It's Raining Again - The Farmers Say They Don't Need No More Of It

I parked in front of the coffeehouse at 6:28. It wasn’t open yet – the sign was not lit, it was still in the dark inside , thou I could see someone moving about. I sat and waited. The dairy’s truck arrived. It was now 6:33 and I knew she would be busy for a while so I drove the block over to the other coffee shop. There I was greeted by the cheerful talkative young lady wearing her short shorts – she will eventually have a bunch of kids and get fat and lazy but right now she is cute and sweet.

The gentlemen of England judged all persons poor who did not command an income sufficient to keep them in leisure – Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation, 1944 p87 – in other words wage earners and any one else who has to work (who is not a member of the landed class) – if you are not a rentier (living off of your investments) you are poor – there are the wealthy and there are the poor. The middle class was an anomaly as we are beginning to discover on our own.

They are all salesmen
On their thankless roads
        To partial success
The home office is riding
        Their asses
But without quality assurances
        What can they do
They are told to rid yourselves
        Of their negativity
        Thank only of 'Yes'
        They have been told
That’s what individualism means
This ability to say Yes
Remove anything else
         From your minds
Don’t get spanked with your
         Competitor’s sign
Go out there and throw
          That wining punch
Let’s get with it boys!
Management always talks
          (as generals do too)
          As if it were their own blood
          That was being shed

The suspension of disbelief and the swift orientation to the passively received bombardment by unexpected visual stimuli may approximate aspects of the infant’s state of being – Michael Greenberg – New York Review of Books [March 11, 2010] p26

Americans view themselves as more hard working, more inventive and as more honest than do most foreigners view them. Americans view themselves as less rude and less violent than the residents of other countries view them. Curiously Americans also view themselves as more immoral than do others view them, but this may be because Americans thank of immorality as necessity for success, in other words as a positive characteristic (not hampered by nambi pambi ethical questions – or as the Nike likes to put it -  Just Do It)

Hour and hour / meeting against me / efficiently whipped cream / efficiently metropolitan chatter and snap, / transparent glistening wrapper / for a candy pack – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p34

There is either a substitutability for creativity nor stupidity

Love’s an encumbrance to them who rinse carefully before using, better / keep yourself to yourself – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p38

Both the Drs Spock and Seuss begin their careers in the leftist New York photo newspaper PM (the initials standing for Photo Magazine). The paper was funded by Chicago millionaire Marshal Field and accepted no advertising. Other contributors to the paper included: Erskin Caldwell, McGeorge Bundy, Heywood Hale Broun, I F Stone, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Tip O’Neile, Ben Hecht. Quit a newspaper. To bad no one read it (or at least enough of them to make a profit – even socialist activities must be self-supporting). That it accepted no advertising was not the problem – no leftist publication was ever been sustained by advertising (after all who is it that pays for advertising – maybe it will prove beneficial to move away from the advertising model for news – but somehow I doubt it). And in the Star it’s successor which only lasted for six months, Walt Kelly first published Pogo.

I do hear, but in a way I hear too much. I absorb everything equally, to a degree that becomes at times a real torture. How does one listen with no filtering system – Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia, 2007 p113

I don’t just jump around the room on one leg but also hopped around while masterbating – no one else came up with this particular method – it made my motivation coach proud – look at how many ways there are to get around the room – look how creative you all are – and indeed I was proud of my creativity. What did you learn today, my mother asked when I got home. And I told her about the motivational coach having us come up with as many ways of getting around the room as we could.

Daydreaming comes easy to the ill; / slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms, / you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper, / to drift among the magazines and plants, / feeling a strange love / for the time that might be killing you – Tony Hoagland – Donkey Gospel, 1998 p16

Failure is generally viewed as a lack of resolve – if more of the same had been applied, a better effort made, then the hump would have been transversed and the task would have been accomplished – any real recognition of structural failure is either hindsight or it is revolutionary – both the lack of resolve and revolutionary approaches to problem solving involve much misery, but only the former adds guilt, debts and failure to the mix. Revolution replaces failure with uncertainty. People do not like uncertainty, but they don’t like boredom either.

They won’t understand… / why we press our faces / deep into artificial flowers, ./ half-hoping to be stung by bees… Tony Hoagland – Donkey Gospel, 1998 p46