Pockadoodle: 2023 Badminton at the Pine Straw dome.

Juan was "The Middenorf Badminton King".  He would enter on an El Camino, play a few rounds to appease the fans, then get craned out like an emperor, he would even scale the boom of the thing, with some rope looped around his arm, and wave like Errol Flynn.

It was Hunter S Thompson that observed of the lights of Las Vegas, "this would be ever Saturday night, if the Nazis had won the war."

This was not, of course, every Saturday night, at the Pine Straw Dome, but a rarified, annual event, something marked like rings in the circumference of a tree.  Pockadoodle.  "It's been a good year."

Juan's son was a porn star in Tijuana, and much of the year, Juan was scarce, too, working away at whatever it was that Juan and his handlers hid from the general populace: things that made money, dubiously or not, no one could rightly say.

It was a brilliant stroke of non-marketing, kind of a Velvet Fog, the way subversives talked in Free Mason code using popular sources, and no one ever caught on; they had even programmed the chat bot to talk the "dialeck", so it was not polyglotis or something, not a "dialack", but an open conversion that at once seemed an empty musing, until the Toyota TuRD Tundra showed up with the yellow flags, the foot and the snake.

Then sh*t would get solid, and no former Obama Czar had the unction to even imagine his own righteous indignation and moral relativities, equivocations, or simple knocks on the wall across the way, as if they were scurilous children at play.

They sold hot dogs, sausage dogs, grilled onions plenty, and you could watch the little slivers sweat and then brown, like fish jumping at the empty glare of the sun.  Juan was hitting at it a long, and the line at the bathroom got longer: something about food storage temperatures, something DHEC would have just loved to hate, but it was all empty calories of enjoyment, and the true emptiness of those calories was that we quickly ejected all of that carrion that came from the pull-behind grill.

Badminton, of course, near Blizzard Branch, was only the upscale cousin of Bottle Toss.  Everyone knew this, accepted it, and gave the game a little space for which to abide its time in comfort and joy.

Lionel Rothschild was preparing an excavator it was told, to upstage the boom crane, the modular home crap Juan's publicity department had trucked-in with the promoters stupid child-like glee thinking of the mountains of receipts and the end-all of reality and compunction itself, the vaunted Gate take.

They were all Ric Flairs, one would reckon, and we were all the hapless onlookers at time and circumstance run unfurled at large across the thoroughfare.

 

Clyde Devlin 1b.

Walking upon Robert Macnamara Square, every one of those Little Miracles assailed, hundreds upon hundreds of souls, teeming, piling over one another like hungry kittens, and those Little Miracles were become somewhat insistent: low thunder in the distance that shook him such that he felt it in the bottom of his stomach.

Greer was somewhere in the buildings beyond, and Clyde was hoping to touch base with him one more time, that with an insistence of its own, them having kind of what the magazines called a "Bromance", something of spermless anal sex, and kissing without holding hands, or watching the news at 11 at night without bothering to cover the nakedness--and yet they barely tolerated one another, a kind of see-saw motion of personalities shoving against one another in a kind of drunken rhythm, and a comraderie that bespoke something of loneliness rather affection.

MacNamara Square had been initiated sometime in the 1980s, sometime when they say things were kind of civil, more civil, it was said, but there were cowboys in charge, and agency people patrolling around, and all sorts--big contracts and important contacts and deals that congealed, solidifying at once, off-the-books, without the awareness of the Nobel Committee.  Nixon had spent much of the decade in China before his health went down; Carter, likewise, failures, maybe, jumping on the grenade of coming hopes, flinging themselves into the electric blue of the bug zapper once more, as to the breach, so it was said.

It had became a safe world, once upon a time, for a kind of ambiguity that erred toward the side of homosexuality.

Not that either was, or particularly wasn't, for that matter, but that it was just not a box that had a check mark on their paperwork, the same way they were not of Hispanic origin, nor Protected Veterans, nor declaring a Disability.

If they were, as Clyde speculated, Little Miracles, he was in a deluge of them, a brilliant day-lit cave of them, in a claustrophobe terror of being overwhelmed by the light of so many hundreds, and to make that even worse, more terrible, they kept on coming and going, even as he was moving along, so many of them, such that in a given span of seconds, no two could be mistaken for another, such that the whole thing was an existential confusion that smelled of pine trees, flowers, all the stuff of commercial soaps, sweet fruit, and herbs, those assholes and armpits generating a kind of ocean of odor about the whole place, finding no purchase in the concrete ground, or the black top, assholes and armpits innumerate, a Clyde's hair, his dark scalp, making a kind of marker point from an overhead view, such that he marked himself out without even knowing it, singled-out himself.

Yes, Virginia Woolf, there is a Claude Raines.

"Such a rapture--for by what other name could one call it?--made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she ahd been about to say.  It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs Ramsay.  It paled beside this "rapture", this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised it burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would not disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying level across the floor."

-Virginia Woolf

"What is the meaning of life?  That was all--a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.  The great revelation had never come.  The great revelation perhaps never did come.  Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.  This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, 'life stand still here'; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent(as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the nature of a revelation.  In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing(she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability.  Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said.  "Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!" she repeated.  She owed it all to her."

-Virginia Woolf

Dick Virginia's fake novel To The Blighthouse.

Mr Ramsay circled the house muttering of failures, things stagnating and dismal pools of the water under the eaves, things begging, positively dying by the minute, waiting to be taken unto the air.  Along came Verne Gagne and Mr Ramsay tossed his own ball onto the ground, like a challenger, Equatorial Guinea or Ancient Nippon, these things spoke to them, stupids they were.

But what was it?  Chris's Better Angels, right?  Yes, there was always that at the offing, a sacrificing, pure Camelot, Dulce De Leche poured into our unwitting ears, any excuse, the lesser of two weevils, always an excuse, a prevarication, some precept that weighed more and need more of a place on the trailer; "hell with the couch" they said, and tossed it aside.  They were going for an easy chair, somewhere in the grand scheme.

Kierkegaard the Broken Sequel completed his circle of the house, coming all the way back around, having seen the whole thing, proved his health, and showed something of his own permanence and immovable quality, that preposterousness illustrated by his taking the full survey of the home, proper, the old home place.

Mrs Henderson sat and watched, haunched, and watched in kind of an empty joy that surpassed ball-flinging, and went to some undiscovered province beyond Chris's Better Angels.  She was a widower, and sort of a silent friend to all, bound to them in silence, and standing at their elbows, however that worked, and she made it work just the same; she may as well have been a Glade plug-in or a singing bass without batteries, but her silent friendship gave off in that quietude a kind of low warmth that set in after a time, her just taking to the corner and sitting there.  One didn't know if she were buying drugs, meeting a man, hustling pictures of her bare thighs or something, but she hovered just the same, like an early brisk fog, and her low magnitude of electricity and warmth tingled.

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Movie: Clint Nosterham's Flags of Our Feathers, "Towers to Tunnels" Edition.

 

In the little "c" catholic sense, unholy.  Positively unholy: an unbroken surface of things flopping and flipping around, a kind of life spirit flicker that mimicked the energetic flashing of television screen on a back wall.

Said the Tunnel, directed to the Tower, in the indolence of late Summer, "for the flags of our fathers, we commend ourselves to posterity."

Virgil Effstein, and others, Johnathan Silverman, Andrew Kevinsly, and introducing Reynolds George as Corporal Oreilly.

