The Jay Gatsby Theorem: on daeth and life.

Jay Gatsby, as my familiar put it, "is a guy that died in a pool."  But such was not the point of the piece he was in, and such was not the utter capstone memorable thing of a life; a secret romantic at heart, my familiar liked the unrequited love, such to sing 80s songs in the smoky ambience of an arcade, White Lion, Cinderella and all.

He gave his life to living above his station, maybe even a gangster sort, throwing lavish parties, rubbing elbows with high society: a Scarface house with a swimming pool, and he had to have his get there too, for there was his heart, in that gold-rimmed dissipation and flaunting of specie.

Can you see?  It wasn't his death that was the tagline, but his life.  In the interim, a death may be but a moment, but we have years with so many, years of memories, pleasantries and platitudes, sideways smiles and hellos and so forth.

Omar Sharif, and I remember one of my own going kaput on the roadside, slowly chocking on his own blood, some 90 minute response time from the rescue team--caught out on the roadside, the Green Hell where there is usually weak cell signal and a very slow response time, the middle of nowhere, the edge of a large tract of government woods, nowhere, bleeding in his lungs from a broken rib, slowly, slowly feeling the life escape from him.

Its a lesson hard come by for so many, to remember how they lived and not how they died.

The girl that was raped and killed circa Jefferson, too, the utter contemptible, loathsome horror of her end, punctuating what was a rather ordinary and happy life, that Melton girl.

We see too in Charlotte, gangland killings and so forth, temperaments colliding, perceived insults, and the inevitable gunplay, with young people killed, and the local media racing to interview at least one of the parents on air, in which the grieving insists the sanctity and loveable quality of the perpetrator, one out for utter badness and dissipation, remembered as a youth, when their balls hadn't dropped and they had never heard gangster rap: the Gospel of pimping and selling dope.

That was a quasi-Mormon after death sanctification, long after they had ruptured their little way through life, with rotten attitudes and toxic interactions with their others, the people from home think they were just swell.

Let death not be the memory, I suppose, is the underlying point, but the substance of the life.

I remember Gatsby as a pure wannabe, not as a pool death, but as a dubiously wealthy man who reached high in life; it is not enviable, but it was his goal, and he pursued it with vigor.  I hasten to lump coals on the head of the ones who thought Gatsby was swell, how he wasted his money and went after a bored married girl, seeming, from a dream, in service to his own wants, bringing so much ruin to his own person.

And we all have our own little dissipations--pretend not to be beyond that.

I had one go abruptly in a pond, and the ending wasn't the point for me ever, it didn't stick in memory, but the life, the hardworking unfailing person that provided for his little group.  Saturday mornings, yardwork.  Saturday afternoons, either a box of take-out flounder, or visiting distant family.  Sunday mornings, church, and not just tithing, but giving pocket change to the young ones, so that they could tithe too, that they would learn to give where it was important.

At the time that episode elapsed, I had my own head up my ass a teenager, but I was not so far distracted that I did not recall the substance of that family member, how their lives were not only worthy of my attention, but also worthy of my emulation.

Such is the question: what good do we take forward?  And in the interim, looking around in earnest, we find quite a bit to choose from, of the good, and these lives are not in vain, even with the stillborn, the dead before adulthood, the accidents, the overdoses, and other dissipations.

We are all but sojourners along the great wheel, and the death of one drug addicted young woman, does indeed leave a gaping hole in the lives of her familiars.

Le Grun Heil: plus "wealthy people problems" and if Henry James described intercoursing on a chair.

Its highest point is not bright;

Its lowest point is not dark.

Continuous and unending!, it can not be named;

It returns to non-existence.

It is called the form of that which is without-form;

The image of non-existence.

It is called confusing and indistinct.

Meet it and you do not see its beginning;

Follow it and you do not see its end.

-The Dao De Jing(Dr Bruce R. Linell translation)

 

Tis a flit of nature, I wot, that part of my heart elopes silently into the dismal cardboard reality facade of pine trees.  Oh, the straw and the tassles, scattered pine cones littering randomingly, like the geode feces of my own spirit; perhaps its random, "just there" quality is what endears me to the pines and all.

A bug or something, now and then, and snakes and such, squirrels bored and also starving, beginning to turn the corner between the caring for survival and that great boredom, like nature itself had induced a beer-haze on everything, and then, from the pine sap and the weird shrapnel of pine bark, the smell of coals that says something good this way comes.

In the interest of full disclosure, I used to live inside a pine forest, perpetually at worry of the softwood giants falling onto the house, and surviving one hurricane, we soon made the yard a giant crater.  And of course, we ignore all that until its gone, such as it is amazing what niceties we usually take for granted in our daily prolegomenon of the eternal march towards the afterlife, that blue glow beyond the horizon.

It was Nietzsche reminding the Stoics that anything they did was inherently "natural" by virtue of them not only "being in" nature, but also being part of and participating in nature.  There, within, and a product of, and therefore anything he or she might do is also natural, a product of, hecho de, and all that.  

But the Stoics broke onto some transcendental tangent, something over and above the common, the average, even while they too strove for the average, there were anomalous ones among them who hastened to enjoin even more with nature, to butt-up close and all, get the claw-end right into the grice, such that they were above the average, with their threshold being somewhere in the extreme end of making it a constant worry, even a burden, to be more natural than the common, though the common, again, as Nietzsche pointed out, were in fact, natural, even in the midst of the synthetic and man made: all things in nature were, even in a round-about subtextual way, in fact, natural, and could be none else.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson the broke forth even more hinting rather loudly at a transcendence in reading the layers of nature, the mildly wealthy intellectual bugaboo, and could be wondered how often he took to nature at all, or observed its precepts beyond his own literature: maybe like a Jane Austen or Henry James character in a carefully tended flower garden on some wealthy estate, where the average young man was not average, but superlative, and supported by hundreds of thousands in capital annually, and a team of quiet subservients that busily saw to the young woman's every need, such that all she had to worry about was what promising young man she would condescend to take to a marriage bed.

If it weren't for the technique of Henry James, I would go full-Marxist against his elitist professional loafers; such was my criticism of The Abyss Also Gazes, professional loafers too elite for their own nation, taking to other environs, where they loaf and sit at outdoor dining establishments in the fine weather and make disguised romantic overtures towards one another.  In the overview, wealthy people with "wealthy people problems", it was, for a class of people who at that time in history, had all the time in the world to read, as if the wealthy themselves were reading about James' ideal of the wealthy, but also it was good fantasy for the rest of us: rich people half-heartedly dipping their toes in the pool of marriage, or sometimes love, and rarely both love and marriage.

I paraphrase, on nature, of the discarded Sandhill acreage, interchangeable with the "English garden", that so much depends on a green truck, corkscrewing on a dirt road to reach the distant pines: and that's life, going to the distant pines, such that the pines always had a relative clearing around them that one could walk, before the foresters came through and inadvertently contaminated the undergrowth, one could prior walk and think, or even Julianne Moore or whatever, her arms spread wide, twirling like a butterfly with the subtlest hint of love in the plans of her impending nuptials: hundreds of thousands in hand, and then hundreds of thousands to be spent on the thing itself, "thirty thousand a year" Henry James would intone, in dollars just before the first of the World Wars.

