I’m getting everything ready to leave town tomorrow – I bought some junk that I thought I might need (probably won’t). I loaded up the truck with all the stuff. I put gas in the tank – Get in little fellow – up up Yes, I’m speaking to you little dog. Wave good-bye. Bye bye. See you later. When you coming back? I shrug my shoulders – Don’t know, I reply. I don’t have an itinerary but the plan is to head in a southeasterly direction. Maybe I’ll make it as far as Cedar Key. Then I might head northward up the Appalachian ridge.
The source of our actions resides in our unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p6
Linda asks where is your green? Green, I go, is that today? Yes, she goes. I point out some green on my nautically themed shirt - Blue Heroshi like waves with a sort of a blue-green tint. This qualifies, I believe. Is this the 17th I ask? Yes, she goes. So I had written the wrong date in my journal. I look back at yesterday’s entry and then thumb forward and change today’s date from the 16th to the 17th. I have to be more conscious of time now that I have less structure.
32% of deaths resulting from US drone attacks since 2004 are to civilians. There were 45 drone attacks during the Bush administration’s eight years and there has been 51 in Obama’s first year alone.. Obama is afraid of not having an ongoing war. All recent Presidents have been afraid of peace. Can the Security State exist without war? Can we have a viable economy without growth?
That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate – James M Cain – Double Indemnity, 1943
On the road again – the little dog and I this time. We took our first hike along the trail of the abandoned Katy Railroad. Then I had to determine where to spend the first night-out. How about Knob Noster? The last time that I had planned to camp there before returning to Kansas City, but it was raining and instead I went straight back. God do I hate pitching a wet tent.I saw my first spring flower, a jonquil along the roadside. The shoots were already up three inches as I drove out of the driveway in Kansas City. Yesterday there had been no green even showing. The line between Winter and Spring is wavering. Instead of going to Knob Noster (twenty miles north), I turn south towards Bennett Springs – I hate to retrogress..
For the artist there is nothing but the present, the external here and now, the expanding infinite moment, which is flame and song. And when he succeeds in establishing this criterion of passionate experience… then, and only then, is he ascending his humanness – Henry Miller – The Wisdom of the Heart, 1960 p3
To remain nameless is to be incomplete
All things and even non-things
Have names
To be nameless is to be of no notice
Awaiting recognition
Even the marginalized have names
For names cannot be taken away
They can only be made to be insignificant
As when they are tattooed with numbers
On your arm
Owen Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. // Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you call for them? – William Shakespeare – Henry IV, Part One
The most mysterious of detective stories are not the ‘who-done-its’ but the ‘why-is-its’ – the mysteries that children want answers for and of which we can never provide adequate responses for we always call upon our store of conventional wisdom rather than our intuition. There is nothing more creative then to look at the world through a child’s eyes..
But not one poet has ever yet said / That there is no wisdom and no old age, / And that possibly there is no death – Anna Akhmatova – The Complete Poems, 1992 p421
This will be the first night back under canvas in over six months. It’s just like getting back on a bicycle (but not quite as good as sex). Thunderstorms are approaching. It will be a rainy night. Nicholas (I had not yet renamed him Trail Dog) jumped into bed with me when the thundering started to boom and he quivered. He hid under the covers. And when the storm let up he jumped back down. And then the thunder and lightning returned and he up he quickly came back up shaking again.
Loneliness was permeating. / It smells a little of tobacco, / of mice, of an open chest – Anna Akhmatova – The Complete Poems, 1992 p452
I wondered
As I wandered
These wonders
What if they are not facts
Just conjectures
That had seized
My imagination
And more importantly
Were they falsifiable
If they weren’t
They would not have even have been
Hypotheses
Supportable by empirical
Evidence
Which I did not yet have
But was attempting to gather
With the exception of the Greek skeptics and the Roman emperors of the Decadence, all minds seem enslaved by a municipal vocation. Only these two groups are emancipated, the former by doubt, the later by dementia, from the insipid obsession of being useful – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p15
Birds chirp, kids get onto school buses, the sun comes up, the grass greens
Some people of course expect / to be rewarded for stumbling / and rising from the floor / and stumbling again. But we give / no credit for living. We favor vitality / over goodness, even over effort – Stephen Dunn – What Goes On: selected and new poems, 2009 p144
My Breakfast Project has almost reached the end of the N-line. There is no place remaining to order a breakfast past 9th Avenue. I backtrack to Art’s Café on Irving. There still remain two more places to try: Howard’s on 9th and a place near Carl and Cole. Art’s is the old-fashioned style dinner with a counter with fifteen stools facing a grill where the hash is slung and the cook wear a grease stained white apron. It’s long and it is narrow. I order a hash melt - hash brown with melted cheddar and two eggs (scrambled) with coffee. There is one waitress, one cook and one dishwasher. They are struggling. They are trying to reduce overhead. I only get one jelly for my toast and I had to ask for a spoon. Art’s Coffee (it’s not Art the person’s coffee – he is probably long dead – its Art’s the Café’s coffee) meets the minimal standards for being called coffee even with the cream and sugar I had to add to make it drinkable. The counter has picture post cards under glass from customs who have gone out and traveled the world – it is connected, if not in time, at least in space with the rest of the universe – a holdover (a time capsule) from Art’s proprietorship. The rule here is least value for your money: No service is provided that is not demanded. None of the postcards is more recent than ten years ago.
Victories are not won by
And for the living
To hell with the dead
Don’t continue to play on my guilt
By your sacrifices
We are the ones who
Sacrifice
We sacrificed you
A definition is always the cornerstone of a temple… a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p18
Terrorism it seems is not the act of an individual acting on or inspired by shared beliefs alone but an act carried out upon direction by an organization intending to inspire fear as part of its strategic goals. Terror is what you fear. Terrorism is what the state fears.
