Seneca on the Philosopher's Mean.

I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavor to become a better man.  I do not merely exhort you to keep at it; I actually beg you to do so.  I warn you, however, not to act after the fashion of those who desire to be conspicuous rather than to improve, by doing things which will rouse comment as regards your dress or general way of living.  Repellent attire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard, open scorn of silver dishes, a couch on the bare earth, and any other perverted forms of self-display, are to be avoided.  The mere name of philosophy however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow men?  Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society.  Do not wear too fine, nor yet too frowzy, a toga.  One needs no silver plate, encrusted and embossed in solid gold; but we should not believe the lack of silver and gold to be proof of the simple life.  Let us try to maintain a higher standard of life than that of the multitude, but not a contrary standard; otherwise, we shall frighten away and repel the very person whom we are trying to improve.  We also bring it about that they are unwilling to imitate us in anything, because they are afraid lest they might be compelled to imitate us in everything.

The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.  We part company with our promise if we are unlike other men.  We must see to it that the means by which we wish to draw admiration be not absurd and odious.  Our motto, as you know, is "Live according to Nature"; but it is quite contrary to nature to torture the body, to hate unlabored elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that is not only plain, but disgusting and forbidding.  Just as it is a sign of luxury to seek out dainties, so it is madness to avoid that which is customary and can be purchased at no great price.  Philosophy calls for plain living, but not penance; and we may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time.  This is the mean of which I approve; our life should observe a happy medium between the ways of a sage and the ways of the world at large; all men should admire it, but they should understand it also.

"Well then, shall we act like other men?  Shall there be no distinction between ourselves and the world?"  Yes, a very great one; let men find that we are unlike the common herd, if they look closely.  If they visit us at home, they should admire us, rather than our household appointments.  He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they are silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware.  It is the sign of the unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.

But I wish to share with you today's profit also.  I find in the writing of Hecato that the limiting of desires helps also to cure fears: "Cease to hope" he says "and you will cease to fear."  "But how", you will reply, "can things so different go side by side?"  In this way, my dear Lucillius: thou they do seem at variance, yet they are really united.  Just as the same chain fastens the prisoner and the soldier who guards him, so hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope.  I am not surprised that they proceed in this way; each alike belongs to a mind that is in suspense, a mind that is fretted by looking forward to the future.  But the chief cause of both these ills is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present, but send our thoughts, the noblest blessings of the human race, becomes perverted.  Beasts avoid the danger which they see, and when they have escaped them are free from care; but we men torment ourselves over that which is to come as well as over that which is past.  Many of our blessings bring bane to us; for memory recalls the tortures of fear, while foresight anticipates them.  The present alone can make no man wretched.

He said: "the gator's got yo granny."

 

"Are not the joys of morning sweeter

than the joys of night

and are the vigrous joys of youth

ashamed of the light

 

Let age and sickness silent rob

the vineyards in the night

but those who burn with vigrous youth

pluck fruits before the light."

 

 

the enmity, and explanations sans reason

It was like a curse, life itself, enmity between me and thee, and Original Sin, the due diligence, was still very much being meted out.

It was a beautiful morning this morning, temperate, but all the while i was thinking on the pure casual way i lost a family member some years back, least resistance  and all.

They had asked off the cuff for my opininion of things, why things happen, and i amazed them by saying no one had ever been able to explain life, but here i was, the one and only narrator  asked by an underpaid state employee, that immortal existential question.

And expected, just as much off the cuff, shooting from the hip, to explain all of life in the last five minutes of my session.

That i would be let go easy, i acknowledged some time ago.  They were more beholden to the wwe mcmahons and the nfl, cbs and nascar, than to me.  They were beholden such that if i explained the interconnections as i saw them, and may have actually however been accurate, to hold the narrative line, i would be prescribed strong medication to dull my brain.

They, knowing i was right, but holding the narrative line, would sacrifice me.

I know that and understand that, so i dont always give them my unfettered perceptions, but a tangential shading of my true thoughts.

I had another mind bending moment in dreamtime, dream representations of real places, and people, some not alive anymore and most strangely, i took the back room apartment of my shadow self, i luged through a maze.

I bought a soda.

I was changing my shirt.

I looked my shadow self in the eyes for a brief second, i at him, he at me.

Prior, i had been thinking of my rebelliousness of old, another kind of least resistance.  I remember once in a haze of menthol smoke i daydreamed about explaining good conduct to a group of local methodists.

In effect, i had, during my bad teenage years, made a christianity but i had no sight, no concept of the cross, having never much heard of gratitude to christ, or the proper staid indwelling of the spirit.

I had pulled into pieces, overbalanced into something untenable, i had prioritized a conduct line i couldnt maintain.  I had, with not the holy spirit, but a kind of demon coming forward, pushed at those limits such to break bones, and with the fasteners of the facility loosened, elapsed through that as if it were a sieve, and then floated absently in oblivion.

I had bulldozed through hundreds of unspoken judgements on my rebirthing and renewal of some theology that lacked objective principles, static figures that remained above reproach.

Im a calvinist and able to rhetorically explain and defend that;  God knows, regardless of whether or not you know.

of societies old, and gods forgotten; elder ones and bygone ways and quite other items, things, and thoughts.

 

Hath not a congressman eyes?

The ancient Carmalians had proposed not a spirit animal for each year that rotated through the continuity, but a different deity for each year.  Not like the "personal daemon", not like the animal politic, or anything like that, but a whole new system, every da*n year.

Further than that, the had the "family gods", the unisex little bearded figurines that they ensconced in a cloth until they retired for the evening, wine and charred pork on their breath, whispering things to their forebears.

I heard that Agcrats were having a vacation into Puerto Fern, and there was a "virtual" option, for those less inclined to travel, the peanut farmers of the lot, the ones on the precipice of a harvest, that is, you know.

Oral Roberts said you didn't apply hands until you were ready to actively release your faith, like through a thunderbolt, imparting a wish, believe as an active verb.

The Carmalians left behind crags of ruins, thought the properties were considered cursed, that perhaps poor sanitation had caused plague.  Surely, there was no discernible sanitation in much of the old ruins.  They thought it cursed, then from the bed of lake Titicutt, from the bedrock of mud, a tidal wave smited the land under surface mud, the superficial substata of the lake coming forth to overtake, as is said in the Bible, itself: the last will be first.

They speculate there was a kind of celestial help, a kind of thing like earthenware spaceports in South America, and precision-cut stonework, impossible for utensils of wood and scotch tape.

Impossible for people that only learned masonry by watching Youtube.

