From the reading, philsophy and poetry, Epictetus, Nietzsche and doctor Phil.

*Virtue bifurcated, but not predicated upon "ne'er the twain", not at all.  Indeed, there is overlap.

1.  What is pleasant.(Percy Bysse Shelly)

2.  What is useful.(John Locke)

*The Triumph of the Will: the sort of goat worship in a movie starring Sherri Moon Zombie.  Friedrich Nietzsche co-opted by the Satanists, a kind of weird thing, I wot.

*Winning the argument is often a dumb idea; as per Dr Phil.  The greater victory, the long game, is to sometimes sit in the corner--the philosophical strategy of the snowball fight, to not waste snowballs on only one target--or the eggs in the basket(today being Easter Sunday, and all).

*If you want the same results as someone else, you have to pay the same cost, logic dictates.  As the old band The Chairmen of the Board sang in the Top 40 some years back, you gotta pay to the piper if you want to dance to the music.  Epictetus wonders if it is ever worthwhile, in most instances, to replicate the unusual success of another; there is a time cost, an emotional cost, and so on--but it is his logic, in my notes, that observe the truism that repeating the process leads to repeated results.

Otherwise, the proverbial lunatic is the one that does the same thing time and again whilst expecting different results in each instance.

Rolling on with Women's Month movie-watchin'.

Virginia Woolf:  She spoke of striving to find a new narrative method.  

Mrs Dolloway?  Orlando?  To The Lighthouse?

"You don't like me?"  Of course.  Your family hates you, and you know it.  Such is always the case, that if there is no anger, and only aversion, do you expect the impetus to say such things out loud?  A suitable kind of reason d'etre?  

She come up with the notion to find a new narrative method, and the little idea excited her; in my own world, I came up with a similar notion, and it was called publicly "Promised Bland".  But to a bored woman without the imagination to amuse herself, I suppose everything around and about her is well.... bland.

And eventually, as the very reek of destination begins to weigh her, she put stones in her pocket and deposited those feelings "Into the Chattapequa", the dark waters of the Chattepequa, reflecting back only what they see...... 

Herself... a gleating of shame and misunderstood intentions, eighty thousand words, and her new narrative method, but did she still feel, incessantly, that she had not come across with her reasons?  (I remember yelling out the Blake line a few times, myself: "who made thee?!".)

To herself, and only herself, that minds eye: that black mirror that looks almost like reality but upon examination.... those triumphal works were but a stain, I wot, in her perview, and she had no recourse but to feel all "alternative" or something, segmented off on her own little island, screaming toward that other shore, again incessantly, but always that perception in her mind, that sort of doubt, that she had ever, at all, been heard.

The staid waters of the Chattepequa.... 

It reminds me of the novel-within-a-novel thing, a novel written by a character in a story, "The Gothic Sea".  James Purefoy writes about his protagonist walking into the ocean, to intention, reason de'tre, to snuff himself.  The character's name was Jordan, or Pidgeonhole, Reese or something.  Murder-cult maven, that nome-de-something.  The canonical league of those fictional novels include, "The Collected Works of Kilgore Trout: An Anthology of the Everyman's Library", "Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House", "White Enamel", "The Philosophy of Time Travel", "Time Against Time"(I wrote that one: that was I; that was me), and some other.

The Fuller Brush Girl:

Lucy, in the "few-cha", Modern Times, as it were, taking up life(and as we say, "life and life more abundantly").  The film, silly beyond words, and that respect, maybe in its lack of logic, reflective of something more real than the average film of happy coincidences.  Why, we have "the impossible job", and its improbable but strange-enough-for-reality failures and its own non-propitious coincidences.  Played for laughs, maybe, but the late 70's saw such "everyday worries" as a true and relevant reason d'etre, and spoke it to the world in such common course, such vain incantations as "mortgage" and "dental work for the kids"--and the audience sat, and almost sh*t their pants in their nervous perturbations.

Lucy pinballs into building her life.

Real-world Lucy was so much the obverse side of that coin, and she "churned her cream into butter" as it were, of the mouse of proverb, helping to produce, via Desilu Productions, the original Star Trek and so forth, doing so much in the real world while being, herself, pidgeon-holed by things like "The Fuller Brush Girl" and "I Love Lucy".

