It was such a beautiful evening that I roundly forsook the search for my previously discarded panties.  I was in such a mental state, as it were, coursing between emotions as if they were great boulders on some mountain path, and as Camus said, "we must imagine Mike happy".  Indeed, tomorrow will come, and with tomorrow, some of the same drudgery and busywork, but there will be time for transcendent thought and contemplation of God-these moments recompense and sound compensation for moments of servitude and the seeing-to. I took the air sometime late in the day, and had of it, not questions answered, because it wasn't a query, not something like a Google search, but an impetus to just "see", to look upon the world with eyes that had a kind of half-satisfaction in the day, and a half-emptiness knowing there would be more later; I ran a project since January 2023, an analytics project, collecting data.  I see so many ads and apps and things talking about automatio

Shining is always costly. Light comes only at the cost of that which produces it. An unlit candle does no shining. Burning must come before shining. We cannot be of great use to others without cost to ourselves. Burning suggests suffering.   -LB Cowman

True faith drops its letter in the post office box, and lets it go. Distrust holds on to a corner of it, and wonders that the answer never comes . -LB Cowman.

Dissect me, oh universe, with all of the improbabilities and spectrographs that look like artist's worst delusions, lay my quiddities upon the spineshank spindle-torque of the thing and look to me licorice scent and Reese's aftertaste as nothing more than a continuing delusion, and the intermixed strangling dreams of the populace are not much more than something carried on the wind, spores and empty plastic bags, nothing much more, and the mule-sh*tted highway to the future, but a bit of candle-smell, something between brimstone and outraged wax, something in the furrow in between, kind of pulling at once at the flesh, even a sharp edge, pulling at the touch, and making wrinkles and dimples in the unknown ass-flesh of the monolithic monotheistic totem titular Godhead, shining hindparts and all.

  If it sounds like nonsense, it might actually be worthwhile, and you might have been mistaken about it the whole time...... You don't ever reach outside, how you gonna grow?

This might not be a dream, otherwise I'd expect more good stuff to happen......

A bit about an old fiction of mine, a scientist at a candy company that accidentally travels time and tries his darnedest to find his way back, but as quietly as he can.  The kicker of the thing was that the world looked like our familiar world of the past, but was very different, and that would become clear a bit late in the game. He brought it off with all the elegaic precision of a two horses wagon, a kind of erratic thunder, a kind of meth addict vital that would come through like a spasm of static through the ether: he traveled time inadvertently. Unsprung, as it were, no coils of things or air cushion--it was that kind of ramshod--like trees thundering onto the forest floor, sideways, and quite honestly, the Theory of Relativity had said something about "a really long stick" that reached past the clouds, and he was already up that, and along, high in the atmospheric strains of thought, an appreggio that coursed the air like a bolt of lightning, perhaps, somewhere in ti

Lucius Seneca: There is no good without reason; all reason is in accordance with nature. Enjoy the journey that is life, folks.

(narrator twiddles the tip of a banana, before opening his beer, with the banana upheld like a sword) "What is this alto-hemispherical blunt instrument you have purposed for the telling?" "Inputting the specimen..." "Out, out brief candle for we hath proposed for our tomorrow glimmers and facsimiles, a rododendron or a pineapple, sufficing for the healthy apple or the noble coconut." "Tis precarious and implicates so very much, even as they merely pretend." An article perhaps on the superficiality of life, how we don't tend to live deep, or we live deep in times shallowness.  We always strike the wrong note, the note cavorted from deep down in the spleen, and we are thus prone to various psychic maladies.  

subreption, noun. The act of obtaining something, as an ecclesiastical dispensation, by suppression or fraudulent concealment of facts; a fallacious representation or an interference derived from it.  

If you want to know what it is to be full, first be empty, and likewise, to emptiness, be full.  To want either state is to hasten something, but what?  What would you have of the universe, a universe that services all?  Would you demand something gross, fancy, or something common to humans?   If you find the dignity in emptiness, are you then happy?  Or do you contend for the contrast, just for the sake of something different?  Some always want a different view out their window, something different, something perhaps special, but do you ever just strive for what is common to man?  Are you an Emperor?  A Proconsul?  Are you afforded some special privilege that sets you apart?

 As the Stoics, remind, we are faced with nothing unnatural, and in that respect, nothing necessarily evil, but of nature and ordained by God.

opprobrium, noun. disgrace or reproach incurred by conduct considered shameful or wrong; infamy; scornful reproach; a cause or subject of reproach.