Enough to buy between 30-60 new cars.

Acres of land were scarcely 20 dollars.

Dana Perino's weight in chicken feed was merely several pennies; a doornail likely cost more.  I observe that today, my own weight in chicken feed might be worth enough to gas up my vehicle--and that's of course, putting the cart way way ahead of the horse, in the old parlance.

Thirty thousand of those dollars?

I would contend sitting there collecting is profoundly and profusely unnatural, attending by lawyers and accountants, good friends with bankers, and all, and somehow they wrung nature into that wash of amazingly idle afternoon chats, their backs straight in Victorian chairs and all, "intercoursing" and so forth.

I relent.  Once I had eighteen thousand a year, hard come by, and I shook my tushy for the sum of some 120,000 people a day, but a lot of that was a computer glitch that pulled the same files over and over, again and again, once every few seconds.

With Henry James, for me, as a somewhat writer bugaboo, it was never about subject matter, "rich people problems", and all, and likewise with Faulkner, though I liked the subject matter usually, twas all about the technique, babies.  Not the "what" but the "how", as I could find the "what" anywhere, but his "how" it was, that was the reason for paying the cost of admission.  Faulkner in a novel about manhood and racism, wrote one sentence that went five pages in the trade paperback printing.  That's the kind of stuff you don't get everywhere, and for a time, there were only edited versions of Faulkner's work available on the market.  That's changed since.

but vanity and a grasping for the wind. On theological Vanity, Life, and the Trinity.

"a grabbing for a snatch of wind", such as it is, in theological terms, man is just dust.

Dust in which God breathed into, breathing life, imputing this weird consciousness, this shading of God, this sliver of the divine, not the mote or beam in our eye, but something in the thinkgood, or something of the soul, something still in present day beyond measure: life.  Something of low voltage in electrical terms, and carried along in chemical energy throughout the human body.

This casting about for the wind, is such as is eluded to in Ecclesiastes, "nothing" or in their more archaic terms, "vanity".

Incidentally, I started a deep breathing exercise, and I have also tried the Divine Breath Yoga meditation.  It seems some times we observe across culture and regions and epochs and all, the centuries and the tribes and the various meanings, we observe those odd congruities, or the implications of things.

Snorting like a bull, mouth full of seasoned fried pork rinds, huffing and puffing, and generally being a bugaboo, saying not, "have yourself a pleasant day", but there he goes, light of our lives, and she says to him, the polyanna, "have a super day", and I want to punch the wall in frustration, or chase her upstairs as soon as he's gone.

"What if he turns around?"

On productivity, and the art of being busy on substantial, important tasks, we observe that the wind assails, and the rain drops pelt the place, but the darn spam calls.....  they keep a coming.

And if one showed his a$$, in the interim, what more would there be?  Just a passing wind, a grasping for a snatch of invisible air, and we would say, inevitably, that too, dejectedly, is vanity.

But if there were a set of wings unfurled, spread wide, and smiles?  What if all meaning coagulated from a set of things, into a smaller subset of things?  I could always close my eyes from it all, or turn my head, and Christ himself said, to turn, and all, and they go, some, beyond that, into Christogenesis, where something of the substance of Christ is found is most everything, mystical and improbable as it may seems, acknowledging that sometimes it seems quite opposite the parabellum and oxymoron and all.

A "vanity", a "divine wind", and a "word": the Divine Word, the Logos, called alternatingly and interchangeably the light, the truth, love, and all good in the world, a substance unmarked and without measurement in present ontology, continuing on as it ever was, the soup of miracles and mystery.  It goes something in this order: word, light, truth, and love.  A shepherd as a man, as both going along healing, feeding, tending, preaching and teaching, and as something that existed alongside, co-equally with God, as both one among, and one separate, co-equal to God and the Holy Spirit, and incidentally, on the Day of Pentecost when thousands were converted, the Spirit manifested as mighty wind.

Creator

Savior

Helper.

meetings at work, on HR

"The sweetest joys in life are the fruits of sorrow. Human nature seems to need suffering to fit it for being a blessing to the world."   -FW Robertson

I had went off the chain.  Again.  One too many funnies that gave me umbridge, and i took to pistol-whipping Kevin.  He fell, dazed, too his knees, tears and swellings on his cheeks, and he bellowed, "noooo!".  It reminded me of Ric Flair and his disingenuous pleadings for mercy, and as Optimus Prime said, "you who are without mercy now beg for it?".

I took off in a cop car, not having been arrested, but having went right out front and jumped in one, a shiny cop Mopar, that jad been just sitting, spreadeagle so to speak, door partly ajar, motor running, between the front entrances, that being Grocery and General Merchandise.

I had 2 dollars and my .380 revolver.

And an unction for the edge of dissipation.

As I began a new life, later, near the Colorado River, i would see Kevin's social media posts, and he too was a pistol, in his own right.

"A turn at the pull." Discourses with a stanger along the way.

When the stars threw down their spears

and watered heaven with their tears:

did he smile his work to see?

did he who made the lamb make thee?

-William Blake

Somewhere from deep within the Western Veldt, came one claiming to be a Shah in some remote principality, some rice field baron or something, perhaps actually just a large-scale farmer than formerly a principe or something, that maybe he had a kind of sway among the local dignitaries and things, and threw his weight around, while the backs of the populace patiently sat to take a turn at the pull.

What he was--who he was--but smoking flax, for all it mattered in the province--coming along the way, shoes wearing and all, having sojourned, traversed, made a point and array along the fair mapping of the area, but not too much taking notes about it, such that one could, to an extent, lose their way, had they not the Way of Heaven to hold them in right-mindedness, and such that anxiety would take over in the meantime.

A familiar inn or way station would do one in such position a world of good: a plate of beans and a cup of coffee for the traveler, and soon enough, he began to intercourse on belief, and it was then we made preliminary indulgence to speak of the way of heaven to the fellow. 

All that transpires underneath is but a transposition, an increment of the way of heaven; how we seem so very cardboard, maybe, and mush-mashed child-crafted effigies of actual real people.  How to communicate that in polite intercoursing with the fellow?  The Way of Heaven?

Ice water from the crick in one hand, and the quenched flax in the other, that was Ming, perhaps, subdivision, one in two, two things observed in one thing, like the proper and generic nouns applying to a thing: the yin and yang.

When a child, one performs his tasks as a child, and when an adult, to the more adult means and techniques, but we tell the stranger, "the Way of Heaven", such that elapsing in to the eternal is but a continuance of virtuous living.  One would make equivocation then that virtuous living was akin to holding to the way of heaven, that after life, such that living well meant pretending one was dead, and we didn't have a particular wordy sort to contend the point, to the extent that the traveler went his way, having not only not adopted our Way, but thinking we were all perhaps something of a misguided bunch, some 15-20 people, mostly from around the way-station who had coagulated around the conversation with him.

The unclarified gelatin melted butter of love of life: a musing, and a partly-autobiographical bit.

A kind of half-hearted epileptic wiggle from my foot as the orgasm tore through me as if I were a sheet of paper: left in pieces on the floor, a decopage left as a secret message to posterity.