The Little Miracles part of The Brown-Eyed Medusa, an old unfinished story of minesown.

     “They’re all Little Miracles” said Clyde Devlin, staring at the waitress’s ass as she worked the plates on one of the tables across the room—the elastic looked uncertain, and this bemused Clyde.  “Each one, markedly dignified, with a right to exist and choose freedom. What was it Doctor Manhattan said?”
    “God bless these Southern States?” said Effie, in a fog of induction, a kind of stew of words with the meat of the thing strangely absent; one could go hopelessly mad in conversation with Clyde Devlin.
    “Thermodynamic Miracles” said Clyde, turning back, a kind of resumption in his face and clarity in his eyes.  Effie shuddered, but looked at him, not quite at all able to match his sudden intensity.  “In all the universe, we put to questioning probability, but we are each, a billion-and-one shot, each so unlikely as to be perceived by each other, that we are, each and every one, miraculous.”
    “Ketchup for your hashbrowns?” said the thinner waitress, taller, meandering over and holding the bottle awkwardly, ready to set it down on the table.
    “For my eggs” said Clyde.  The waitress winced.
    “Oh shit, not this again” said Effie.  She was an old hand at these gatherings with Clyde at the little diner, and she had seen this, suffered through it before, but that did not mean she would sit today, by any means.  The first time was novelty enough to last a lifetime of lost musings, and today was not specifically a day for those lost musings, so she shunned it as per her want.
    The bottle made a click against the plasticized covering of the table and the waitress ambled away again, kind of a walking broomstick.  Effie marked that Clyde gave her no amount of scrutiny, and one could argue, matching ketchup with eggs may have even been an attempt to scare the lady away from his strange habitations.
    It was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, away from the eyes of Clyde and Effie, as if the stick waitress had a bad foot, her torso pulsed this way and that as she walked, as if one hip were giving way when she put weight on it, a kind of swing left, swing right, swing left, and what would have been easy entertainment for Clyde Devlin, went hopelessly ignored, as if maybe there were no sore feet or aching knees, worn hips, allowed in the daydreams of the man Devlin, only a kind of uncertain perfection, as of underwear elastic being made visible outside a suit of clothes, seen by any that wanted to see.
    “You get a lot of your philosophy from comic books” said Effie, putting down her fork, and it kind of slid on the glass plate.

-From an unrealized novel called "The Brown-Eyed Medusa".

wakey-wakey ray: the I-7 killer.

The blessings had flowered and went into the wind so long ago, much earlier in the season, and possibilities hanged from the branches, beginning to rot in the summer swelter.

Meghan Meade had perched beside the highway, neatly on public property, still, bestriding the line between truth and evidentiary proofs of the human state, torrents of vomit and other bodily fluids.

She told the nation what was known that day, the popular line between the department press officer and Fox, what was between a packaging foreman, hitch hikers, the alligator sent away, set neatly aside, stomach cut open to hunt for evidence, scat parsed like scripture fragments.

In the heat of that summer swelter he had disappeared nine into the back of his Nissan Juke.

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I am a Wonder. one of sixty-six thousand.

I wonder and mayhap, I am a wonder.

God said, "I am."  And further, "I am that I am."  "I am the great I am".

Talking theology wise of the pursuit of knowledge, on the ministry page, i think there is a contramanding tendency at self condemnation and knowledge for impure ends: it reeks of original sin, where some pursuit of knowledge is that terminator, that remote edge between day and night, the tug of war between wonder and the unholy side of knowledge--not unethical against laws, but unjust and unfit for man existentially, such as the world-destroying paradox created in California, Woodlow Park, fusion, fission, a'fishin' and a con'fusion underwritten in the pursuit of a perpetual, inexhaustable resource.

Of this, it too, I suppose is a wonder.

Franz Tost was building a fire pit behind his property, at the rear, in relative seclusion, security, and presumed privacy, a fire pit for pulled pork, pizzas, and all sorts of fun food fodder.  I peed near the base of the thing, slinging little sand flecks against the masonry, but he could but love me even still for my loose ways.

That fleck of sand was as my life at the root of eternity, how it figured in the beginning, and how the adjusted balance will later figure, im less than one of 66000 words that describe but one solitary acre, not even an insignicant ankle or wrist piece, less than that, but dignified, nevertheless, a "unique", like a horrid busted tooth singing along.

I am a wonder, I wonder if the quiddity of so much, and the quiddities of so much reflect me back into the spectrum, part of like a broad class portrait, and that too is a wonder, not to catch the enormity of the perspective.  Robert cady, downcast, suggests slightly that I invented my own wonder, and that the immensity of it was too, my own invention, as if it were not naturally occuring, just as Eden was between the rivers, so too, this magnitude was between dueling perceptions.

The boundaries of the friend's perceptions perhaps lacked proper solidity, which put him insecure defensively, but the question persisted, and eventually he would take up the subject, if only perfuctory at the start.  The subject would become, as it were, as if his own, for him to tell for every available ear.

Behind the counter at the Choking Rooster food vendor.

Catey.  Robert Catey.

He was watching me as I worked at the desk, making my calendar.  I was digging through Google Docs and help pages, trying to find something, an advisory on how to actually sell a Google Calendar file, if there could be such a thing, to sell access to a super calendar.  I was working at it, pulling at it with both hands, and at the end, a little flotsam of my shame.

That little smile of Robert made it almost worthwhile.

He was talking about Chic-Fil-A, and I was calling him a c*m-guzzler in a soccer mom SUV.

We had our differences, but what made it all worthwhile, set a hue to the prism, was our similarities, and that little smile almost put lead back into my pencil, where all the lead had squirted out just moments prior.  Hell, it was sweet icing for his little Waffle Fries.

"You like my itinerary?"

"It has a certain caveman dignity--a monolithic kind of sense about it."

I got under my caveman blanket in the other room and ruminated, I put it through a kind of interpretive matrix of things about OBGYN concerns and schedule maintenance, and tannery and all sorts of other, even the Zodiac somewhere.

Would he try to kill me?

I was just, as it were, making a calendar, a list of dates and references about various things, even the Zodiac, and he was, Robert Catey, Parnassus, the wall at the corner of the town, a fringe kind of barrier between thee and me, and I had to push right through him, stick it through his middle.

"On this date in history..."

The debut of the Edsel.

The shuttering of hundreds of Blockbuster stores.

Reggie Jackson broke the home-run barrier.

But to make a Google Calendar, sell access to that, access URL given via email, and the thing encompassing various subjects and philiars of daily life, across minutia and other things, birthdays, deathdays, monumental reason du'tre of society, various national days and days from other nations, so that the things is relevant across the spectrum, across the world, wherever the little Google fingers reach down from the sky to touch a person.

She is scared sh*tless of me.  And I was laying there, one knee pulled up: it had my ass cheeks kind of opened up, where when I broke wind, it sounded like that whisper of butterfly language, and so many people could be offended by the surly speech of a butterfly, even think I hated Mariah Carey, which I don't, but that I had a problem with somebody, and I was projecting my own contradiction and fallacies onto the innocent person of Robert Catey, that no one ever died from ill-intent or anything, but I was the little impetus mixing in the water like powdered electrolytes, and if I brought it off, the entire remainder of the empire would slide off a cliff.

Robert Catey, ladies and gentleman.  I salute him.