Of this, I felt a profound fliffle within myself for a few days, a kind of dissipation of essence; my thoughts roared in my ears, no blanket was enough and no blanket was needed.  Everytime my eyes would shut, the warden would ring the buzzer and ask for my block number.  Fluffadiddle-possapittle.

What they never asked of the old Carmalians, that if their society had flourished so, centuries past, why had they not multiplied through future generations?

a bards moment.

Hath not a congressman eyes?

Prick him; do he not bleed?

A congressman by any other provenance is just as sweet.

I would save a word for after--a pouch of globulin; i would fleck this out, somewhat hereafter, to make anends to the observing daemon of posterity, for all its insults and ignorance, maybe, to do it a service.

2022: The Lateness of the Hour Revisited.

It was, "once more into the breach", another noel, another yuletide, another chance to get it right.

Beans.

Tasked to control the crisis, was decided, "we'll buy them houses".  And I thought this sounded like government wisdom, that full-fledged citizens crap in city parks, and the immigrant gets a free house.

"We'll buy them houses", and this when most of their own voting bloc aren't homeowners themselves.

Its what happens when we put lawyers in charge, I wot.

The serialized pillaging and the "just add water" go-to news story for the right side of the aisle, the story of "a crisis".

We'll take a kind of spherical geometry and run in through a spatial matrix, and me, I'm having a prophetic vision, laying at the Lateness of the Hour, thinking how so often, the kids are raised by phone apps, and only yelled at by their helpless, busy parents.

Not that the parents don't care, but they're panicking already, up to their nips in quicksand of child disrespects and broken vows of citizenship; and New Year is, at once a rebuttal to Harris Faulkner, and also an elegy outlining the very Lateness Of The Hour.

It was the rub that the robots thought they were human, and the humans wanted that certitude of the robot mind within themselves; it was penis envy, maybe, for the plasticized circuitry.

"But I want to go the prom too."

I want to throw up on the Class Presidente's shoes.

Zapatas Ellas.

Any way, in spherical geometry, optics are terribly misleading, and the angles arch and curl like limp spaghetti, if one traveled along a ray and measured with compass, caliper, took the measure of the thing, such would be befuddling and muggawumping and generally the think meat is sort of a gutter pooch innards sausage that came around and flew across Harris's scalp, then made for the door.  

Tasked to head-off the crisis, Time In A Bottle, and the Lateness of the Hour, "we shall sit, still, like a colored stone in the bottom of an aquarium until our prey comes close."

Gypsies Tramps and Theives....

"I was sixteen; he was 21..."

"And Papa woulda shot him if he knew what he'd done...."

I had kind of an ovoid construct in my slumber, an open rear fascia, and front fascia that dissolved behind the co-stars back, and in mid conversation, out-of-body, I floated along the city street, looking at the colors they had painted the bricks lately.

The place was an annex, this dream-slide Hell's Kitchen back room apartment I was in; a cot, slats, Black Mariah, and an actual honest to God kitchen at the back open frontage.  Why they had the kitchen open to rear parking, I don't know.  I didn't ask.  But they gave me a cot, and I shut my mouth and took it, but to say I shut my mouth wasn't a thing, because Black Mariah was asking why I was speaking so, so unusually, beyond the usual bleeting and gleeting, a spermecium tendril of Black Mariah's beguilement and wonder flapping along the century old floor boards in the old store building, flapping like a confused snake, and damn if the front wall didn't disintegrate, and a spirit-floated my own person around the corner staring at the pretty ugly painted brick.  The 150 year old painted brick of would-be historic shop buildings along the main.

In the advancement of time,

there was a marked Lateness of the Hour,

in which personage stared into a haze of Azure.

What does thou in thy mind have, love?

Only thee, my pooch tiddy mammie dog.

And there was plenty of straw under the porch steps.

Plenty of straw.

Yon lay-about, the donkey balls sweat,

but thee, in they near comatose, sweat not?

william blake: a cradle song

Sleep sleep beauty bright

Dreaming over the joys of night

Sleep sleep: in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit & weep

Sweet babe in thy face

Soft desired I can trace

Secret joys & secret smiles

Little pretty infant wiles

As thy softest limbs I feel

Smiles as of the morning steal

Oer thy cheek & oer thy breaswhere thy little heart does rest

O the cunning wiles that creep

In thy little heart asleep

When thy little heart does wake

Then the dreadful lightnings break

From thy cheek & from thy eye

Oer the youthful harvests nigh

Infant wiles & infant smiles

Heaven & earth of peace beguiles.

On the good and evil of nature, questions and answers, and a four-feathered bird bottom.

 

 

From the natural world, an occasion or something pockmarked by various things, cratered by the flying storm of detritus that is the modern conversation--a saving grace then, to cut the noise.

In my cups again, and feeling no pain, I wagged the bird ahead of the dog, whacked the dog on the head with the four-feathered bird ass.

I said if it was natural, then it was explicitly a good, and not an evil, no matter that stance of perception, that a natural thing was by nature a good, by reason of faith, by faith in reason that these things transcend subjectivity of the being a remain static, objective principles of life and the cosmos.

The Nuclear Snowstorm.  Not an evil, but just a thing, and by faith we can sheepishly apply the label "good" to it, if we can maintain feeling enough to grab the post-it and the tape, we can put a name on that sucker for all posterity, and say, no matter how many crashed, died, lost property or what not, it was not an evil because it was natural.

By the same token, people whispered that the Christmas Tsunami was an act of God undertaken on vacationers in a foreign land; but was it an act of vengeance, or just a thing?  Was it the sea coming forward to claim them, the idle vacationers, balls out on the warm sand?

*an act of nature is without conscience and only a product, and by that token is neither good nor evil.

By the same token, are all my whims acts of good or ill, being products of nature?  Why, I can stamp with my own judgements that I don't do bad things, but perhaps things that provide chiefly for my own providence, and towards others, decidedly less so, with my own comfort or esteem the chief aim, the reason'du'tre, the raison detre of the whole piece.

If Banana Pudding is pudding and bananas, then explain Baby Powder, or Motor Oil, or the Christmas stockings hung before the roaring fire?  Did Grandmum remove her stockings, hang them up neatly, then climb into the fire?

So we have posed questions to the universe, and expecting answers, as neatly as Grandmum's naked legs roasting in the fire, and we have only a time stream from which to deduce and extrapolate our answers, a timeline that is at once an answer, and a kind of celestial EKG of God, from which our largely-untrained eyes puzzle to put together responses amidst little blips: slashes and dots. 

Give to the site, if so inclined.

where the spirit is wheeling.... the freschetta is abysmal.

