and of living not by reason but by imitation of others.

*You may observe the same thing human life: no one can merely go wrong by himself, but must become both the cause and adviser of another's wrong doing.

*matters do not stand so well with mankind that the majority should prefer the better course: the more people do a thing the worse it is likely to be."

But only so many..... Our love is prodigious, but our circle few. On Whack-A-Doos and the Chosen among the common.

 

Kind of a "we love you but we don't like you" thing.  We want you to get your biscuits and maple at the table, but we don't want to talk to you during the tobacco-cutting.  He'd sit there all alone with his mason jar of cloudy water, and that reminded him of his boy, named Cloud by his half-black momma, a hippie and reader of Etsy-bought special Tarots.

In the final analysis, we're all whack-a-doos and good puzzlers, and like Medavoy bemoaned, the atmosphere of the 15th, "don't nobody uh uh say nothing that don't have to be decoded with a decoder ring."

They were saying you felt with love, you controlled and operated on faith, that faith and love had properties which were supernatural according to our fledgling understand of science and the universe proper.  Faith and love operated on the spirit of God, and operated on our standings with our fellows.

Also, to feel the love of Christ without understanding too many of his parables, and to think, the Apostles listening off-the-cuff, live and living colour, didn't make a lot of sense of the parables.

We had that there was one prize for faith.

Late faith bought that prize.

Early faith bought that prize.

Aquinas would be in the same level of heaven with Polooka.

Its like eating at a buffet: in the estomago, it all gets mushed together.

The sinner who repented at 3 yrs old was considered co-equal with the elderly that converted to Christian on their deathbed, the work was plenty, the workers were plenty, but only so many called, as it were.

The anti-Calvinists say it unfairly limits the power of the Gospel, but Christ himself spoke of the message falling on "stony soil", or evil forces condemning the good seeds before they could do their thing.

 

This country is having a movement.

Desantis being a sort of pie-eyed piper for Cali expatriate Florida-bound carpetbaggers.  It's the new thing, to coalesce from edgy graspacho California, in favor of a different sort of life, in the sunny shores of Florida.  And in the middle, like any good oreo's sandwich meat, lies Disney Plus.

I suppose its true anywhere.  The SEC stands for winners.  And also rumors that a lot of people have fled Hidalgo county in fear of being rundown by Paul Pelosi in his Eurocar.

It's like Lucas James said, "from the coal mines of West Virginia, to Muscle Shoals, they can all hear my cheffahlay truck."

"Had a friend in Piscataway, never called me by name, just called me 'skidmark'.  He liked to drink Thunderbird and punch his old lady in the eye.  He was mugged on the ell train; for 16 dollars and a Harris Teeter savings card, my friend lost his life."

Circa 1990: The Decline and Dissipation of Western Civilization.

 

 

They had a right that it had to be chicken bones, but the two gents couldn't find a live chicken to slaughter in the middle of the cold "Living for the" city, but they could find a bucket of chicken.

Indeed, at the expense of Andy and Johnathon's careers, the saving grace of popular cinema, a poison ivy branch extended to the popular imagination.

*Somebody has a little of the old swamp butt.

*I was happy, I was sad, I was happy.  I was wanting to lick the makeup off of Maria Bartiromo's eyelids.

Huwwo worrel. New configuration.

Omg.  Hunter Biden told a NYT reporter to jump off a bridge without a rope.

The fart-blossoming, and the parfait and the eclair, and the King James, and Rebel protestor scum. In a word: a lunch.

I noticed a few stray protestors kept off-camera, even Joey Chestnut clubbed one of them during the Hot Dog Contest, a protestor standing bravely against the building of the Deathstar, and this, after a mystery crash/explosion on the moon.  This is just like when Captain Archer was testing the phaser banks on a asteroid, and Commander Tucker unplugged his eyepad, which caused of burst of free power on the internal grid, which surged through the phaser array and obliterated the asteroid, rather than fine-pointed target practice.  It fart-blossomed onto the parfait of the eclair.

And from the "all politics is pms" department:

And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:

For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.

But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, "Daughter be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole."

And the woman was made whole from that hour.