She pawed at the dunce-cap molded into her Queen on the board, a self satisfied smile on her face, so as to, in the modern parlance, "get righteous" by watching the fubar machinations of others.

I returned to my chair, but a drunken vapor that had been expelled by my own person, left somewhere, unknown and almost forgotten.

I remembered Anakin turning to the darkside, and in my own world, I watched a man's love turn to bitter hatred, and he cursed so much, but I had mused at the time, that the curse had always been pressing from the inside onto his lips, just waiting, and such, the ramifications of love and loss, the pretext for what he wanted to do anyway; it was such as wars, wanting to and just waiting for an excuse to fall, for the idea itself to "get righteous", waiting for the thing they anticipated anyway, improbable to some, and the subject of various plans and projections by others, "starting-up".

Shame to watch a man steel himself against the world, his heart sore and his thoughts turned to coldness and cruelty: it was a trust broken, I believe, a trust discarded and done a horrible disservice, renounced, like.

"It is" I said to myself.  "It really is."

Turned into a cold moor rebuke of what love had been, in the ruin, it was such that machines did things, maybe, but not the things for which they were intended, such that things of weight are used as paperweights: heavy wrenches, and the knife becomes a pry bar or some such, like my uncle slicing a pair with a tiny pocketknife, a gentleman's old school model with a wood grain handle, and his clumsy hands, he dropped it somewhere in the back forty and didn't think to look for it till he was long from the spot, leaving it hopeless lost on the ground.

His life was what--a Janis Ian song--imparting a kind of false dignity to be taken up elsewhere, his own rape victim confessions in verse, and all, in the end the comparison making him seem even less dignified than in person, and he were a pookerdoo, but he was one in my collection of pookerdoo, and thus had a value to me, in my own perview.

A wild tiger in the jungle, and a shirtless woman sweating in the sunspots beneath the canopy; maybe it was all false dignity, and we were all just pimps and loafers, pimps and loafers, and not much more, no matter what else was said, and at the end of the day, did that mean love was cheap, and honesty was whispered, and that it was all markedly transactional, a hard reality that for something you wanted, you gave something.

I remember staying in bed an entire year, after.  I think a read a few chapters of the Haunting of Hill House, about an askew geometric nightmare of architecture, and as such, the only things worthy of roaming there, were themselves anti-geometrical nightmares of men like Arosthothenes and Pythagoras, the Pythagorean plane and all, being nothing more than itself paper to be torn.

"What is life?" I mused, taking a moment unto myself, post-orgasm endorphins bringing a renewed, re-invigorated sense of clarity to my wayward thoughts.

"Oh, this!" I said, in astonishment.

Movie Review: Some Hawthorne adapted by American International Pictures.....

"a sheltered young woman" says the encyclopedia, as if, as it were, hiding in plain sight? or is it, in plain sight, hidden away?  Something of a, scientist father doesn't know of the little itch, thornboggle, the wanderlust, and what's beyond the trees?  what's beyond the hills?

Stupidly or innocently, tending a garden of poisonous plants, as it were, near the roadside("sheltered") such that a stranger sees, happens to be a handsome man, and an actor in a lead role, auspiciously, unsuspecting, and being the first man to show her love, she would marry him.

It reminds me of another production I witnessed where the man said he'd give the first good-for-nothing horse's ass of a bum that he came across in the next town, give that one a bright shiny silver dollar.

The first one.

Dead-red sitting on go, and a green light for some people, or just sitting there waiting to smack the fly from his cereal bowl with toad tongue.

The close captioning on the television presentation of this Hawthorne adaption captured the pure nonsense of it: "his hands still smoking".  I'm thinking right, and a blue gel applied in post-production, for some silly reason.  "He's turning into Doctor Manhattan!"

American International Pictures.  Thank you so much.  And the House of Seven Gables accompaniment, with the feigned disease and wonder, ineptitudes that become feigned scripted mysteries,(is this how Dick Wolf comes up with his stuff?) and I'm wanting all of them, the evil sister, the gambler hub, the blacksmith's great grandson and the beautiful trophy wife that indulges her husband's stupidities and failures, his bad ideas, and I'm wishing they would all touch Rappaccini's poison's rose bush or whatever that crap is, a plant that makes living tissue superheat such that it looks like its on the grill, a magic plant.

One magic bush.

Anyone, in the other thing, that's like Sandra Dee, the B movie girl.  Aware that she's possessed by a ghost, but looking very befuddled about it, and unable to stop from fulfilling a generational curse between two families.

The sister took a pick-axe to the forehead without an entry wound, but she went toes-up.

They claimed to have scoured the house without ever opening the trapdoor at the bottom of the basement stairs.  Immediately, one curses the set designer silently, but knows still, its a red herridge, that the treasure isn't under there.  "Maybe the deeds to the land in Utah are in there.  Its worth millions!"

The portrait burped blood, and still, kaputnick is thinking of his gambling debts, the portrait anyway looking like a crumplestiltskin fellow, and fresh blood on a chair, and the sister claims shes a witch, cavorting with spirits, and all, and the families hate on another, and the wife's vagina bumps into the family's one living enemy, like pure magic.

It's Gothic, right, like the magneticism between opposites, when they want company, they brood alone, and when they should be alone, they throw a party.  It's like teenagers in expensive clothes, in a way, people without responsibilites, continually on about their own swerve.

I note, that if they had social media in this one, no one would have died.  Just saying, and don't shoot the messenger, but a little healthy self-expression wouldve saved this doodles from the grind of the grice.

Doug the haughty peacock: The great Walmart #1010 Easter Story, circa 2009. Say maybe March or April.

The squirrel's jaws were full, and Doug smiled as he crossed over to the S-10, the broke-down 80s model, made in part with Isuzu, the square-bodied little acquired low-to-the-ground thing with the inarticulate six cylinder engine that both breathed in and out noxious fumes.

Such factory agreements, common among those that clung to high positions, Isuzu contra General Motors, and such smiles from Doug usually meant someone needed stitches.

I had wore my Jesus shirt; hoping to instruct Doug, but these things are ever uncertain, in my perview, and more certain to others--its a lifestyle I reckoned, and looked at him as if he were the equivalent of a Radio Shack or Texas Instruments machine that ever needed to be checked behind when it calculated: Doug.

He had gotten a scurrilous little preview of something from Batley Dairy, a woman beseiged by her man, him a fearmonger, and she a fear-wort, and all, and he thought to make an impression, not by his thumbprint or the print of his ass in a chair, but the impression of his penis in a kind of dough or something, his life, but a cake all for her, cakes and illicit drugs, ragging on pictures of elected officials' family members broadcast on television in various states of undress: what passes for discourse with our betters.

My Jesus shirt, I remember, and me telling them, Darnell, and his brother Darnell, and Doug, and all, telling them the reports from people that they had found the interment spot of the brother of Jesus, and all that.

"It's all going uphill."

Doug was listless, but going on about driving his truck, stories I felt rang familiar, but ignored, anyway, because it was filtered through Doug's own hard and diseased thinkmeats, and watching the food fall from the squirrel's mouth, and his smile becoming an open-mouth gape, I know Doug would not remember any lesson from life marked without pain, and as such, his tales of road women were marked with a kind of disillusioned illusory kind of soap opera denouement from his penis, such that as to Onan, in his air-ride seat, floating, still listless, he might shed water from his eyes, the old bean.

