Conjugates of the Infinite. The Film Flam Man. behold we now through a "Mirror Glass Darkly"(formerly of the "the Abyss Gazes Also", nee Futnuckery with Abaddon1215). Christogenesis. Clyde Devlin. Memphis Cawdor. Consider it all joy when [you] fall into divers tribulations.
Addenda and Errata: John Ashcroft.
John Ashcroft was the name that I couldn't just pull out of my butt last post, the one that is was insinuated so lightly that he was a racist during his time serving the government as a conservative-leaning public official.
Under Bush 43.
Dubya.
Intermezzo: Peer Gynt Suite "The Funeral of Ase".
Catch a quart of crick water before I get back to the field, boss. Done got me a Mason jar with a handkerchief over the top of it.
I was looking stupidly, unclearly, at Toni Breadinger's times, and said, "where's Brandon Gaughan?" "How fast is that thing?" "Lap time?" "Sector Three?" Like I cared, but part of me was still parsing at the particulars of the Uranus turn.
What distant thunder? What skies and what deeps?
When that of no consequence uptakes consequences of its own accord, and then manifests the impetus to participation in the universe, as if by magic or sheer force of will--why some people would have other people picking door locks with the little plastic nubs at the ends of their shoelaces.
In such a spot, that blemish on my china-bowls.
The More You Know.
I'm the reason Oprah won't marry Steadman.
Interloper, carpet bagger, me, of Mesach Shadrach and Abednego, tossed at once by a mad king into the fiery furnace, Belshezzar to turn up against everything but porridge, a pure Communista, at once to both walk the best halls, but then also poach in the king's forests.
"I'm not Democrat. I'm democratic, as of little dee. Would you like to examine the principle, and weigh the matter such that the better of all values takes precedence?"
Solon, they say, set those principles about in old Athens, and they tried to uphold, but still, there was political aristocracy, and various trappings of wealth, privilege, and Socrates pestering the cold-moor sh*t out of the supposedly learned in the populace.
In the eyes of what monster did those wings unfurl?
Did who made thee smile his work to see?
At the touch of a hand.
Knowing is the halfness of the battle, and the shelf-life of knowledge is beyond the breadth of eternity.
I thought at once, of the realm politic, Eric Holder bears a resemblance to Steadman, hilariously so, and James Comey looks like that guy that ran the FBI for Bush 43. One of those they insinuated was racist, you know, "dog whistle from the left" and all.
We are all, all of us, decent people here, of course.
Journal: Google, and on the obverse, Uranus, and not much else.
How to subliminate Uranus in retrograde? Except to say the usual mumbo-jumbo about expecting the unexpected, such as per the vibrant optimism of many astrologists.
I typed this into the search box: "I contribute nothing to my country."
Number three in the search results was the Library of Congress's collection of Thomas Jefferson paper.
Laughing gleefully, energetically, in front of my Linux box, at the implications of such, and wondering, was this an Easter Egg of Google's?
Distant and cold, we think, something changes from a distance: how does it effect us? Does it touch us, other than to offer up some new interesting possibility in the face of the universe?
We say its life renewed, life sprung anew, life to the former barren wastes, mayhap, and in that, we've got hooked into that youthful, imaginative optimism, too.
One of the Easter Eggs in Google, and I say, try it, don't let me spoil it, except to say it is in fact, an Easter Egg: type askew in the search box and watch Google work. And to think some soul programmed that into the results. :)
Old Bucky that roamed the muddy depths.
There was once a river blue, and legend had it that it crapped out a wide-whitewall spare tire, complete with the dog dish wheel cover still on it. The river catfish was that awesomely big it seemed, and it was well, a titillation, such to perturb even Crick and Watson and their pet theories of the substance of life.
What was done, some of the old boys had poured straight Castrol and Supertech and some other in the water, Prestone green, and then some Prestone pink, until at last, what looked like a smooth sandbar, the color of blue cheese surfaced.
Twas, perchance, the belly of the great beast.
In the meantime, the Capital Intelligencer-Gazette had nicknamed the big old fish "Bucky" because somebody had come up with something that was either a fish tooth or petrified wood: no one knew the difference, I guess, and Crick and Watson had departed the mortal coil anyway. The fish tooth thing was the size of a car alternator or turbo charger, kind of a molar that he had lost trying to eat God knows what, maybe even the concrete bridge pilings that supported 29.
Three diesels brought it up, or well, not up cause it would rip apart on the bank, but brought it to water's edge, and they had a field day with it. There was an entire 1964 Volkswagen Beetle in it, with some muck inside that, which may have once been human. It reminded me of the time they had found an old Triumph two-wheel in the water, and the whole time I'm thinking that if the rider hit the water at highway speed, he was unconscious entirely, and in the drink.
The Poston's Salvage trucks that were there had pulled 16-foot trailers with them, and believe me, they loaded-up on meat, the good old one-of-a-kind river cat meat. They also said the whiskers were bigger than their tow cables, and they stood there taking pictures for the newspaper, holding parts of the great beast, the desultory provincial Leviathan, the beast from the deep.
It was the kind of thing, had we not abandoned that technology, the gut could have wintered hundreds of lamps and camplights.
the ministry opening to the Gentiles. The thing that would reshape the world.
So he had a dream, and then a certain kind of real-world application of the thing, did Peter. "Peter come and eat" said God in the dream. And Peter said he couldn't because it wasn't Kosher, but God insisted, and reassured Peter that what God wrought, He had made clean to it.
Think of it; Peter, a good Jew, and so strict on upholding the Mosaic Law that he would even chastise God himself for not holding to those rules. Elohim. YHWH. Jehovah.
Soon enough, another paradigm shift.(I was reading this in the "One Year King James Version", for the completist who reads this stuff.)
Paul.
Paulie-paulie-oxen-free, at once trying to bump shoulders with the believers in Damascus, set about and realizing the Jews would not listen to him, the Chosen People, well, the ethic Jews, I guess, and the ministry thusly would be opened up, and it didn't take the prophet Daniel to come to the point, but anyway, as it were.
We all, ya know? "The Gentiles." And I think of how they call America the Melting Pot, and all those people, races genders and so forth, "The Gentiles".
"Y'all."
I was told from some in the behind-the-scenes, that there was a "push-pull", and think of it, we trade our hours for a handful of dimes, and then the real, if the government were our mind, the church then, our heart, pulling a tenth of the intake, gross, right off the top.
"You all." (for the providentially deficient).
Little Devvie.
They said, and I was thinking, was this the universe playing one of those indifferent little funnies on me, that they had a face-sized Oatmeal Cream Pie. Before Steffy made the blippity-blah Glutton Face, my pumps were kicked-off and my panties were going across my ankles.
"I think you misunderstood."
"Don't worry. We're about to get straight."
"Have you ever discoursed with two women?"
"Hath not a Jew eyes? Prick us; do we not bleed?"
Being told I had to last about 42 minutes, I was about to start asking for a bottle of water, tapping on her forearm, asking her for a minute to breathe.
I thought, and I realized we had a Mark Twain Prize recipient who looked the Predator, and I thought to myself, it was grossly political, all, how some look at remarks and agree, where others are horribly offended, such to cost the Predator work.
Thing was, you had to parse the discourse from a particular world view, see it through that lens, and magically, words and ideas would appear; it was like writing one's secret notes with potato gore, and then pouring brake fluid on it to make the quiddity of the thing plain.
As clear as an unbroken leg.
She had her hands around her face in a big circle-shape and she was flicking her tongue. It reminded me of a horrible nightmare from my teen years, in which, it was, an anxiety dream, where any amount of bad things could happen at any time, unbridled, unchained, the world at large, and like an infantile territorialism, I was suited as such to be almost in a state of panic. We only had one thing on our mind, and that one A.I. slot oscillated randomly between Final Fantasy 6 and Mortal Kombat II.