But what I had run up the pole, run it right up there, was an impossible idea to share a calendar amongst some hundreds or thousands of strangers, kind of viral thing amonst the populace, a death code matriculating in various communities, percolating and evolving, baking like bread, making, and thats what it was, making, like the yeast rising the dough, and then Robert Catey's eyebrow went up one millimeter, and I was left alone in the room, no calendar file made, and only a fart smell to prove the moments had elapsed.

They are really nibbling away at the population totals, aren't they?  3 here, 12 there, 6 over yonder.

That sh*t adds up.

Who's gonna watch Avatar 2 if yall keep shooting everybody?

Robot Dickens: "potable potpourri"

"phew, for a minute there, I lost myself.... I lost myself.... I lost myself..."

strangled by yards of sentence surrounding like crime scene tape, something of a Mary Collinsworth sweet ripening party, while her own dying body was about to grow ripe, raped and "mine" carved into her neck.

Matt Dillon would scour the territories for miners, perhaps, strays, dry-gulchers, panners that may have had the nagging little precipitate to bring it off horrorshow.  Remember Grandma was horny all those years for Pernell Roberts, and in her later years, the edge blunted of her sanity, she would full admit the truth in any company whatsoever, as if it were as plain a fact, her thing for Adam Cartwright: Adam Cartwright and her thing.

"should'a been dead on a Sunday morning in my head...."

The raw novelty of the thing was that it had to be intricately documented, the finery of the thing recorded for posterity, to be stored in libraries, searched over years later, and published in numerous histories in the far reaches of the future.  I was just saying that I was looking at the window, not even looking out the window, but just sort of staring at the thing itself, you know, a kind of landmark of a point in time it was, and I remember at that time, Pernell Roberts wasn't being beamed around the satellites; there were fewer then, and military grade GPS hadn't been made available to the public.

Pernell Roberts would have poured-over the thing as if it were a job, but it really being just a hobby, that he took any task, however it was, as it were of a kind of monolithic importance.  I gave no permanence to the moment I was talking about, kind of floating along the timeline like the little ghost in Mario Brothers, kind of strolling about in some gigantic highway to the seaside in Alexandria, Egypt, kind of wandering.

Not lost, per se, but wandering, as was said, "not all who wander are lost".  But I might be simultaneously, and distinctively in both states, "lost" and "wandering" in perhaps senses that are unrelated, disparate states of being at once, as of having two feet for which to bestride two provinces at once, in the selfsame moment.

Of Mary's ripening, a kind of hydrosis, or something, a layer of water between her person proper and the skin section, the rind covering of her person, a kind of artificial weight induction, something of a stymie of the body mass index, Mary would begin to smell, and perhaps even draw flies.  They would need mentholatum to get near her, that or some other kind of thing, the kind of Febreze that nices up a corpse, and all the well, Matt Dillon's determined chin.

Set the Comanche and Festus to abide at the Landmark Inn while the old marshal, the big old slow-talking farmboy, pitched spleen and his bowlegged stance at whomever come wrong on the thing; a convertible sedan near the woods, and all, a kind of existential "up yours" to the whole thing, watching the west die the death of the CCCP, spending its way into oblivion, a la the end of the Cold War, but a revenge visited on the West, ya know, if ya dig.

A private army of desperate welfare moms taking on professional military combatants, and, held in reserve, an all girl army that "knows Kung Fu".

Strange thoughts assail on a Sunday night on the edge of the big woods.  Partial memories, some, co-mingled with other things, and even the sound of two different televisions contorting two different types of shows, not just two shows, but two different type of shows, ye dig?  Meanwhile, a stereo system adding a third voice, four memories, all that noise, and an Oprah quote about depression, she called it a loss of self, essentially, and she didn't much put note to it, but let the participants do both the writing and the underlining, as was her brilliant sort of way, to let them try to bring it off, because they knew their own terrain best.

A kind of doldrum in between all of that, the different sub-currents and strifes and strains of the things, and what was that--4 things, 3 sound streams, and an Oprah quote.  It was something of depression in some of the things, and somehow we even dragged in the Marshall from Dodge City, and all that, and it became as it were, greater in sum than any particular piece in and of itself put to scrutiny.

We have, as it were, a coalition of trained zombies, gun-toting, facing-off against that army of desperate welfare moms(if they don't fight, they dont get SNAP benefits), meanwhile we've transposed Adam Cartwright into Gunsmoke, and somehow, Miss Kitty is a ho, and my granny is a ho in her old age, and everybody is sort of broached of character and integrity, and the only true zombies, the zombies themselves, and Adam and Matt, for all their wooden expressions.

You would turn a cross on its side in the middle of such a skirmish, and strap Miss Kitty to that, after a brief torture session to soften her, and then light fires around Dodge.  Festus and the Comanche, back from the Landmark Inn, drinking Sasparilla and smoking two Commandante cigars.

Doldrums and Tradewinds and Horse Latitudes and so forth, none of which explained the conviction that maybe there was something amiss in that old memory of mine, something more amiss than the soup of demented television commentary from my familiars, the conviction that it was the onset of some kind of feeling; they had said so much of becoming a teenager.  They said as much about becoming an old fart, too.

Far more jarring as it were, to transpose the old Western show characters as if they were entirely interchangeable, but then Oprah and 90's Top 40 songs, an 80s Brat Pack comedy and a staid news show.

We could self-righteously call Miss Kitty a ho, but we have to at least, and its not even condescending from our seat on heavenly clouds, agree that she certainly was a pimp, a mistress, a madam, a lady of the evening.  Fret none, there is no pearl in her clamshell, and the forthright and upstanding slow-talking local constabulary will not stoop to marry her--the pretense of making one honest.

Kingdom Cone: a rap commemorating twenty-five years of glacial melting and dissipation.

Having my own "data analysis firm" and sitting in a pool with 220 candidates for single positions on the internet; this consolidation reeks inflation by unemployment, death by lack of use, and dare is say, Rust.

Woken to find my socks off my feet, those sitting part way up, past my ankles.  Some friendly ghost had undressed my feet and left me pedantically nude in the night, and I had those same puzzle-solving dreams, problem-solving dreams, my mind working out solutions to unreal problems, my mind, even in slumber trying to pitch-in.

And "Woke" being misappropriated by popular culture.  I think of Shane, living by the popular dollar, and conversely, obversely, dying by the popular dollar the way Glenn did; it can happen, as so many put their lives on a thread.  I thought myself perhaps lucky to be outside of the "cash and carry" economy, but where do my resources come from?

Return of the Prodigal

Methodical, Chronological.

Captain in the doorway,

selling his wine,

workers on the promenade

they had trimmed the vines;

memorized the lines,

wrote it all down,

recited it,

twenty-five times.

As if to say, I will remember, even after ten years.

I will vaguely recall, after twenty-five years.

I still have a recollection of the shape of her bosom in that red silken shirt; she came to see me later, and it went not well, with not to much exchanged between.  I see her perhaps to a degree, still, as my own game of Simon, to push her buttons and sequentially react to this or that, action and reaction, flaming toothpaste volcano of love and sexually urgency, our timidities pounding in our youngling stupid ears, our plight still, even in the secret moments: only what someone else gave us.

The Big Niggah

The Steak Dinnah

Solace for the saints and sinnuh.

