Thursday, April 30, 2015
The Make a Pass Foundation
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Stupid Democrats
Monday, April 27, 2015
Let Them Eat
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Monkey Gone to Hell
There is no determinism. Nothing is written. By God, that is. We write it ourselves. We write our own history.
We create our own world.
Heaven is us. Hell is us. It's a choice we make. I'll prove freewill by writing "this." This. "That." That. "Snarfawunkle."
Snarfawunkle.
Do you want hell? Fine, go to hell, but don't take me with you.
I want heaven.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Corn Flakes
It Doesn't Flush
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Note to Self: Get a Grip
Cruel Girl
Vickie. The name makes me reach out to steady myself. She was a girl I knew, beginning maybe in fifth grade. She had a talent for cruelty. Maybe a genius.
That was Vickie. She changed lives. She changed mine. She seemed to mark a new era in a large family, pre-Vickie and post. They were a nice family, once.
But after Vickie had her way they would knock you down and take you out, find a weak spot and slash away at it. They would remember every humiliation.
You would be reminded of every defeat. And, man, the look of pleasure in her eyes, the celebratory glee, when she'd caused harm. Insiders were rewarded.
Outsiders punished. It was like a little mafia. If you were outside you wanted to be out of range, to be safe. Even the mother participated. I was surprised.
I thought parents were above that. This is not the sort of thing you tell people all over the place. Why would you? I've told only one person. Was Vickie a prodigy?
You have no idea, as a kid, what's normal and not. I assumed normal. My confidant was stunned at the specifics of the sorts of things Vickie said, pointing at prodigy.
I had been friends with the family. I was an insider for a time and then not, but I knew my sister had suffered horribly from some attacks at school. It was Vickie.
And here I became an insider, unwittingly adding to her hurt. I think all this just happens. There are brilliantly cruel people. They strengthen some people.
They destroy others. Which am I? I don't know.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
I Want to be a Genius
Idolatry, Superstition and Fetishism
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Time (The Revelator, My Ass)
Friday, April 17, 2015
Rejoice!
Republicans have found a cure for baldness and an antidote for anthrax: tax cuts for the rich. You can bet your retirement on it. You already did. They bet it for you.
Munchkin-proof
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Name Your Gods
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Plant a Tree On Me
Why anyone would want to be buried in anything other than a pine box, I don't know. Let 'em eat me, the critters and microbes, that's what I say, and plant a tree on me, with maybe a wooden cross which will last long enough that they won't accidentally dig me up with an excavator or run a ditch witch through me while I have flesh on the bone.
Then nothing. That seems to me the most honest expression of our existence. We do live on for a while, viscerally, through those who have known us, and then that's it. We are no more, without preservation, and I don't want to be hermetically sealed in anything. Let 'em eat me, I repeat, before I get this notarized for the benefit of my heirs.
Lies The Koch Boys Told Me
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Men For Any Season
Friday, April 10, 2015
This Is Me Getting My Ass Kicked...
Me at Krakatoa mid-eruption. Me on the beach with the tsunami coming in. Me at Chernobyl catching some rays. Me being pissed on by Republicans.
Where do you draw the line between unavoidable catastrophes and man-made destruction? It's all gone fuzzy. There's man-made as in individually, and man-made collectively. Man-made as in planned and intended and man-made as in unintended, or collateral, damage.
Unconsciousness is a hard thing to get your head around. And unconscious intent, wanting something and not knowing you want it. I've been there, though it wasn't so much unconscious as a shadow personality you want to get rid of but can't, semi-integrated with your "real" self.
My shadow self wanted to suffer, to go through some wrenching experience and come out the other side shot of grief. I wanted it to be the way it used to be, before a sense of loss became a part of my life. Firstly, you can't get there. You are already changed forever.
Secondly, you don't want to get there. You are, potentially at least, a better person because of it: more compassionate, kind and emotionally complex. How does all this play out in a collective sense? I don't know. But I'll bet a bundle there's a collective, repressive unconscious.
Not archetypal stuff but a level or two up from that, a shared version of what I just described, a group of people in flight from themselves, irresponsible corporate actors. What would it look like if there were a doppleganger version of Disney World based on Dick Cheney's psyche?
Shudder. The thing that has changed is this, simply and undeniably: our ability to destroy stuff, meaning we can now wreck the whole world. We aren't programmed for this possibility. We are programmed for the power version of a budget constraint which isn't there.
