Going To The Sun - What Gene Autry Thought

“You’re right there partner” said Charlie Manson. He is talking of railroading and places in Texas and Arizona.  And the price of gasoline in Utah.  Charlie Manson is standing on my left trying to get the bartender to notice the one dollar bill that he has placed on top of the bar. I have to leave. I have to go. He has only thirty two dollars in his pocket the scrawny little creep. He peels off another one to cover his tab. Lilith  says she just got back from Gainesville Florida. She had gone to her sister’s graduation. No it is her sister whose name is Lilith. Her name is Hannah. She has both names tattooed there on her neck. Charlie Manson as a pentagram on his forehead. She asked me if I were familiar with Gainesville. Yeah, I said, that’s where they finally fried that guy Bundy. I crossed his path a number of times. Manson asks the bartender, “wouldn’t you say there is a little bit of communism here?” The bartender agrees, “yeah”, he says, “there is a little bit of everything in all of us?” Manson nods his head. The Man in Black comes on the radio. It’s time to go but I stay until the end of this song. I gulp down the last few inches of my beer and go. The nursing students were still there studying – something about the symptoms of dementia…. Restlessness, sleep disruption, and…. I am gone. I go out into the night. I lose myself in the fog.

Man is unhappiness, he said over and over, I thought, only an idiot would claim otherwise. To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and so long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness, only death puts an end to it. That doesn’t mean that we are only unhappy… only though the detour of unhappiness can we be happy – Thomas Bernhard – The Loser, 1991  p65

You need a place in which

            You’ll never live

Need to dream about it

Any place to which you

            Move, you’ll ruin

“I move in, the rents

            Go up, coffee

            Shops become

French restaurants, useful

            Stores close” (Ian Frazier)

Going over Logan Pass – Going-To-

            The-Sun sunset in the rear mirror

Only a lone mountain ahead

            Only the sky

            And fenceless

Wheat

The car brakes down

            Two hundred miles on

            Out in the midst of infinity

Take a break, stretch the limbs

            It was a much happier time

So goddamn many stars

            Happiness is just beyond

            Hopalong Cassidy vaults on
                     Gallops off

The danger [is] that conventional man will adhere with growing obstinacy to the trivial surface of his conventional nature and acknowledge only the flatness of thess flatlands… [at] this the moment when man is about to assume domain of the earth as a whole – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p57

In many cases the only part of public education that remains public is the school itself

[He] has a feeling, that the time has come… When a lot of people have such a feeling, there may be something in it. But the time for what?... Well, we don’t need to know that yet – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1050

More Chinese live outside of China than French who live in France

Our civilization is a temple of what would be called unsecured mania, but it is also its asylum, and we don’t know if we are suffering from an excess or a deficiency – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p834

PRESIDENT NIXON

Dr Kissinger

            You wouldn’t know it

            From looking at him

But he’s been underground

A surreptitious life under

                        The sheets

News news news, prime

            Time in the US of A

I like conservatives but I’d

            Not like to find

General De Gualle in

             My bed

Capital-hiss; capital-hiss

Little yellow brains

            Fly about

For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1017

It takes three times as many people to operate an unmanned military aircraft as it does a manned fighter jet: 300 vs 100.

The history of the world is written before it happens; it always starts off as a kind of gossip – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1064