A man convinced, from his mountaintop, from his own promenade, from his own view of the countryside, that he had certainly lost something, a thing that he never really had anyway.  He missed it, and he wrote a cycle of best-selling books about it, getting a publisher firmly behind him with their marketing dollars, and an agent, feet on the desk, spouting ideas for his remonstrance.

I had took to the Evening Post, the fortnightly, and found that Mrs Hearst's vagina was still as young and vital as ever.  "May it always be so" I was saying, my mind trying to overwrite that with the thought, "somebody else's problem".

A rotund little jiggle-billy at the mercy of the Sanctions Monkeys, continually penalized when the prospect of pressure clearly doesn't outweigh the perceived danger; somewhere in that, they make high finance, monies, and hostile nations partner-up in the light of walls of red-tape and speeches that were well-paid for.  All the while their hope is not peace, perhaps, but to pay car payments, and that is what the system gave us--an endless cycle of words and punishments for words, stipends for bureaucrats.

Can a man lose that which he never had anyway?

Some threats have no teeth, as it were, and men a world away from the action cannot put their words at the scene reliably and with certitude of forethought, because they have put nothing to the fear of a loss, nothing on the table, no skin in the game, and only the endless selling of their words....

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Movie: Jeepers Beepers.

 

"If it moves, kill it..."

-Darnell Strafford-Lisenby, The Lesser.

I stepped into the world as one partaking from here to there, or was it there to here? but nevertheless, a transitory sort of bird, coagulating between two junctures, at a pace, a happenstance plopped-down and push-pinned between several more determinate points.

It was Friday morning.

I un-knotted my colon, lost in thought in the outside air, to be sustained by pure clean air, and have those as it were, influence my thoughts; I was somewhere between Stunt Driver Bo and Henry David Thoreau, with probably more Stunt Driver Bo in my colon than without.

I was thinking as such that all news was not about the President, and I turned away to better my perspective, as I was not paid to generate content for a network, not fill so many hours a day with pointed perspectives for or against; I had the luxury to reserve my own judgement, as it were.

One could pay dearly for independence of mind, so to speak, in the modern age, particularly if he sought for it in the wrong corners, for indeed, it is not found without very often, but more or less consistently indwelling, sitting in between the ears, all the time.  Indeed, so much of that outside must be cast aside and did away with in order to actually mark a moment of silence, to not be plugged-in or reachable by the touch of a button.

They used to experiment on small animals by inducing stimuli at the touch of a button.

I was watching a program on the Akashic Record earlier, something of the mysticism, a sort of global consciousness that more learned men have hinted it, things like the collective unconscious, a kind of spiral symmetry prevailing across the human beans in the ether, how they all seem to approach and sense and theorize and then, even when it is unexpected, there are more than one set of hands to be found grasping for that new, novel, original thing.

Synchronicity.

Or, as Blake said darkly, "the Fearful Symmetry".  It was something only one with extra senses could pull off, to mine his thoughts from a few cryptic words, and then, to find, enigmatically so, that it was not a new thought, but the pattern, the shadow of one's own prior thoughts, that Deja Vu that fingered insistently through the darkness of time and space to encapsulate and snapshot some un-bespoken moment in time in the reader's own life, even some 4 centuries later.

Indeed of the unseen transmissions, of the Akashic Record, Tesla said to know too much or much more in a given time than anyone, to seem to have advanced knowledge, to even do "wireless electricity", and him being one of the pooka, one of the touched of the Akashic Record?  Was his symmetry fearful, locked in patent wars with Thomas Edison?

I had caffeinated sweet beverages, and set down my "f*ck-all", and generally adjusting the bolts in my neck my looking at my own little space, the mindset, the attic of the old asylum, as it were, I finally had some unabbreviated television time.  My "f*ck-all" sat, like Matt Dillon's 45, for a few hours as I gathered-up my spleen, my unction, got a snoot-full of who I am, who the ancient Isrealites were, and then I found myself finishing the guy on tv's sentences, finishing the thought, as it were, going further ahead in his sermon notes for the greater truth of the piece, what they call "the Bridge of Interpretation" in hermeneutics.

Of that a "breach in the wall", which I had plugged with Chris's sunburnt ginger hindparts, how he was there and not there at once, and there was such burned with fire, the Temple damaged, and such and so forth.  Even that, as Solomon would have said, had its time and place, and even the reign of an Anti-Christ according the St John would have its own marked time and place, and somewhere in all that hatred and killing and territorialism, I checked the tag on my underwear, and it amazingly had my name on it.  I remember that guy.

Adrien Brody.

I remembered talking about Specific Gravity, or saying that mass and the pull of the curvature of spacetime: voids abhoring, vacuums calling like unto like, and all that, and all the substance of the universe singing various portions, ala String Theory, of the self-same song of amazement, wonder, and all that, set to the rhythm of life and death, and marked by the drip-drop of the perception of time.

It was such to say, "gravitational forces are abundantly self-evident, inductive."

Or, to wit, "I like big butts and I cannot lie."

Perhaps it could further be theorized, one can't have a hot dog, without buns.

Underhill on Creation and a shading of Original Sin.

"Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite another part in the cosmic scheme.  And on this apparently unimportant speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief.  Love, with it unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain; all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life and death.  It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.  And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in comparison with its population--are able to hear.  The music of a more inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it.  Those who hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of life and death."

-Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today.

Quite as it were, though the spirit be the same as it ever was, we begin more and more to craft and customize the world around us, and some, as it were, propelled by forces beyond our comprehension, to "mingle the eternal and temporal".  Of which, no one has of yet plumbed the spiritual depths of Special Relativity, nor probed much of the nature of this little burgh of ants.

Of life and the human condition, there is not so much more than the material for which to quench us, to set onto our flaming bodies and starving minds.  But our minds starve still, as is the searching nature of man, the Original Sin, which may be caste in the same bag as the Desire To Know, for assuredly, man would open a Pandora's Box, time and again, just to see or experience what happened.  This was Schroedinger's Cat, that Uncertainty Principle, telling us that we just cannot keep away and keep our fingers out of that large existential pie, consequences be damned, forgotten and given no warrant.

"He has a craving which nothing in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is possible to him."

-Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today.

the inviolate violet and the outrage innocence of the well-intentioned webmaster.

So she had been the world's oldest person at the ripe-old age of 118.  Now the oldest person is 117, and probably has a new goal for her life, that being to equal 118(her birthday is in March) or eclipse that.

119?

Sour, sour mood this morning, a deflation of my usual optimism.  Thinking of my books, and how its sort of given to some that if you write a book, people would eventually read it.

I published in 2013 and made, over the course of five years or so, the princely sum of about 4 dollars, during the whole time.

But think of that assumption, like if you write a book, someone's gonna read it.

I've disproven that, but I kinda got cursed on my efforts, with my father saying I would be the worst-selling author of all time.

Then that guy that made 13 thousand in one month publishing spreadsheets on Gumroad.  I've done that and only got two views, with zero sales.

Seems like so much of this stuff is just a gloriously crazy waste of time.

Even the ministry page.  No one really cares, or gives, or ever even makes a comment.

Just a train wreck at the roadside, netting less than 2 minutes per page view, so by-and-large they basically just scan the headlines....

of a stranger's catch-all website....

All of this seems so utterly useless and barely worth my time, and I say "barely" because I on a good day, full of ego and crazy bipolar ideas, I can begin, at least, to make the case for maintaining a website of my own.