Every nostalgia is a transcendence of the present… we want to force the past, we want to act retroactively, to protest against the irreversible – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p31
At USCF the POP (Proof of Payment) Police board the N and sweep from both ends towards the middle. This is the first time that I had been popped but of course I had my monthly pass. The guy behind me was the only one that they netted. He was shameless in his lack of documentation. No excuses, no alibis, nothing - just a flat admission of a lack thereof. He had probably coolly calculated his chances. Had done a business risk assessment. He had concluded that in the long run it was cheaper to not purchase a ticket – the cost of tickets exceeding any fines that he might incur. He had no sense of guilt. He handed them his ID and exited with them at the 9th Ave stop. I figured that if the odd of getting popped were one in one hundred and fifty or once every four months then his strategy was valid. I wished that I might be just as shameless but I knew that I never would be.
Manhole
Foxhole
Wormhole
What a whale of a tail
The whole stupid lot
The saint asks, what will you die for? The revolutionary asks, for what would you kill? Either way, sacrifice is an ugly business, as ugly as history itself. Choose between these terrible things, history often says, for us, it comes to that choice – Stephen Dunn – What Goes On: selected and new poems, 2009 p52
From the 8th to the 11th centuries menstruating women were not allowed to receive communion. Jewish tradition proscribed the mikva a taboo – women were not allowed to prepare food and were segregated in special “women’s huts.”
Nearly all economic models of “development” rely upon an unsustainable assumption: that the discovery of new resources (technology, capital, etc) will always come to our rescue, enabling us to postpone, indefinitely, any final audit – David P Barash – The Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept 4, 2009) – The fundamental definition of a Ponzi scheme it would seem to me
The one armed economist
Cannot equivocate
“On the One Hand”
As Harry Truman aptly
Observed – He wanted
To meet one
Many-handiness comes
In handy – no applause
For the tree that falls where
No one can hear it
To be close at hand
To reach out a helping hand
The truth is at hand
A bird in the hand
Like most travelers I kept stupidly observing the sameness of things – John Cheever – Bullet Park, 1969 p182
She’s got a list of passengers almost a mile long – The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe – Let ‘er rip, let ‘er rip Mr. Engineer – gotta go, gotta go, pretty far, pretty far, Mr. Engineer
Nearly without exception, economies are growth-based, presuming that the future will always bail out the present, thereby making up any deficits accumulated in the past. The basis of borrowing money – as fundamentally to modern economics as one can get – is that money itself, properly employed, can be counted upon to repay the loan, with interest – David P Barash – The Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept 4, 2009)
Snakes coiled everywhere
In the deep grass
In the shade of that bush
Serpents carved in basalt
Climbing entwined up a staff
Tempting a woman
Dangerous, poisonous, enticing
Tongue darting – Jacobson’s organ
Having knowledge is traitorous
Stay alive, be struck dumb
The silent live to cry in their beer
No one possess the antidote but God
It may not behoove one to be an atheist
But it is necessary
Life is blistering with thorns
And women must bled
Labor builds on nothingness, creates and consolidates myths, elementary intoxication, it excites and maintains the belief in ‘reality’; but contemplation of pure existence, contemplation, indemendent of action and object, assimilates only what is not… E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p23
A universal language – a lingua franc, is by necessity sterile and its speakers soulless
It’s St Paddy’s Day and the youthful drunks have yet to get this far from downtown. Given that happy hour would start in fifteen minutes I was sure that the invasion would soon be on. An occasional infiltrator, the regulars and then the masses up from the financial district talking unceasingly of stocks and bonds and only stopping long enough to barf. Clancy Brothers & Makem without green beer. Four o’clock rolls around just as I finish my pint. Tom rolls in and orders a half pint of Albatross, and I do the same.
A trio of would be St Paddy drunks enter and order two pints of pale ale and one of Dopple Weisen. The wear beads strung around their necks as if it were Madre Gras in New Orleans. Then they hit the restrooms. The woman finds hers easily. The men always have to be directed - restroom downstairs - this way, says Paddy without interrupting his drawing off of a pint of Irish Stout. Another trio - three of your lightest pints please. So Paddy do you have the Battlefield Band or the Chieftain among your Cds? Somewhere in here he says. Another trio - a pitcher and three glasses please
They stumble in and they stumble out. It was three by three and now it’s five by five. To be able to still walk and to not have barfed is a disgrace and the Clancy Brothers play on. They are all coming to North Beach whines the brunette who had claimed her name was O‘Daniel. I‘m Irish today for crying out loud. To the end of the bar and downstairs, says Paddy as he points with his left and pours with his right. Settle in, take a seat, sip on the beer and watch, observe and write. A little fiction does not hurt but it doesn’t not improve the story.
Paddy is drawing three pitchers at once. Someone wants to start a tap. Minimum of fourteen one dollar beers to run a tap he had reminded several tippsters. The Dopple Wiesen has a caramel taste. Sell me what every you like as it all tastes the same to me. Poor sot, what a waste of cash. David another regular settles in next to me and orders two Albatross half pints. It appears that there are more St Paddy drinkers than regulars, I say. And I try to avoid them, he replies. Well the migrations out of the Financial District into North Beach is underway and you are in the midst of it. The bulls of Pamplona are running. And still they come.
It’s half way through happy hour and the St Paddy crowd has yet too overwhelm the bar. There is a chance that we may avoid the worst of the storm. The tide begins to recede. The flood is over. The waters are subsiding. They move on up the Columbus Avenue.