My Sociology text had a picture of Michele Obama in it, and I almost had that right-wing knee-jerk reaction.
I could go like that sometime, depositing magic eggs across my region, but never exactly flicking my tongue like a sneaky-snake, but doing more Isaac Hayes, kinda caressing the tendrils on the opened-up peach, going against the tendrils of the peach pit. "Let the people know my wisdom; fill the land with smoke..." -John Fogherty.
I would not apologize for the numbness or lack of conscience demonstrated across the universe, for I was part and parcel, myself, as much as anyone, and who knew in the final balance, some random hair follicle or toenail clipping in some forgotten corner might make her think of me, even in the throes of that lack of conscience, and if I precipitated a smile, I'd feel like my life were almost worth all the other that came with it.
Being and Experience. Mysticism.
Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?” declares the Lord. “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” declares the Lord.
-from the Bible, New International Version.
This is the soul, and the spirit, and the creator, and his creation. Compartments: sections of being and experience. A funnel and a flute, a kind of riverflow into experience from being, and the a re-uptake from experience into being, and I still, for the life of me, no pun intended, cannot stop confusing soul and spirit, except to know one is more fleshbound than the other, and one we just are, the metaphysical, transcendant self.
Journal for Sunday June 25: Its a Wonderful Dissipation.
Trailblazing.... tires inflated with nitrogen....
Regaining composure after a few laps, thinking to myself "It's a Wonderful Life" and all, that jazz, and stuff. Coming back to myself, having intermittent moments of clarity, such that make some people nervous; as we know, the usual dissipation is a profit to some, and a prophet to others.
The blithe unseemingly quality of all, and myself, have I become a monk?
It was process, a thoughtful and contrived process of coming back to one, in a sense even remembering who I was in various stages. I was giving myself the advice of Epictitus, that it was only opinion and not much else, and my own self was safely in it's protective box.
The world could seem different, then myself, for a place to be secure within, look to myself, and find myself different, and upon some reflection, and finally coming back to self in the analysis, the world then looks different, and I'm in my familiar thing.
Things as the usual dissipation then, can satisfy not much more as usual, for the eyes were different, the inside was different, then anschluss and the outside appeared different.
Process. An experience held within the psyche, and without, in the spirit.
Good times with the poets. D.S. Marriot from Poets.org
O these bonds packed with zeroes—harmony, grief, regrets. I’m done with memory. And every time I listen to your poetry, nausea becomes a river in me in which I swim naked, dispossessed.
I’m making a fetish of everyone dead, my electrons black with heat and sound.
O my thousand delicate microaggressions, bound up with a
hunger I can never grasp. Keep me safe, erotic. Be a mirror to these
movements of bourgeois frustration.
-D.S. Marriot
outer experience, inner experience.
Outer experience just an echo of inner experience, and yet producing results out of proportion with the origination; is one influenced so by the inner life? Is the inner experience given its due diligence, or do we float along meditation on the dust?
Word of the Week: Tergiversate
tergiversate, verb
to change one's opinions;
to turn against a cause formerly advocated;
to practice evasion or subterfuge.
(from the Latin, tergum, meaning the back, and versor, to turn.)
Continuing Adventures of Mil Lesions.
"You wanted the best; you got the best."
So there it was, roasted peanuts and iced Pepsi-Cola.
Mil Lesions verse Clutch Nelson.
Mind, they had seen Mil Lesions plenty on some of the wrestling tv shows, so the fans were kinda excited to see the Pine Cone Squash. They had seen my ass.
Clutch had went off the chain. The Governor's Daughter was there watching, and he snuck-up to hit her with a chair after she was giving him what-for.
I came around the ringpost and sailed through the air, knee-ing the chair into Clutch's face.
For all this, and the fans loving it, I was paid gas money, and given some of the leftover peanuts.
Marcus Aurlius on Stuff being.
Some things hasten to be, and others to be no more. And even whatsoever now is, some part thereof hath already perished. Perpetual fluxes and alterations renew the world, as the perpetual course of time doth make the age of the world (of itself infinite) to appear always fresh and new. In such a flux and course of all things, what of these things that hasten so fast away should any man regard, since among all there is not any that a man may fasten and fix upon? as if a man would settle his affection upon some ordinary sparrow living by him, who is no sooner seen, than out of sight. For we must not think otherwise of our lives, than as a mere exhalation of blood, or of an ordinary respiration of air. For what in our common apprehension is, to breathe in the air and to breathe it out again, which we do daily: so much is it and no more, at once to breathe out all thy respirative faculty into that common air from whence but lately (as being but from yesterday, and to-day), thou didst first breathe it in, and with it, life
-The Meditations, Book 6.14
Alexander of Macedon, and he that dressed his mules, when once dead both came to one. For either they were both resumed into those original rational essences from whence all things in the world are propagated; or both after one fashion were scattered into atoms.
-The Meditations, 6.22
A rebuttal to euthanasia; life both without qualification and quantification. "Life and life more absurdly."
When one freebases on her messenger bag, she of courses obliges by sitting there, blouse open, real horrorshow-like, a carnival exhibit, and we were paired like two racing cleats, or a team of oxen, one curse to knock down two mistakes, as it were, God's economy--not a dream house, but a pumpernickle swift move to redress the balance neatly, and from nature, not much other than a hot dose.
Her boobs were pointing at the gulf of travertine between us, and that a nice green like the felt of pool table, but infinitely more durable, and her tits white like a blank sheet of paper, an unapologetic senile piece of A4 that had forget not only its sins, but the feeble excuses for such lapses in judgement.
A mafia hitman, sans both mafia and kills, a kind of Great Unwashed sitting in a flamboyant semi-formal shirt eating a sandwich made of organ meat, and of course, the bun: sesame seeds, to perturb posterity, beyond the speed of light, beyond the purse of eternity, and posterity having one look at him and laughed at first reaction, as Camus said, enough scorn overcomes any bad luck or ill fortune, any misplaced intention, love given to the wrong litter of puppies.
An exotic dancer, from the far end of the town--exotic enough for horseshoes--neither dancing nor possessed of any other nervous gift of nature: he had watched her put lotion underneath her belly, into the cleave of the fat roll. And he lived to tell about it. They were pure Elmore Leonard on one side, the side with the building, and Horatio Alger on the other side: this Lincoln penny laying on the train tracks waiting to die. Why her only dance was the consequence of nature as she walked normally, and her only exotic quality was a rarity, like an uncommon, unknown disease.
He thought at that, he could wake up dead, or wake up and not feel bad about anything, in which case he would assume he were dead, or absent-mindedly knit a silken tie around the closet hanger rod as she performed a show of some kind, legs spread, trimming her toenails, and him just wanting to go meet Jesus, one would guess.
Claiming Elmore Leonard, but leaning out towards Vonnegut, dashes of Anthony Burgess and Nabakov, maybe even Dosteovsky, somewhere in there, if he ever put two coherent and partly honest words together; she the Ibsen, perhaps, or Nietzsche's final curse on the Ubermensch, a woman capable of sustaining that peculiarity and long, long evaporation into whatever trace minerals.
2023 Solstice and Divine mercy for those even too stupid too ask.
A postulation, that the "unsearchable riches of God" represents both mercy and the plethora of nearly infinite possibilities in front of brow-beaten and usurping man. In his impertinence man has grown more and more to contempt the Divine, when in fact, he would be more pleasant if he otherwise contemplated the Divine, to unclench the buttcheeks and experience the air, not as he wishes it, per se, but such as it is already, to behold what irrevocably is.
And on the first day of Summer in the hemisphere, the air is butter-clutch thick, a milkshake of humidity, an earthen sweat. Of earth, i smelled the soil as the latest rain began, either it was something elemental in the drops or the very dust breathed a sigh of relief. The Solstice, a time of perhaps, some kind of naked polarity, in which emotions run clear and pure like the mountain brook, without complication, and without begging distinctions, but just happening as the Now has been continuously unspooling and the winding around increasing universal chaos for generations without end.