Maybe I'm trying to say, if I'm gonna live a long time, I gotta stop worrying about this stupid shit, stupid shit like this that does me not one iota of good--never has.

So fuck-off, and good luck.

link to a gross pay calculator and hour logging spreadsheet.

 Log worked hours in a sunday-saturday 2023 calendar format, with calculations for weekly and overall totals.  The spreadsheet is compatible with both Excel and Google Sheets.

get it here, on Gumroad.

Planning when its time for planning, doing when its time for doing. #productivity

*You either carry over a to-do list from the next day, or make that to-do list the night before. I love hitting my Google Calendar the night before. It reinforces a sense of structure. But don't forget too, to include "whitespace" for brainstorming and inspiration. Mind inspiration isn't idle time, because a lot of that will come when you're busy, but make time to chase those leads, which is what inspiration is: a nexus of leads.

Plato and Batsmaglion 2: The Log Flume.

"They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface.  This is no easy task.  But whether easy or not, herein will lie the difference between them and every other legislator--they will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.

They will be very right, he said.

Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the constitution?

No doubt.

And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn their eyes upward and downward: I mean that they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God.

Very true, he said.

And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God?

Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture."

Plato, The Republic

They were sitting as it were, in an AMC location, watching some Aviator 2: The Log Flume or Batsmaglion or something of that nature, and all of the real world they were aware of was the shadow of their own heads on the bottom of the screen, that of himself and his peers, and those were the only elements of the world proper that encroached, elseways it ways that dreamtime held sway over all.

It was as it were, top-up bottom-down ideology, people that kicked against anything of organization, except for the one company in Middenorftino, anything of the usual kind that reeked of efficiency or was abundantly common, but they could be lulled by the muses, and beauty spoke many a dialect into even the most ignorant of ears.

"You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows..."

Plato, The Republic

Cabaret Savagenun.

Count the stars or drop shafts beneath the crust of the earth, we do, but understand mankind?

Why, it was otherwise, "as flies unto wanton boys are we to the gods"/this Bud's for you! and it was kind of a twiddle widdle play purdy kind of microwaving under a hard glare of pallid indifference, and for all it was, this humanity thing, a scholastic undertaking, but for breathing hard enough, a kind of puff of boredom, such that it could snap the wings right off a butterfly.

I personally had a week, and was having a weekend, procured three favorite beverages; three remained yet.  I wanted to try dimestore Cabaret Savignun.

In my being birthed a proletariat, I but smelt the earth, time to time, at my fingers, poo on my shoes, cuticles bloody rosettes, and I came to prefer as it were, not to "taste the barrel", but to enjoy the grape, which meant to me I would have the more convenient single man's screw-on aluminum cap rather than the more effete cork.

Last cork I came across, I dug it out with the corkscrew on a Swiss army knife, and it was horrid, six dollar pseudo, and a two dollar combination piece, for all it was worth, three dollar hands, and I estimated my glass to be between one and two dollars.

I jabbed into it and twisted with the pissy obstinance of a elementary school lad protesting for his lick at the big swirl lollipop.

Franz Tost had came and celebrated with some bread and cheese, set a bit towards my recent loves, how I had ditched one six hours before the ball drop at New Year's, and I had kind of a nice moment of stellar confusion that equated in the firmament to indifference or even apathy.

We played poker.  I had a full house, and he had, well, two pair.

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.

*There is another Friday the 13th in October.  Have heard rumblings of a new film somewhere in that timeframe, along with the confusing mistakings of fan films for real movie trailers, and so forth.

*had a good moment of prayer, and I feign that I even got an answer from God Himself.  I like to think it was God, maybe, because it was pretty good advice, and it didn't just apply particularly to the one situation, but to various things, just the way an intervention in one life touches so many other lives in ways that we humans can't possibly anticipate.

Are you intimidated or inspired?

In any confrontation, there is either intimidation or inspiration.  You choose how you react: whether to cower or rise to the occasion.  We can become complacent in our dictums, and we become lazy, we can become slaves to our circumstances.  We can react with hostility, defensiveness, envy, and maybe even fear.

Do we regroup and come back better, or do we hide under the porch, my friends?  An orphan became the Emperor of most of the known world.  He said in his private journal that he retained the mindset to react to anything, not by whim or instinct, but reflectively, that he could choose how to react.

Our modern leadership guru wants us to be lions, but even the lion's great majesty is just an image, for the lion is a scavenger, an opportunist.  How much of that should we employ?

Certainly we should take advantage of circumstance, when our principles are observed. 

Should we lapse into complacency at the expense of core business?  Do we spend the work day dreaming of some turn of luck that affords the purchase of daydreams?

Neigh.  We work and dream, too, but we can't stop work to dream, nor can we afford to neglect our dreaming for work.

We might miss stray currents and less beneficial aspects by staying to the center.

 

Eddie Munster emailing pictures of his try at Italian cuisine. "day in the life".

I was skeert as sheet 'cause Cheryl had hit it with the pasta sauce.

I was listening to these lipstick lesbians talk about Mayor Pete being a reasonably attractive younger politician, but I thought of him as like a kind of "junior Bela Lugosi", kind of a Pugsley Adams.  Or Little Eddie from the other show.

But you know how it goes, you know how the whole thing gets strewn around, and one man's trash, you know, and he's kind of strange in a "secret" way, like when I was rolling around with the tree-fif, and I was silently doing intercessory prayer for my brake pads.

"He has a nice smile" but so do lawn gnomes.

I bought myself a gift, a small gift, sub-eleven-dollar gift, after doing some part-time work, kind of like the "spend some, save some, give some".  I spent some.

I gave some, and to the very best cause I knew, a cause I believed in probably more than most anything else.

Of saving some, well, I hit a period of temporary indebtedness.  Using it to back up a Workspace account for my great ministry hobby.

Of that, I had hit on a line in Romans 15, about "receiving others as Christ received you".  I thought of the magnitude of that, how that went beyond even Christ's own words of loving others, this put it in perspective, Paul saying to use the standard of Christ.  Christ's love sacrificed for the good of others, not just being socially kind to people, but really getting in there, man, and doing a good turn above and beyond.

As Christ did?

He was even more than willing to lay down his own life.

Like even, if pressed, some venison meatballs in the pasta sauce, and me, the American, getting told that there is in fact something of just pasta in pasta sauce, but then there's meat sauce.  And other stuff.

But again, not as I would, but as God would that I would do, for that which I would do, I should do not, and that which I kick against the pricks, was probably where I should be in the first place, without all the caterwauling.

Even the most unworkable dreams have a kind of pull, that magnetism that dreams have, where you can't wake up, and you might feel anxiety, but its like, in your own head, you're watching tv.  Of TV, during Gunsmoke I roused and lit one wondering what in the hades had happened the prior day, like I didn't know, but you know, unworkable dreams, and the salient saccharine daydreams of stuff that really won't happen, but you kinda would like that instead, and hell, I just don't know.

"This is who I am, yo; this is who I be."

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frisson imagnetique; drops of honey drowsily drooping from an ear lobe.

I saw Paige on AEW with the eye make up and the milky white skin and the cascade of midnight colored hair.  My manhood rose up so suddenly, it almost flapped my eyelids like wild spinning window blinds: it was the coherence and cumbersome ease of sociology in the western world.