Rio Bravo:  

One woman in that one, so not much for the "Women's Month", but at least she is one of those that strides the dividing line between classical womenhood and bold modernity, a saloon girl but oh with a mind of her own.

But you remember this one, of course, Ward Bond--my Wagon Train dude--and some others, Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin.

It was a film so good that John Ford made it twice, in fact. The team of Stumpy, Colt, Dean and the Missouri Kid.  Such a good oater but proto-action film, buddy-comedy that he had to revisit the formula later.  Such a formula in a western figures more a lot of people pointing shotguns at one another.

And there was livestock.

 

Springtime 2024: all of nature says hello.

"They say that springs of sweet fresh water well up amid the brine of salt seas; that the fairest Alpine flowers bloom in the wildest and most rugged mountain passes; that the noblest psalms were the outcome of the profoundest agony of soul.
Be it so. And thus amid manifold trials, souls which love God will find reasons for bounding, leaping joy. Though deep call to deep, yet the Lord's song will be heard in silver cadence through the night."
 

-LB Cowman
 

The sylvan hue of melting ice--this, as the dogwoods slowly open sleep-crusted eyes, and all of nature begins to pick up its instruments, carry the rhythm, and each in earnest portray its own element in the over-arching melody of what we have termed to be a "season".  This, the Vernal Equinox and the Mongoose Full Moon, the Penumbral Eclipse--a convergence, and in the world of commerce and amalgamation, a divergence, mayhap--nature reminding, tapping us on the shoulder with spring showers, pulling our attentions and shaping further our intentions to remind us that, yes, Cheever, we are very much alive.

The cycle of life continues.

"Seasonal Descriptive Disorder", in a sort of manic daydream, a Tchaikovsky pulsebeat and all--eyes to nature--regeneration, "regenerate", instead of past tense "regenerated", as in the ongoing, the infinitive, discarding the past tense for all its weight and lack of worth like so many pounds of waste matter produced in alchemic experiments--why I scream life begets life--and water, such a crucial part of life--80% of my own gelatin, in as much as so much of the ejaculate is mere urine.  Was it "affective" or "effective"?  As in suffering versus efficacy, I wot, that the point is somewhat more of something that flaps the mongoose on the hind-end, urging to response, rather than something passive like a mere feeling.

Why, the mental energy of our various transient feelings--and all of nature a peculiar so misunderstood battery--the little spit of yellow curry dust and all, the pollen is like our own residue, nature shaking off the dust from the corners of its autumn lover's bedroom.

Not a eulogy at all, with nothing dead but all rushing to life and then life-more-abundantly, the awkwardness-es and so forth that require clarification to most--not that, but instead a narration of something yet alive and vibrant, just like a puncture wound or something that one hastens to ignore, yet cannot--the very temper meter of all existence, kind of an axial swingpoint on which so much variously relies--like the proverbial red wheelbarrow--or the discount superstore bicycle.

 

Aquinas, Plato, Paul and spring is officially sprung on the SEC.

"...in as much as it is good..."  does existence fulfill, or does one fulfill his own existence.  A thought from Aquinas, and the weeks readings.  Life, or existence, and goodness, in the formal sense, nee Plato, a concept or idea.  The province of God is goodness in the Christian ethical realm, and we approach God as the pollen begins to shower about the SEC conference, in this: the spring of 2024.

Give a reason for your hope, as Paul says.  But do so with gentleness and respect...

And of all this, I can say: it has been a week.

Normality performed a kind of shift, in a kind of incremental kind of way, and as if to say, what is normative has been, in some fundamental way, altered.

"....all of my portion, and my cup..."

 

The thin line between the frying pan and hookbait: moderation over abundance.

Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention.

Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.

-Habakkuk 1

But I determined this with myself, that I would not come again to you in heaviness.

And I wrote this same unto you, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I ought to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is the joy of you all.

2 Corinthians 2

Here we are: preached to of abundance, though Lao Tse reminds that the full bucket is more difficult to carry than one containing a lesser amount.  This abundance is like weights on a diver, who can only resurface if he releases his burden.

