The Little Dog Grieves and the Little Lady Gets Her Own Place - It's a Struggle To Make it All Work

The dog has this thing it does where it snaps its neck up and snaps its jaw shut making a clacking noise like it was trying to catch a fly but it does even in the dark. It may have eaten something that it is trying to regurgitate like a cat does with a hairball but no it’s not that either – its annoying and I kick it out of  bed. No I think it is grieving. Missing its mistress who packed her clothes in the car and is gone. Maybe it was wrong to have kicked her out of bed.

Violence, in the hands of the people isn’t violence; it’s justice – Juan Peron

Extortion: first they
      Make you pay them
      Then their friends
And if you are unable
They’ll arrange for it
       With the loan sharks
They have a contract out
        On your life
Who are they anyway
As if you really didn’t know

The truth of memory struggles against the memory of truth. Years have passed, the dead and the hatreds pile up; exile is a cow that can give poisoned milk – Juan Gelman – Unthinkable Tenderness: selected poems, 1997 p57

I get a refill. It’s a struggle to get to the counter. A woman has joined the group – the only one. Fans are still arriving. They occupy every chair in the place. They are sitting on tables. Every available chair that could be dragged in from the laundry or out front has been brought in this small space. It standing room only in the back and there are many. The game has resumed. Ossama turns the volume level back up. Tunisia just scored - there half a dozen Tunisians in the room. Fans from both Tunisia and Morocco seem to get along – unlike Moroccans and Algerians who had to be segregagted.

[He] didn’t have the ugliness of an exploiter because his own state of degradation put him on level with the natives and made him sympathically picturesque. But this was a colonial situation, nevertheless – Christopher Isherwood – Christopher and His Kind: 1929-1939, 1976 p32

Politics is the art of re-alignment

But what was hard / Was when you got a snoot full and all you can think to say starts with s / And you know damn well you’re a good guy and you’ll never meet a dame / Who really has your address, who can really dot your t’s and cross tour I’s // Come back when it’s old homeweek in this particular hell / And you can bum enough nickels to take the fallen angels out – Kenneth Patchen - Collected Poems, 1969 p131

The woman is given a seat - in the corner by herself. She good naturally becomes the sole occupant of the women’s section. The trash can had to be moved to create her separte space. She made a few gestures of protest and then assumed her honored throne. One young man offered Linda a seat in the ladies section. She declined saying that she already had a place in the laundry room.

In as much as men and women / in their infinite goodness / believe in God / is it possible that God / in his infinite goodness / believes in men and women believes in me / right now when my heart is purple with sadness – Juan Gelman – Unthinkable Tenderness: selected poems, 1997 p121

Only the psychopath is capable of living the good life

Most people…think of words as stones, as great unmovable objects with no life, as monads that never change – Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy, 1990 p90

How much time is left on the clock. The man next to Yousef says “exactly thirteen”. It is now 7:40AM. There is now only one minute and twenty second to go. No its one minute and twenty seconds into the fourth quarter. The game ended. Tunisia won. By 8:10 - the café has been cleared out and they say “its all back to normal now”

Experience only teaches us how one event constantly follows anther, without instructing us in the secret connectdion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable – David Hume – An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

There is no need to choose your enemies – they will choose you

THE DELUDED: hope fails us often / grief; never / that’s why some think / that known grief is better / than unknown grief. / they believe that hope is illusion. / they are deluded by grief – Juan Gelman – Unthinkable Tenderness: selected poems, 1997 p167

Two groups filed lawsuits against the city for violating state law defining a marriage as between a man and a woman. They were told to return to court on Tuesday to seek a temporary restraining order. City Hall will be open today from 10Am to 4PM and for the rest of the three-day weekend for ‘anyone’ to get a license to marry. 590 same sex couples had been married. The words ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ have been crossed out on the licenses and the phrases ‘first applicant’ and ‘second applicant’ have been substituted. Technically I should have said I had been abandoned among the gay ‘second applicants’. PC language sounds so bureaucratic – why is that – without any mystery or romance.

The whole problem is to find out which is God and which is the Devil. And the one sure guide is that God appears always unreasonable, while the Devil appears always to be noble and right. God appears unreasonable because He has been put in prison and driven wild. The Devil is conscious control and is therefore reasonable and sane – Christopher Isherwood – Christopher and His Kind: 1929-1939, 1976 p2

History is all incidentals but nevertheless well written

You smell of double humanity, the one that murders and the one murdered. / Centuries have passed, and the beauty of the vanquished rots your brow – Juan Gelman – Unthinkable Tenderness: selected poems, 1997 p85

Factoid: One fourth of all items of sports wear sold in the US (by value) is branded with a logo from the NBA, NFL, MLB or NHL ($13 billion of a total market of $55 billion)

The alternative to government for the sake of big business isn’t government for the sake of big government - Drew Weston – The Nation (Oct 19, 2009) p7

The City Hall Café has never before sold so much Champagne. The city has hauled in $50,000 in wedding fees. It’s a new all time record.