Another dusting of snow – I’m missing my wallet – I carry the loose bills in my front right pocket, so I can pay for my coffee – I carry my wallet in my front left pocket – It’s not there – I retrace my steps. No it’s not in the truck – I only hope that I failed to put into my pocket when I got dressed this morning. Yesterday it was the glasses. Last night Dave called, telling me he couldn’t find his hearing aides. God, its horrible getting old. But still I worry that it might have dropped out of my pocket – how will I know until I return home. Dave though he might have left them in his work clothes. I put them in the washer, I told him. In that case they might be fried. He said he had been told not to let them get wet – dry them immediately with a hair dryer. I told him I would check the pockets of the clothes in the washer when I got home. It is not the first time they have been lost – once Brenda threw them in the trash when cleaning the house – once he left them while working on Staci’s house (they were found that time). But at $3,000 a pair it is a clostly mistake. And this time I might be partially at fault – what should be my fair share - $$$ - when I got home I looked in the washing machine – they were not in there – I was relieved. Later I found them next to the computer. I just can’t remember where I might have left them. I called him and let him know he could stop worrying. Buy something cheep that you can show the Highway Patrol when they stop you (he’s required by DOT to have them). They do not have a field test for hearing aides (and you can always claim you didn’t know they were broke). You have plausible denial with your hearing unlike sobriety. Lock them away and use them only for your DOT examination. Oh God, two old bachelors – stereotypical old farts. I called my little sister for her birthday – how old are you know, fifty-five? Fifty-six, she said.
Cognitive fluency is a process of getting a lot of data in under the radar
The real question is not how we can keep things the way they are but how we’ll survive and maybe even thrive, on a hotter planet – Spencer Reiss – Wired (Dec 2009) p3
Blogging and commenting on bloggs among teens and young adults has declined by 50% in the last three years. Among the same age group usage of social network web sites has increased while daily usage of those same sites has decreased. 58% of 12 year olds now possess their own cell phones.
I climbed the towering walls but did not sack the town. / I yoked the steeds but did not mount the car. / Acting, I did not act. Completing, I did not complete. / Achieving, I did not achieve. Doing, I didn’t – Theognis
GCOIN or Global Counterinsurgency is the new term for what George W Bush had called the “Global War on Terrorism”. GCOIN downplays much of the religious and ideological associations with the war on terror and allows the “War on Drugs” to be rolled with the “War on Terror” into a single concept – that of restoring rule over “lawless” or “ungoverned spaces” (I suppose it can also be applied to pirates). Plan Colombia is being touted as the poster child of this concept replacing Iraq as the GCOIN marquee. “Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like in our best dreams”. We need to take a closer look at Colombia and see what this may mean. What Plan Colombia really means is a return to the “Banana Republics” where large landholders seize land from the peasants and use it to grow cash crops for North America (in this case commercial crops like palms that can be used to produce ethanol and of course drugs).
Plan Colombia has financed the opposite of what is taking place in neighboring Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, where progressive movements are fitfully trying to ‘refound’ their societies along inclusive lines – Grey Grandin – The Nation [Feb 8, 2010] p10
Factoid: Only 19 of the world’s 195 countries have no US military personal stationed on their soil. About one third of the US military forces are stationed outside the United States. The US spending on defense exceeds the spending of the rest of the entire world
America goes on, goes on / Laughing, and Harding was a fool. / Even his big pretentious stone / Lays him bare to ridicule – James Wright – Collected Poems, 1971 p121
We cause so much misery trying to establish a (the) reality
Our maps have grown less speculative, less interested in elemental possibilities of the Earth’s skin, and that suggests that the Earth has lost its capacity to keep Secrets. We tend to look at them [maps] for what we want to avoid, rather than for what, in good fortune, we might discover – Robert Penn Warren
Grandpa did
Gandma did smoke too
Set her apron on fire
With a corncob pipe
The chimney smokes
Badly. That’s what
The damper is for
Asshole
Don’t let the smoke
Get in your eyes
Don't let the dogs
Catch you among
My watermelons
The smoke of the lamp
Sooted the roof
He peeled away
And his tires smoked
That pile of old tires were smoking
Sending a dark cloud
High into the sky
Wannta a smoke? Sure, I replied
Where there is smoke
He lit me up
There’s fire
The Smoky Mountains boys
In their prime
And the Dixie Chicks
Smoke!