She had, more than once, the Whore, called Kimberly Brighton-Wonderworth on me, complaining about my thought-inappropriate technique.

But one day she was saying she could hold any position for a length of time.

"Ya juss lay there?"

"Aw naw, cuz.  You don't think I'm gonna give you a chair to sit in. Hit the clock, cuz, or go to the back and unload the truck."

I was thinking to myself, and not saying out loud, that I'd probably have to jab her with my pocketknife to get a reaction out of her, the Prodigious Whore.

She had a man to pass the time, but away, she was in lamentation about him, that placeholder of a penis, holding between the pages, a fleshy little bookmark of Peter.

Years ago, we had threatened unmercifully every Peter Hunt driver in Columbia around I76 and I20, and they were laying low, probably hanging down in their own little air-ride chairs.

The whore just lay there like a jellyfish, waiting to call Kimberly Brighton-Wonderworth, thinking the whore was a sex symbol, but to me more an emblem of lackluster presentation and high mileage.

Never did hear for sure if the Whore had sex with Kevin, but there were rumblings, and at no point did I ask, mind you, or if Kevin even had a penis in the first place, or if he were in fact married to a servant from the front-end; of these things I cared not a fig--it was just something for them to say when I came into earshot.

Of Wonderworth, I had planned to put an Allen wrench in her differential on her SUV to see if there were fluid in it, but of that, we were barred from using synthetics in those things, though some third of our vehicles used that.

Doug's stratagrem against Wonderworth was a policy of first hard talk, and second, hard disruptions in productivity which he disguised as a sort of feckless outer nature, and fear of his natural predator, the beautiful little Assistant Manager, only then working online off-the-clock to get an Masters in Business.

They say

where the spirit is willing

the flesh has the strength of ten.

That sort of underlines Doug's abrupt smashings into a wall of outright failure and completely negative thoughts, predatory against his fellow workers; Johnny rose above Doug's ineptitude and sang beautifully, gave discourses at the Stoa against ineptitude, but he too, had that sort of predatory aspect.

Of the predatory, there was one at one time, for a few months, who would mention that his dick was hard.  I didn't know how to deal with such a situation, figuring ignorance is no excuse, of course, but a plausible course of action, that he sat between rows of Toyotas and Dodge trucks, among 4 or 5 uniformed technicians, nursing a blaring little klaxon of his own shame and predatory nature.

It was the ultimate in predatory nature to target one's own fellows, and at my behest, we air-mailed his throbbing cock to Laurinburg, where he would, incidentally, meet his fate.

*Wonderworth looked like an exotic dancer.  She shines off her backend in selfies these days.

*Doug is probably dead of some horrible negativity-based disease, willed onto him by his own evil thoughts.

*Kevin was fun to work with, primarily because he was insane, which made him at least entertaining most of the time.

*They forbid us to talk about Barack Obama.

The shit I didn't give about any of that, I saved to drop from a plane, years later, to fertilize Kevin's cash crop field.  But I wondered, if that girl was such a blatant whore, a "prodigious whore", why was it unknown that she had sex with Kevin, hated her boyfriend, and kept calling the main office about my antics.

Should such be a secret, unless it was all reputation, a smoke screen to draw one into the radar?  I had been disoriented by Doug's own impetus towards destruction and conquest, and the girl did say she would just lay there, contorted.  It was the old celestial game of slapping a dog on the ass to make him jump.

I was asked if there was a plot against one of the managers, and I thought of their own rules, and I played it cool, for the ultimate plot was the plotter destroying himself, which he did, and with censorship going around in odd doses, too, I brook not to dip my toes in the pool, but stop that whining noise from Kimberly's Tahoe.  It was a matter of a technicality preventing service intervention for the cause, but knowing too, as a human being, that damage was being done everyday she dragged her rear end on the asphalt.

It was, in fact, what was right, versus, in opposition to, what was right.

So anyway, she went in the WNBA playing for the female concourse in Washington, probably had a wife prettier than mine.  Better weed than I've ever had.  Straight from Acapulco, ya know, and all, and the real true Whore of the piece pinioned down like a dead butterfly, still-proud and holding true pride in the aspect of just lying there, and that guy on the moped took all the chairs because of some OSHA regulation.

Probably none of this ever happened, not even in my imagination.

Stranger To The Water.

I was flipping through the cards, amazed of the contradictions I was being shown, such as Defeat manifesting Victory, such as the galactic truth that Victory is Defeat, and Defeat Victory, and perhaps, as is said, "there are never any winners".

The muddling speaks of nature, a stream troubled, perhaps, in which the sediment clouds the waters, or even a timeline, a sequence, to be defeated once and then victorious: I looked at it and I puzzled.

The very gayest little stick man...

 

Your grandfather, circa 1949, shining his shoes and having a bottle of something brown, but not tea, not tea brother, but something more revoltingly antiseptic; he could have been even then having a go against nature, despite that nature reclaims her own.

There's no explicit "Tiddies" tarot card, I observe, but a few with female nudes, like the girl and the bucket, "This Is The World", and I'm like yeah, your ass wishes, Cheever.  She's got a bucket full of your pocket change, mayhap.

Melvin Vernon Presnell...

Pater Familias had some Jo-Jo's corn nuggets, and I thought it was more an intellectual exercise, decoding some of current events, while yet one was supposed to un-purse his buttcheeks some and "just go" with the feeling.  One could suffer adversely, health-wise, when going so much against nature, and losing the feeling that whatever will elapse is coming to you, anyway, silver bullet, no side shuffles or deviations, baby.

I liked that Mary Cawdor from CLT.  She kind of stutter-stepped into my imagination.

I was listening to a Ted Talk and cutting my toenails and the whole thing was kind of a Gestalt, that if I wrenched meaning from it, such is the way, I had brought my own problems and used it as a Chi Mai kind of Chinese Click Clack to decode the thing.  This is the future.... this is the past...  Bitch, I know the past, already.

Shit, I was there.

"What had happened was..."

Tsu Tsen had a big old batch of ideas, and I even saw there were pups in the waiting for springtime.  I had kind of a consternation that my oldest cat was pregnant, and I had to prune a peach tree before summer.  All things on the radar, you know, and the control center stays in that inspiration mindset so much, kind of an endless musing.

There are chiefs, and there are indians.  Sometimes your the chief, and sometimes youre the indian.

Tsen had made a low country boil, for one thing, and I didn't care usually for just a boiled plain little hodge podge of random stuff from the pantry, but this was Tsu Tsen, and you were supposed to act like you enjoyed it, or he would get upset and lose his shit.

