Learned Helplessness and Nausea in Cranky Monkeys in Deliperatly Induced Depressive States (Like Arizona)

The inability to rapidly turn the head is not only painful but nausea inducing as well – a feeling not unlike being sea sick – seeing something moving just out of range of sight and not being able to quickly turn and glance to see what it is – the man sitting out on the patio is waving his hand as he talks and smokes his cigarette, but all I see is a blur of motion, disjointed from any actual event – it is the same with the cars passing on the street as I write. The man sitting opposite the man on the pation is also smoking – a square jawed man with a dark blue shirt and tie, probably a salesman (either appliances or furniture). A local cop stops for his morning coffee and joins them and since I have to turn my head slowly or readjust my position, it looks like I am staring at them – this is so damn inpolite of me – and here it is I who is always complaining about the lack public civility, just like the cranky old man that I have become.

People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal growth as an accumulation of institutional outputs, and prefer what institutions ‘make’ over what they themselves can do – Ivan Illich – Tools of Conviviality, 1973 p68

A good writer occupies much space in many a commonbook

They speak through the mouth of machine guns / There flashing tongues / are bayonets… // Punish them O God / foil their politics / mix up their memos / block their programs // At the hour of the Alarm Siren / you will be with me / you will be my refuge on the day of the Bomb // You bless the righteous / who don’t believe in the lies of their ads / nor in their publicity and political campaigns – Ernesto Cardenal – Pluriverse, 2009 p80

Hedonists exclude a lot
They exclude me – old
Intellectual and poor

I don’t go somewhere to eat the stuff that arrives before the stuff I’ve gone to eat… Sod that. I’ll have a gin to get apptized up, merci - John Barlow - Everything but the Squeal, 2008p230

Happiness is not a measure
         Of how happy you are
Happiness is a measure
         Of how much harder one feels
         One needs to work
It is not an emotional state


The more you work the more money
You make the happier your are
         Or so the theory proclaims
Happiness is the opposite of being
         Discontent – It is not
         An emotional state – glade, joyful
                   Or gleeful – it’s sad to say


Happiness is making more money
         Than someone else
Happiness is making sure that
          One is surrounded by
          A lot of unhappiness


Oh God put an end to the status quo / tear out the fangs of the oligarchs / Let them be flushed away like the water in the basin / Let them wither like weeds beneath the weed killer – Ernesto Cardenal – Pluriverse, 2009l p81


A well groomed business Suite type walks into my coffee shop. He comes directly  up to me and says in a gruff voice, ,“You finished!” while gesturing to the newspaper that had been left by the prior customer. “Yep” I reply. He paws through it. He removes the sections of interest to himself - probably the sports and business. He takes his newly found treasure and exits. He has a big shinny black car parked at the fire hydrant. He gets in, turns left onto California and drives up the hill. Another customer looks over at me and gives me one of those “what the hell was that” looks and I say “he just walks in takes the paper and drives off”. And I guess that’s how those types  come to be rich.  But are the happy!

To be noble is to be your own experiment – Frederick Nietsche

Then it’s a well deserved burger and a beer at the San Francisco Brewery - A Grippman’s and a medium done burger with fries (I llike mayo with my fries). Jazz is on the sound system - a few customers are also having lunch. The Chinese handyman is replacing the burnt out light bulbs over the front door. He takes his ladder down to the basement. The bartender is washing glasses. The cook has just rung to indicate that my burger is ready. Burger up!

Modesty in method and objective is appropriate to the uncertain process of self-experimentation – Frederick Nietsche

She is having a Shanghai PA with her fires and  I  an drinking an Emperor Norton. Do you have Ranch? No, We have Blue cheese. Maybe. Yes. Plastic? . The woman with the Shanghai introduces herself to the bartender and extends her hand. The bartenders reciprocates. It is an awkard moment - first you are supposed to converse - chat the other up before you introduce yourself. Her companion also introduces himself. I don’t catch the names of either of them. Not that it matters much. The bartender goes back to work. I pay my bill. He picks up the condiments from the bar in front of me. The handyman in a white smock returns from the basement with a plastic gallon container full of cleaning fluid. The #12 Jackson bus waits at the corner of Jackson and Columbus. It pulls away. Jimmie Hendricks has superceeded jazz on the sound system. I finish my porter. “All along the watchtower…” Music loses it vitality once it becomes linked with a commercial.

Nature is ordered only to the extent to which its modes of being can be grasped analytically, by our Understanding – Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen – The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, 1971 p142

It’s red - the red of the Chinese woman’s felt coat. The red of a stoplight it is not. The woman in the seat in front of me on the bus reaches out and as inauspicassiously as possible gently strokes the matted texture of the fur coat of the woman in front. It had once been a fake fur but now looked like the bottom of a dried a dead racoon. I had wanted to do that too but she did it first and now  I wanted to ask her what it felt like – maybe a dead fish?

There is fire engine red which is not really red but for which we have no exact color name - except of course ‘fire engine red’. The red ‘don’t walk’ hand below the red stoplight is not red. It is an orange color. And yellow caution lights are not really yellow – they are amber which is a type of orange . And the white ‘walking man’indicating it's OK to croos the street, it seems to be kind of gray.

As the red hand flashes the fire control officers is counting down backwards starting at ten. I have a rule - never start across the crosswalk once the countdown reaches six. Here in San Francisco the white traffic lines demarcating traffic lanes stop before the crosswalk. In Los Angles they proceed through the crosswalk. There are obvious differences in planning priorities between these two cities.

An epoch in which purposes have been reduced to operations… in which people “raise’ consciousness, movements pretend to provide “liberation”; languages rather than persons are said to “speak”, and politicians “make revolutions” – Ivan Illich – Tools of Conviviality, 1973 p94

Wanda says that I like her orange rose because it’s the same color as my shirt. It is not.

I watch the French baker cross the street. He wears a brown apron.It looks like it could be leather but is probably not. The apron that reaches his knees and if he had been a blakcsmith it probably would have been leather.