And furthermore, and so forth:

"Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Or rather, cast into the sea, or cast onto MSNBC, "the unfriendly skies".

Before the third trimester?

What is the difference, in the long run, in the final analysis, between Hannity's unfairly gleaned text messages appearing on tv, and Hunter Biden's abandoned homemade porn being on tv?

Let's ask Chelsea.

She was, is, and has ever been, fubar.

 

 

Her gramma used her as a wing chun Chinese boxing apparatus, beating her about the torso, where she wouldn't show.  All them days, going to school, busted up on the inside, hurting, wincing at nudges to the ribcage and back, but trying not to let it show.  She was too proud, hurt, and maintaining the status quo to let on, to show a sign, to let those winces out, those gripes of pain.  And still too, she feared for the little mush-face old mamasan, too, that maybe if the truth were out, she would be locked up; still in a worse place, the thought that telling on the little mamasan meant her eating some of the guilt too, that maybe some judge would wonder why they took the coathanger to her in the first place, what brought it on.

So she wouldn't say.

But in silence, her own form of wing chun, her own training, for her own fortitude, her own confidence, she punched at the closet door, the plaster, bloodied knuckles on the quarter-round molding.

She got fed into a woodchipper, in a freakish turn of fate, an existential lark, something of a protest, like a solar flare eating away the atmospheres of entire planets, but I, within myself, being but the casual disinvested observer, feel fine.

 

So good, in fact, I might even use the side door this time.  The others would wonder and puzzle over such, but as was the way, they could make so much of even a fly landing on the birdfeeder, sort of a Thoreau ass-fucking of nature and consequence that left one feeling rather too tired to even rattle his own chains and binders, afterward.

"Onwee en dweems" the other was intoning as I tossed my old leather satchel on the doorstep to confuse the help.  I crossed around the Jeep to the other side, looking for my hair comb for a MacGuyver trick, and I heard her doing some kind of improvised singing, between the gap in the toothflesh, "stee-ool waining, stee-ool dweeming..."

"The hell?" said one of the attendants.

"Shaving cream" I commanded from within, giving that one a bit of startle, having ingressed from the side entranced unbeknownst, myself, and happened upon, in re-doubling, towards the front entry, where they were looking for me somewhere about the pavement or the stepping stones, or even the azaleas.

Like I might have taken a nap in the shrubbery.  As if in history, that had ever happened, no precedence, no cause to even think it, but still, the mind is a wandering thing.

The beichukala looked at me, surprised, and then to the bag.

"Oh", he said.

The Wild Man of Zhuangzhi, thought to contain the meaning of life.

Kiang had approached Ming before, something of asking of the meaning of life, to which Ming replied, "Pooh!".  

Three years later, he found his query again:  

"Wandering listlessly about, I know not what I seek; carried on by a wild impulse, I know not where I am going.  I wander about in the strange manner in which you have seen, and see that nothing proceeds without method and order, what more should I know?"

Kiang replied:

"I also seem carried about by aimless influence, and yet the people follow me wherever I go.  I cannot help their doing so.  But now as they imitate me, I wish to hear a word from you."

Ming replied:

"Do you only take the position of doing nothing, and things will of themselves become transformed.  Neglect your body; cast out from you your power of hearing and sight; forget what you have in common with things; cultivate a grand similarity with the chaos of the plastic ether; unloose your mind; set your spirit free; be still as if you had no soul.

Of all the multitude of things every one returns to its root.  Every one returns to its root, and does not know that it is doing so.  They all are as in the state of chaos, and during all their existence they do not leave it.  If they knew, the would be consciously leaving it.  They do not ask its name; they do not spy out their nature; and thus it is that things come to life themselves."

With this, Kiang felt he had been given the riddle of life.

Wyeth Tarn: The beginning of the beginning; it begins.

 "Usedta be a stow, money yeah ago.  The post holes for the hose rail is out frun, still" said Darnell.

Bobcat grinned, and did that silent laugh, where you couldn't even hear the breath.  It was like a happy little silent scream.

"Doug is building a deck on the back.  We'll get that ready, so you can get in and out."

"Is that frost on your window, there?"  Clyde tapped the glass.  It was condensation, like an ice-cold Pepsi.  "Yall have like a freezer room in this add-on to your house?"