There would be in the offing some vagrant uslurper, doll-like, and bent of spine, fortune's little bitch boy, and so forth, fumbling up and down on waves and looking at the angry but still pulsating of the gray water: a uslurper, a pretender.

Movie: In The Good Old Christmastime. "The Shop Around The Corner."

Of the romantically starcrossed Jimmy Stewart being accused of being bowlegged, we can only remember Eisenhower's cryptic warning about the Military-Industrial complex, which JFK and LBJ would later milk-enthusiastically.  If DDE was King Philip, then JFK thought he was an Alexander, and LBJ a Nebuchednezzar, later to go crazy after the writing on the wall: PSSH, thought to be bowlegged.

The director's favorite film of his own.

"He stole that from Victor Hugo."

Mataczek's Roadside Super Emporium is where lovers meet.

It's Budapest, baby, its Christmastime, and the only Five Folds we got this time are the imported pig skin wallets that both Jimmy and his colleague work on, to get that from the girl as a romantic present.

"I can prove I'm not bowlegged.  Let's go out on the street and I'll pull up my trousers."

More Western optimism, but this time in Budapest, invading the near East, with a new kind of imported pig skin bi-fold in place of the five fold path, these are clerks, my friends, and Pepe has that kind of Horatio Alger hard-on for career advancement, and twisting the knife, romancing the dollar....

...forgetting the perfume.

"roast goose filled with apples..."

It was a more civilized age, and a man and woman could get at the meat of their souls together in the medium of the handwritten word, with one cherry-picking witty quotes out of a treasure trove of memory, and another ad-libbing beautifully.

My pen pal girl, makes me sing a little of the Francis Bacon, maybe, and in the interim, bottom-up ontology dictates that my venerable old bard be discarded in place of 90s music, maybe, and in the end, she was put-off the music box and steered expertly by no less than two clerks into opting for the imported pig skin.

Eine Kliene Nachtmuzak. "Stuck in the Middle with You."

Perhaps, as it were, a sort of cosmic dissipation, the cosmos vomit into empty space, and that, the dog returns to its vomit, the center cannot hold, the dogs and the cats, and sort of the infernal thing taken back into itself.

I had a strange, blessed blissful day.

"thy thoughts, towards, cannot be quite catagorized"

Indeed thy thoughts, the issue of my mouth.

Praises I sing, women I fight in the ring, Titan Mexican.

One hysterical vomit of indecency, malaise, onto the pavings, and so forth.

Melvin Vernon Presnell holds the torch, carries the standard of decency, athleticism, energetic actions towards that Horatio Alger handpurse full of what the universe tabulates as "earnings", one man holding the torch, making the case:

Melvin Vernon Presnell.

....I watched the sun vibrate higher and higher......  from the between the tree trunks, to higher into the tendril witch-finger limbs.... the heat from cigar smoke exhalation daubing and defrosting the windshield slowly...

Gonna call Georgia for some votes, again, OJ?

Intellectual Freedom, Creative Courtesy. Hochevar, Legion, and my life in wonderment.

 

Hochevar had came, toting a frosty, bicycling shorts and all, and we observe frost on the chicken's back too.

Redundancy gives a kind of sense to things, I told him, layers and insulations and installations and the pings and the pongs.  As Blake put it, not redundancy, but a more kind of synchronizing, a symmetry, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, some pointing one way, and some another, but all each a radius from a kind of nexus, and in that, certainty is a deliberate illusion created by the system, that nature pumps and ca-jugs along whether there is certainty or not, and the only true certainty is but a few precepts of nature, and those that we only feel as if we can prove.

I do not mean the world is subjective, but your chains, some of those fetters, are different from those that assail my person; and some things are common, such as the common ailment or the common blessing, the common cursing, and the snow and rain.  Yet some things are quite unique in the interim; I do remember saying I had a unique life experience.

I had a kind of dispersion, a kind of reworking of the body scientific many years ago.  Indeed, I had turned over all the old ideas, to no avail.  Of the avail, I was ignoring the quite plain things in front of my very eyes, in place of much larger concepts which touched others, and not me at all.  They were talking about church glass, and I yelled and raged for two weeks thereafter.  It was a bad science filled with all sorts of variables, things I could sense, but not properly brush-across, while the things I need I brush-across lay in neglect.

What of science, that this was Eden, a dumpy little room, with a desk, shelves, two monitors, a chair: a dumpy little room with a man seeking to answer his own questions, and that not being curiosity, per se, but a kind of initialization of the universe.  In that I remembered a conscious moment before my first birthday.  They said it was impossible for me to remember such, but I even remember what I was thinking.  The novelty of the event led it to be memorable for the others; I was loud, in this moment, having a very conscious moment in the life of a happy less conscious child.

What of this consciousness but not an assailing from the world proper? 

I had detected my own spark of life; and even at months old, I remember the room, the people, I knew where I was, I knew how I'd got there, I knew who was there.

My own little spark of life, and would you believe...

it didn't make me happy.  Quite honestly, it was weird, to be alive, I was looking around at a room filled with people, and the whole experience of living at once seemed so very lamentable, not that there was a problem in the place, nor the doings, but in simply being that particularly conscious of anything: it was not fun at all.

There was a grayscale world this morning along the seaboard, and it was that particularly light and dark of frost.

Hochevar dipped his tortilla-colored fingers into a glass of some kind of stuff and went to work at his art; his art was life, and I was but one dismal corner of the canvas, and an uncheerful but not too upset, little corner of a much more vast cornucopia.  I took one really long, slow breath as he began, and I spat where the lawn meets the flower bed.

The outline of frosty coconuts, and that vaguely resembling that classic family head shape; the baldness, the profound kind of angularity of the skull aft the crown, that kind of symmetrical thing.  I had that moment at Walmart in Rockingham too, watching the back of my bald head in the monitor, the camera behind, the monitor in front; it wasn't quite so much a security camera, but a kind of employee compliance camera, and I was watching male pattern baldness, a contest I had quite put many under the table in conquest, the jettison-action of the dying tree, the hanging tree, the scalp underneath, bad earth, and bad earth brook no good fruit.

"Paint your horrid sh*tstorm, Hochevar, and if it looks vaguely familiar to me, perhaps I'll curse it too with a sort of consciousness that is bewildering, an unemotional bewilderment."

Perhaps this was Legion, forcing a herd into the sea.  I have a vision of their horrified and simultaneously outraged bulged porcine eyes; they made a go of it, the Long Swim to China, not to befuddle Legion maybe, but because something of it seemed familiar.