Why, we didnt need sociology or HR; we needed anthropology.  We needed the symposium when we had chosen the ampitheater, and the stoa when we had chosen the cinema varete of streaming enigmatically prolific and abundant data--lifetimes of it.  It had come across that SQL remote pull sessions costed hundreds of dollars from disinterested third parties; they had free trial periods, but it was so off putting as to make one forget and yearn for the server-in-the-bathroom of yesteryear.

I wotted a kind of netherworld, a space of odd gravity pockets, where spoken words were not heard, they found no purchase, but the thunk word was far more substantive, it lived and breathed like a monster created in secret, but on the escape and quite frankly, running amok.

I had fallen in with an institute of higher learnings, talking of self-evident objective truths, self-evident good, and so forth, but they would spam me talking about various sins of Mrs Bacon, and the high virtues of Anne Hathaway, how MSNBC set out to renovate culture by uprooting the whole thing, a stripmining of objective good to encapsulate spores on the winds.  Indeed, I wondered how the organization line devolved and coalesced from outling Plato to soapboxing for political movements.  Such wears my a$$.

But anyway, I had noted some leadership advice, one that capitalizes on a trait that I have, and one dictum also that notes addressing a deficit in my capacities.  A boost from unch, and a boost on a flaw.  It said I should learn a new skill to help my business.

I expect they say that to all the single men.

I expect, they found, beside the stored Stingray, a classic 12 ounce canned Yoohoo.

I expect Paige would get bored with the wrong man.

Somebody got bored with the yoohoo, like Alberto, absentmindedly lopping off his toenails, those falling in the loop-pile, and it seems those academics in that online college got bored with surveys of Plato and the others, longed for something more contemporary, something of the day, the present hour, something that reeked and cowered from the groans of the present age.

Of these things, there have been glimpses, kind of titilliations, hints, peepshows, and outright marketing campaigns.  Fundraising letters that want the peanut gallery to toss their remaining empty peanut hulls into the bullring.  They repaved Rockingham: the artist formerly known as North Carolina Motor Speedway.  Of bullrings, i suppose a few I have seen with my own stupid eyes.

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On self care when you don't even deserve it.

Try to be good to yourself, and it's especially important to treat yourself well during those times when you don't think you deserve it.

 

 

Tozer on politics.

It is not complimentary to the masses that they are so easily led, but we are not interested in praising or blaming; we are concerned for truth, and the truth is that for better or for worse religious people follow leaders. A good man may change the moral complexion of a whole nation; or a corrupt and worldly clergy may lead a nation into bondage....  -AW Tozer 

Dora Neale Marston: Children of a Lesser Bacon.(Snap of the Chain, #100)

"My God, my God, what have I but to curve inward on myself, pointing the accusing appendage back at my own sins and the balance, recompense of a life, such as is the fires of hell awaiting."

The other cops got out of his way like being repelled by magnetic force, repulsed: they parted like the Red Sea, but they were blue and slightly stupid, too, for their own balance--they got out of his way, and he wasn't a particularly big man, either, but that sort of Angry Inch of unction repulsed them in some fundamental innate animal way, like bacon drippings or sweat or teenager's sex-evidenced bedsheets.

"I'm the f*cking Inspector, the ranking officer on site, Willbarger."  Jerry was right there in a big clump of them, lording over like the top-dog, the biggest vulture.  His polo shirt was pure discount store, but his attitude was PGA or Ivy League, trying to put ownership on the thing.

"Report to him, Will" seconded Detto, hoping just to hold the peace, at least in front of the victim's family.  Detto was still new to this department, and so he felt he owed a little deference, if not primarily to his partner, than the unproven and untested thus far command structure.

Without a center, what does everything connect to, but a discount store polo shirt, pulling at the South American fabric beyond limitation.

Willbarger stopped, hands on hips, and slowly turned, looking not at the other cops, even the taller, but quite over and above them, surveying the scene.  Even the television people near the door seemed to wince audibly when his glance fell on them; it came and went, that withering hard glance: it was a universal balance, as if to say, you kill someone, no matter who you might be, in recompense, we'll kill you right back.

Then Willbarger stomped back outside into the dooryard that was in better times part of the driveway, he basically powerfully stepped outside as if daring anyone to follow him, and for all he cared, he might as well have been the ranking officer, and he was senior based on years of service, though of smaller rank than some of the others.

Luckily for the others, they usually had a good sense of when to push on the old cop and when to just let him be.  Jerry had to take charge for the sake of the paperwork, the cameras, state investigators on site, but all the locals knew one word from Willbarger was worth more than anything Jerry could put together.  The rank patrol officer would be later all over the photos, evidence logs, and doing everything but the press conference for the regional media.

Detto drifted out like flatulence from an open bathroom door, he was cock-sided, turning to shut the door, but contorted looking for Willbarger, like Willbarger didn't generate his own repulsive force, a kind of gravity that contorted, too, the throng  of people, town county and state, the blue shirts, brown shirts, drab shirts, and the state boys in their polo shirts and cargo pants.  

Willbarger and Detto were loyal little brownshirts, given to the county stripe, given over also to patrol the county on saturday nights from one end to other, cruising the state roads for traffic incidents, drunk drivers, between other aggravated causes like boyfriend and girlfriend arguments.  Going through the crowd, parting the crowd, was that same kind of gravity Willbarger threw on the drunken lovers, protesting one and another until the old cop cut right through the noise.

There was no victim name yet, not in polite company, because the family was being notified, but they all had a whiff of the name, all between them, among them, even the television people taking notes on an electronic tablet, probably having sent the name.  Like it was said of politics, all politics being local, the girl was a local, from a few roads away, known to some even among the cops, and the very bereaved family got unknowingly to see the swarm of police vehicles before curiosity pulled them towards the fray, and they saw the girl, too, some of the family, naked as a Jay Bird, clad only in a bit of dried blood at the edges, where she had pooled blood somewhere at a kill site.

What they had was a dump site: no weapon, no suspect yet, canvassing only beginning then after the boys got their marching orders, and the whole community had swarmed the little house at the edge of the woods with the asbestos siding.  Tips and character references, people generally talking like it were a family reunion, or a wedding, or a community barbecue: that was the fabric of the community kind of going solid to hold onto something, though they did no such while the girl was still alive, and the murderer's whatever grievance something against that knit of the community, too--a rebuke big as a tractor trailer coursed through the community on that score, and these were all, basically, the outsiders, the community, the cops and the regional news team, they were all the killer's victims, in a sense.  The girl was dumped dead and nude in a contractor tarpaulin in the woods in that very community, and the house was just the nearest place to the scene, where they could make coffee and park their numerous SUV's.

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William Hazlitt on William Godwin. or "Hazlitt the Professional Hitman."

The author of the Political Justice took abstract reason for the rule of conduct, and abstract good for its end.  He places the human mind on an elevation, from which it commands a view of the whole line of moral consequences; and requires it to conform its acts to the larger and more enlightened conscience which it has thus acquired.  He absolves man from the gross and narrow ties of sense, custom, authority, private and local attachment, in order that he may devote himself to the boundless pursuit of universal benevolence.  Mr Godwin gives no quarter to the amiable weaknesses of our nature, nor does he stoop to avail himself of the supplementary aids of an imperfect virtue.  Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good, and the dictates of inflexible justice, which is the "law of laws and sovereign of sovereigns".  All minor considerations yield, in his system to the stern sense of duty, as they do, in the ordinary and established ones, to the voice of necessity.