"Nar, nar" said Darnell, face not changing expression, it looked like the ghost of something went across his face, but didn't register.

"This ma's room" said Bobcat.

"She alive in there?" said Clyde.

That soundless happy silent scream from Bobcat.

There was a thump within, behind the glass, a heavy thump, then a sliding sound.

----

Nicky was at the fence, finger in one ear, screwing her finger deeper and deeper, maybe hoping to touch her ear drum.  On the other side, an airplane engine was spooling-up as the airplane was about to take-off for flight, the pilot was going through the checklist.

When the plane took the air, Nicky walked away from her fence back to the green Chevy Silverado, an old square body 80s model Silverado.

----

Doug was almost at a sweat, if he ever sweat, lugging deckboard and nailing each one down individually.  The morning was clear and Bobcat was just as placid as anything to watch his brother work.  Ard was at play hitting at the edge of the woods with a plastic whiffle ball bat.  It made a hollow sound, like Doug and Bobcat's dreams made manifest.

"He was in the newspaper" said Bobcat.

"Ard?" said Doug.

"Clyde" said Bobcat.  "Plane crashed.  He was one of the only survivors.  Three thousand dollars worth of electronics in his bags were just gone, and he bitched all over.  Even his socks gone, and so forth.  Some sumbitch even wanted his socks. Think it was on WGON and WMKL, him belly-aching about somebody stealing his luggage."

"Heh heh" said Doug.  "Reckon he'll take a donation.  Oxnard family spent three grand on this stupid deck, wanting me to sit here, free labor, painting two-tone with masking and everything."

"Run-down old mess."

"Buncha crap, it is" said Doug.  "But I guess now he'll stay."

"Mamie wants him hear" said Bobcat.  "She's taken an interest in that weirdo."

"Oh" said Doug.

"But now, Clyde was talking about some stalker being after him" said Bobcat.

"More wetwork for good old Doug" said Doug, darkly.

"Could be good for a lark" said Bobcat.

And then that kind of wind-noise of a vehicle coming.

"Reckon he'll stay" said Doug.

Ard was still hacking and slashing at the bushes, and the noises intermingled, Ard at play and the vehicle coming, until finally they could hear the burble of the engine coming to idle.

writing: civil war chess.

There was one of those above-ground pools and the girls were swarming it, with Doug standing watch.  Of course, Monmouth and Crissie were still perched at the kitchen counter, talking in their secret language, and Mamie was corralled in her room as usual, but most of the rest were there.

Except Howell and Ard.  Nowhere to be seen.

And Bobcat and Clyde, who sat in Clyde's house, blinds drawn to watch the ladies in their swimsuits.  They had Bobcats civil war chess set between them, like some kind of battleground between Dollar Generals, the ground where the real stuff happened, with Bobcat and Clyde pushing buttons and moving pawns.

Their eyes kept going to Maya, as everyone's eyes did, tallish blond looking like a wet dream, a model, watching her weight, and they where their two, the eyes of everyone, watching her weight.  She was in a two piece and looking untanned, fair, in her dollar store loafers.

They all had them dollar store loafers, it seemed, and they all, probably even the women, wanted to fuck Maya, and she stayed aloof, kinda quiet, which gave her a maddening sense of mystery.  

And she was one of the few that worked around the three houses, at Chicken Place #1637, where she probably just walked in everyday, into a place where everyone wanted to fuck her, there, too.  It was enough to make her desirable, that she had a little pocket money, that she wasn't on mister Roys disability check because of her adult age separated her out even more.

She wouldn't get in.  She'd just stand there and make them all wish.

Bobcat and Clyde played at chess, nudging the pieces like two ogres bartering, and PT Beauregard had met Sherman, had met the 37th Camden, had shot the line over by the Wilderness, and his horses were making the blue bellies toss their cookies in the scrub brush after they had fled in terror, tossing their cookies in the relative safety of having run on foot all the way deep into the heart of Maryland.

The newspaper people, in no uniform, probably had it easier, probably turn-coating and taking up with the rebels, in the name of getting the story, and saving their skins.