"I adjure thee, thou Son of the Most High, torment me not."

To the madman, the Son was a psychiatrist, a therapist.

To the stuck screw, he was oil.

To the rash and raw, a balm.

To those requiring guidance and overseeing, a Shepherd.

To the hungry, the Bread of Life.

To the thirsty, Living Water.

To the reader, the Word.

To the concept of time, a constant.

To the criminal, forgiveness.

To the downtrodden, hope.

He is the bootleg handbag that upstaged its more expensive Italian twin; he is the plate of beans, perhaps, given to Esau as consolation and reward.

the frisson sociale, and le medium sociale, the sunshine after, and the popular content torpedo aimer.

 

Oh the peculiar vulgarities and transciences of the life social, and itself a cataloging of said peculiarities, curiosities and emotional atrocities, a file of instances in which we were happy or sad.

But then there is the utterly peculiar beauty, that kind of renewed resonance of the sunlight after a storm.

What am I but one in the catalog?  I pretend to be no more special, and certainly any special quality I might show you could be partaken of and imparted to any of the others, and that, a kind of "participation trophy" of the blogging world, and the life social, nothing thrust upon us, as we assured in the Good Book, nothing tossed onto our aching backs that is not common to mankind.

God loved and gave, in turn the spirit comes upon us, and we can think of what we deserve, or not what we deserve but that we get overmuch, out of love, we are duly blessed, and in the interim we are but with our grateful hands out in wonder, surprise, amusement.....

I awaken talking to so many, being talked to, social balances redressed, new love interest redressing herself, too, and so much other, blessing and wishes imparted, blessings and wishings taken, received, and so much hope trafficking about on a cold morning.

And in the cold, the little molecules grown large and so much apart, but in their magnitude, somewhere therein, not unaware, not absolute zero, but chilled like the sparkling wine at a social gathering.

We are that wedding party in Cana receiving the gift of vino, as the gift of gab and conference among our peers, and they say too, the media social is a bane, but only in tangents; never before have we brought the rest of our community so close, never before have we known so much brotherhood.

Of the media sociale, I note that Twitter bagged Trump, of which I have no opinion of their action, but make note that Trump had a huge following, people loving, people love to hate and others, and they cancelled his account, and an exodus had begun.

Something of the old adage about biting the hand that feeds one....  That maybe, they want the post-modern Trump back to bring back less offensive elements of a more full user base.....

If Crapdashian, or Terry Colon were the most popular figure on the platform, would it make sound business sense to suddenly ban each, or even one of them?

A random sample of vulgarities, the life social, with belches and farts, complaints and well-wishings taken as but bits of peanut, pecan and walnut in our truffles, if such were to be allowed.

And banning the most popular content was never a particularly sound decision from the business side.

But the sunshine after the storm glints lovely on the leaves, the flower petals, and the humidity rises from the firmament, higher into the air, and the breath comes easily, moreso and moreso as the humidity risings, something of steamy mist leaving and rising higher and higher.

Nature's recognized "Best Science Photos" of 2022.

Beauty that astounds, and most of it is just stuff from around Creation.  From the center of the Milky Way to stormwater runoff in Tibet.

Nature.com presents:

 https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-04372-2/index.html

On learning....

.... The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly.  -Oswald Chambers

William Blake's version of the Demon Futnuckery, circa 1800 AD; remembrances.

(excerpted from "The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Innocence)

....And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!--
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy....

I come, mayhap, dreadfully so, dread and want of my own sillinesses and gray gooses, for want of a horrid smile turned toward that youngling face; do I come to eulogize?  Demonstratize?  Evoke?  Persuade?

Come perhaps, on my own time, to say something of the dark corners in our well-worn halls, mayhap, of something which we express, so often, but not so well, for we wrestle, we grapple at it, trying to grasp what is the very liquid of the air.

I lay, like a corpse, sleeping approximately ten minutes, during a sort of "mindset show", kind of lulled to sleep by the armaments of the conversational games we play, the little runtime and memory stack of the life daily, sort of a hardware/software/firmware update, feeling along blind with my somewhere lodged in those dark corners of those well-worn halls.

There were, from my point of view, little grains, tiny beads of sand, and a webwork of nicks in the checkerboard, that so old and expertly laid, but worn, the clack-clack of senior citizens coarsing those halls, and they, I could but look and see, but turn back to my own kind of perception of the discourse, how the nicks and small cracks in the checkerboard looked like a sparkle of shattered glass over the mirror-glass finish of the whole thing.

They were on about QAnon, and sort of a cryptic clue of the whole thing, and I was cringing, thinking of how the old terrorist coordination flowed freely through the popular conversation; it was already there, and they set their watch and warrant, and now, the political aiming of the thing.  Much more to be said of QAnon, or better yet, ignored, still, and I see a way to work against it, not a real strategy, but kind of a sub-layer pattern that breaks their discourse; they want so much to be empowered and in control of their own lives.  Methinks it unChristian in the long view, that we are in fact guided and maneuvered by a bigger hand that controls a billion other things.

Perhaps on my own time, not calculating this time my own merits, but embracing a kind of dignified anonymity, that at once was undignified, and nor was it particularly anonymous: I had my name on my shirt; I self identify, in a sense.

Come to look at the smooth mirror glass of a sarcophagus and with a rose in my lapel, too numb to remember, but memories like frost along the edges of a window light, come to stick in the firmament my own cut oak limb of a sort of common humanity.

"The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Experience

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying " 'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? say?"—
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

"And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."

.............................................—William Blake

Midnight's Children: The Kaballic Verses.

 

Martha and I were sitting there over a dish of toast and some Stella Rosa chatting of minutia, her boyfriends, and other things, a perfunctory foray into investing in electric cars.

It was a quiet morning, before Hell came to the door of the conscience.

That's what it was.

And then hell came to our door, "for all have sinned", "not one is righteous", kind of an ethnic cleansing of the suburbs, kind of a Western Civilization stomach cramp, and for such a mundane malady, people do, in fact, die.

I had lead the mammie dog out for breakfast, you know, having to keep them caged: town limits and all, and they were saying you could put chickens in cages, but don't under any circumstances, park a car out front.

I told Martha that electric cars were just a dream of the future, but that someday, it would indeed pay dividends.  I considered that the stock value was a bit much for how much product went out the door; I looked at mass-marketing competitors like GM and Ford, stock values sub 50 dollars and sub 20 dollars, respectively, and I knew the electric car company was overvalued.

I was listening to Martha chew her toast, classic light bread super heated into a partial burnett, and it sounded so much like bones snapping.  Of Burnett, I remember there was a cute little genius named Campbell Brown keeping her seat warm and throwing peanut hulls randomly into the crowd, kind of a child like amusement.