Not anymore. We are way too powerful for our own good, strange as that sounds. This is the objective, to integrate that awareness into our collective consciousness and have it play out in our behavior. The whole of humanity needs to go in for analysis. I know, I know.
Dick won't have it, but couldn't we try? We bring our kids up with Disney World and then shunt them off into Cheneyland. If Cheneyland is our dark side, so be it, but we need to own it and integrate it or it'll be some petty tyrant running things from behind the curtain.
Back with the curtain, Toto! The Dicks of the world must have their due.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
I Love Apricots
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
The Imploding Naugahyde Noninevitable
Brother Flanagan Reporting for Duty
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Dugout
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Take Away
Fussing around today, Easter Sunday, I came upon a cache of old pictures and was quickly taken back more decades than I like to think possible. I have been very fortunate in my life but also endured a spell of real bad luck, which I can first date to when I was twelve.
My sister had begun a meltdown by then which lasted the rest of her life. She died a few years ago in New York City and had been living in an utter shithole and working as an intermediary in the prostitution business. She was brilliant and stunningly good at a number of things.
If I were to try to sum up my life as I just did my sister's I have no idea what I would say. I have probably under-realized my potential but I'm pretty sure I opted not to go down that road in my late teens. Not to define myself in that way, I mean. Occasionally I think you have moments of insight.
I once saw a totally unrestrained and probably spoiled child in a grocery and thought "shit, it's me." My incredibly nice parents had been wanting a child for fifteen years when they had me and had lost a full-term, perfectly formed baby years earlier. They had adopted my sister two years before I was born.
They may not have had the heart to discipline us enough, meaning my sister and me and my brother who came along after me. More bad luck followed my sister's falling apart, in the way of sickness and death, and it all came back looking at those pictures. I'm curious about all this.
But at the same time I kind of don't care. I mean I'm curious but not looking for some revelation. I read a book by a priest years ago. He thought that the parables were the most important part of the Bible, thematically and structurally, and that the most important of these was the one about the seed and sower.
What does it say? Shit happens. Get over it. So that may be the wisdom of the Bible, succinctly, and I'm okay with it. The philosophers and physicists seem to me to agree, though more: "Shit is happening, be cool with it." Okay, I'm cool. Cool right now and at peace, thankful for all the wonderful love I got as a child.
And sorry for any bratty, grocery store behavior I had a hand in. And any ongoing bratty behavior, for those of you who know me now. It takes an enormously forgiving heart to carry on well in life, I think, firstly toward yourself, then toward life itself and the indescribable strangeness of it.
Was that a heckler? Something about my own indescribable strangeness and would I please shut up? I can take that.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Days of Wine and Roses
Art Pope is having a ball in North Carolina. Who knew you could buy a state. You could see it coming, though. For a few decades things that were once named for worthy citizens or communities or anything other than living, wealthy individuals have been named for money.
Schools, arenas, you name it. Why not a state? Call it Roses or ThriftWorld or something, in honor of Pope. I like ThriftWorld. The whole School of Public Health at UNC was named for a rich guy. Let's get it over with and rename the state instead of chipping away at it piecemeal.
The Popists also fired the president of UNC and decommissioned the poverty center in a throwback to the days of segregation. There's no practical point to it. It's a primal display of power and an insult to their opponents. The most telling expression of power is the ability to be arbitrary.
So they're being arbitrary. You can see why the righties want guns, ones that are designed to kill people efficiently: to make sure the dispossessed can't fight back effectively. This is the old way. Different groups play by different sets of rules. It's not the rule of law but the law of the jungle.
Pope and his pals drink the intoxicating wine of racism and live in fear because they grow soft while the oppressed grow strong. The adversity produces strength no matter how much they try to ensure weakness. The dispossessed must be cowed. It's the only way they can be kept down.
That and being incarcerated. But Pope's day will come. He will reap what he has sown. The seeds of discord will eventually return home, to the fatass white boys who enforce oppression through their surrogates, henchmen and mercenaries. The racism is utterly real, not a tactic or a ruse.
Though they are too cowardly to fight their own battles the racism is inseparable from their being. They will die racists. Church-going racists. Self-righteous racists. Bible-quoting racists. Constitution-citing racists. Anonymous racists, in that they will deny it forever. It's their addiction.