All at once an 80s Chevy Silverado ballisticly killed the front entry, the decking and the cinderblocks, and was parked feet from Clyde and Bobcat.

It was Nicky, Nicky the wonder, not much femininity about her to speak of, but always a pet interest of Clyde, pursuing him around the country the way she had already and would continue, if they both lived.

She had a gun and was firing wildly, making the plaster rain down like dust and sand from the ceiling, firing and running towards Clyde, who made for the bathroom, and came in so fast he fell in his savings bathwater, dirty stuff he kept for watering the tomatoes, and she was on him then.

They clawed and scraped, Nicky screaming inarticulately at the top of her lungs, sounding like a raging locomotive or something, a snake-scared bear of something, and suddenly 

a gun shot.

It had grazed Clyde, only, but went through the bottom of the fiberglass tub, and suddenly he wasn't drowning in dirty water, but sucking in pure air, as the water drained out of the tub into the crawlspace under the house.

He had the gunhand.  Not the gun, but the gunhand, and he picked up, like they were glued to one another, and water was pouring off of them, out their pockets, shoes, everywhere.

He wrestled her, tooth and nail to the bathroom floor.

Finally Nicky said something, enraged, as he landed on top of her, their elbows against the toilet:  I HATE YOU!
 

She kept on, "I hate you, I hate you", and his penis got into her somehow, and the gun fired knocking splinters all over the place, and he was kissing her, and she pulled away grunting and squirming to say she hated him again,

and then they got still.

She whispered, "I love you" and as his grip loosened, she scampered away like a frightened squirrel, scampered out, back into her truck, and left, leaving her trail of destruction like any afternoon thunderstorm.

One of Clyde's eyes was blood logged and useless, and he stumbled, partly out of breath back into the living room where Bobcat sat.

"Well" said Bobcat, that knowing hate-it-all smile on his face.

writing. taco imprezzo/doodles fat check

Doodle and lisa, two cheevers, one boy, one girl.  The walked along the pine straw, near terrencea cage behind the neighbors house.

Lisa turned and revealed a swollen belly, a basketball under her shirt.  "Oh look, my love!  You peed on me and now we're gonna have a fambly!"

Doodle was nonplussed.  A thunderstorm briefly came over his demeanor before a crooked smile erupted.

He put one hand chop, slinging his hand, down onto the basketball and it tore out and bounced away towards doodles own yard, lazily.

"And i say you aint saddling me with no undue burderns."  Said doodle.

"Wheres terrence?" Said lisa.

"Hes usually only here late" said doodle.

Lisa turned again.

"I love you, doodle, and i want your check, every last throbbing bit of it."

"Eww" said doodle.

"My deddy said you get a little lead in your pencil, you would support a good honest girl, if you can find one."

"Your deddy dont know my mind, nor what i got in me or on me" said doodle.

---

Away, doodles own, Deddy the epinonymous drove along in his old f100.  Ahead of him was one of the neighbors pulling a trailer.

The front truck slowed abruptly, and before deddy could react, his truck was sitting on the trailer, and his drive shaft was broken, laying on the metal deck of the trailer.  Deddy knew cause he stabbed the accelerator a few times and nothing happened.

Not really surprised, even by such an unusual turn of events, deddy turned off his engine, but kept the radio on, listening to desperado, and lit a winston, content to be lead wherever the neighbor was going.

----

Lisa turnes around with a baby doll in her hands.  "Look doodle!!"

Doodle protested and ripped the baby doll from her hands.

He grinned crazily and turned away.

"I'll call child welfare doodle.  Dont do nuthin mean!" Cried lisa.

A flint coughed.

"Heh heh" doodle said.  He turned and he had burned the face of the baby.  "Guess its not my baby after all.  What watkins street black boy you been seeing?  You can get his check instead of mine."

"Dont believe it, doodle.  Its the michael jackson skin disease, baby.  I dont lay with blacks no matter how much they beg for this."

He tossed the burned doll in terrences open top cage, laughing.

"I want your check, doodle!" Screamed lisa.

-----

Deddy had gotten bored and was anxious for the truck ahead to stop so he could get about his way.

And there it was.

They stopped.

At taco imprezzo, the nationwide chain of mexican food restaurants.