Bruce's birthday, of course.

Good Versus Evil, 

that's what it was.

I scratched Martha's belly, toast-filled, as it was, and took in the morning news, mostly opinion it was, but there was some dribs and drabs of factoids accidentally filtering through, and I scratched too high eventually, above the nipples, and Martha found that painful, I had worked-up towards her throat, by the utters and the John Wayne Tattoo and all that without realizing it, kind of, for the time, lost in a daydream, before the news came in over the wires, circa 930 AM.

'heard the Crimbus bells rangalanging.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men

Across the brow-beaten schizoid-of-weather fusion-encrusted and drained erf, I wandered, looking at the monuments of some of the old cities.  A world-destroying existential paradox, a proclivity towards California-style dissipation, but I thought to myself, with an ounce of renewed depression, it hadn't always been that way.

Under Reagan in 84, it was "Morning In America", before the hardliners got bitchy, everybody was essentially beguiled of a dollar and a spare moment to pick a booger.  

Now some say the woke are trying to tear it all down and rebuild it in their own weird image, the people that can barely read past emojis and nude photos, trying to recast the world in their own image; its more of the push-pull, top-up bottom-down kind of thinking, that some deserve and get, but we've seen a sort of Gordon Greedo kicked to the curbed ahead of a Congressional hearing, arrested and tossed aside, something like 1.2B left of 3.5B+ in debt overhanging.

It's the dirty little pro-growth "growth-at-any-cost" secret of banking and high-finance, MS buys into London SE for 4% but almost gives that back by securing usage of its own cloud.

Dirty little unsophisticated little things, and you would have to pay me or offer the service free before I used MS Cloud services, such a clumsy unwieldy product, I was running Outlook and it crashed, not six inches from monitor, a tv screen with a Bill Gates interview on.  And Excel, the VBA brains of the outfit, I had personally penned a few suggestions for OneNote, thinking it had the potential, when properly linked to the Outlook and Office apps, to be quite a useful little booger in its own right.

VBA string statistics.  In the old days, Rufus Howard and Roland, taking popcorn on strings and lining the trees with them; my thing is to have a live tree in a giant pot, living and still living thereafter, soil, nutrients, water, my stupid smile.

"VBA for OCD persons."

They had created possibly something of what lies at the core of the earth, a paradox of energy that pull water, clouds, even the plate tectonics of the very soil under our feet, a global energy crisis, precipitate, where we have to keep feeding the thing something, something to keep it from swallowing the entire earth, the whole while, the thing becoming so strong it pulls back its own emissions, even photons, and we have, in effect, an encrusted core, a nice little pull-back, and we have to get Spiderman to toss it into the East River to stop the thing.

I was reading Campbells had increased take 15% while losing 1% of sales volume, which means a nice little price increase, and the enigmatic phrase, "price elasticity", and WSJ barring me from their website, hiding me, hiding them, putting a nice pay wall between the unflattering truth of big business, the mindless certitude and soap-smell oddity, the shaven, that is the big business strategem.

Of golfers, my experience is thus: too high monthly fees, sort of a corporate allowance for the man, taking too much money off the top to sustain himself, but wanting, fair enough, to be compensated over time for his investment.

The other had a nice bleach-white Titlist hat.  I gave him a scholarly book, bought by me with student loan dollars, a book on one of his favorite topics, and he seems to have discarded it.

So of golf, I say, "go f*ck a bug".

The fairways are lovely though.

Satan Claus had a gleam in her eye last night, and a kind of Mona Lisa smile, and I wondered, was that some sort of Benzo-induced lethargy brought on by hearing my Ted Talk on Doug, given early in the day.  Had she been crying?  And I was looking at, among other things, a Camaro-survivor sitting in a room full of Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge stuff, which was an oddity in its own right.

I had mentioned that Mariah Carey's Christmas song, our alma mater, was released circa 1994, but only first reached the top spot on BillBoard in 2019, in a doldrum filled with Taylor Keyes, and Bianca and all those that are touted for moneys made.  "She has her own record company; she's become a business lady."  And I thought it weird that Taylor Keyes had got paid years back for all her songs, but then she does them over at her own expense and re-releases the entire catalog, stuff most musicians eclipse in the second or third year of creating, but the cell phone streamers get stuck on it.

I speculate a software virus has artificially flated Tailor's sales.

If you were showing your thighs, singing your heart out, and the audience turned against you, you could reconfigure, or you could just hate the audience, or like Gutfeld, just stop writing books.

Years back, and I had missed the reference at the time, but I was asked for a second performance after a first performance, an instrumental piece on distortion guitar, a somewhat odd version Beethoven's Fate.  It sounded balls-out on the tweaked-up guitar, a cheapie on a pretty good muscle amp.

I put my ball's in your mother's hole, not some stupid plastic cup.  What are you?  A 1990's teen-comedy?

"Shes an entrepreneur; she has a fashion company."

In fact, she's probably directly texted me her bare breasts on Whatsapp.

"Oh, well she's also a model."

I tend to break pieces off of sh*t like that.

But I had my Moment of Bliss today.  Consumption, the taking-in, and all that, and later, my bald head in the beautiful sunlight of a mildly cool day. 

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
    "For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

 

The bard foguesworthy, and the folk tale, "Ramble Tamble".

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

From the "book of improbable short-hairs."

There was once an insane man, taken into police custody for accosting strangers. Only the most skilled lawyer could see what had happened: when the people came close to the man, they each accidentally, and without realizing it, each, had stood on the tip of his necktie, which, each time, drove the man into a kind of belated fury. Before the truth was known, they had all complained about him, both the left and right-leaning media types. -upon being asked, "who do you envy?"

Brittany Grimesgorge meets Santa in the Free World. "The Great Santini."

So they let out this WNBA player, going to basically a dictatorship with her little marijuana in her bag.

They had so many reasons to be upset; they lined-up politically, the liberals and potheads versus the others swarming around the conservatives.

When we have every reason to condemn Brittany, it becomes, perhaps, more and more obvious, that she is.... well.... us.  Any of use abused and misused by the system, just an American in the Russen hip pocket to be traded like a pollywog.

She us.

Isaiah 53, bebies, the maligned and put-upon among us, and she was hustling as an athlete year-round, bound by chronic pain.

Some on the political right observe that "she hates America".  Well that's her right, no pun unintended.

Futnuckery 2: The Way of Blunder, exentuensis the first: why people enjoyed his films, the fact eludes him, James Tiberius Fern Cameron.