When Doug drove uphill, he had said, it got slower and slower, and there was a light "touch" sound from his twenty two caliber coming to rest against the cab wall, the rear of it, as the grade increased, and the truck, growing ever slower, his ears perhaps popping from the change in air pressure, and the effecting being as if he had transmogrified his own dimness into the very brightness of the rising sun.

We had asked him to buy a portable headset from Big Lots, down the street, which came recommended, but not for quality, but a good price, and we wanted him to have it, but it was not a work expense recognized by the place, but something among the streetgang inside the place, a bloodthirsty cozened lot that would do murder without so much as a blink.

I was gonna call him, in fact, to tell him the Easter story, but I remembered that he was a scumbag, and I was glad he was out of my life, so he would have to read the story, posted under an assumed name, on some random website, all with Sniggers chocolate around his mouth and on his index finger and thumb: he held the Sniggers like it was, well, contraband in itself, a rebuke against nature and reality, that if he had it, ever, properly had it off, it was on the run, and he would bust the flower to annoy the bee, perpetually, because that was his nature: his turning away from the squirrel, with the nut gore on the ground far beneath, it was his own brotherhood with love and loss, and all those things, and somewhere in that, he justified even his own existence, if only to himself.

Movie Review: Babyface.

From the dirt cheap speak-easy, to the NYC boardrooms, then to the family living room, via a lot of expensive gifts and cheap feelings.  I wanted to take my pants off during a few points of the movie, just a few brief make-outs, but somehow, I also felt too dirty, and gazing at once, at the screen, and also into my own self, my own dubious heart, I relented and let the footage roll.

Stanwyck had been sorta wholesome in 16 prior performances, and wanted somewhat of a change of pace, and what we get, "its a wonderful life" for prostitutes, and a few pointers from Friedrich Nietzsche.  It's enough to warm the heart of mind of many an Instagram diva, I wot.

All she had to do was smile, and lean in; but she had to be told first, by the old German that called her friend, Mein Freunde, who mislead her by leading her to Nietzsche and taking her complete control over men, such that in the script, at various points the lifestyle makeovers were only of a two-week duration.

So much in so little time, gather her rosebuds while she may, pawed over back home by drunk factory workers, and trying to be an honest girl until the life of philosophy came to her: a misguided interpretation of Nietzsche's Will To Power.

And she slept her way further up the food chain, with the convenient set piece of the camera moving slowly up the building exterior, until at last, not even the vaguest pretense of a day job, and her servant has servants, and that was the great two week fleecing of the bank president.

"You don't have any family in the city?"

She fled one set of urchins to nest with a set that were lovebird urchins, love sponges, and she became, as such that which she loathed, one of the people using other persons as a means to an end, and not more justly as a means unto themselves.

Zanuck the elder of Fox moviehouse royalty supposedly scripting a tight script of his own accord, tight and with zero extraneous parts or pieces, save for a suitor John Wayne type of guy that is basically heckled off screen early on; Producer Zanuck is Screenwriter Canfield is Producer Zanuck, so to speak, no credited ghost writers, no credited scene hacks, and with a tight, terse bit of screenplay, the director works his cast fairly well in the course of a rather stripped-down bit of scenes.

We can like the last guy, because she's supposed to like the last guy, so in casting and performance, the director and the actor make their magic, and its effective.

Why not like the last guy?

Let me tell you something, Instagram divas, he's not the last guy, probably, at all, if you don't actually like him--he will no sooner be traded off like a scuffed shoe, and without the dignity of so much as a rat turd in his pocket, fed then bled, and set off to continue his own adventures, for surely Stanwyck's Lilly Powers was to have so many of her own adventures with new game, new sport, new fresh hunting on fertile grounds.  You go on to fresh game, discarded suitor, as she does the same, the Will To Power version of the old adage, "live and let live".

Ten minutes, the It's A Wonderful Life surprise bit, and not the overly moralized ending.  At once, to let the criminal realize his own crime, and the criminal set to look feelings of guilt and remorse up close, in private. 

3 of 4 stars.  Barebones script with good performances and direction.  Barbara Stanwyck, Zanuck, and good old Fred Nietzsche.

or

7.5/10 stars.

I could watch a solid 3/4 any day, but this time, a nod of respect to the awesome body of work of Barbara Stanwyck, and part of Darryl Zanuck's portfolio, too.

On Election season 2024 and the nature of people, some preliminary abrandonment of human civility.

Forecasting ever by which, for which, unto and untowards, man puts down this God he found that gave him society, he rebukes God first, bitterly, and begins to nitpick his own uniform in the lifespan, until all meaning has evaporated into that bitter rime that he calls knowledge, and utterly, segmented and compartmentalized into little slave segments, what makes him feel as if he is in control of himself, until at last, gone feral, he goes back into the jungles from whence he came.

The Stephanie Abrams or the Jen Carfagno of the Dark Night of the Soul, and Flipside, comrade in this sluggard wash we call life.

"Purgation and repentence" and how they rebuke one another so much, and gone is the internal botchagaloo board game of discovering one's own inner sins, so that all that remains is an empty frontage--something from an old Chaplin film, and those the see behind, run dejected and without much aim at all except to reach the jungle--be it the jungles of Asia or South America, even Africa, land devoted to tribes, land devoted to the state, repurposed as the homeland of homo erectus.

The Meninites in Walmart, are some of us, or the illiterate prostrating the New York Public Library, or the unsighted at MOMA; a country without its own devoted persons, and persons without a country devoted to them, but to a vague new standard, such of a "living document", that the scholars of the document come to an understanding that they can interpret it into any malleable reachable meaning, however untowards or seemingly inhuman, that something could be both strictly inhuman, and yet humane by the scholastic standards.

The Polemics and The written Philippics, portraying a society of ravening wolves cavorting and giving excuse to their unjust nature, and the Machiavellian paradigm evidence on both sides, in one, a will to money, and the other, a will to traded-away life responsibilities, such that we have the nanny state and the golf course nation in remarkable thinly veiled similitude, and yet at each other's throats for power and control, as a nation of serfs send them 20 dollar increments, and perhaps condescend to vote in an election with very unpalatable choices: convicts, demagogues, and people who should be convicts.

The political message of hope is not dead, and we need not re-brand warmed-over choices from the past, but, in spite of our serfdom, rebuke the establishment, for the life of me, not understanding how Ronna McDaniel stays in control of the GOP, or that the name of the DNC chief isn't on the tongues of the average people, in abeyance and acknowledgement of the figurehead-in-chief, fed strange ideas by an army of handlers.

Parse our own natures?  Dare we admit a wrong, even in our own heart of hearts?  We say we are, at once forgiven, and eating our young at the very same gathering, while those in control chuck to client states, the bruises of other nations, and all of them with grown children, perhaps all are corrupt children that serve in the business of the ruling class, businesses in disguise within the body politic.  Indeed, in the far future when we have returned to the jungles, they can eat, cannibalizing, the made-anemic bones of their Ronna Mcdaniels and others, demagogues, and so forth, meanwhile, the vast portion of the body politic not returning phone calls, and no longer in consideration or discussion of the RonDonJohn or JoeFrackSwamy, or whatever materializes in the coming months; the professionals have done their work too well on both sides, and anyone stepping forward, it would seem, is a mark for destruction, to be pulled-apart in pieces in front of the eyes of millions.