Smoking! He said and was gone
In a blur
A computer simulation of the soot
From burning forest fires resulting
From a nuclear exchange
Makes it possible to conceive that
A large meteor might have
Caused the dinosaurs' extinction
There’s nothing / we can’t pluck the stinger from / nothing we can’t turn into a soft-drink flavor or a T-shirt – Tony Hoagland – Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
The chance of autism increases with the age of the mother. It also increases with the age of the father and his age makes the most difference with young mothers. Mothers older than 40 were 50% more likely to have a child with autism than were mothers in their twenties. There is also a correlation with the age of the father and the his son’s cognitive abilities
The yellow-bearded winter of depression / Is still alive somewhere, an old man / counting his collection of bottle caps / in a tarpaper shack under the cold trees / of my grave – James Wright – Collected Poems, 1971 p124
One should be weary of any term that was not originated by a poet. Only poets care nothing about your trust.
There is parody only in relation to an authenticity… There is caricature only in reference to a non-degraded form, words lie only to those who are haunted by the truth of words – Raymond Federman – The Twoflod Vibration, 1981 p63
Factoid: Up to 45% of the traffic in Manhattan is generated by cars circling the block looking for an available parking space. In one year cars looking for parking in one small business district in Los Angeles burn 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produce 730 tons of carbon dioxide
Nobody knows us and we don’t know anybody, so we need to send out signals about who we are that can be instantly understood – Ned Niedziecki – The Peep Diaries, 2009 p147
Someone looking like Leslie is in a day dreaming mood as she walks towards me along the sidewalk up ahead. It is she. “Hey Leslie” “Oh Hi” she replies, “I was just tripping along thinking how great it was to be walking down the streets of San Francisco. I was just thinking that I never see anybody that I know on these streets”. “ I am thinking of the shellfish we ate under starlight last night at the cafe in the alley and I speak about Amelio’s in New York’s Greenwich Village with it’s patio surrounded by a wall that was topped with broken glass bottles to keept the prowling neighborhood cats out of the restaurant, and how you got to the patio by going through the kitchen and how I have spent the intervening thirty years looking for as good a meat ball sandwich as I had gotten there. It was just opposite of where Bleaker Street ended not far from Washington Square and you go through the restaurant (but I had already said that) and its kitchen and emerge into this great tree enclosed patio. I always ordered a house red wine and a meat-ball sandwich.. It was probably not the meat balls themselves but the space and the warm New York City nights and the cats and of course my youth. So now I sit at Happy Donuts with a eighty-five cent chocolate covered buttermilk waiting for happy hour to begin next door.
It’s now probably after 4PM but I have not yet finished my pastry. I had been interrupted by stopping to write this. The man next to me asks what time it was. He too has been waiting for happy hour next door. He leaves and walks up the street combing his hair. He wants to look his best for his favorite time of the day. He will have two or three one-dollar half pints. I have seen him in here before. He always has a light beer in a half-pint glass. I’ve never seen him have anything darker than an Albatross or Shanghai. I do not wait to finish my donut before heading over to the brewery. I did not come to eat donuts but to drink beer. The old man is there at the end of the bar, his regular place. I take a seat. Josh is behind the bar. He serves too later arrivals and starts to serve a third. I interrupt him. “I’ve been waiting a while” I announce. “IPA” he asks? I never drink IPA. I order a Doppel Weisen. Pint or Glass?, Josh asks. Still annoyed at the service I inadvertently say “Pint” not realizing what I had asked for before it had one plunked down in front of me. It’s too late to change the order. He was already in the process of helping another customer - the guy that I had rebuked Josh for serving ahead of me. The customer snidely remarks “I didn’t know that there was a line here.” Yes, he is right, but there is protocol – a bartender is suppose to look out for his regulars, the ones who regularly leave him a tip.
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