Cracking Each Other on Bare Butts with Rolled Up Towels and Shouting

I asked Clair - "Is a taco a sandwich or not." She said that she came down firmly on ‘NO’.  I told here about Walter’s dream. He was at the ballpark you see and he had hollered ata stadium vendor for a sandwich and the vendor had tossed to him a taco and Walter had wanted to know, "Was a taco a sandwich?" We argued about the definition of a sandwich. What exactly were its critical attributes?  We agreed that it must be held in the hand and be food but on little else. The covering does not have to come in two pieces. The hero sandwich and the hot dog being clearly examples of sandwiches made from a single piece of bread. Did a sandwich have to be savory? No, there were jam sandwiches and there were ice cream sandwiches. There were Oriel sandwich cookies so it was not even necessary to have the filling contained within bread. Yes some type of enclosure that was firm and was made from grain was necessary to qualify it as a sandwich.  Lasagna it was agreed was definitely not a sandwich (it could be held in the hand, but that would be messy - assuming of course that it was cold and not hot, in which case you would have to wear gloves). We were trying to help Clair hone her legal abilities. Help  Clair with her logical reasoning ability. She was just staring her classes in Law. She was attending thethe same law school that Hunter S Tompson’s Dr Gonzo had gone to (some years before of course). We were disappointed. We thought she held to convention too dearly. Another Dr. Gonzo she was not. We let her get back to her textbooks. And then there was the open-faced hot roost beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet – Kin Hubbard

There are a lot of Christians out there looking for a place to worship…. I’ve talked to a lot of marketing people… and we need a charity… and that’s the bottom line… we are tasked with… and he waves his open right hand in a circular motion with his arm held at an angle just above horizontal… and he proclaims, we don’t need a white knight. His jaw muscles are well developed like some fugglehorn blower. Everyone responds to his booming voice with mousey responses while he nods his white haired head and then again his voice drowns them out with more Christian marketing ideas.

Supernatural thoughts are mesmerizing decoys for the brain areas that encode places, objects, animals, and human beings – Stanislas Dehaene – Reading in the Brain 2009  p312

When They Blow Them Horns

Boys in white – Once, but

            At the start of the year

            Infrequency of laundry

            Tending towards dingy

Or too often with bleach giving

            A propensity for yellow

Girls in snowy brilliance

            Their drill team twirls

            Majorettes’ blue pleats

            Of short skits unfurling

Four in a row with budding breasts

            Onwards they march
            Christian soldiers
            Teeth glistening

Damp from running laps

Left in the bottom of the locker

            To mildew

  

Take a seat over there on the

Bleachers – a section pulled out

            To the edge of the basketball court

An announcement is made

President Kennedy has been shot 
            In Dallas

         

We snickered – hee hee – sitting

            There in dingy smelly t-shirts

            And yellowing shorts 

 – then we showered

What did we know – This is a solemn

Moment – This is a tragic event

In the history of this country

We are told.

And we flipped each other off on bare

            Butts with our rolled towels

            And snickered – bang bang

Your dead


And what did I think on 9/11
When the towers came down?
I had said to myself - I guess we
            Got our comeuppance
            At last
Gee, he said, I had never heard
            An American say that

They might be homosexuals. That would be a natural conclusion, of course, since there were two grown men talking about “beauty” instead of scratching their crotches and cursing the goddamn government trying to run everybody’s business - B H Fairchild – The Art of the Lath, 1998 p11

Spreadsheet of cruelty – the draconian slashing of social programs under the pretense of budget balancing, while leaving big-ticket items and wealthfare intact and not even that but actually increasing  their funding but less than they would have liked to have done (they have the gall to proclaim their decreasing these increases as cuts).

Problems cannot be solved from within the same paradigm in which they were created – Annie Leonard – The Story of Stuff, 2010 p.xxiv

There are six million public sector employees who by state law are not eligible for Social Security and who depend exclusively on their pension and their personal savings for retirement. In addition their pensions are not quarantined by the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp – and hence will receive no bail out if a state is allowed to and choses to abrogate its pension fund agreement.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965 p396

Retronym – re-naming a thing after it is superseded by a new technology to distinguish it from the newer technology – acoustic guitar, snail mail, rotary phone, sailing ship, solid wood, organic farming.

You’ll fight – maybe  you’ll smash that and maybe you won’t: the main thing is to fight. Life is struggle . A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism – Machado De Assis – Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952 p206

One side wins on the ground and the other makes films. One side defends it’s space and the other conquers time – that’s what winning “hearts and minds” really means.

In every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the ‘form’ which has developed of itself out of the experience of time [and] the situation – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965  p361

The tools of the rich are in their character; the character of the poor is in their tools

A tool / made out of thought / pillar of salt – Roland Johnson – ARK, 1996 ARK 40

Grids eat men; pen them up – fence them in – confines them to property lines. Posted – Keep Out - No Tresspassing - No Hunting or Fishing Allowed.

If in a world of truths it is ‘proof’ that decides all, in that of facts it is ‘success’. Success means that one being triumphs over the others – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965 p396