Two Bojangles: The Pockyclips and Aperiodic Repetions.

I probably have the biggest penis on the women's swim team, btw.

Anyway, cocksmanship aside, I was reading Paradise Lost and Paradise Found, a kind of "vacation journal from hell", in which you kinda wish they had lost your baggage in the grist.  And I mean, everybody has heard of Paradise Lost, "that's old timey", and maybe some have read it, but Paradise Found?  Pilgrim's Progress?

"Lets go see Jesus, e'rybody."

"I ain't gonna need my cell phone charger for this, I think."

Anyway once more, two ridiculous shapes combined in a tiled mosaic that could conceivably go on infinitely.  I had a simulation of this on the LX QT window system, where it just jumps into the computer memory and processes until its little unction is finally satisfied: a cacaphony of randomized patterns of shapes, in which no single section is actually repeated without variation, in theory protruding indignantly into infinite space.

It was said that there was research, and someone(Roger Penrose) was credited with inventing the thing, and then it was found in materials from centuries ago, invented actually by another culture, and respected, understood to some extent to represent the endless variety of the life natural.

"Hey, how ah ya? Hey how ah ya?"

The infinitely random space of nature, just like the almost infinite randomness of consciousness, and my preliminary thoughts were that probably all snowflakes weren't entirely unique, that perhaps some repetition could be marked, even in random, such that it is entirely without a given pattern, and merely a few snowflakes distributed over the fruited plain that vaguely, of millions of them, several that vaguely resemble one another.

The English paradise was what?  Pacific Islands?  Hispaniola?

Perhaps the cutting edge of a perceived agnostic paradise today is the conquest and pioneering of outer space, carving a vast dominion out of a superset of property in four dimensions.

In the interim, the little space between today and tomorrow, I declare myself to be the factual "Bull of the Woods" of female swimming, declaring myself whatever I want to be, and whomever obliged to comply.

What would you do with a room filled with gold if there were no one to trade it with?

Alan Watts and the mysticism versus physics thing con't.

Subsequently.

Alan Watts, intermittently described as a mystic or weirdo in some circles, tends more towards the well-learned and those interested in self-progression, the process.  In reality, a very well-studied seminary graduate and Anglican pastor.

He refutes some scientific points:

that "our intelligence is an unfortunate mistake"

that "our only hope is to beat the irrational universe into submission".

He contends that there is much hope for us all yet, and that varying fallacies will fall like scales from our eyes as we progress from the agnostic to the purely spiritual, and I further that to say we need not embrace the dogma of others, but carve our own path by cataloguing the congruities and intermittent patterns of the universe.

Is life not a pure wonder?

Is awakening not a great gift.

As Watts states it, how unlikely it would seem that an unintelligent universe would spawn an entire billion-some total of intelligent beings.

We say God and some say the Universe.  We have the Pater Familia and all, the benign Creator breathing life into the something formed of the dust, something of the substance of the earth being imputed something wondrous from God.

 

Carl Jung and Paul. Where science and mysticism have a steel cage match. Return of "the Ether"?

Furthermore, Carl Jung's maturation process, called "individuation", was as indefinite and seemingly as magical and full of variety as life itself, as one were at once part of the cosmos, only to be soon absorbed by the cosmos.  That alludes to spirit, which we've never quantified, save for one charlitan that measured terminal patient bodies' weight, and in some instances noticed a loss of several grams just after death, proof he said, of a substant soul.

In the olden term, we had Paul, who experienced a great spiritual awakening on the road to Damascus, and that, he was already somewhat spiritual, but he got such a boost that he prayed for his own jailers and commented that he was always satisfied whether in "abundance or want".  Indeed, the transformation, that individuation boost was so great that he changed his name afterwards, to Paul, from Saul.

There are some yet undefined 11-13 dimensions of the universe, some cosmic threads that hold all in abeyance.

This too, then, is all quite preliminary, and within these dimensions, Quantum Entanglement, Uncertainty and all that, we shall perhaps find some congruities that defy our knowledge at present, and present to us again the old theory of the Ether that passes through all matter, such that the old is once again take up, and this time, more properly re-asserted, re-inserted with the more recent, and even the cutting edge theories.

Individuation might be like one's own Savior returning to earth, such that it begets and be-gravels a proper integration into the universe in an altered form, nee, viz a viz, unmeasurable spirit matter.  Others have worked along these lines, but have been enticed to hold out a promise of money in some form, be it in productivity, something of business or something.

But its so much more, and so much of it lies beyond the working years of a person's life, and more oriented toward that insubstant fairy tale spirit state of being that eludes our understanding.

Preliminary on the universe as an analog computer: even our psyches, I hint, part of that control system.

They were saying "unsex me with your magic crayon", and there were surgical strikes in Tierra del Bonita, guerillas in the north; I said, what is this modern entropy but a reflection of the dispersion that we walk around with inside of us everyday?  What else could it be, to the fair minded?

It's such that one affixes his to the sticking place, and walks with a certainty, rightly or wrongly, boldly so, into the future.

I plop-on and take to a manuscript that combines Jung with some contemporaries, something of the universe being an analog computer such that it mimics the brain--continual processing at low power, an entire network of flesh bag filaments.

I was listening to Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger", and digging it pretty good, in between sessions with the magic crayon, in between utterly destroying the chances of the coming generations to make good, in betwixt and between the bleatings, gleetings and general unimportant, insubstant dissipations of warm afternoons, and all the while, I had a niggle, a little niggle tugging at me.

Nested infinities.

 

I said, suspecting, a potential seed for my own downfall if I didn't meet it head-on.  Its just like when Darnell and Chris had made a bootleg tape of one of my concerts; they later tried to blackmail me.  I had a moment: do I destroy the evidences that I had thought so carefully hidden, or do I shank Darnell in the hallway?  It would have been prudent to do both, and not make it either/or, to have my vanilla, strawberry and chocolate together in the same package.

It is like magic, is nature, such that I told on of my spiritual leaders to take heart, chin-up, that he already knew the truth of the matter, and he had his own keys to the kingdom within himself already: he gets to decide who he wants to be.  A tyrant? A benefactor? A coxcomb? A ruffian?  Spurilous, scandalous or upright or some magic gumbo of all those.  Endeavor.

Productivity and would-be entrepreneurism: Victor Tortuga's Mail Order Management Refresher Course and Leland Briggs Annual Almanac For Good Old Fashioned Folk.

The human river dwindles when ’tis past the hour of eight,
Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;
But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat
The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street—
                Grinding body, grinding soul,
                Yielding scarce enough to eat—
Oh! I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

-Henry Lawson

Of course, the guy says, how you do anything is emblematic of how you do everything.

Really?

Am I not sometimes tired or weary, and thus slower than at other times?

Does my confidence and stamina sometimes flag? 

What I just did was take a break from scholastic heroics to go after spiritual pursuits, in the balance, there was a feeling of irresponsibility, but at the end of the day, I know I did what was most important.