Seneca writes: If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel and the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of a deity. ..what is more foolish than to praise in a man the qualities which come from without? And what is more insane than to marvel at characteristics which may at the next instant be passed on to someone else? A golden bit does not make a better horse. Likewise, they bid us to "examine all things severally", like Aurelius saying sex is just skin surfaces touching, and his exclusive purple dyes for his cloak were just shellfish blood.  Everything can be produced to something contemptible; he even had contempt for his dinner, saying it was just "some dead flesh". They also, between Seneca and Marcus,

bucolic : adj Of or pertaining to herdsmen or shepherds; pastoral; rustic; rural; countrified.

"We must do our Alma Mater.  Time for our Alma Mater..... When I was a little bitty boy, my Grandma gave me a brand new toy... it had a ball and a bit of string... Grandma said it was my ding-aling-aling. " -Chuck Berry(on stage). In the obscurity of a cloudy sky, as was the saying, in the obscurity the presence of God approaches not through the eyes, but spiritual, psychic, and the person just knows that there is a God, and he has put a blanket over his little world. Nothing one will meet with is particularly un-natural or by the same token, evil, save for the work of Satan, and one can parse and label and identify, but in the end, what will come does in fact come, and what does not, eventually is boxed-up in a dark corner, one would hope, lest life is to be ignored, and the most prominent and pertinent in mind is something irrevocably unimportant. "I have a blog." Heart like a shuck: greasy little soft matter, a kind of tongue-flesh or something inside it, the raw

  A little time to fill... a little spot of time to kill... a rime and reason for things to think... bending heaven and earth for a morsel to drink. d The titanic turbo MKL, perhaps the greatest and most unknown of existential failures, pushing dust, watering daisies, taken up in an afterlife, the second heaven, somewhere between receiving that red mark, and having finished his paper, somewhere in the collegiate indeterminate strain between doing and knowing, in the space intermediate, so much of life falls into that void of vacuum, so much of life is drawn in and taken up: subliminated in the dream work of a world somewhat wide awake and laying in the sun, perhaps yet praying for even more sleep. Upson Watt and Teddy Etchwasser, come calling sometime in the brainstorming of the afternoon, and the fronds, and the birdsong, and the other things, Teddy and Upson, kind of a dink water of the thing, kind of tea-colored stuff that makes the sand underneath look like biscuit-flesh; his que

I saw a turtle crossing the blacktop.  It saw me, and its head pulled inside the shell, away from the specter of any possible mischief: me.  I thought to myself too, the dog circling the thing, as a turtle to the traversing, am I to God, perhaps. If I looked into the occlusion of the woods, I would find it self-evident that God exists, and I would find it that any occurence that happened naturally was not only good, and providential, but natural and not so much elapses outside of that boundary.  And if so, if otherwise, who can say? I looked at the scrub growth in the odd transition between forest and yard; it was haphazard, obscure and at once also roughshod; what seems the random happening in nature, the faithful say, is connected to God, others yet, pantheists, say it IS God. Providence came to the turtle as he crossed the hot pavement to the cool of the wood, and the dog came away perplexed, but had to follow his boy, did the dog, following the Boy, his friend. I stared the turtle

 

inculcate, verb. To impress by frequent admonitions; to teach and enforce by frequent repetitions.

cynosure , noun. anything that strongly attracts attention; a center of attraction. an old name of the constellation Ursa Minor or the Little Bear, which contains the pole star, and thus has been long noted by mariners and others. (from the Greek for " dog's tail" )

He is a true fugitive, that flies from reason, by which men are sociable. He blind, who cannot see with the eyes of his understanding. He poor, that stands in need of another, and hath not in himself all things needful for this life. He an aposteme of the world, who by being discontented with those things that happen unto him in the world, doth as it were apostatise, and separate himself from common nature's rational administration. For the same nature it is that brings this unto thee, whatsoever it be, that first brought thee into the world. He raises sedition in the city, who by irrational actions withdraws his own soul from that one and common soul of all rational creatures.   -Marcus Aurelius , The Meditations, 4.24

If you are truly to love something, then never have it, for no sooner is it within our grasp as that love becomes ashes.  If you seek to hate something or even ignore it, pull it close to you, yon dark-hearted populi.