The preparation of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord.  All the way a man are clean in his own eyes....

A man's heart devises his way; but the Lord directs his steps.....

-Proverbs 16

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee? 

-William Blake

What's that you say--that I'm bound for the graveyard?

Oooh, I wish you well.

-John Fogerty

We Rise Together. On virtue, goals and other such static concepts.

We rise together.

And what are we?  Me, standing here as insistent as a toothache, your brother, the other shoe in the trashcan.  Brought together by court ordered visitation, we are two legs pumping, achieving tandem through some candid form of natural Fibonacci sequence.  But where are we going?

"I want everybody to succeed."  -Deon Sanders

"Lord-willing, and if the creeks don't rise." -Milton Bradshaw

Consider it. What if I reached the magical land of success and fulfillment and you weren't there?  Well, maybe it'd give me time to pour some wine and fluff a pillow.  What if I were looking up from the bottom of my well, watching you across the interminable?

We could spend an untold wealth of time and processing power in the pursuit of a definition of success.  People have different goals, and if that infinity wasn't large enough a grouping of ideas, then we have the means and methods of attainment, which is an even larger infinity.

Virtue is a noun, and the previously Puritanical moralist America would define virtue as either end-point righteousness, the goal, or perhaps the mean, such little temperances and self-denials that we think make us closer to the deity.

Ancient philosophy defines virtue as the means and dictums that achieve the goal.

The goal is the Chief Good, and that in itself can mean so many things to so many people, where Puritancal America gave it to a "cabin in glory land", the achievement of a place in heaven in the afterlife.  I do note that some petition for a dream home in this life, but it was said the savior had went forward to glory to prepare a place.

I heard that the victory of virtue is joy.

I heard that exercising creative impulses is joy.

I heard that joy is the pursuit, and not the destination.

Is joy an end?  Or is it just an emotion, a perception, internally of the end-point?  The "point b" on the ray of the life, that ever-elusive destination somewhere between all the government forests, that Xanadu or Silverado, in the acid western that is Chesterfield County.

The chief good-the entire point of the thing-is said to be "self-evident", like in the Preamble("we hold these truths to be self-evident"), instantly recognizable, something very human, very common to all in the thoroughfare.

For the Apostle Paul, sin is the opposite of virtue and one of his practical arguments for the avoidance of sin, is that sin is "inconvenient".

At King Biscuit Flour, there is that old diesel THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-ing, the blooming and blossoming, of the corn blossoms, et al, the apparatus churning that corn into the precious stuff: grits.  The pine trees assaulting with something like cumin or curry; the fish opening their gaping mouths for worms from heaven to all in to them, propitiously, and virtue, the common signal horn peppering us in the stately halls of purpose, intent: our families, our homes, our legacies, as we discontinue various grievances and indulgences and strive, reach for the more ecumenical, evangelical, and the more conducive of joy, hope, and peace.

Film Festival Update: Vienna and the Dancing Kid, Plus Ayn Rand.

Ernest Borgnine(Marty the Butcher) as Yeet, going at Johnny Guitar like a whittlin' piece to be demoralized.

The thing about this one--Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, et al--a pissing contest in the opening scene, a big old bar room that transitions into a cave wall, personalities jostling and tumbling and generally roiling around, almost like watching a derby of personalities, each speaking up and trying to lay claim on the spot of the Prime Mover.

Dancing Kid shoots, and does not dance.  To be specific, he has a silver claim, but the townsfolk think he robs and robs and gallivants and all.

Sterling Hayden plays guitar.

Ward Bond as the cattleman pushes the sheriff around.

The puritan woman with the gritted teeth: a vague resemblance to Judy Garland, but that ain't who that is, and well, not seen before, and not seen after, soon to be forgotten like a bad dream.  Her little snarl, and the thing that she had a heart-hold on Dancing Kid, a dead brother, and a hatred for Joan Crawford's Vienna.

It was such that they took their guns off, did Sterling and Ernest, to go outside and fist fight.  That's not House Husbands of McBee type of pissing in the wind, not at all, Cheevers, it got physical, like Olivia Newton John.