There's your emblematic spirit pookah of my thoughts: that I hung with what I thought was important, a religious charity over my own schooling.  But mind, there is time enough, it is thought, for both, and any jiggering is a balanced calculation in the offing.

The Victor Tortuga book of Productivity and Sliding Scales for measuring production in line settings, advices, does the expert Tortuga, the fictional person with his fictional ideas on how to do hypothetical projects efficiently.

Its the Eisenhower Matrix, the 4 group ranking of scale, in order of importance, and I read of another guy claiming "I invented this.  Buy my book."  He didn't invent it, and I didn't buy his book.  He had a regular email, a scam "informational" thing, in which he did no less than 6 paid endorsements for other people's products.

"Informative."  Fkt.

Does not the time press us, and bare out the need for a better method?

Victor Tortuga's mail-order course for Senior Management was a great success with readers of the Weekly World News, Soldier of Bib Fortuna, and the Leland Briggs Farmer's Almanac for Old Fashioned Good Old Folk.

I sat plenty of times myself, with a vintage or peanut butter Ritz, leafing-slowly, mind you-the pages of the Leland Briggs Almanac For Old Fashioned Good Old Folk, and sometimes I would have King Biscuit hour on the radio set in my sitting room.

The business of doing business, costs and obligations and so forth.

Fornis sum fundit.  Or was that "fugit"?

I tell you, we as people take to heart lessons come by hard, such that we inside are shaped much more by our failures than our successes.  Think of it, there isn't a convenient Roman Polanski or Roger Goodell for everybody to take-up and carry-on with, and sometimes we're left with a lonely evening playing with our purse pistol, some Derringer pussified shooting iron that we use to threaten squeegee bums.

Incidentally, I'm good with .45s, which is neither here nor there, and my aspirational gift-gun is a Desert Eagle, chromed, in .45 caliber.

But most recently I suffered both a kerflop and a vindication in the form of a new business venture.  My idea was to stock wholesale small engine parts, bundled according to model.  Off the top of my head, during brainstorming I identified a sweetspot price point, where the bundle was convenient and cost effective, and after site-royalty, shipping and taxes, I made a little prophet on the thing.

It was, in fact, such a good idea that someone was already doing that, and having a degree of success by the statistics.  Made a tidy sum on a kit for a model that hasn't been sold since 2018 or so, but there were literally thousands upon thousands sold mass-market those prior years, and there are a few still going out there that sometimes need parts.

Imagine it though.  Its such that a convenience price of 8 dollars for an air filter, and there are grudging sales at that price, with grumbles a plenty over the high price point of a piece of cut foam.

I get that same piece for less than 50 cents.  25-40 cents, thereabouts.

Ditto spark plugs, retailing for 2 dollars or more, and I get those in quantity for cerca de 60 cents each.

Sometimes though, a darkness comes over me, and I can't help but brandish contempt for the muck-a-mucks that pull the wool over the eyes of the consumer.

Fidget Goes To The Beach.

He woke his butt up that morning knowing he had a tough row to hoe ahead of him, and he was gonna pack a lunch and all, fill-up a Mason jar with creek water and all that, take his wide-brim hat and that sort of thing.

During the night, I had left him something, that I knew he would find as he took the morning air, sunlight next.

In John Deere green.

On his retaining wall.

Emblazoned.

"I'm wild as hell, pony boy."

His cousin kept inviting me to a fish dinner(note I don't say "seafood", because its not all necessarily from the sea, as in "salt water").

What we were really on about was finding some hubcaps for some 70s cars, so called "classic" but not yet officially ranked "antique", but hey, you trying buying parts for them, they might as well be stone age, such that one would expect Stone Henge or Puma Punku to have "body colored interior accents", "european stylings", deluxe wheel covers", and "carpeted floor mats".

Maybe even FM radio.

Spend the extra 12 dollars for it, Barry Gordy.

But imagine him looking at my hooliganism on his private property.  I mean, first, who did that?  Sometimes, and in his perview, there was no doubt.  I mean, "what kind of utterly detestable piece of sh*t would do that to someone?" and in his frame of reference.

He didn't need three guesses.

He didn't have to "phone a friend" or "poll the audience".

We say of static truths, and particularly the conservatives, Platonists and more, that Good is self-evident to the thinker, but yet others, modern and post-modern thinking, it was all parsed and sub-divided into a kind of whole stack of things, such that me painting mean things on his private property, could in some frame of reference, be defined as "good".

We have only, in the end, the average.  Mode.  Mean.  An index, maybe, if one felt adventurous.  It was brought into focus in my own recreational readings, the dividing and subdividing of arrays, proper lines, and so forth, not so saying anything of beginning and endpoints, but that mentioned earlier, not that the line was infinite, because it wasn't, but that the relativist could point to an infinite number of points on even that very limited line.

The words of a frustrated man with a master's degree?  Mayhap.

I watched, just recently, a sub-set, a continuum of oscillations and so forth, and what measurement standard would one say is not quantitative, in reference to making distinctions, but qualitative, in terms of a very intelligent gentleman, probably schooled at Oxford, waving his hand and pronouncing a single word definition, which is so lacking and indefinite.  Is it a philosophy when it seems all the more an attitude, instead?

"Your neck, pony boy."

I mean, I had the unction on him, you know, such that he wasn't answering phones, and he took to parking his little Toyota in his garage and putting the lock to the door, going in through the laundry room door.

I had his name; I had his ass.

So to speak.

If he was on the esplonade, walking around like a european, in his disillusionment and aimlessness, he couldn't afford to let his own unction free, because something deep within would starting running down his pants leg.

His own oscillation then, had attached, a coordinate identifiable in two arrays on graph paper.

I wanted to get up near him when he was distracted and dog tired, with his Mason jar full of his water to drink on break.

It just wouldn't pay for him to come across me on the esplonade when I had some tater wedges in the little calico-print bag, or whatever, maybe peach cobbler egg rolls, me keeping my sugars to the good, like getting liquid nutrition, constantly making out past the foyer to check the balogna, and if it was to the good as well, get my nutritional supplement by licking the sweat off of it.

Quite "high-toned" as it were, myself, mayhap.  Rejected from the Lion's Club and some other, not like him, not like the little toot-sweet voodoo-doll in which I had deposited so many of my own, both real and imagined, slights, offenses, and perceived indecencies.  Such as what was said, with productivity and office culture, good for people to have objectives, workable goals to try to achieve, and sometimes these were short-term and sometimes more ambitious, but to put his little nose in the dust.

(At first run-through, I accidently fudged the spelling of "offenses".)

 

 

Lethargy! Plus: "Some infinities are bigger than others."

Were I a Buddhist.  I sympathize with them, some, on the whole, self-improvement, the impetus to let go of various suffering and malignancies in their lives; its quite modern, and on the whole, marking the way to improvement or "enlightenment".  

But I'm not a belly-rubbing chimichonga.

They say, and I was told this, "some infinities are bigger than others."

Imagine the non-sense of such a static statement, but consider the erroneous label of infinity implied to numbers that are not infinite, but just very large, as if unimaginably so.

"For our purposes, this is....

infinite."