-William Hazlitt on William Godwin.

Being good to yourself, and not being revisited by past bad acts done to others..... karma...

What if all those ppl you knocked down fell into your pathway forward?

Remember, the universe cleans itself, and karma is a great wheel that will eventually make a full rotation: it will all come back around.

 

And if you won't be good to yourself, could you reasonably expect others to be good to you, in turn?

 

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two kerfluffles in one plastic bag. "reverence and due gravity"

This lady i know was feeling lonely, and had a smart phone at hand.  She put on her make-up and trucker cap, and there was a flood of selfies.

She felt good, for once, and also felt pretty.  She was conscious of her beauty and her ample buttocks.

She put out an open call for companionship, having become narcissistically sexually aroused by her own beauty.

Anyway.  Thing two.  To work out the salvation with fear and trembling;  i work it up to revence and due gravity, such that a life has, a kind of respect, how "fear" in the arcane tongue equates to respect.  It seemed of the covenant with Moses, they didnt stray far from real fear and apprehension, living as it were, in times of old with signs and wonders.

In modernity we have the Holy Spirit, and as is thought, the spirit works through us, its only flesh claim, our actions: to love God as He first loved us.  Prophesying for the benefit of the hearts of the masses.

Working through not terror and threats, but reverance and due gravity, such as is required of diligence done a singular person.  Its nothing more than is steered about by the til of state, the Constitution, George Long translations of great books of antiquity, and us contending within fir our own status as Children of the King.

Her boyfriend Tea Pitcher.

He was a howdy-doo of a man, hair in great strings, police watching him, victims' families cajoling and caterwauling about police inaction.

But there was a spreadsheet of Tea Pitcher's comings and goings.

They knew and had extrapolated more from Tea Pitcher's doings, than Tea Pitcher himself ever could, a man sliding along, both hands on his own ass, and his mind nowhere to be found, neatly out of sight and without contention, except for the straw, the piece of little paraphernalia that would hang him up for the duration of all of his remaining days.

He would buy a fountain drink for the purpose of getting a straw, a plausible conquest in the Southland, for the purpose of taking drugs, with the straw.

This little howdy-doo of a somebody, behind KFC, parked neatly on his buttocks beside the dumpster, thinking he was safe, ensconced, wrapped about, but actually, without his knowing, surveilled, documented, and that bubble-wrap encasement was handed to him, unknowingly, by a cop: an inspector.

His ass: to say existentially, he was born and had always been, having a hair across his ass, but to now also be in the crosshairs, of not of truancy or social services, but graduated unto state law, capital crimes division.   Even their dogs knew what he smelled like.

Safely waiting for the hot seat, perhaps, mayhap he would bring it off himself, too, like the classic Faulkner "heart working against itself", smoking his drugs, or snorting, of however, in the thralls then, seeing the drug genie, listening to him.

She, meanwhile, stupid bag of penis vision board bullcrap, had got onto Facebook Marketplace saying she was "ISO Rooster".

This Richards and Billingsly was coming around interviewing all their friends, hooking themselves in as it were into the great sex device swing apparatus of Constant Enjoyment.  This, this, state law, these motherf*cks, getting affidavits and character statements and all this, even talking to one's high school teacher, a great big bast*rd of a lady, if there was such, one that eats cigars like the were Tootsie Roll candies, and they had Tea Pitcher's ass, they had Sharonda, and all they had to do was go pick them up when they wanted.

Best to leave them shooting up artificial sweetener or whatever, high on their own drugs, and low on life, the two of them, that was: little sonofabitch niece and nephew sitting proudly melting at the right hand of the Devil himself.

BWV: 267 "Once More Unto The Breach."

Amor Fati, Memento Fati....

The bootless cries of a man against his destiny, and other such, the theme of failure as a watchword of the day, leading into the big anniversary tomorrow, Teresa Du'Tres and Felonge De Castille.

but a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage....

Cutting through a sort of melange of stuff, minutia, a sort of "virtue", a sharpened tendril of impetus cavorting and gnawing into the fiber moral, temporal, and so forth, having at the gutty works, and getting chased away like a beggar.

A kind of "honed edge" which meets the material that are put to it, such is to exercise a kind of superlative in a world of flats, but sharps in a room filled with weather balloons.

A kind of prolonged lukewarm birthday party for Kevin.

Out out brief candle...

Wee.

In the dominion of the static universe, perhaps I somewhat floated, or lensed as to have specific gravity, I sat like a lump of iron or a millstone, but all the way, the objectives and terabytes coursed through the thinkgood, the brainmeats, the very core of the nut, as it were, and thoughts and ideas, most insensate and ephemeral danced like sugar plums in my head.

All the while, tomorrow, another catcher in the sawgrass, something wicked this way, and various things leaping and cajoling about the various schedule apparatus, all sorts of bs scattering about, as if to be broadcast over a field, waves and waves of it to change the color of the leaves or freeze the mud puddles, or induce Mike Pence to go scurrying along.

There was a kind of trap door, where the hunter sleeps along the bottom of the aquarium, and he patiently waits for the lapse of attention from his prey, for which he pounce at the given opportunity afforded his leisure and guile: neigh, that's what it was, things floating about, an obscure flavored cigar of leisure and guile, and the smoke of that, a kind of rotary output, torque, measurable by machine.

I need to be much more specific about the output of my hobbies, I suppose, but a bit of art, flourish or flair, perhaps is the least indignity done to my little works, and that only showing indignity in the slightest backhanded sense, as if to blame me for the faults of others.

This is what I tell them of a role model: they make a mistake and blame it on the example of their idol, their icon, their stub toe pookah.  Blame that one, for all the good such does.

Thou spark more of a morsel of undigested beef than of grave soil and charnal wounds, I wot...

I have to decide too, when flaws should be changed, or whether that's sort of the paraphernalia of character traits, real identifiable markings and such.  I cannot afford time-wise too disassemble myself everyday for some obscure arcane cleaning procedure, but perhaps just to dryfire the workings to see if the hammer and pin does what it should; but nevertheless I afford myself the opportunity to realize that I am here.

Mansour Mon Ami and Bernadette Farthing.

The Strange Case of Self-loathing and self-abasement, wrapped in a cult of Self, in which the central Ego controls....

 And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The cult of self, Jekyll was at times, up to being half a man, even that much, and other times, not equal to the task, barely putting in the niceties to keep up appearances.

As a half of person, he was out of his depth, but he kept to the line and gave no sign of the truth, that he imbibed himself into someone else.  This is like Stephen King and Peter Straub's other world behind the fog of drink, where good and evil fought tete-a-tete, where the real world reeked more of poverty and dissipation on its own terms.

Here I was thinking Jekyll should have had a third alter ego, something more of a happy medium, but decidedly different than the other too.  But I note Jekyll behaved secretively, and then openly and grand, as if he too were experimenting with making another personality, living his "best life" writ large in the society pages.  And that without a tonic, but his own life energy being used, that wick burning brighter and brighter still, folding down and down, until at last, he would disappear as Hyde for two mighty months.

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Brain Fog!

"There are, however, no sharp lines or demarcations between the various operations just outlined.[thought and belief] The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier than it is, did not the the different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another."

-John Dewey, How We Think

"We ought to consider no only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing which must be taken into account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human.

