Monkeys Charge a Service Fee for Picking Off Lice

Churchtalk – good natured bantering – like around the pot bellied stove – mild inoffensive insults easily laughed off (hee hee hee) – innoxious topics – reinforcing bonds like monkeys picking off each other’s lice – mutual grooming might have been an option but touching must be limited to hugging and hand shaking and maybe some back slapping (unless with your lawfully wedded spouse). I’d rather listen to half a cell phone conversation. And  all these smiles with every muscle of the face contracted at once  – its all so damn sticky – like pouring half a bottle of Mrs Buttersworth on your morning pancakes. It is not just limited to church but where ever thy gather in my  name. I’m so lucky to be working there. We have prayer meetings at the start of every day. He has been blessed by the Lord.

I was a member of a class whose money enabled me to benefit automatically from its institutions of robbers, to assume automatically its disguises of respectability. To my mind it appeared that there are two classes of robbers: the social and the anti-social – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p118

What a bureaucrat wants
That all the blanks be filled in
A word or phrase from a list
      No nonsense
This all makes sense under
      The circumstances
Whether true or not is of
No consequences
So long as no red flags
       Go up
Words, after all, had been
       Invented to occupy
The bureaucrat’s blank spaces

German youth which had been born into war, starved in the blockade, stripped by inflation – and which now, with no money, no beliefs and an extraordinary anonymous beauty, sprang like a breed of dragon’s teeth waiting for its leader, into the center of Europe – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p116

We are all donuts
     Dough around a hole

That runs through us
     From orifice to orifice
Nothing gets in us
Until it passes through
     The inside wall

Poetry was to use a language which revealed external actuality as symbolic inner consciousness – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p95

Walter was an industrial designer who just got fed up with Dilbert’s world and fifteen or twenty years ago he just up and quit a good paying job. Now he designs and builds store displays, signage, exhibits, etc. – all one off jobs that he can manage by himself – no assembly lines, no production workers to manage, no paperwork to file – even if it means no health insurance. He is my man!

It is possible in life to feel fairly good about nothing in particular – Jim Harrison - In Search of Small Gods, 2009 p59

The ‘Soup or Shuttle’ scheme crops up frequently. He also talks a lot about goats and accordions. He says its not that he likes goats or accordions per se but that he likes the idea of goats and accordions. His thinking is curlicue never in a straight line, never boring. His line of thought jumps from one concept to a variation of that concept to something analogous and then a variation of that – it goes from “Soup or Shuttle” to “Foil to Go”. I tried to interest him in “Phonus Interruptus” – a handheld personal device that would zap annoying cell phone usage (thay have something similar on Tokyo subway trains I tell him). I wanted him to design it (being an industrial designer afterall) – I though it enough to have originated the idea – no, he would have no part of it and got annoyed with me when I repeatly mentioned it – its not the thing itself that interests him but the idea of the thing.

What seemed petrified, overwhelming and intractable could be melted down again by poetry into their symbolic aspects. The fantasy at the back of actuality could be imagined, and the imagination could create its order – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p95

An old man with a white beard, blue stocking cap and umbrella slung over his shoulder is beating on the pay phone on the sidewalk outside. Twenty minutes ago he had walked inside and asked me if there was a clock - or - if I knew what time it was. I looked over at the clock on the wall and told him “4:30”. He said “is there a clock?” I said, “Yes” He asked “where?” I pointed towards it. He said “I don’t see one” “Right there” I said.  “Oh” he says “right there in front of me” and he walks out. Now he is mad and beating on the pay phone outside.

It is difficult to describe moods of intense depression, because they are, in their way, revelations and they pass away when what they revealed (overwhelmingly true as it seemed then) has vanished, been refuted by a different mood, and cannot be recalled – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p206

Who’s cool and who is not? Not the man with that big blocky goatee, black leather coat and a computer case. He has just walked across California on Fillmore and turned right and is now headed west on California. I had seen him on my way to the coffee shop and thought then that he was so un-cool. Being un-cool is attempting to satisfy an archetype of coolness and miserably failing at it. The harder one tries the un-cooler one is. Being cool is an effortless process (or at least the appearance of being without effort) of not being a member of the crowd. The more outrageous the style the more cool the person succeeding at it is. Otherwise he is a dork.

If success is corrupting, failure is narrowing – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p173

The parrots of Telegraph Hill are bedding down in the Yerba Buena Garden evergreens. Its too dark to see them except for an occasional ghostly image transitioning between trees. It’s their noise that gives them away not their gaudy plumage.

The moon passes into clouds / so hurt by the street lights / of your glance on my heart – Frank O’Hara – The Collected Poems of, 1994 p206