There were spirals to the immediate northwest, and the general malaise flowed, determined, from the southerly section, passing from the tropics into the waystation of the southeast of the states, itself a clearinghouse of all kinds of contractions and predelictions of servicing its own past, and laying at the feet of its own proud statues, with more clenched buttcheeks, and a thickness of saliva from too many sugary soft drinks, that last only to be washed away in beer as the weather slowdanced to the north.
Accordion serenade during the brief romantic interlude. Angela, a northern devotchka, and 1984.
Angela had her fingers in my belt loops; my gorge rose.
A yankee b*tch started on her accordion during the romantic interlude; my tongue was free, and hers so surly.
The yankee b*tch was not expressly a b*tch by point of being a yankee, but both a yankee and a b*tch separately; I could give her no sweat but what little flossed off during flight from her prattle.
Did I say my gorge rose? Angie thought I was presenting it to her; and in the course of human events, there are such galactic misunderstandings, and what was meant to be pleasure or deepest love, becomes something much else and altogether different: 180 degrees aside, and completely out of proportion with the intent.
It felt like that scene in 1984 where the couple makes love set to the tones of the orders of the day for the proletariat, like sneaking away in prison, knowing full well later I would have to be re-educated, but of Angela, no education at all, lost in the bombed-out environs of the city, "smelling of bug spray", and the lips of her sex were like something of a deformed cabbage in the dust bin.
I could help myself more, I thought, and I was certain I could find no good where there was no good--all the more lost for even looking.
There was a solitary stray rose petal on one of Angela's plenty of stretch marks across the flanks of her belly punch, her savings account, the belly, and the rose petal some kind of declaration.
No fate but what we rake.
I keep you at arm's length or further because it suits my wicked purposes.
I was up early again, propounding my own cause to the fates, trying in vain to get their attention: for fickle they are, and bound to decide summarily, as of leaves suddenly falling only a sidewalk.
To bemoan fate is to waste spirit, to spill a 2 liter bottle and poo-poo about it as the drink is pouring out. Better still is take action to preserve the time. To bemoan nature is to bemoan reality; it is not to be escaped. Only the foolish try that.
Life's great highway offers up a journey, and not a destination; you will spend so much time staring out the windshield that you may as well enjoy the time.
Confuseus, you slime.
Confuseus say, "Only a fool prevents beautiful words from becoming beautiful deeds."
How is that the tinting of life drabbles from pink, to green, to gray, and then all around again, until at least, we forget or ignore outright the meanings of each?
pass it on: on different opinions getting fair treatment.
Respect, respect, respect.
We so often talk about the uniqueness and spontaneity of the human existence; we do lip serve to the very miraculous nature of people, but yet we have so much trouble recognizing and appreciating in person, the unique nature of each of our fellows.National Vanilla Milkshake Day capping-off Juneteenth?
Of course, there is always a sense of humor underneath all the blood and guts, behind all the yelling and ill feeling.
The day after Juneteenth, June 19, is June 20.
"National Vanilla Milkshake Day."
Lol.
reasoning on why, instead of asking when where or how. The riddle of life.
...one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
-Albert Camus
Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.
-King Solomon
...you will have to live once more innumerable times more; and the will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
The struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-Albert Camus
I reasoned such, or remembered such, standing in the porch, with the temperature down from passing rains, and a kind of percussion of distant thunder sounding like a Norse lullaby to my idle ears. The magic of the moment is so thin, so vague, ponderous, but unable, like a gallon of water, to be grasped on its own.
Perhaps to be enjoyed or experienced, and not quantified the insipid way we often practice.
The contrasting meanings of life, and how the literati could boil down the details of so many collected moments within one skin, reduce that to a singular trait or adage; traits they talk as exact single labels of something. It is not unlike graffiti artists tagging a passing train car, or something, something so inadequate, but at some moments apt enough.
terrific: a note on the antiquate usage of the word.
It once meant something else, before good showmanship, hucksterism: terrific meant something a bit meaner than its usage today.
terrific: adjective
extraordinarily fine or intense;
extreme;
great;
astounding or awesome;
causing or tending to cause fear and terror;
terrifying;
dreadful.
(from the Latin, terrificus)
Happy Father's Day and then Juneteenth. On choosing to be a Dad.
Some men collapse into fatherhood at the maddening behest of biological necessity, an impetus towards destruction, to quiet his own moods, to lay spent, exhausted next to a woman, and for him to fall asleep as she is talking to no end about her dreams.
Other men make a choice, where someone stole the milk from Bessie already, and he is just there to bring her fodder to eat, like a good animal husbandman, and the old Bessie's always say he needs a hundred thousand and the prim of his shoulder at her eyeline. It never all quite shakes-out the way the want it, either of them.
They are stuck, as it were, like old Dilbert tilling the soil of the lease holder, watching the sleepy back end of a mule undulate as it saunters along. Dilbert had shot a man some years ago, and for his trouble, got not a Thank You card from the county, but instead pulled long years at Parchman Penitentiary.
It humbled him but did not make him forget, and that was God's own irony of the thing; he would set after Flem Snopes with nothing so more than the old form of Saturday Night Special, which was a chunk of brick, maybe or not with mortar glazed on it.
He was like them, a father of an adopted one, and the convict, at least in the sense that he never got the wild out of him completely, and like the rednecks cooking wildgame, some put vinegar in it to cut the wild flavor--the residue of endless forages through the brush, eating weeds, wild berries, sundry tree leaves and such.
William D. Goddens. As this one thought, it wasn't William Dilbert Goddens, but instead William Damn Goddens, the man that quietly worked the earth, himself like poured out water, and his recompense the oily residue that gleamed on top of the water, the finest, thinnest little garnish.
Or should we say, not the they fall into fatherhood, but that fatherhood falls all them, and few, beyond that biological necessity, are privileged to actually go to fatherhood by choice.
Little Brian needs a dad, maybe, and Little Brian himself too innocent and naive for meteors of evil and stupidity to cause any real alter to his path of orbit around his mother's sundress-covered thighs.
The could meet together and stand there, each somewhat befuddled by the other, and Dilbert would take Brian's hand, and what Dilbert learned of killing his cousins and other stuff of lie, he could share with Little Brian; talk about feeding the meat to alligators just simply to get rid of that awful stink of putrefication, and not at all aimed at hiding the evidence, particularly.
Respecting and in awe. Pass It On.
Of respect, we note the King James era of usage in which the word "fear" was interchangeable with "respect".
And of course, I appreciate any sincerity pooled in the universe that would lead someone to this website. And by "appreciate", I mean I am at once thankful and in awe.
I begin to write a bit about a character, a fictional distillation of a real person, that in me inspired a kind of horrified awe, and at once, smiles and laughter. Oh, how we writers like a good line, and we make so much over the least turn of words, such as it is.
But after Father's Day, we come to Respect in the Pass It On canon. Perhaps there is some poetry in that, that with familiarity bled away, drained from the concourse, we come to loving memories, a plethora of a kind of respectful awe of the older generation.
Juneteenth.
Once more, a celebration. America's unquenchable thirst for freedom. It was obvious to many even at the abolishing of slavery that the slaves had that same American yearning for freedom in their hearts, and idealism in their eyes.
The Time Millionaire counts his currency, and towards no particular end.
It seemed like a waste of time: a terrific waste of time, terrific like the original sense of the word, with a kind of ill-feeling awe about it, but there was not much else pushing or trumping or stomping. Not much else at all, but a replay of the classic Top 40, and one could at least, with nothing else interfering, intervening, pushing at the seams, one could then have the unfettered experience of the music.