For if we being to fall into dotage, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and the appetite, and whatever else there is of the kind, will not fail; but the power of making use of ourselves, and filling up the measure of our duty, and clearly separating appearances, and considering whether a man should now depart from life, and whatever else kind absolutely requires a disciplined reason, all this is already extinguished.  We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and understanding of them cease first."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book three.

"So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a human figure and face.  Thinking in both of these cases(the cases of belief and of fancy) involves a noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed but which is brought to mind, suggested by the thing seen.  

One reminds us, as we say, of the other."

-John Dewey, How We Think.

Rising Fog.

 

 

The gas hand in my truck.

I was praying, hoping, petitioning God Himself that I would have enough gas in my truck yesterday to get back and forth to work.  On the way there, I was tying myself in knots, in my own thoughts, going back and forth on the matter, whether to just turn around, or press on.

All along the way, Hwy 9, the farmland in Dillon and Marlboro counties in South Carolina, part of the so-called "Cotton Trail", flat land, between the piedmont and the sea, very well-watered and fertile, great for growing cotton every year.

The fog was rising.

I was thinking: I could see the sun through the remnant of the fog, and thought, not the Sun but the Son.

Christ was the solar body, burning off the fog of sin and doubt, and metaphorically, fog can easily be equated to doubt, and more thinly to sin, an obscuring force between ourselves and Christ.

That fog was all the prior dead souls coming up, the dead souls and the doubts, dead souls rising into the air, vaporous, going to dissipate into thin air on the ascent to heaven.

Doubts dissipating, too.

Sin dissipating.

Every obscuring force between ourselves and the Lord coming to some sort of evaporation, leaving behind clarity.

A perfect clarity, just as perfect as the Perfect Law of Liberty, to rest in God's will.

For my own part, it was like God was telling me just to continue my drive to work, as planned.  Not that it had the endorsement of God, but maybe that it was better than the alternatives, it was, if not God's outright enumerated plan for me, then it was closer to His will than was turning around and going home.

Under the Perfect Law of Liberty, we look for the will of God to help guide us, we loosen ourselves in our daily walks, to wait for His guidance.  This loosening of our schedules and self-imposed time tables is the Liberty of choosing the Father's will.  And more importantly, the Father's will slots us into perfection and harmony with everyone else.

Everyone wins when we all go to the Father's will.

But that clarity then, that perfect brilliant orb sitting high in the sky: the Sun, the promise of the Son returned.

auld lang writer.

But but but.... i made a New Year's resolution, and everything.  I decided to get started on a whole menu of positive, beneficial changes, like:

Only healthy food, and none of what tastes good.

Boring lovers that are stable in their moods, and probably b elong in a stable, regardless of their mood.

But it was a New Year.  

And I, like Tony Llama, feel cheated that all this miss in the New Year has that familiar reek to it, like a bad potato in the bag, of a soiled baby diaper somewhere hidden in the bottom of our garbage can.

But then i think, if i had gotten it right last year, I'd be prepared for new stuff this year, and it seems i'm not prepared for new changes, completely unequal to that mark.

Mastery and strength, from the Tao Te Ching.

According to Lao Tsu:

Strength is controlling others.

Mastery is controlling one's own self.

 

Tozer on New Year's....

Every new year is an uncharted and unknown sea. No ship has ever sailed this way before. The wisest of earth's sons and daughters cannot tell us what we may encounter on this journey. Familiarity with the past may afford us a general idea of what we may expect, but just where the rocks lie hidden beneath the surface or when that "tempestuous wind called Euroclydon" may sweep down upon us suddenly, no one can say with certainty....  -AW Tozer

Of Stardust and Ditchweeds, a play fragment.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Number Two: Commander of the Alien Craft.

Number Four: Subordinate, presumably a "think-tank" person, high ranking intelligence officer.

SETTING: On The Ship, having just taking aboard some reluctant and confused humans.

(FADE IN)

Number Two: We’ve stuntified the light barrier, traversed across the endless void, defied time and circumstance.  Exploration budget.  Military budget.  Our very best among us sent across the stars.  Did all that to hide among them, the earth people.  And eat them.

Number Four:  Hey Number Two.

Number Two: Yes.

Number Four: Rabbit Stew.  A Warner Brother’s cartoon.

Number Two: What are you on about?  Explain.

Number Four:  Well it goes like this.  Seven and I were watching the old cartoons, the ones where they try to cook the rabbit.

Number Two: Television?  Your idle hours paid off for our cause?

Number Four: Yes, indeed.  They would have a big cauldron of water sitting on a roaring fire.

Number Two: Boiled would be good, yes.  Human soup.  Just force them in, the beasts.  A two cadre strategy.

Number Four: Nope, nope.  Bloodless and surprisingly without violence, you see.  That’s the thing.  They didn’t just toss the protesting rabbit into the stew.  That would have been too easy, or seemed too easy.

Number Two:  It would have been violent to just toss him in and dunk his little bunny ears into the boiling water.

Number Four: Well, it was a kid’s show.  It’s Shakespearean as you say, a bloodless snaring, and the rub, the very rub….

Number Two: Caribbean?  Creole?  Bourbon Street rub?

Number Four: They make the bunny decide.  He has to willingly choose to climb into the stew pot.  That’s the devilish brilliance of the thing.  He’s given the power of choice, and he, as the earth people say, is self-destructive enough to jump in and let the water get hotter and hotter still, the way humans so often are self-destructive and oblivious to obvious harms.

Number Two: I like this innovation.

Number Four:  This way uses not even one Cadre of the military.  Barely even a skeleton crew of guards in our kennels.

Number Two: They didn’t always know to pluck diamonds, those people.  This ‘least resistance’: I like the doctrine.

Number Four: Of course, not needing the soldiers and guards here, leaves us a bigger portion of Human Stew.

Number Two: The absurd brilliance of the thing, being both intelligently devised, and then set before intellectual ruffians, a kind of clockwork ineptitude.

Number Four: The very dust underneath the great cornerstone, Number Two, tasked and set to bring it off however might be possible.

Number Two: The very dust among even greater things.

Number Four: See how dust collects and becomes more and more bothersome.  Witness time’s discretion.  It is an ancient foil across the pictures of the old emperor, earth dust.

Number Two: You’ll earn a promotion, yet, but for the time being, extra work would only cut into your television time, and it seems Earth television is where you get your best ideas.

Number Four: I watched Scrooge on TBS.  I’m your own Tiny Tim to be carried through the streets on your shoulders as you expound.

Number Two: Are we paying you to sit around getting your best ideas from Earthling television?

Number Four: And this too, dignified and brilliant in its simplicity, Number Two.  The empty programming slots that would come along and feed the empire for decades.

Number Two: I’ll have to keep an eye on you, too, because I see a streak of brilliance in you, too, little geode.  He of the empty hours that saved the economy of the star empire, securing a very billions-strong new food supply.

 

Happy New Year. Hello 2023!

"...sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one."  

-CS Lewis

Ah, another year, another opportunity to repeat the same mistakes, or an opportunity for the glorious quixotic pebble-toe half-nature of the impetus towards self-destruction and the love of pure noise and disturbance.

We claw through and breathlessly make our way to the exit sign on 2022, hoping for the first rays of dawn on January 1, 2023.

Another opportunity to get it right or go up in flames.

Another opportunity.

Happy New Year!