Physical, physical, on your face.

In the television presentation, the personality jumble took some 45 minutes, a vast opening scene in big the bar room--each character demanding the center of attention.

As the film ran on, it began to seem like a snuff film, running some two hours, thirty minutes in the television presentation on INSP.

Ayn Rand, and the Virtue of Selfishness and Capital.  A biopic that tells of the biography of her, and the philosophy that she extolled.  A second film chosen to begin the week of the 11th, looking like a woman that went against the grain in her homeland, and came to make money, extolling career as the top priority, even as she made 30 cents a day, but she rose like the cream in the churn generally does--Horatio Alger and all--and she lived her philosophy.

Selfishness: A Virtue, and all, At Last Snugged, We The Eleven, The Spigot, in the dull tongue of the innerweb.  The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and all, writing in fictions, going in circles and all, and what had really grabbed me about Atlas Shrugged, was counting how many men Dagny Taggart slept with, she like a Kimberly Guilfoyle blueprint, and not a Paul Ryan role model, a kind of pookah of the 90th percentile and all.

I felt that, that 30-cents-a-day and putting career above all--Objectivism, and all,  AAA batteries here, and the jump start box and all; in fact, I saw it in lesser writings, "--to rise above it all--", bootstraps and all, that, that they say.

I lived some of that bullsh*t some early day, some 1995, 1996, talking about the ideal of various things, holding that up like a banner, a totem, a rasion d'etre, and all, and doing that, while subjecting, submitting to the everyday, of which the two rarely fed into one another.  The purest Romanticism, merely concepts and all.

And later in the Polksa Cowboy Operas, The French Palace, the hero, head-shot, bleeding, in a cheer, and the defaced saloon girl love interest, and the hero died quietly, off-screen, away from the focus, head fall back, looking through a hole in the roof at the signage higher above--

French Palace.

Not "Vienna's" like in Johnny Guitar, but the fricking French Palace.

Cactus Root and the Man of Bitter Fruit.

Ya'at'eeh.

Man from Big Water? 

Him scooch from beyond Big Water, then make hot foot from the gray shores of what the "white ass person" call the water the Atlantic.

Some call this legendary frontiersman Cactus Root.

Him heap full of unsound word.  Word of nothing much in particular, and then we also begrudge him to take part when the drum start, hold knives to his throat so he no culturally appropriate our tribal dances.

We laugh, and him see our teeth when we laugh, and him think we think he dentist, and he look into our maws.  Guffaw, guffaw, our breath-wind soundless laughing exhalations, our teeth, our plainsman toothsome laughing.

He hand us good medical IOU from business office, 12/hr staffer using stick in sand to scribe an invoice: financial burden for medicine that heap bad; him fee to recoup losses in receivable monies from simply staring aristocratically at our mouths.  Like the 400 dollar per hour IBM pony in Frankfurt--Floating Cloud and others put that one at standstill, tossing snowballs into its open, sucking mouth.

Him trade blankets and fire water for our maple syrup; and mind this blanket and firewater, strangely familiar--like when squaw pass toolbox to elder, and elder distribute to other braves, then other brave, to the chief here, and this, a gift.

Recycled?  Repurposed?  Alchemy?  Trash?

Other Man from Big Water put his scrotems in the gopher's mouth.  From the money bag he hide in pants.  He sweat on short grass--he sweat, turn pink then red--red like chief--in mid-afternoon sun, when his secretary catch him off, him make deposit, making stupid game with prairie dogs and gophers.

Other Man, we call him Man of Bitter Fruit. Him and him valet, Humpty-Bumpty-Stumpty and the Singing Woman--big noise, all of them, no sand in their words.  Singing Woman on a mission, a spirit-quest, to cycle through every man in her nation, and she, like St Paul or John Calvin say that each, after she has sampled their produce, she claim each one is unworthy, and bad.

Intl. Women's Day, and some "film festival", sponsored by Uncle Bingo's Bald Cream and Knob Butter.

 

 

March 8 was International Women's Day.