Were I a "time millionaire" on a Sunday morning, I would have traded it, feeling I had, that it was unproductive, but away from what end, I knew not. So there was guilt, but not clear, and the only thing clear was the signal from the radio.
It was a father's day, too, and the father effecting a kind of combination Howard Hughes and Zen Buddhism--that voting Republican that so often agrees with Democrats, in principle, but does that identity politics, and so he commonly jeers them.
And on feeling unproductive, I would frequently find something of the digital variety to do on a Sunday morning, but for that, a man assailed by thoughts, with none taking purchase. If it were poop, it would be plain to see that none stuck to the wall, but glanced off it and fell to the floor.
But poop too, had some kind of residual value, and even traces of minerals and other matter, but the thoughts of the morning had a kind of mysticism to it--insubstant; perhaps it was okay, after all, that the body rested while the mind floated, disconnected to anything of consequence. Okay in the sense that I wasn't drowning puppies or strangling orphans or engaged in other kind of malfeasance.
I would relent that an entirely wasted day is something of consequence, as I spoke spoke previously of learning new things being a way to salvage the day.
The pure virtue of the thing, perhaps, is not doing any substantial damage in the meantime, I suppose, that virtue being a trait or handle that leads to a positive outcome, and dismally I aver that not breaking anything, not causing more harm, is certainly by context of being less evil, seems all the more good in the long run.
Perhaps, that void is more of a perfect moment in time than it feels, pure clean and natural, with neither the past pressing, nor the future assailing, but each moment like a casual walk along the shores of eternity--perfectly and nakedly stuck in the current moment.
an extra touch of class: Shaolin edition
One thing, perhaps, eluded me, in the realm of knowledge, such as the process: day by day I gather some new bits of information, reminding me of the Werefkin painting of the devotchkas with the pillowbags over their shoulders, walking along the boulevard.
The thing I didn't know.
Shaolin classes online aren't that expensive.
But in everyday, and I was once told by a fire-breathing dragon, the secret sauce of life is the collecting of facts, such to the extent even to call life a philosopher's path, or something, in today's compartmentalized world, and with a large amount of information at our fingertips, we indulge, intentionally or not, in the learning of new things quite frequently.
As Paul said, the Athenians were constantly on about taking up new ideas, and just based on that natural curiosity, kind of gentleman curator people, those philosophers, some of the philosophers told Paul that they would hear more about Christ, more of the Gospel, but to what end, Paul seemed somewhat uncertain.
The taking up of new things, as it were, almost like "retail therapy" or impulse buying, some learn new things, others take in new material, such as news, or what not, new types of fried snacks in foil bags.
newschannel, ad revenue, and salesmanship.
Accordion to THE Megyn Kelly, her old 9 pm hour Fox broadcast drew some 100 million annually in advertising dollars.
(The rest of this never happened.)
Shep was telling me about Journalist Kelly's Random Noise Generator. I remember the day, cause she just had a flattened look in her eyes, really did. One minute, Tripping on a Hole in a Paper Heart, next second, blippity-blop here comes Bernard Hermann and the previous meal has resurfaced onto your shirt.
She just had that look in her eye, and then what do you know? There's a movie where her adapted character says, "We're gonna be the story?"
When the fifth seal was opened, out of the smoke came the great and terrible Sarah Palin, and chirped, "you betcha".
And there was a hydra crawled out of the sea, PT boats and Destroyers on the Normandy coast, the RonDonJohn, and one of the five heads was as if to die, and then the Nazi's were hiding the coat closet waiting on Kevin to ring them up.
Do we see some of this is inverse, reverse, obtuse, or footloose? Do we say none of this ever happened, but to purely qualify the piece, some of this did happen, but who knows which or what, even the author(does he know?)?
"The blog that says the least entertains the best." said John Schubert Meal.
"The nationwide newschannel that informs the least, gets the MyPillow dollars", said another man, but this one of no fame. "Because the audience is bored."
So I was talking about an inside job earlier, and I noticed, a splash without waves, my doleful spirit at rest looking at the rest of the thoroughfare and thinking how at cross-purposes it all seems, and none able to see far beyond themselves in the interim, and olive branches cause for pulled pruning hooks, and such.
A probability matrix, something altogether different from A.I., an actual neural network made out of some very pricey and antiquated vacuum tubes, and not too many Asian semiconductors, a probability matrix, a kind of spectrograph of thought, and kind of an ancient sort of 8-digit kind of thing that has co-related to perhaps, perhaps, every thing in the known world.
He reasoned all this, the originator, from his work shift, the doldrum of his workday, stocking shoes, arranging product on the shelves and so forth and even as he slept, that plastic smell of shoe soles, the plastic, rubber, and the dyes in the various fabric used in such. A combined ambience for the meal proper of things that ring fake, insane, bombastic, but thinly-veiled, hidden yet, the real truth.
The I Ching, that's what it was. And Nietzsche said, "blessed are the sleepy for they soon drop off."
"Where's the sacrificial ram, father?"
"The Lord will provide us a ram."
Breaking News: "Biden's Border Crisis" Lol.
Such as it was, in the days and the times, people were willing to manipulate even reality itself for the benefit of their own particular chosen teams, those people, to be perhaps, blissfully unaware of the core uselessness of the product, but to be only focused perhaps, on ad volume, and sales.
Why, in the land of the volume sellers, I was perhaps like a local car salesman, geared more toward getting the client on my side and not just making a quick sale. There was more empathy than profit motive at work, and in that model, the client would be mine first, such to the extent that if I switched organizations, switched workplaces, the customer would seek me out, and feel less of a loyalty to the establishment, but appreciate more the salesperson that largely dictates the sales experience almost entirely.
It's not a conscious design, but comes naturally; I've done it before, even in large retail stores, customers asking for the magic by name, the silk-drawered MKL that puts the birds in the trees and all, you know.
"A different kind of client experience."
Nebulose Nervosa or something or other, where the city salespersons try to dress extra sharp and they make the sale clinically, quickly and are soon adding commissions to their income. The Ellis Island experience of new car buying. Fie on that.
early word of the week for the next week: Embrocation.
embrocation, noun.
The act of rubbing a liniment or lotion onto a bruised or diseased part of the body;
the liquid used for this;
a liniment or lotion.
Fluidic residue from Gary "engaging with the world", seen under a blacklight.
What in the world is that noise coming from your room, Gary?
"Hush, ma. I'm passionately engaging with the world and experiencing creation."
There was a man, he was singing a song and they were all listening: it went, "I'm a whole damn town". And he had non-federally taxed gambling kiosks and some other, some gummies of dubious origin. Something that looked like the old bubble gum that came in packs of baseball cards.
And his essence.
If you put a florescent light in there, it would have been horrorshow, the handprints, assprints, and other odd shapes that appeared on everything in the gloom.
And it glowed.
Like his sin.
It was, his passion, his art, the sin-stain of a life, blemish like the pock-mark on the lunar surface, his name and whims scrawled across eternity, no amount of Ammonia or Multi-Surface standing a chance against it, a life lived well, you ask? Or a kind of life lived profoundly unwell? Under the spell of something one might find in a database somewhere, hidden in the million years of analytics generated by the system, terabytes-plenty of-databases and then the thing moving to still images, and only shortly, the mainstream to be introduced to A.I. generated video, generated from whatever terribly lazy prompt typed in by the user---but yet--make it more simple, Mark. They won't even have to type.
A modern art mosaic dabbled, dribbled, smeared and daubed across the landscape of the life.
Dissipation, as I so often say, the profoundly not only unproductive, but quite the opposite: classical mortification.
As I said in a novel opening once, something to the effect of "now she had him enveloped, marked and on the path of ruin--just like the rest of them--Jefferson Road East--just like the Goddens family, so stupidly programmed in a death spiral that they willingly, laughing, smiling, jumped into the grave, and gleefully pulled great handfuls of dirt over them to hasten the end."