Imagine, a person or group set to exhaust the set of real numbers.  A person, a group, a crew, or a whole nation of people, either pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or both, working an inexhaustible supply of numbers.

The supply of numbers, in theory, is inexhaustible, and yet, their capacity to record those numbers in sequence, is not without limitation, such that at some point, one runs of computer memory on Beowulf or Wolfram or whatever, distributed computing platform, or genius mainframe, or the supply of paper runs out.

Almost unimaginable.  You can in fact, probably easily imagine a stoppage on such work, but to really test your brain, ask yourself what's the last number in that sequence when the supply runs out, and you might have difficulty recording just that one item, such that one single number is practically beyond our imagination.

But that's not infinite.  Its just beyond our capacity as humans, you see.  Some might call it, for human purposes, "infinite", such that it verifies the statement, "some infinities are bigger than others."

Anyway, I was reading on "infinite divisibility", and thinking several very basic points.  Now, first thing, the point was to make much of mathematics irrelevant and imprecise, to draw that out to a fine point so we could move on to something else and stop ringing our hands with worry of these calculations.

Say you keep, infinitely, cutting one piece into two, even as it gets smaller and smaller, decimal points and all.

The pieces would not only be infinite, but the pieces would really be (infinity multiplied by 2).  

That leads back to something my secret gay lover told me, not my Harris B*tch that sits in my passenger seat like a happy bulldog, but the little man meat mousse, the caramel drizzle on my vanilla cone.

He said, did the little fruit loop, that for God to be omniscient, to know everything, he would have to have a copy of the universe, or himself be big enough to encompass a projective model of everything in the universe, say like having a play set version of all reality in your back room somewhere collecting dust.

(infinity times 2).  Two almost infinities.

We sometimes talk about these things, smoking cheap cigars(White Owl), and sitting nude watching Timothy Olyphant stuff, talking like some broke-ass Jean Paul Sartre ni**as, and he tells me this one day while I'm quoting Bible verses.  The point he was making was something like, "the Bible isn't real, only what I think matters."  And God bless him, its difficult not to let him go on like that, because I think too of all the times he's sat dissheveled and ashamed, naked and alone in the corner after one of my lectures on art, himself contorted like a picasso of shame and self-loathing.

Legends of the Fall: A traipse remembered or "Something Miked This Way Comes"

We weren't on the regular track, and it was usually a point, if we were mentioned, it was "smart shaming" or something, not the "nerd" word, never that, but we were a bit different.  What they had to do to set us out was run our little circle a year ahead of the regular track, for the purpose of preparing us for the AP exam as Seniors in high school.

It was something.

8th grade: Romeo and Juliet.

9th grade: Julius Caesar

10th grade: none(American Literature time)

11th grade: Macbeth

12th grade: Hamlet(interchanged sometimes with King Lear).

The respect I had for the head of the section that decided all this, it was astonishing, and her son, I punished him for hours on end with my presence, he and Jeremy, I punished them with my evil jokes about their "self discovery", junior high things that die hard.  He got revenge, did that son, by saying he could whiten my buttery teeth by ejaculating in my mouth, so there was a balance there.

The teacher in 8th grade seemed to enjoy Romeo and Juliet more than we did; we were not parsing the various double chicken tenders and stuff in the dialogue, and she was at pains often to point out things we would have otherwise missed.

Macbeth, however, was a complete romp.  We loved it.  I even got to portray Macbeth himself in a skit, and I had one line, and I knocked the bejesus out of it, using the old Steve Mcqueen technique of trying to draw attention to that, to make that one bit, if that was all I had, memorable to the audience.

A change of department heads, and cultural things, brought Tolkien into focus for the high school curriculum, with those people at pains to keep that attention of the students focused.  Lord of the Rings was not in the curriculum in my day, however, even though, on his own time, the smartest student that ever attended the school, would stay up very late on school nights reading the Tolkien trilogy.

The inject politics, in the other places, saying Oprah wrote a poetry book that was credited to a high school student, that hope and so forth is a dirty word, the implication.  However, I had a boxed of Oprah book club Faulkner stuff, which included Faulkner's most "racial" book, and he taking a partly racist stance most of the time.  Mind, his racial views seemed somewhat progressive probably in his time, maybe, though he was a conservative, and more to the point, he was less observing his own opinion, but a kind of reflection of reality.

We could hate that teacher's son just enough to spend hours with him away from school, that kind of brotherhood of real friends, that hurt each other so oft, but from them, the wounds are lesser than with strangers because of the friendship betwixt and between.

Ron Desantis is a chud, and people that complain about the curriculum generally portray a less than decently motivated concern.  Always, activism, either for the left or right, and fodder for the media, in observance or complaint, be it either, I would impeach Ron for excluding any amount of Shakespeare in the discourse, no matter what triggered parents complaints came to float like turds in the punchbowl, such as "Oprah wrote that book".

Trump and his cohorts tried to turn so much of the regular people against the media, to outright mistrust anything they say, and of course, the media naturally biased towards the progressives anyway, and then too, preaching to Trump haters, trying to "make the case" with people who decided long ago, such burning air time, and so on.  In turning the regular folk against the media, he wishes his own friendlies to be the main source of those folk's news, a kind of brain control, but Caitlyn, unable to get out of her own way, making a very dismal showing in her appearance with Trump, unwittingly(?) adding fuel to the narrative of progressive bias.

Such that it seemed like Donald and Caitlyn spoke two different languages.  And my own language, I reserve maybe for my own space, such that I may not even vote if its Donald and Joe on the ballot; neither represent me, but are more concerned about their own interests.  I like Tim Scott's Horatio Alger Gospel of American Opportunity, very much, but I wonder if he can gain traction, or will it all be toxic media gotchas as the fall of 2024 approaches.

People that ban Shakespeare should perhaps themselves be banned.  Perhaps I'm at pains to portray my discomfiture with old boy Ron.  Partly vanquished by Disney, Ron turns to Shakespeare, who may or may not have partisans protecting the interests of classic literature.

But there's me.

The imperative galactical. Vida en verano.

As if a galactical imperative, dissipation.  Even you, Itzhak?  Even me, Cheever.  All things unfurling their life force as if it were an existential fruit roll-up, and then merrily devouring the otherwise precious thing.  Need we change our service to the categorical imperatives in our lives?  Do we alter methods if results don't come?  Indeed, only Caitlyn does the same thing over and over again expecting different results each time.

Life and life more abundantly.

For God's sake people, and for the sake of your own person, enjoy your life now and then.

Indeed, I was struck with a pain, and in the throes, and all I had to do to overcome was remember anything at all that I was grateful for; indeed, most of the time, I have a mystical kind of satisfaction at life.  I call it God, being a Christian, but you might refer to our own galactical imperative with your own tongue, in your own chosen way.  The universe.  Panentheism.  "God is somewhere in there."

I watched the evening swelter break.  I even took to the heat, like a cheap sauna, taking to it and listening to business podcasts; the luminosity was amazing, and I was under an awning with ambient light.  But it broke at its peak as first cloud cover, then cooling winds, then rain, such that during the day, before sundown, the temperature evaporated away twenty something degrees, as if the cooling breath of God himself.