As per the good book, "be prepared to give a reason for your hope".  And that, indulging hope and so forth, as the Ides of March approach, good old Bette and Cassiopeia.  "Methinks yon Cassie has a lean and hungry look."

Turner Classic Movies is doing a dual focus with women's month and the Oscars, putting mostly the Oscar films in prime time, and squeezing Bette Davis and other classic actresses into the obscure hours.  To some observers, such a relegation would seem a kind of minimizing effort, but wait, the obscure hours are the haunts of some of TCM's most ardent supporters....  some 9 am in the morning or something.

To get the blood flowing on my own little itinerary, a documentary about Barbara Stanwyck.

Weekend of Friday 8 March: Barbara Stanwyck.

Weekend of Friday 15 March: Maureen Ohara

Weekend of Friday 22 March: Katherine Hepburn

Friday, March 8 2024: Crime of Passion.

Previously I had seen some of Barbara Stanwyck's early efforts in film, as a "babyface": a fresh young beautiful face on the silver screen, and even a movie called Babyface, but here she's somewhere in transition in terms of screen persona, in Crime of Passion, opposite Sterling Hayden(more on him later).  Its that profound thing of life experience, a kind of mental tarnish that takes the innocence and beauty and turns it into a bronze luster and duller still daydreams of simply holding on to those regular moments: maturation.

Sterling Hayden in the mix, that cave man glare, the simplistic boom of voice.  A basic kind of hard stone of a man, like when Sterling Hayden brick-walled Peter Sellers's RAF officer....

I called Crime of Passion the "price of cabbage" in my notes on this one.  Its a variation of the yellow wallpaper, I suppose, that a woman's vibrant and active mind is turned asunder by marital concerns.  She's not co-opted or taken charge of, specifically, as in the Yellow Wallpaper; she willfully gives up a brilliant career as an up and coming journalist for the sake of her husband.  He becomes her focus, and with all that time and talent of her left idle, she begins to invent some unique, but morally bankrupt, ways to advance the career of her beloved.

Caveman Sterling Hayden is perfect as the good-guy working-stiff detective.  He's a less caffeine-fueled version of Donnie Wahlberg's detective character on CBS's Blue Bloods, but nevertheless, smart or dumb, he's honest.

However.

His wife envisions him growing in his job, not only becoming better at the work, but advancing higher into the chain of command.  She attaches that, staples it to his mental chicken, and stakes her hopes that the man's value is in his work status, and not in other things.

Mind that his character explains that the police job is just a means to make a wage, and that it doesn't define him.  Consider, if he feels that way, then maybe he hasn't giving his best to the job, if it doesn't own some of his pride, some of his identity.

The film asks the question that a lot of us have wondered about from time to time, "who ordered this Lox and cream cheese on a bagel"?

Saturday March 9: The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers.

Martha Strangelove(Martha Smith/Ivers) in Barbara Stanwyck, and a young Kirk Douglas as "supporting cast".

Sunday March 10, 2024.

Perhaps one of the best of the cable television experiences, is numerical channel surfing, just like we did for decades before streaming and the absences of numbers of the television remote controls.

So there I was, full of unction...

"flipping" from The Redhead From Wyoming on INSP, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Turner Classic Movies.  Redhead, was a new one to me, while Cat was beloved and familiar.  Mere appetizers and afterthoughts during my little Gal's Month revue.

...she just brushes through--does the redhead in the low-cut saloon girl dress, turned horse meat monger, cattle baroness- lightly scraping against the felicities of some cowpokes, and that with its jealousies and infatuations alternating in such a way as to produce dull violence amongst several big ranches, the local police, the state courts, and a candidate for governor.

She's Cattle Kate, is Maureen Ohara.  And she has to struggle some to get, not exactly far ahead, but to just to keep her place with the ranch.  And the struggle, Cheevers, we relate to that.

On Productivity(The Productivy Corridor): Disparities Between Brent and Vincent.

On the local level, there is a certain mindset.  Brent is our case study for sake of making a point.

Brent works part-time.  And having that part-time job is worth a kind of social credit, despite the lack of funds in the bank account.  The little job earns Brent a kind of respect among the mainstream of the locals.  Social cache.