Indeed, it was the early 90s and he was a kind of "hitman", a person expected to make big-budget, high-profit, widely-appealing action films.  He had a singular hit with the original Terminator, and through the years, with his own Terminator sequels, and a few other things, he clearly demonstrated time and time again that he did not quite grasp how to do those really big films that demanded his attention as a "hitman".

Terminator 2, where he supposedly establishes kind of a precedent for later Terminator work, was itself the recipient of a dividend of attention based on the success of the more modest original film, beloved and known, constantly repeated on video and cable.

Terminator 2?  Not so much.  Consider people went to see it, flocked to it, in part on the novelty of certain gimmicks introduced in the film, but largely because of the prior enjoyment of the first film.

Around the same time, we were given Predator 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and a few others.

Weekend at Bernie's 2 was vastly superior at reflecting the era, perhaps, and with its own dualities and pooka personality, a kind of cosmically-misaligned foray into a hatred of fate that Cameron would rather briefly touch-on in his Terminator 3.

Bernie at least could dance.  Arnold, it seems, could not, and had embarked on his own pillage of box office dollars, even making the bomb Last Action Hero satiring not his own movies, but others, mostly, dragging in a fictituous action hero with his own equally fictional canon of work that was constantly referenced on film without real world audiences batting an eye, zero emotional impact, zero intellectual impact: as much fluff and filler as some of the stunts and crashes in Terminator 3, perhaps, reflecting more of the current day, maybe, jaundiced, crutched by a misunderstanding of its own appeal, the Terminator sequels.

Now we come to one of the so-called "great" films in Avator and its sequel.  A film, originally, shot on a new 3D method, but clearly not the first 3D film, but it was meant to yet be a first for a plethora of new presentation techniques in cinema, the now-defunct impetus towards "3D everything."  The film meanwhile not great in story, not great in celebrity cache and not particularly action-oriented, marched its way through profitability for reasons few might understand, a kind of maybe, "mass-pychosis" as if Sky Net had cursed the fate of humanity to be herded into long lines for one or two big box-office presentations per year.

Bernie's had the Gestalt of existentiale malaise, borrowing on that mass psychosis decades prior, with a man who simply danced to the music, just like the promotion of Cameron's box office fodder, but constant music, the film equivalent of music's widely lamented but every selling Drake, Dreck the Impala.

Indeed, the perpetual appeal of the original Terminator lies not so much in script or mythos so much as it is reflected scene-to-scene.  And the most recent Terminator features the unstoppable machines being, in fact, stopped, time and again.  And the beloved boy, butcher as part of a dream-like flashback.  Ideas not probed properly was the continued psychic evolution of a Terminator, his "mental evolution" past being a killing machine.

I would have expected more from them all, had I cared.

The wanted me to be that, Weekend At Bernie's 2, they wanted us all, dancing or inducing dancing, feeding the mass-hypnosis, and around the same time, Jurassic Park, between a doldrum marking a recapitulation between Die Hard 2 and Die Hard 3, where the original mastermind some soul searching, John McTiernan, and he comes back for another enjoyable foray into the action film business.

During this growing pain of Western Civilization, we saw Bill Clinton get elected, and Bret Hart was WWF champion TWICE.  Hulkster turned his nose at the old boss and testified against Vincent Kennedy McMahon; people had a taste of the evolution from the 80s to the 90s, and didn't quite like it, it seemed.  It was Jurassic Park, from another box-office hit machine of a man, that kept the whole thing afloat, maybe.  Even the maga-popular Rush Limbaugh had an unsuccessful safari into television, but countered that by writing a best-selling book.

Dare we add Batman to films that did not understand their own appeal?  I saw Batman Returns in the red curtained cement floor alley of the old Carmike cinema, and cleary, the film did not understand itself, and was uncertain as well about the appeal of the first film, as to what kept an audience's attention.  It was phenomena, not just box office success, but later home video success. 

Lethal Weapon built on its appeal with films two and three, even adding the great Pesci, who, just going for the money, threw himself into his work with the zest and effort a great thespian, that if he were some shoeshine loveable sidekick, he really put energy into that role, elevating the character and almost stealing some of his scenes.

Need I mention Limbaugh, love or hate him, agree or disagree, had plenty of energy and thought to cover three hours of radio five days a week.

Jaunty a loo etta: the 12/6 conspiracy.

d

The face, the Age of Enlightenment, the insipid, "I think, therefore I am", while some yet sleep and live and be, some yet dead and in their comfortable urns, yet, be.

"I am, and, betimes, I think on my condition."

Twas, in fact, the kind of people to go where, "everybody knows your name", and some of the interns had never even watched Fox News Channel; those f*ckers.

 

What if we're not correct in our closely-held precepts?

Dubiously so, to aim the narrative is to invite the spectacular possibility, that in all the probabilities, millions of consequences, outcomes, happenings and such forth, we have to have believed with something other than our own discursive squeamish hearts that we have indeed chosen, correctly.

And how often are we otherwise, correct, in our heart of hearts?  We have only the certitude, the moral imperative that others are wrong, evil, while we ourselves have the very purest motives.

It was said of Cambodia, "dey no dey bad people", and I responded oh really?  There was a probability that in my counter-reasoning, there may have been something of a snick-snock video being shot of me from an obtuse angle; and I observe, straight-on the front is obtuse enough, even moreso when in view of the rank and file.

The very few people who believe themselves truly bad, are the broken in spirit, who mistrust even that, having felt even morese that they had lost touch with their trueselves.  The deluded self-justified have only to hide their misdeeds, I suppose, maybe some empty file folders or something.

They post online, you know; they flee the platform when people disagree with them in open conversations, spreading the fear, uncertainty and doubt that Twitter is "the Wild West".  Meanwhile the others have miles and miles of justifications and half-truths with which to bolster their whims, books by Ayn Rand, the owing of things, redressing balances and so forth.

But few in the boardroom world that have anything but a cock-eyed angle for increasing revenues.

Ford suddenly had the most popular truck, and they thus began to put the technology from their horridly unpopular cars into those before so beloved trucks.

"Oh, we can make a higher profit by selling the company every few years, of course, us taking a cut of that income as the executives."

Are we correct in our precepts?

Did I not, as I read on my website, I attached extraordinary value to people from the past that seemed to barely tolerate me, and indeed, I add to that plate of whores d'ovaries that it seems quite logical, like a nice plaid pattern as such, that a man living in the past, has perhaps abandoned his enjoyment of any possible future.