 

The old fudge clawed absently at his porridge. "I should grow an onion from an old discarded one." And I thought to myself, how it were, not like the multiplicity of nature, but a certain kind of balance: one with shoots of it, green splines going away, up toward the air, yearning perhaps for heaven.  We plant that, and it rots before giving away root and tendril to a new specimen of onion. A one-for-one interchange, prolegomenon, naturally, cadenced by a passing of the seasons, and one onion become yet another, and some waste stuffs which nourished the new onion, like a baby crawling from the womb to dine on it's mothers flesh: I read such in Spenser, a cadre of little spider babies pouring from the womb door only to crawl up the belly of the dying forebear and eat of it to live themselves. "I should interact with this somewhere between its terms and my own." Our own cadence then, the fits and starts of the world proper, jaundiced and plagued by our own limitat

Upon seeing on the program guide, it sounds like fodder for Dateline, but no.  We get a new goatmommy, there but for the grace of God, after Megyn got in the rat poison and hemorrhaged even out of her eyes.  Its an interesting premise, two or three words that seem to imply so much, and not in the minimalist sense like the movie names, but actual marketing, you know. I've seen this before anyway, sitting with a Bud Light in Davenport, Iowa surrounded by some of the nation's most interesting antique iron. They said, there was some regulation about providing rural coverage on the pay tv systems, basically almost like a subsidy, that they pay the farmers some, and they then feel the notion to pay the farmer's tv network. They took these city girls and brought them to God Knows, Wyoming.  It's almost like 40 Dollars a Day with Raquel, how you just sort of airdrop those bitches and see if they can find their way home, and if so, in that unlikelihood, what diseases have they d

Either this world is a κόσμος, or comely piece, because all disposed and governed by certain order: or if it be a mixture, though confused, yet still it is a comely piece. For is it possible that in thee there should be any beauty at all, and that in the whole world there should be nothing but disorder and confusion? and all things in it too, by natural different properties one from another differenced and distinguished; and yet all through diffused, and by natural sympathy, one to another united, as they are? - Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, 4.22

I would spend 4.89, some 5-something with all the taxes included, on International Delights.  It was empty calories, sugar high inducing caffeinated bullcrap of a tailspin mentally and physically, and halfway through the carton, I took a nap. "This sort of indulgence is unsustainable." Don't we tell ourselves pretty little lies and platitudes, moral prevarications and so forth, things on mindset and mindfulness, listening to music, and we gorge as the whole place sinks ever further, with our reasons looking paler and paler as time goes along. As a literature student also in the workforce, I qualified for "help" with groceries. C'est la vie. "Even the mailman?" Throbbing little button that initiates the destruct sequence, that such a complex organism is given a way out, a way towards dissipation, and enjoy it as it burns while re-entering the atmosphere. You didn't think something fearfully and wonderfully made would have a pathway to obsolescen

"I'll f*ck your world, counselor" said Max Cady, snarling as he crawled out from under the old lawyer's Jeep Renegade. "Go near my daughter again and you're dead" said the old lawyer, Scout, thinking of who in the good old boys he could call to get this head on a pike, who would work him over but good and make him see the error of his ways.  To the old lawyer, there was good sense in the old boys network, and they would know how to push Cady just enough; the universe could very well push any man to reconsider his ways, at least, if not precipitate an outright change. Cady had gotten college degrees in the clink; and for a truth, there was an old Arab proverb about knowledge teaching some people how to bring about their own undoings: their own personal universe of hell that transcended the world, a dissipation. He had flitted at the old lawyer's wife, but what he didn't expect, the daughter, was even more fortuitous, like a gift from the devil him

I make two points. Houston Astros gonna need to pack the vaseline if they want a good next few, facing the Braves and then, sans breather, the boiling hot Tampa Bay Rays. Secondly, and not unimportant, as per my own consternation over "free" or "ad-supported" journalism, BuzzFeed is killing its free journalism division, noting I guess, perhaps a failure to find a sufficient way to monetize.  The BuzzFeed model relied on crucial shares and so forth with other media partners, and such wasn't coming through. I note an older iteration of this website known as Kane Rose Up made about 1.43$ in six months of ad support.  Spensah, this does not even cover my breakfast and gasoline. This from BuzzFeed as I began to do a data-supported, fact-driven analysis of my own web stats.  Quite frankly, we're just giving it away, and some point out the content isn't valuable anyway.

abstruse , adj Remote from ordinary minds or notions; difficult to be comprehended or understood; esoteric; profound; recondite. (from the Latin abstrusus, to thrust away)

If I could, were a hammer or a nail, or a firing pin or something, pierce the central obscurity at the heart of being, look into it, deposit a chestnut for others to look upon at other points of posterity, not a signature, but a souvenir for the universe that said I had been there; but I am no Killroy, roundly apart from a Killjoy, a chestnut of random thoughts, as it were, and some are indeed fun, where others are more tedious, as expected: thoughts tend to vary with the thinker, as the thinker elapses along the line of history. The very first black woman poet, reading her in my studies, and finding she was a stickler for literacy amongst her kind, and one could expect altruistic monarchists writing self-effacing works like, "Educating The American Negro" and so forth, leaving their sort of chestnut, but perhaps out so season. Condescended to sit with the Native People and sit quietly as they unfolded their creation stories and magic incantations, and such other, their medic

  LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, July 13, 1798. Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur. 4—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from

 

They will say commonly, Meddle not with many things, if thou wilt live cheerfully. Certainly there is nothing better, than for a man to confine himself to necessary actions; to such and so many only, as reason in a creature that knows itself born for society, will command and enjoin. This will not only procure that cheerfulness, which from the goodness, but that also, which from the paucity of actions doth usually proceed. For since it is so, that most of those things, which we either speak or do, are unnecessary; if a man shall cut them off, it must needs follow that he shall thereby gain much leisure, and save much trouble, and therefore at every action a man must privately by way of admonition suggest unto himself, What? may not this that now I go about, be of the number of unnecessary actions? Neither must he use himself to cut off actions only, but thoughts and imaginations also, that are unnecessary for so wi

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   Dejection: an Ode.   Stanza the Fourth   'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,          And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,          Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!                 With light heart may she rise,                 Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,          Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul!          O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice. Oh really, Samuel.  Oh really.  Who needs to be liberated?  Your libido or your friend?  Don't think I'm not question this, such tails of freedom are usually exortations towards dissipation, historically speaking, even the Barbarian Hannibal was really jus

a golden crucifix set on the top of building, in secret, in good old NYC.  What could it mean to a resigned priest? Marcus Aurelius saw all of the universe, the body natural, as the City of God, but yet others subdivide, seeing the mind as sometimes either self-contained, or part in parcel of the body natural. Doctorow the novelist worked, like peeling layers of an onion, on the inner world, the obscurities: probing, stoking the pangs of the mysterious until once we confronted with something either repugnant or unsatisfying.  We could be in such circumstance, perpetually unhappy, or we could realize we enjoyed the unfurling of the thing. One orientation of mysticism is man approaching God from within, as of acknowledging or communing with the creator from his own little City of God within himself, and yet another lensing might be man's position towards nature, elapsation, resumption.

primogeniture , noun . The state of being the first-born of the same parents; in law the right of the first-born son to succeed to his father's estate to the exclusion of the younger sons and any daughters. (from the Latin primus : first genitura: a begetting.) also: Primogenitor, the earliest or first forefather.

 As Ryan Holiday said it on a book title, "The Obstacle Is The Way"(available on many platforms and at the Stoicgym.com) Sometimes was is need is tumult to effect positive change, as Captain Picard said it of meeting an insurmountable foe: "a kick in the complacency", as if we had become overmuch secure or set in various ways, and needed a change....

Whatsoever is expedient unto thee, O World, is expedient unto me; nothing can either be 'unseasonable unto me, or out of date, which unto thee is seasonable. Whatsoever thy seasons bear, shall ever by me be esteemed as happy fruit, and increase. O Nature! from thee are all things, in thee all things subsist, and to thee all tend. Could he say of Athens, Thou lovely city of Cecrops; and shalt not thou say of the world, Thou lovely city of God?  - Marcus Aurelius , The Meditations, 4.19, George Long edition.

It was one of those regular days, I remember bits and pieces of it; I really do.  I was in high school, I had "gymmed" that morning and had Ms Ingram's History class, but then I had lit out.  I had frequently lit out, even though the schedule was great and I had the end of day Art class. It was talk radio then for me, a Young Republican, an outsider, but one who was not engaged, but a learner. Today I'm not so much of a Republican, more of a RINO, and the party these days hates a RINO. But I heard the coverage, circa 10 am on talk radio, then later on CBS.  I took a break for films, cold things from the refrigerator and such. It had just seemed so unbelievable that one would attack like; out of the pale. A long distance view of the burning building, just like the first WTC bombing, a long distance shot and a talking head narrating the scene. There were commentators that refused to say the name of McVeigh, saying instead, "He Who Will Remain Nameless".  I had

oppugn, verb To attack by arguments or criticism; to oppose; to question; to exercise hostile reasoning against. (from the Latin oppugno ob , meaning 'against' pugno , meaning 'to fight')

 

Not to wander out of the way, but upon every motion and desire, to perform that which is just: and ever to be careful to attain to the true natural apprehension of every fancy, that presents itself. - Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 4.18  

Clyde sauntered, and he felt vaguely french in his suit coat and all, vaguely exotic in his fancy wanderer clothes, in MacNamara Park, crossing the acreage, Effingsly Durham at his side. She had been called Eff-kenzie or other things, even had her father give long lectures where he explained they'd be friends if she wasn't his daughter; she lapsed into a kind of dull mortified silence during all that, the fake names and musing, the protracted spoken daydreams of her father. But she wouldn't be confused with Greer's girl, Isis Holsclaugh, she wouldn't do that in any form or fashion, nor even wear her hair the same way, lest it should spawn confusion; she just wouldn't have that, and she, like all the others, shared that one thing in common, along with the fat girl selling lemonade in her vertical stripes--her couch cover shirt looked like a television test pattern--on her table, Lemonade, from the signage, and some variation of Faygo, or Sunkist or Fanta flavors,

  Davezula, the answer book  Fryjohn got a hard **** rock you like a cop when he's on top Mikewad you up next with ya mahjong. Mikewad make the money, see? Mikewad get the honeys, G. Ice on my fingers and my toes and my toy Taurus.