Yet Brent is below the poverty line.  Nevermind the term "time millionaire", Brent living his best life engaging in various cultural activities and socializing with friends at his leisure.

Vincent is basically the polar opposite of Brent.

Good old Vincent, a Yank, born into a family that owned a convenience store, Vincent began to work for his father during his teenage years.  Imagine that Vincent learned to manage his time during that period, as he made room for work, schooling and all the other.  

But there was a niggle that began to grow, a sort of obsession with getting on the clock, working when he could, so that he might earn.  He might forsake some of that regular teen stuff in order to make some money.

Vincent learned small business during that time, and he fed that obsession with being productive, with earning.

I personally came up with a sort of scattershot approach, putting my eggs in several baskets.  Despite that the totals of each basket grow slowly, they do grow, and in the end, where one person, like Brent, will have a half-full basket, and yet others might eventually have one full bucket, I would find that I had slowly filled not one bucket, but several.

So I organize an hour with the pomodoro, and do time-blocking for the daily, which is segmenting various subjects into various blocks of time, usually each block an hour or two, important meetings with Chris Hale and Seth Adams, and so forth.

But the week?  The scale of so many days?

It gets a variation of the Eisenhower Matrix, a four part grouping of squares of varying distinction, does the week.  I take artistic license here like so many productivity pundits who each claim to have invented the Eisenhower Matrix.

What I've done is segmented the week into large pieces of time that I divide into pieces in an Eisenhower Matrix, four parts, of varying importance, just the way Ike would.

Those pieces might be 400 dollars a day for some weird analytics, or 2 dollars an hour in the spare time, stuffing envelopes at half-attention while on Zoom with Chris Hale.

You could call it quick hands, or perhaps busy hands, just the way Vincent would, but with the pomodoro's enforced leisure periods mixed in.  That even making a grocery list for Seth Adams demands its own leisure time added into the substance of the time, like Bentonville's "2 hours on" earning "15 minutes downtime".

We're talking seat-time and the economy variously of attention and other demands, such as mental energy.

Imagine a neat little row of bean sprouts.

Each bean, less than cent in cost, acquired almost as worthless waste material, and then placed lovingly into cups.

What did we do?  Did we get a business loan?  Did we buy Facebook ads?  Did we design influencer content?

No.

We did the core business of putting small dashes of nourishing water into each cup.

And what happens, eventually?

A penny spent in December.  A few minutes spent in care.  A squirt here and there.

It spawns a few meals in the later seasons of the year.

Vincent the obsessed Yankee hustler takes something like this to a further extreme, saying that he doesn't spend his first million on a "f*cking Bugatti", but instead uses the money to hire a team of employees to grow his own business interest, cementing his income stream, multiplying, compounding, feeding his obsession for the concept of business.

In the same sense, that modern entrepreneur mind is pitched the 5 percent interest bearing checking account, earning some low amount, but feeding that dream of someday having the passive income, some subsistence amount earned trouble-free on all that sweat and negativity from the daily hustle.

I think the new American dream is somewhere between the Meta content planner calendar and the interest-bearing online checking account.....

 

People with two lives, plus a goatmonger and one his charge; Futnuckery.

the life one has v. the life one wants.   Invariably to attend to one, does no service to the other, as of the sunflowers and the Christogenic inner sunshine--these need our mental energies, our attention, in order to thrive, but we have to choose between the two over and over again, and choose wisely, at that.  

"The Life One Wants" is as much a thirsty little plant that calls us away from the ordinary, the things in front of us everyday, and it can become a demon, in its hunger, being in the balance a full, heart-felt love letter of negligence to our regular lives.

A good dream can make us vital, can push it and we can use it as a fuel, a tonic, that helps us in our real lives.  A pain that verges on pleasure that keeps us awake, it could be, or something that makes us cognizant of not, The Way Things Are, but The Way Things Should Be(as of the dreams of inventors, civil rights pioneers, and hobbyist bloggers).

But.  The Life One Has, is it as changeable, is it as easy to form or re-form as it is the dream?  Can we just imagine something new in to that world?  Dare we?