And I was reading Koine Greek, that typeset into modern English, and I was looking at it, seeing the patterns of the old, the old archetypal elements of a tongue alien, just as the Hebrew word pictures went by their own peculiar logic; I was taught a bit differently.

I saw that Pamala and Lisa Ling were talking about sperm donors.

I'm not making that up.  6pm hour yesterday.

Talk about your "FDIC insured."

But anyway, I was doing the equation that God is Light, God is Truth, God is Love, and all those things in effect equate with each other thanks to the Associative Property of essential math.  I was wondering how much of that was truly metaphorical, as God was somehow present BEFORE light, before anything else, in fact, but I assumed it was simply a reference to some man made conception/perception of light.

I consider too, they left town to find something, those of "extraordinary value", dubiously, I would say, to make a life or find a life, to live a life, as if their were no life prior?  I left town for a free house on the homestead, which was another matter; partly indigent, and so forth.

1987 movie film. batmanator. bedizzle fer rizzle.

There was Lance Henriksen, putting over the baddy.

"This is different."

"Harder to kill."

The lobstrocity came from the Easter Sea, formed one mimetic alloy arm into a rudimentary blade.

Then the the other arm, a blade.

Put them together around john connor's bewildered head,

And so.

August 29, 1997.

Took his head.

"Millions died that day."

I almost spilled my beer, too.

"Bodies burning like paper."

"They called it the trepaning day."

I was sitting with a girl, and i hadnt asked her her name-whats in a name, anyway?-a name was unimportant, though if i had it, i would have glorified well beyond its worth.

A lotus flower, it was, a cup in which we sat, two illegals, maybe, in a nation of Karens, a nation of scraps of information.

She had fell in a trash dumpster at nestle water, and i, drunk, looking for a place to sleep, bottle in hand, and all i had in addition was my socks and a newspaper, climbing up to get in and sleep for the night.

And i stopped.

I saw her in there, as i had intended to get in there myself, her sprawled, pawing, looking to me searchingly for some scrap of help, and me, on my hip painfully, something getting squashed between my tittities and my kidneys, on that metal wall jut lip.

The moment hanged in time, lingering like unpleasance, but it was electric.

Eclectic.

Too improbable not to ring true, not to be instantly believable.

Eccentric.

I toppled onto the blacktop outside and my consciousness became the august 29, it was the biblical thousand years of anti christ, it was paul christianizing his own jailors.

No guile was found in that man.

"In him was no darkness", and no indeed, this otis campbell kind of degenerate innebriate, an indulger, and too idle to be a facilitator, had a kind of light over his head.

"They'll call this one The Phone Book Killer."

"I hate the weird ones."

"I put a cigarette out in that coffee two hours ago."

"Yo momma."

"August 29th.  All this.  You.  Me.  Everything.  Gone."

"Garden variety schizophrenic.  Paranoid delusions.  Robots from the future trying to kill him."

And what of the three affluent necrophiles? Had they ordered pizza delivery?  

correspondence from a kaput gunfighter amd gambler.

From the letter of wild bill hickcock to his estranged wife.

Dearest agnes, i thirst for that other shore.  Amazed still that a man cam die of thirst on am ocean of disconcerted thoughts and random facts about a person.

-as opened and read aloud by Francis Walcott to mr Charlie Utter, esq.

high school reonion

The films of my high school experience.

Freshman: the godfather

Sophomore: clockwork orange

Junior: for a few dollars more

Senior: the matrix

4 yrs.  4 different best friends.

Crushes on a new girl each year.

From buying novels to stealing nascar hats.

The more i learned, maybe, the less i cared.  I piled a litany of reprehensible factoids onto a burning fleshlaser.

In year two i read thoreau, and in year three i stood in the pines, dollar books in my bag, myself a kind of fractituous thoreau, watching the pine trees communicate breeze.  The dark fresh water, a soapy froth mingled, was at my toes, kfc rime on my fingers, 11 herbs and spices being my supplement for reading Pyche and Symbol, my young sponge of a brain denying the existence of a shadow self, reading objectively a text of subjective importances and application.

melinda gates, would you also regain beauty with your regained youth?

I was talking with Melinda and she gave me a piece of life advice, unsolicited of course, and quite often, thats where we find the gems among the chaff, nuggets of wisdom.

Something like, "be who you were in high school."

Paradoxical for me, this advice, because i was honor roll first year, and failed 2 of 3 classes my last year.

I went from doing my homework daily, to, finally, just walking out of school in the middle of class.

I lifted weights one year.

I drank heavily one year.

I made an a+ in psych one year.

I was fatter and heavier in year one than in year four.

I liked a different girl every year.

I had a big old color tv, year one, and that tv was gone year four, replaced by a growing collection of music.  Not having the tv in my room, i lorded over the family set in the living room.

Cable tv came to my neighborhood in high school.

Nicole, at the time, loved and cherished me even without knowing i existed, and later it would seem so effortless and trouble-free, her losing her own persona to my torrential oddity.

As the o.j. simpson verdict was read, i stood alone in a room with a journeyman educator that would later run for congress as a Democrat.  I would watch the dnc debate on pbs and listen to his comments on the war on terror, myself bemused hearing tv pundit lines from a familiar, same face, same voice, but saying that party line stuff, the talking points.....

The question wasnt to be or not, that high school Mike, but which of those?

I have been, now as a senior in college, that honor roll mike again.

Will i see nicky again, in that red silk button-up shirt?  Before i get my b.a. of lit?

There was music mike.

Movie mike.

Wkqb overnight mike, rousing to procul harum, or rolling stones 70s cuts.

Weight lifter mike.

Comic book writer mike.

I had even written a 150-page novel AND read The Stand in one intense five day period.

My first cigarette made me dizzy and i sat still for an hour after.

Which mike.....  i wonder....

I remember him, but i didn't know him, yer know.

I played classic rock songs i loved on the pizza hut juke box.  My cool kid friends were underclassmen and complained to me about the songs.  One of them liked marylin manson better.  Another liked jennifer lopez better.  Yet another preferred cypress hill.

One of those died.

One is an expatriate, absconded to socialist environs.

The other still has no taste in music.

One ver married.

The other married twice.

The caboose of the group married to a man.

A man that flipped me off in the middle of class went on to play awhile in the nfl.

In tee shrts, i went from an atl braves postseason shirt, to a too-tight megadeth shirt, to a multi-pack cheapie indigo shirt, to an el paso truck stop shirt in one of my senior pictures.

What melinda means, maybe, not to go back to that maturing and growing, evolving condition, but maybe, numbly, to go back to being who ppl thought i was the whole time.

What absolute sh*t advice.