The little teetering log at the edge of the river, partly-in and partly-out of the current proper, teetering, twitching somewhat randomly, and at a slow clip to soon pick up speed towards an end. The Bible spoke of an expected end, but that was for God, not for that family. They didn't expect. Instead, they happened, like random massive burps of the natural that destroyed entire ecosystems, entire solar systems even: not expected, but instead simply happening.
Hypocrites, Imposters, and the Mystical Everyman.
The mega preacher was noting that the word hypocrite has an antiquated usage, where it originally referred to actors wearing masks, such as in the theater. In the old Greek.
Then we come forward to modern times, with Imposter Syndrome. I was thinking how much that is hit or miss, in retrospect, me in a temp job, an imposter, but not feeling like that, being quite comfortable in the office environment: relaxed, but focused.
Calm, cool and collected. Relaxed such that I could sound semi-formal, which a lot of customers like, friendly and helpful, and it really put me in a status to advocate for my product with those customers.
Didn't feel like an imposter. Felt good. Later, I think maybe I was an imposter.
As a Census Enumerator, an imposter in all ways, too unable to get over myself to represent the Census effectively.
And here, James Finley and company talking about Meister Eckhardt appearing in a vision to a man, and he appeared....
without a face.
Which would be the opposite of hypocrisy. Not affecting distinguishing features, but shunning them, as the person noted: "he appeared as Everyman."
But aren't we all, in part, the Everyman when we embrace mysticism and contemplation? Do we not all feel part of something, be it exclusively from our fellows, or such as from nature, or both, part of something much more profound than just one person, indeed, maybe even a shard of the deity?
All the while, not feeling like an Imposter, in the satellite office for a one-off assignment, I'm being told our work app says the GPS claims I'm down the street at that moment, and not sitting in the office at the desk. The satellite office manager is on the phone with the general manager, the senior manager for the district, telling her I am in fact right there in the room at that moment, at my desk for the afternoon, and she can actually hear my breathing.
Incidentally, that same spot where the GPS located me, is where I would buy gas in that part of the country, one of the Corner Cupboard stores. Talk about Imposter Syndrome, hypocrites and pretenders, usurpers, and all, and its got my shifted in the time stream, pinged probably from so many moments earlier.
150 feet off the mark.
Which was probably true, too, of my own perception in that time, being the Imposter but not feeling like one, being the true obverse of the earnest employee that feels like an Imposter. Too dumb, too ghetto, too gangster to feel like an Imposter: Hernon D'Mkl, German Lassiter and all, the Sunshine Superman.
A walking talking comic book, not unlike, in presentation, the commemorative Chicken McNugget Tetris game in China.
It's like slipping in and out of the Flow State, where I'm probably fouling-up the entire works, but I'm too tripped into my Flow State to know I'm ruining everything for everyone, and then afterward, I have that private moment of shame, long after, days or week after, in my own rooms. Kind of a decompression chamber, where good feelings go to die, and we are constantly on the look out, R&D, for that next thing that might spark a Flow State.
The next job, or the next challenge.
Mind, I was making those Gumroad spreadsheets during the time I had that job, a tax representative, which turned out to be mostly calls to customer leads. I had a good little routine of being in anticipation of afternoon caffeine, watching a tractor pull. A data analyst, excited about getting an iced coffee and watching the tractor pull on the farmer network, and during this fit of excitement, I would make a personal productivity sheet, something like either a time log, an expense tracker, or an income and expense tracker. I would prepare the things on Google Sheets, maybe test them in the current stable version of Excel, make my screenshots, upload and post them for sale, and that, of course, at the princely sum of 3-5 dollars where others charge 10-20 dollars. I later made them free, but with a suggestion to make a donation to the publisher.
All good times, flying right along, between tasks, having both scheduled things, and moments of inspiration, being quite often in the state of Flow in which I was just working so efficiently and effectively.
But as we know, for the self-employed, its often a thing of questing to find the next paying assignment.
Wishes or "actively manifesting".
"We don't need wishbone; we need backbone."
-Joyce Meyer
When some people now speak of manifesting, is it just wishing?
Are we dealing positively with our everyday concerns, thinking we are owed something more? Just because we picked up our dirty socks? A whole bitcoin for your house-cleaning?
Remember that 20% of your actions often determine 80% of your results--meaning the residue of some good habits carry over into other things in one's life.
crazy task lists and time management. the apps that keep us on the way.
Such as it is, success is not determined randomly, no matter how much that seems the case.
There must be intention.
I use these crazy apps.
I kept considering upgrading my time management, task list, and calendar software past the Google Workspace offerings.
They say the task list is so simple in that package that its hard to really get much use out of it; however, with that simplicity comes a variety of hacks.
One could add a number in each entry to indicate the priority of the task. And of course, one can re-arrange the things.
But there are other tricks, like using the various lists for various subjects. I think I have about a dozen different lists beyond the regular daily agenda. And unlike the for-pay tasks apps that integrate into a calendar, I can hold over the list for days.
I tend to favor putting the everyday things near the top of the list, and putting everything else underneath, lower down the list.
It was the advertising for the other apps, where I was amazed by the team options and enterprise versions, with large-scale back ups, in Google Workspace, I've got a nice little bridge between those apps and MS Office.
Edward Gibbon.
"Such was the way, then, revenge was cheap and gratitude expensive."
-Edward Gibbon(paraphrased)
productivity. mind mapping.
"Our lives are all processes and workflows."
-the Swedish Organizer
I consider now taking on some mind mapping software......
But the key isnt necessarily geared towards projects, but at home productivity and capturing nuggets of ideas for inclusion later in the main routine.
Pass It On: Inclusion.
A news broadcast began, "the Woke Agenda has come to a popular national restaurant chain, assailed by the demons of diversity, equity, and inclusion."
I was partly horrified that they thought inclusion was so particularly awful; indeed, conditionally I say, but to these people, an on-air personality and whoever wrote his script, diversity and equity was awful.
I suppose equity scares some people.....
word of the week: Elucidate
elucidate, verb.
To clarify something by explaining it, such as to explain in a lucid manner.
Mysticism: The Newly-Scraped Road, and the Soul's Night, John of the Cross and James Finley.
Quite innervated and driven by caffeine to a certain richness in the darkness of the soul's night, smelling my own a** and such, so it isn't quite sensory deprivation--mayhap yet happiness deprivation or a rather soulish sense of self-punishment, hitting myself with oak branches and other things.
I was watching the blankness in the road pattern, driving slowly "D1" behind the grader, watching him put up the blade, the county man, then set it back down, and he stopped for me, waved a hand, and went along ahead, no longer tracing his pattern but laying down a fresh set: P235 front, P265 rear, a haphazard little skidmark that was my own calling card, my own little flash of Zorro.
"Laying down tracks" as it were, "Ice Cube" of the hinterlands, or something, where even the National Guard is fearful to tread--an old man, grazing along in life, I might be, with a certain variety of indeterminence about the spirit floating along, somewhere between brain and solar plexus, feeling wise, perhaps just an anomaly of the caffeine.
James Finley had commented on brotherhood, a certain bolstering of the spirit by being flanked by kindred spirits, but a thought of lynch mobs and other such, Custer's fighting force riding unawares, proudly, to their certain demise. But then Finely elucidated on his thought, that the kindred spirit was God, and God was there all along, even in the dark night of the soul where we don't sense him.
Such was and is the function of faith, "the evidence of things not seen."
Such also, John of the Cross going through the energetic partial depression of the Dark Night of the Soul, that not-sensing, that stewing, that basting in the silence of God, and finally, after the surrender to the Creator, we are in perfect brotherhood with such.
The little dirt road was of course, the blank page of life, and I laid my prints upon it: God willing, these be good, and not ill, and as such, onward to bigger and better as they say, forming precedents and marking tendencies and so forth that labor on in memory, and that perfect alignment with God somewhere ahead, as the man said of the Cloud of Unknowing.