Dare we not just suffer along in the everyday world, while wasting our best spiritual energies on daydreams, idling away in impossibility, rather than churning the cream, doing our knitting work, to manifest the thing, The Way It Might Aught To Be?

One of my various personalities was that of a fledgling bluesman, Fatfish, picker of the acoustic blues, owing nothing in particular to any subset of the genre, and likewise finding himself unclaimed on the part of any of those others.  There was a thing, an artistic expression, "The Goat Farmer".  

Read on, if you have the sand to read on.

One of those "goats" was an alcoholic.  A man of public schooling, a tradesman, skilled labor, and an alcoholic.  Mind, so many would say, "oh, that's the alcoholic" as if he were a lost cause, a lost soul; and yet I knew him to be not quite dead in his own time, having spirit and vitality.  What others dismiss as something to be ignored, I could find a sort of level of friendship.  He could even make human-like sounds in conversation, and we would sometimes trade cigarettes, and variously give a ride to the convenience store.  It might shock the Pharisee to realize he was as much as almost human.

At home, his friend was a wandering neighborhood mutt, but his pride was a bought pure-bred, some Alaskan species.  Beer and Louis L'Amour novels, and on the best occasions, to pamper himself beyond servicing his alcoholism, cooking a batch of fried chicken and biscuits for himself and his purebred.

He was unmarried, actually divorced, with several children, and it was the thing of Jesus broadcasting the mustard seed transposed into the real world: that some of his seed fell on fertile ground and thrived, while yet other was carried away by predatory birds, and finally some dried upon stony soil, never becoming much of anything.

We come to the point where we realize that if we could not extract some sort of lessons from our past, then it was lost time, neutered, and useless in pushing forward.  Both the Daily Life and the Daydream of old could be a sort of data that we put through the sieve of our own intellects in producing something yet more ugly than those dull hours, something of a horrid blueprint, of something wretched that we idealistically and romantically refer to as "a blueprint of the future".

That past dataset and the dubious, incredible agenda of the future, I sometimes refer to as "futnuckery".

mathematics is but a method of describing nature.....

Some trick, slight of hand, the pattern and number of the petals on a sunflower, and the light, that beautiful source, the arrangement something in itself, some {1, 3, 7, 15.....}.

 

Naturally occurring like that syrup-goo slathered Celine Dion cassette in her glove box, Fibonacci sequence.

 

Also, as a friend reminds: 3, 6, 9, the goose drank wine!

 

Not the Creeping Chaos of the odd half-addition, half-multiplication of the natural universe, but instead the opposing, not like the neural pathways growing and all that, rerouting and splicing, forking off into an almost never-ending set, a large set of numbers, infinite but for our lack of comprehending such a sum.  Like the Meta dataset.  The increasing tonnage of cat videos online.  They say of Meta, they have more than a lifetime of metrics in their system, that no humans would have enough time and inclination to ever effectively parse that....

no human.... but a cold, indelicate intelligence might....

That Russian Winter of Old Age, losing the faculties of the mind, yet growing more and more in emotional maturity and common sense.  Decreasing almost infinitely towards zero, even between whole number one and zero, trailing more and more fractional components, ever decreasing in numerical size, quantitatively, but increasing in complexity.

Reeks of high school, oh my brothers.

The inverse of Abraham Maslow, the corrupting of the FDA food pyramid, the difference between say an orange and a tiny truffle, size inversely proportional to caloric content, the whole work reaching not to RA, per se, past the Walmart, the benches at the library, and all, the FBI training center, not that, instead but death, and the infinite open sky is but an expression of some kind of dispersion, in which we but hear something of an A.M. signal, with much noise interference, as we gaze back languidly on the wreckage of the earth.

Contra-indications.  

 

Pro-growth capitalism, racing to keep the stock vibrant in the eyes of the trader, beating inflation by the total of some 7-10 percent... 

 

....and Megyn Kelly telling the story of the boy chased by the mongoose... 

 

I'll sue her pants off; tell her an even better story.

 

Mechtilda of Magdeberg, the universe whispering that white noise, that breeze sound of indefinite existence.