This was more of the galactic imperative, the storms coming to stauncheon the weather, and the weather bleating on us like a reminder of our own sin debts.  A reprieve, it was, that the sum total is less than the peak top number, and even though the light was beautiful, it was down time, time to sit beside the donkey and rest, siesta, and the galactic imperative, the downtime, bleating in our ears.

And the cooling storm, that too, down time, but more enjoyable to take to the awning and listen to the rains, listen to the cooling winds.

Do we after our method, have only madness?  Do we have Donnie, all other life gambits turned up in failure, deciding to drive Uber and pick-up strangers for money?  Do we in service to our method, work a froth in our minds to face the discourse?

Productivity: Sessioning and the Pomodoro Method

Under the Pomodoro Method, one works say 20-25 minutes, followed by a break of 5-10 minutes.  After two hours, a slightly larger break of say 15 minutes, just like in many modern workplaces.  This has proven, over time, reasonably effective at keeping "the workforce" productive.(Incidentally, this corresponds to study advice as well, where one takes a few minutes after that increment to, if nothing else, at least rest the eyes.)

In a loose and informal office environment, one might browse the web during that break, or get a refill of coffee, or even smoke a cigarette outdoors.  However, in more formal settings, one is basically chained to his or her desk, and might opt to sneak in a game of Solitaire on the pc or something.

What I like to do is pack that session, that 20-25 minutes, as much as I can.  Think of it: its like bundling high-power electrical wires together, one gets sort of a maximal value for his time.

During the break in the session, I find myself packing stuff in my mind for the next session, as it is about to begin.

Maybe it just a fad that I caught onto, but it helps me, and if you find it too unwieldy or cumbersome for your own workflow, then by all means shun it.  One has to do service to his own workflow, and you know, better than anyone else, what works for you.

But I just love to think I have that "session" sometime, that 20-25 minutes where I might toggle between text editors and email apps, and some other, and then do posts on the social media side.

A good session.

All that said, mine typically are stopped organically, meaning I'm not on a timer, but stopping when the work is done.  I find its usually either 20 minutes or 35 minutes, my sessions that I let go on as they will.

Talitha Cumi, or Samson and Duh-lighter.

They do, do in fact, in their own miseries tell us such beautiful and grand lies, with the evil purpose of strip-mining our hopes, psychic vampires, when all in the world that I've known to be strictly honest, Testarino, old bean, and these people, sending telegrams across the way to one called Terrazo, a familiar, one of the outer guard that patrols Guantanamo Bay, Guantanamera, and all, bean-sucking federali and all, and I take to the roads, "shine a light!" "shine a light!", hoping for my own freedom, my own liberty, that I ever happen to observe theirs, then maybe mine is not to far behind in the offing.

Erin, again, perhaps jury duty or some sundry other.  And they were showing Samson, arms extended pillar-to-pillar, body forming a crucifix symbol, and saying that was emblematic, one to destroy, and another later for the saving of all, in hope and love and mercy, and all the while, the droning of the beautiful lies from built-in audio and all--it occurred to me in the dim modern malaise, the buillobaise of hair-laden modern stew, the hodge podge, the potpourri, the ongoing conversation, that I should buy a sound bar and then treat myself to purest musics.

She was shooting at strangers, I thought, she didn't love at all.  And there were bounty hunters out there, after the boss's son, and all, a rich target, as it were, and not like he hadn't so often spread his own butt cheeks of his own volition, having them pour coins into him as if he were some kind of flesh-bag vessel, his own self.

Did I mention yet my own butthole?  So many ideas, one loses track, but its here of course, purse against seat fabric, here, and present and partly at least accounted for.

What gold-rimmed Virginia tobacco magnate could pluck such turtle doves, polly's, from their comfortable but unsure perches?  Where a good comedy routine has purchase I wot, some roadside funhouse in which she's removed part of her underwear before she came in, and keeps "touching-up" in what passes for a ladies room, and yes, I almost forgot it was all a question, and not an answer.

"Shine a light! Shine a light".  And "our hopes" they said, "nearly diminished!" And I said, "republic! We are all, combined into one Voltron of a humdrum thing, all together now, a populace and wide body of hope."

"We have yet a dismal kind of gloom, as if our own thoughts were made manifest", they said, ruefully, and I watched my familiars glancing to their own devices, what was pre-loaded, memes and advertisements, and it was taken to be something of a "spending of time" and an investment of attentions, where I had only my own thoughts, and a few stray glances at some cleavage or a thigh.

"Republic! Republic!"

vision, blames, preoccupations

"An ignorant person blames others for his troubles. To blame one's own self is a sign of progress." -Epictetus

Indeed, a person of vision carves his own road, but it is not  merely for slaves and the baggage train to then travel thst selfsame road.

How many times have we not traveled familiar roads or those well-worn, time-old and perhaps even venerable or worthy of esteem?  Man is after all, a man of his own community, affixed to at least one circle, overlapping traits and commonalities with his fellows, perhaps even overlapping some with his very masters as much as his peers?

Do we fault the stars, or attach our own stars, even while our feet are upon the terran base?

Perhaps it is which, when indefinite, one is honed in fact to a purpose he has not chosen, byt is trading his hours, pieces of his precious life, to some definitive end, just as the very terminus of that man himself is a definitive point in space and time.

This, under the milky-gray cloud cover, having sat screaming inarticulately into the ether and then, in wickedness, in the space of a throng of lost seconds, awaiting the reverberations of same.

Greatness and Integrity. Modernity: "Here there be lions!"

Greatness comes not by having a mossy path made for you through the meadow, but by being sent to hew out a roadway by your own hands.

-unattributed.

 

In all things, meekness is a kind of majesty is it not?  It's a kind of dare to the eternal to practice anything, and everything this day and age is usually done with such an attitude and lack of concern.

What would have been a greater generation, found themselves, not on the shores of Normandy in uniforms, but marching at a yet younger age through hallways of glass and steel, indoctrinated, institutionalized, such that they vow, "never again", to themselves, and at once, the finishing was a mark of prestige.  Now, not so much, we survive and escape into the wild as we might, to emerge into the urban jungle as bestial as ever, with our low-sloping brows groomed so prettily, and we dance on videos.

The man out of the jungle, and the jungle out of the man: an existential promise made to one another, to be true and without precept, this modern man and his hunting ground, for the rape and pillage, to discard a woman's legs here and her skull there, promises and vows made to some jungle animal spirit, something that speaks through our appetites, moans and groans through the tones of blood pumping in the ear drums.

What was beloved in Coca-Cola became Tyson Foods, and Tyson Foods became Walmart, and Walmart became such and other: these are lions, there they be, among the many aisles of what passes for civilization.  It is civilization not that it has been tried and proven by us, but because they taught this in school.  Guard your heart, hold loved ones dear, for as the Apostle said, "the days are evil."  

The family establishment became the franchise, the franchise then became the chain, the chain became the corporation, and then the corporation went multinational, such that even a staid moment between two enterprising brothers became a global phenomenon.

"Do not those who plot evil go astray?"

-King Solomon, Proverbs chapter 14. 

"ye are a city shining on a hill.... do not hide your light under a bushel."

-Apostle Paul