Habit Tracking.
I noticed the habit tracker apps for Android, and realized I could do that for free.
With Google Sheets, in a nice, well-designed spreadsheet. One could even use Data Validation to make a plethora of check boxes instead of manually filling in data.
However, sometimes one might want to enter a data point, instead of just a "check in a box", a data point such as quantity and not a simple Yes or No. For instance, I put "N" if I didn't take a walk that day, but if I did walk that day, I want to note vaguely the distance, which I have a convoluted method of measuring circuits completed, rather than a real distance measure. A "3" entry for me equals a bit more than a mile.
Note that the stand-alone apps aren't particularly expensive, but I could use Sheets for other things, too, and have the capacity to do my own metrics at various points in time.
processing a day after the sun sets.
The Desert Rose.
The Dessert Rose.
--these discrepancies can be maddening to the lowly robot making his way home, parsing through the memories of his day, trying in vain to sift the wheat of logic from the chaff of emotion and dissipation; how do you do it, anyway? Deciding the who and what of the important and the everyday, mundane things; why--the same one sat for the better part of an hour mentally considering the pattern of the 1970 wood paneling in the room.
How do people get to these places, and why not pull the "rescue lever"?
I tell you, we people, decide, for better or worse, what is best, and we generally know, or the people around us know, what we need to get through the day.
It is evident that I am a thinking being, and my lot is to harness the power of my own facility to the fated end.
The horse that barn past the fell.
The fell barn past the quick horse.
We know, and if we get too caught up in worry--aside from smart planning thoughts--caught up in worry, we are lost from enjoying just a simple moment. And as the meme said, people were made for "each other", people were made in part to interact in some form of human society.
Pass It On. "If you can't see the light, be the light."
It was Aristotle that said "man is a political animal." Later, in Rome, Marcus Aurelius would echo the same sentiments.
Man is made for the mutual cooperation of man and nature. Pantheist, panentheists, the garden-variety Christians, and even the left wing atheists believe this.
And of course, a kind of word given in the right frame of heart and mind can go a long way towards healing various forms of hurt.
Indeed, as some have said a bit differently, "if you can't see the light, be the light".
Descartes on Being.
".. I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it us put forward by me or conceived in my mind.... But then what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and slso imagines and has sensory perceptions."
-Rene Descartes
Mindset: storms, the good and bad.
Remember that the same storm that destroys your home also waters and fertilizes the pretty flowers.
Mindset matters.
psychologically speaking, was he gay, at all? Robocop.
Robocop was a movie about one man deciding, consciously choosing, not to be gay anymore.
"Bob Morton made a mistake."
He made his live-in, Melissa, dress like she was in a Robert Palmer video. And stuff a pair of athletic socks in the crotch of her men's trousers. It was okay, just a game, until she watched with growing horror as he got on his knees, removed the socks, and stuck them in his butthole.
His butthole.
As he lay on the table, partly dead, hell, maybe even mostly dead, his brains on his brow, he was dreaming about people picking up and broadcasting his inner most thoughts.
They had carted him down the hallway, "break glass in case of emergency", "pull the chord", "strap on when necessary". And all that, the chips were down.
"Bitches leave."
He had a bad dream about getting shot in the head, and when he woke up, it was like he was stuck in front of a television screen. Bob Morton told him, "you're gonna be a bad motherf*cker." A woman with party favors kissed him, leaving lipstick on the screen.
"I know you. We killed you!"
He was gonna shoot the dude in the nuts, while the college boy tried to figure out the security door so he could get out of the cashier booth, and the gas was everywhere, and a Black'n'Mild on the pavement, gasoline coming closer, perfect Saudi Arabia and whore bastard golf, Ferrari theme parks, increasing gas cost to pay bastard golfers--sell a palace why dontcha?--and the little f*ckstick cigar sparking the gas, and kerplow.
Only his conscience could really get him, and it was in a stupor half the time, busily condemning everyone else, roaches crawling across his naked toes, and they had shot that man in the head--sh*tola--and he lay dying while a black man pissed and whistled--and the gang had a military gun, calling each other "f*ggot" and driving around a 6 MPG Chrysler nightmare.
Is it really, I mean, psychologically gay if he stuck socks in his *ss?
He begged her, nude but for an anarchy symbol drawn in lipstick scrawled across his little bird chest, he begged and begged, sounding particularly metrosexual: "give me a quarterly employee review".
Como se dice, "potato gun"? The socks, he put them in, and then squeezed them out, and they bounced, poo-wet against the wall, half-sticking, and then sickly rolling away.
"You're nuts!"
"Crazy about life, maybe."
"Let's see what sticks."
He made them socks get up and walk, by the man Jesus, and there they were, odorific.
Odoriferous.
His essence staining them, like a blindly tossed accusation, but something of the existential ethereal substance of all, as it were, "nothing uncommon to man", and something of the coat in the shoe rack, or the table confused with the chairs, sitting high-up, eating from a stink seat bottom.
word of the week: axiogenic/axiogenesis
axiogenic, adj
producing anxiety.
Axiogenesis,(in Metaphysics) oddly enough, is an optimal or productive physical state, implying nothing of anxiety.
aging again.
By the time we get the right to say we are no longer young and dumb, senility has removed the urgency to declare it.
Thoreau's week of rivers.
"The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him. It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter. Some men are judges these August days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises; they sit judging there honorably, between the seasons and between meals, leading a civil politic life, arbitrating in the case of Spaulding versus Cummings, it may be, from highest noon till the red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman, meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer’s sun, arbitrating in other cases between muckworm and shiner, amid the fragrance of water-lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole’s length of where the larger fishes swim."
Christ's own comrades drafted from the very fisherman, the working men on a great big lake, and they too, knew the reflective power of the unconscious, and became, in their own time, marked for death, yet also collector's of man's salvation. Reflexive, the response, "the men that shook the world", later Paul and Silas, sometimes John Mark, the Pharisees gunning for people that did what they were unwilling to do. Of healing one on Sunday, is that not Holy? Is that not keeping the sabbath holy? We prayed for grandmum on a Sunday, at the very same moment, some county away, she was passing into death, but we were on our way, bringing prayer-ointment, when we heard she was gone, peacefully slipped away, as of the fish disappearing into the deep water.
"I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his son,—the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow-pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,—for youth and age then went a fishing together,—full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man’s life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun’s familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles."
We all know what buttholes do--what they were made for.
6/8. Marcus Aurelius 6.1-6.8.
I. The matter itself, of which the universe doth consist, is of itself very tractable and pliable. That rational essence that doth govern it, hath in itself no cause to do evil. It hath no evil in itself; neither can it do anything that is evil: neither can anything be hurt by it. And all things are done and determined according to its will and prescript.
II. Be it all one unto thee, whether half frozen or well warm; whether only slumbering, or after a full sleep; whether discommended or commended thou do thy duty: or whether dying or doing somewhat else; for that also 'to die,' must among the rest be reckoned as one of the duties and actions of our lives.
III. Look in, let not either the proper quality, or the true worth of anything pass thee, before thou hast fully apprehended it.
IV. All substances come soon to their change, and either they shall be resolved by way of exhalation (if so be that all things shall be reunited into one substance), or as others maintain, they shall be scattered and dispersed. As for that Rational Essence by which all things are governed, as it best understandeth itself, both its own disposition, and what it doth, and what matter it hath to do with and accordingly doth all things; so we that do not, no wonder, if we wonder at many things, the reasons whereof we cannot comprehend.
V. The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.
VI. Let this be thy only joy, and thy only comfort, from one sociable kind action without intermission to pass unto another, God being ever in thy mind.
VII. The rational commanding part, as it alone can stir up and turn itself; so it maketh both itself to be, and everything that happeneth, to appear unto itself, as it will itself.