Your experience and your reality is only narrowed or broadened by the quality of your perceptions. In fact, you are only as narrow as your perceptions, likewise, your friends, relatives, only as narrow as your perceptions. We exhibit a tension between being unfit for this world, and yet being unfit also for the next, but we yearn for the best of one, and egress to the the other; will we be happy anywhere, or will the splendor of heaven only bring about a sense of profound depression?  

edify , verb To instruct and improve in knowledge generally, and particularly in moral and religious knowledge. (from the Latin aedificare , to build erect or construct aedes, a house facio , to make.

Graceful raceless, restless ladies, ticking on the clock, and me, with my diddle-bop: we all killed time to some extent, in our own fashion, that was, within our own arguably limited frame of reference.  Someone called out "Order 66" and the apprentices were jumping over one another; my solar calculator was stymied by a cloudbank to the southeast, and I was on the verge of making another helpful pictograph. I was about early, taken to the outside, having a thing of my own own, and watching flickering lights, and all, pay-outs to customers in the form of bill credits, and all--things that tend to madden people that hold the shares, and why--to hold the shares, just serial rape-age on a grand scale, sanctioned and held up by the law. I killed time forever dead, with no hope of reprieve, at all, to no extent imaginable, and yet others talked of things like reliving the past; I had figured I would have the same experiences, if repeated, the same mistakes and failures: it was the

"these ladies know who I am.. she knew I wouldn't let her slide through my hands..." -The Rolling Stones

 

If so be that the souls remain after death (say they that will not believe it); how is the air from all eternity able to contain them? How is the earth (say I) ever from that time able to Contain the bodies of them that are buried? For as here the change and resolution of dead bodies into another kind of subsistence (whatsoever it be;) makes place for other dead bodies: so the souls after death transferred into the air, after they have conversed there a while, are either by way of transmutation, or transfusion, or conflagration, received again into that original rational substance, from which all others do proceed: and so give way to those souls, who before coupled and associated unto bodies, now begin to subsist single. This, upon a supposition that the souls after death do for a while subsist single, may be answered. And here, (besides the number of bodies, so buried and contained by the earth), we may further co

An author commented of many Trump supporters, that what they sought was a "constitutional autocracy" in which Trump and his voters were protected by the constitution, but everyone else were fair game, not protected, and as such, slaves and targets of various bad activities. Sounds about right, I wot.

A non-controversy to me, but it triggered some who were perhaps, "straight-acting" and generally the type to overcompensate for something; it was all meme-fodder, the beer turning the men gay, and all and why? Does it matter who the company pays?  Assuredly a lot of these companies slide dark money towards some unsavory types all the time, and we don't know, hence the term "dark money", Biden's widowed daughter-in-law and all, the "dark money". This as I consider Dell Computers for my business because they sponsored a podcast I like, but that too, is extra money, collateral; my tendency is to respond more to sports endorsements and so forth usually, in the form of stock car racing, where I took up an Anheuser-Busch product largely because of an athlete sponsorship.  My initial foray into healthy fresh sub sandwich also came from a sporting sponsorship.  "Cousin" Carl Edwards. Snowflakes versus Karens, tis all, sound and fury signifying no

 He who is greedy of credit and reputation after his death, doth not consider, that they themselves by whom he is remembered, shall soon after every one of them be dead; and they likewise that succeed those; until at last all memory, which hitherto by the succession of men admiring and soon after dying hath had its course, be quite extinct. But suppose that both they that shall remember thee, and thy memory with them should be immortal, what is that to thee? I will not say to thee after thou art dead; but even to thee living, what is thy praise? But only for a secret and politic consideration, which we call οἰκονομίαν, or dispensation. For as for that, that it is the gift of nature, whatsoever is commended in thee, what might be objected from thence, let that now that we are upon another consideration be omitted as unseasonable. That which is fair and goodly, whatsoever it be, and in what respect soever it be, that it is fair and goodly, it is so of itself, and terminates in itself, no