VIII. According to the nature of the universe all things particular are determined, not according to any other nature, either about compassing and containing; or within, dispersed and contained; or without, depending. Either this universe is a mere confused mass, and an intricate context of things, which shall in time be scattered and dispersed again: or it is an union consisting of order, and administered by Providence. If the first, why should I desire to continue any longer in this fortuit confusion and commixtion? or why should I take care for anything else, but that as soon as may be I may be earth again? And why should I trouble myself any more whilst I seek to please the Gods? Whatsoever I do, dispersion is my end, and will come upon me whether I will or no. But if the latter be, then am not I religious in vain; then will I be quiet and patient, and put my trust in Him, who is the Governor of all.
-Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book 6.
The rational commanding part.... do we consider it irrational, that it cannot be subdivided? Or is it irrational such as unthoughtful, non-reflective spleen? Do we distinguish the two?
Conscious effort molding the universe?
Or is the universe making a tidal action on the intellect?
"Churn" = a mental decision came at with some reflection.
"it makes everything that happens, and everything the rational part is, appear to itself."
Pass It On. Thoreau talking about living the dream.
Emerson: Ralph Waldo Emerson, at one time, Thoreau's work-a-day boss.
Lake-for Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau.
Palmer-Walt Whitman, perpetually singing a song of himself.
Oooooh what a Lucky Man.... he was....
On age.
The sands of time wash away the energetic stratagems of youth, the fire, washed out to sea like so much leaves, and the sands of those old dreams turn to something like sugar, bleaching into something we barely recognize: something we feel more than remember.
Hard-usage or well-earned life lessons?
Pass It On: Emerson on Dreams.
Are you losing, currently, or pushing slightly towards a better future?
The other side of the coin.
I brought about me tv shows, books and movies. Sugar and caffeine. Pork fat.
There was a second-hand beanbag chair. I sat in it, dollar cookies in whole milk, and I watched Steve Austin.
I had done my labor, and then I enjoyed my rest. It would always seem sometimes that either the rest wasn't enough, and times the rest was enough, it seemed the money wasn't enough.
I had watched the mists descend from the sky--I even watched two skyscrapers descend from the sky. In all the heavens, the firmament vibrated with a certain something(or was it an uncertain something), as of a singular organism, the whole thing combined, celestial dimensional strings between them, filaments and information circuits, things alive and things that just moved about like automata.
It seemed stated, to spend it all as it came in. There was always something, and if something wasn't readily in mind, they would find something for the purchasing. It seemed so often that we didn't pay a tithe to a church, or donate to charity, but give a portion of our income to the very concept of barbecue, or a certain run-down retail store; these were our charities, but I persisted that they were not our reason de'tre, not ecumenical institutions.
Solomon's natural discourse....
The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to its place where it arose.
The wind goes toward the south, and turns about towards the north; it whirls about continually, and the wind returns again according to its circuit.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from where the rivers come, and there they return again.
-Ecclesiastes 1:5-7(paraphrase)
Pass it on: Your Dreams Are Valid.
Not only do you choose your dreams, your dreams are only important as long as each are important to you. You can let them go, and they might be forgotten, or you can try to bend the world around your vision.
Astrology: Venus in Leo. Lionheart.
The Proudfire Objective, call it, the proud active authoritative "Kang of the Jangle" and the aesthetics of Venus: love--an object of love.
June 5th 2023, such started, Venus traversing Leo, and so forth, a mishmash that begs a kind of personification and hyperbole, begs a kind of, perhaps, metaphor.
What if love roared like a lion?
What if my impetus was epoxied to the sticking place?
What if I wasn't just a pudding?
"Kang of the Jangle".
Can we subliminate love, or make majesty an object of eros?
I note the following. Nikki Hailey had a Town Hall June 4, setting the initiative for reviews and reports to be unleashed on June 5, the next day, politely coinciding.
But this is a delicacy and majesty, together, not maybe, politely coinciding, but a kind of austere aesthetic.
And summer approaches, the heat rises, we are fighting the weather by watering our plants, and watching our plants, happily pampered, being puddings like their itenerate master.
The D-Day anniversary: The Storm Last Time.
So our forefathers rescued the world from a force of almost eternal darkness, a Germany lost in it's own narrative. Operation Overlord was launched on the occupied French coastline, landing at first light, taking the war to the Germans, setting it in their very lap.
Some 80 years on, America is almost lost in its own narrative, playing a global game in which countries like China have awakened to the fact that, in China's case, American foreign policy is geared towards minimizing China's influence. And then the Chinese rank-and-file, the populace, will hate the United States.
A world of subsequent half-hearted moral prevarications and interventions, adventures in foreign lands, with the core of America mined for fodder for the killing machine; it was all policy, and the dirty fingernails never seemed to much intermix with the clean fingernails: it was almost like we had an aristocratic ruling class, plebs and patricians.
Call it, "a subsequent serious of unpopular interventions". A failed nation-building campaign in the 2000s, the Korean stalemate, the guerilla fighting in Vietnam. We chose Iraq and Kuwait as pet causes in the 1990s, and then discarded them like ruined laundry.
Not to disrespect the troops; they weren't allowed to win as the politics shifted. The U.S. fighting force is among the best, of course, but, by George, give them a clear motivation and do not send them into wars hatched by policy thinktanks.
The most courageous.
Everyday men, many of them, in times of conscription, and filled with the fighting spirit. A cross-section of much of the best of the nation, our fighting forces. Citizen soldiers.
God bless the troops.
God save the troops.
Kierkegaard: Why or why not, God and reason, the irrational universe and a self-thinking thought.
"The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."
-Soren Kierkegaard
Mindset Monday. Motivation Monday. Multiplicative Monday. the Tao.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
-Lao Tzu.
pass it on. Macchiavelli?
We may say that only small minds make small goals, and that small goals equal small success.
But think of a vast dam built one pebble at a time.
Such is the adage of 20% of your actions determining 80% of your outcomes.
goals and measuring risk.
For a truth, one cannot fail if he never set a goal. So often in life, the goals are imposed upon us by others, from learning institutions we remember well a litany of judgments and standards to be met....
Does it seem to be wonder if all goals melt away without some form of enforcement?
And here we are, rating ourselves against others.
What if we come-up wanting?
What if John Cheever wanted to be John Morrell? What if there were no comparisons on which to set a frame of reference, such that one thought, pulling out his shirt tail, that he had come up sufficiently to the mark?
John Cakeworth was making a documentary, and here in high school graduation season, entrepreneur that he is, on the deflowerings, the stipples of blood on white enamel, subsequent footprints on the tile--footprints set with baby powder--and not water-based anti-friction, but petroleum jelly--concubines of a Herod, wives and neices, hotel rooms with cars hidden safely behind the building.
One that had never contested, had never known either failure or the thrill of any kind of appreciable risk; indeed, No Risk makes for No Reward.
She begged on the community yard sale board for food, even as she perversely posted pictures of herself getting several new tattoos, several as more than one.
And that with nothing whatsoever to eat, and the beesting of fresh ink insisting on her. John Cheever had his bowl and John Morrell had fallen asleep after munching some old scraps of carpeting.
To have never contested, to have never put forth the propositions of either gain or loss, with no possibility of advantage.
Financial Planning apps and some productivity stuff.
I was reading a review of a "Get Rich Quick" guru's system, and the reviewer said they went in looking for material for a hit piece. There was some, they said, but they found some very sane ideas that weren't phenomenal things like praying to God for lottery winnings and other things.
They found planning.
They found visual aids for the person doing the planning.
The list systems from Microsoft and Google aren't bad, out-of-box. Google Keep is a fairly no frills app, where Office 365 offers One Note which is much more robust. One Note may have been designed in part to compete with Evernote.
There are other systems like Omnifocus and so forth.
And of course, there are the spreadsheet apps. The thing about the spreadsheet apps: these can record your transactions, make tallies, but some people might hate the learning curve. Spreadsheets an tabulate the sums of a big sequence of numbers easily. "=SUM(A1:F1)". One could see Minimums in a sequence, Maximums, Averages, and Mean fairly easily.
Charts could be made, like a pie chart, showing how much of the day's budget goes to what, then how much of the week or month's money goes towards various things.
Otherwise, there are apps like Acorn and a few others. Quicken offers a free budgeting app.
We orient towards past data to analyze our spending patterns, to know what our habits are. Sometimes, we want to go all Spartan and are filled with enthusiasm, but that might lead us, paradoxically, to make binge purchases later, thinking of at like a dieter's cheat meal. Better not to make a binge shopping trip, but take responsible indulgences, like an extra candy bar once a week, or an extra fancy coffee.
The weekender, soil nails, green thumbs, late frosts, and tropical breeze. Plus the Frisson Politick, the "push-pull".
(supplemented by the Public Domain poem by Hart Crane: "Recitative", a poets.org "selection of the day". )
Yard-working with some admittedly late plantings, but in my defense, the weather has been crazy. I have planters that have mold in the soil thanks to recent "tropical systems", and then there was a spate of late season frosts.
Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us—
Alike suspend us from atrocious sums
Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant
The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.
We've talked a lot lately, you and I. Its been really good. Its helped me keep things unusually clear, and that clarity, was in part your doing. I thank you, and more than that, I salute you.
We've talked about our self-worth, how we are most often misled by others, and we've talked about clarifying the core business: the stuff this is most important, not just by opinion or sense of favoritism, as in choosing, but a balance between life necessity and opinion.
Its something outside ourselves, it is, and quite often rebel against the popular notions, but there are, apart from opinion, popular notions and so forth, there is a kind of hard determinism at play, and we mitigate, using the term "soft determinism".
Why, so many do protest measures--the vulgar and gross--in part just to prove they can, to "move the needle", to bring about change, in part, but also to affirm themselves. We have a kind of push-pull between exceptionalism and collectivism, evidenced in politics and other facets of life. There are leaders that would bring about change to older standards, and then leaders that would advance various newer causes.
The highest tower,—let her ribs palisade
Wrenched gold of Nineveh;—yet leave the tower.
The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;
A wind abides the ensign of your will . . .
In alternating bells have you not heard
All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
Forgive me for an echo of these things,
And let us walk through time with equal pride.
Elon and the Doge.
So the merits of a lawsuit is being pondered, accusing Elon Musk of using his megaphone to manipulate the price of Dogecoin, a fledgling memecoin cryptocurrency. As a memecoin, Dogecoin is largely promoted and circulated about and kept in the popular conversation by memes on social media.
What we know is that the last big bump for Dogecoin was when Elon temporarily put the Doge image as the icon for Twitter, causing a rally with memecoin holders. At the same time, Elon Musk sold 125 million dollars in Dogecoin.
The claim is that he knowingly manipulated the value of the cryptocurrency for his own gain, and the claim is "insider trading".
The decision, either way, could set some precedents for cryptocurrency and legal liability.
Tozer on finding the words for divine Awe.
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary lists 550,000 words. And it is a solemn and beautiful thought that in our worship of God there sometimes rush up from the depths of our souls feelings that all this wealth of words is not sufficient to express. To be articulate at certain times we are compelled to fall back upon "Oh!" or "O!"—a primitive exclamatory sound that is hardly a word at all and that scarcely admits of a definition.
-AW Tozer
Seneca and Ryan, on June 1, calling the rich "poor".
Look at any millionaire, Seneca tells Lucilius in one of his letters, they are some of the poorest people in Rome. Money has made them obsess over public opinion. Money has control of their schedules and their decisions. Money has put them in the center of a circle of sycophants and grifters. Money has escalated their tastes and expectations beyond quenching.
“These individuals,” Seneca writes, “have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”
It’s a sad sight, he says.
-Ryan Holliday(dailystoic.com)
Joyce Meyer, "the four hundred pennies".
"It seem to me: the more effort you put into it, the more you get out of it."
-Joyce Meyer.
This dovetails back to the unexpected total of four hundred pennies.
As per a recent them, I questioned the validity of our goals, such as to wonder if we were directing our efforts towards the wrong goals. Gary Vee (discord.org/garyvee) notes that so much of us today are oriented towards our little victories on social media.
Social media is just a tool.
Social media is just a piece.
Social media is just a supplement, and not a lifeline, to the outside world, respective of circumstances.
Gary Vee himself became a millionaire from social media. As he says, "I didn't go out and buy a f*cking Bugatti; I took the money and hired a staff." He used initial success to bolster a successful ongoing model, and now he lends his advice in the form of conferences.
The ongoing model was his goal, and he made it work. He built a team around it.
Truly, as the adage, 80% of our outcomes are determined by 20% of our efforts; but cumulatively, its like the snowball thundering down the mountain, growing larger and larger. If we support an orientation in general towards success, happiness, and health, if we do that in total sum of our smaller action, then each little piece is one of those four hundred pennies. Trimming toe nails. Nourishing the skin. Taking one less cookie. Deciding to take the stairs instead of the elevator on a side trip. Or a stray kind word to a casual acquaintance on social media.
pass it on, June 1, 2023
Most of our results in life come from only 20% of our actions; however, all the little stuff can add up eventually, just like pennies adding up eventually to dollars. I had collected my coins, my pocket change, and was amazed when I cashed in that had 30 dollars in coins in only one little cup, including four hundred pennies.
Word(s) of the Week: Exogenous and Endogenous
Exogenous, adj.
Originating from, or oriented to, the without, or outer section, relatively.
Endogenous, adj.
Originating from or oriented in relation to the inside.
Noun forms are exogen and endogen, respectively.
We observe the endo- and exo- prefixes and the presumed Greek root genesis, meaning to begin or occur, in the most generic sense.
The Quick and the Bread. Marcus Aurelius, David Milch, and the others. Baked bread looks wonderful.
"What does being attractive have to do with it?"
-Erin Burnett, on being reviled by Russian media.
"Come and see."
-the Angel (from the book of Revelation).
This also thou must observe, that whatsoever it is that naturally doth happen to things natural, hath somewhat in itself that is pleasing and delightful: as a great loaf when it is baked, some parts of it cleave as it were, and part asunder, and make the crust of it rugged and unequal, and yet those parts of it, though in some sort it be against the art and intention of baking itself, that they are thus cleft and parted, which should have been and were first made all even and uniform, they become it well nevertheless, and have a certain peculiar property, to stir the appetite. So figs are accounted fairest and ripest then, when they begin to shrink, and wither as it were. So ripe olives, when they are next to putrefaction, then are they in their proper beauty. The hanging down of grapes—the brow of a lion, the froth of a foaming wild boar, and many other like things, though by themselves considered, they are far from any beauty, yet because they happen naturally, they both are comely, and delightful; so that if a man shall with a profound mind and apprehension, consider all things in the world, even among all those things which are but mere accessories and natural appendices as it were, there will scarce appear anything unto him, wherein he will not find matter of pleasure and delight. So will he behold with as much pleasure the true rictus of wild beasts, as those which by skilful painters and other artificers are imitated. So will he be able to perceive the proper ripeness and beauty of old age, whether in man or woman: and whatsoever else it is that is beautiful and alluring in whatsoever is, with chaste and continent eyes he will soon find out and discern. Those and many other things will he discern, not credible unto every one, but unto them only who are truly and familiarly acquainted, both with nature itself, and all natural things.
-Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 3.2
"He said I had good, natural tits."
-Delores Mayo, NYPD Blue
"Oh Delores."
-Jill Kirkendall, NYPD Blue
"My name rhymes with a female body part. You can't remember my name can you?"
-Mulva, Seinfeld.
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