The Necessities of Life

I laid out my firewood and covered it with a tarp to keep it dry. I’m having a hot cup of coffee on this cold day. I drink the whole pot. I have to get up and go outside in the cold to take a whizz. It hardly seems worthwhile, but you can’t spend the whole day lying in bed trying to keep warm. The nights are already ten hours long and that is too long to have to lie in bed all that time and most of the day. Now what did I do with my glasses. Never just put something down in any old place. You need to have a designated spot – when you take them off your face always put them there or they will be lost. The same goes for your wallet and keys. It is one of the rules of getting old. The other is that you have to piss a lot. Oh, there they are on top of the refrigerator. What are they doing up there? If you can’t remember why you certainly won’t remember where. And when you get old you don’t have to make a fashion statement  anymore (well you do anyway but you don’t care about what it is) but you have to be sure that you change your underware frequently so that you don’t smell of stale urine.

The oat fields said oh / And oh said the wheat field as the dusting / combine passed over / and long after the dust was gone. / Oh they said / and looked around at the stubble and straw – A R Ammons – Collected Poems, 1951-1971, 1972 p2

Take your pills, brush your teeth, put on clean underwear, take the dog for a walk – drink and be merry. The dog insists that I walk him first. Breakfast – bacon, hash brown potatoes, black beans and coffee

It’s dark – I take a lantern

I came out here to take

            A crap

I sit there and grunt

Elvis Pressley died like this

            He died for my sins

I refuse to die for yours

Not alone here in the dark

            Sitting on the crapper

It takes a while but

            I do what I came to do

And I return to my warm bed

            This is were I wish to die

I am fortunate

            There is enough

            Toilet paper

Don’t you just hate that

            When there isn’t any left

Even in the middle of the catastrophe, individuals and groups were still unable to asses the real degree of danger and abandon their usual roles – W G Sebald – On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003  p63

Teatime outside in the sun – bread and jam and butter with a beer chaser. Listen to Shostakovich. And now the sun is going down. They are extending the number of slips at the marina. The welders are now headed home in their diesel trucks. The sheriff makes a loop through the park.  The sun is red on the western horizon across the James River. It is time to start a campfire. I eat my evening meal: penne with garlic butter and broccoli florets, an avocado and banana salad and a glass of wine

Defending Medicare and Social Security may be all well and good, but what happened to utopia? – Beverly Gage – New York Times Book Review – 9/18/11 p24

The questions asked when setting up a project are never asked after that project is in place. The project itself is the answer. Afterwards the only relevant questions relate to the mechanisms best needed to implement the project.

Rich countries now have a semi-conscious plan [for responding to global warming]: what ever happens we’ll have the money to cope – Simon Kuper – Financial Times

The function of the judicial system is to create criminals who become the raw materials that the carceral network then turns them into delinquents.

Criminals have traditionally been devoted to their mothers and vise versa. It is a poor criminal whose mother will not attend court to say that he is a good boy at home in an attempt to mitigate the sentence he is to receive – James Morton – The First Detective, 2010 p37

8:45PM and the rain is letting up – drip, drip, drip – Bread and jam

I believe in God and I believe in free markets – Ken Lay, CEO of Enron

A society’s principles should be imperfectly realized otherwise they constitute a form of tyranny

Leave me this black rich country, / uncertainty, labor, / fear do not / Steal the reward of my mortality – A R Ammons – Collected Poems, 1951-1971, 1972  p37

We are allowed to reform the mechanisms that implement the project but we are not allowed to question the project itself

We are unable to learn from the misfortunes we bring on ourselves… We are incorrigible and will continue along the beaten tracks that bear some slight relation to the old road network – W G Sebald – On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003  p67

The camper-shell (man and his son) with the red boat leave. The wind blows and rustles the dead oak leaves. It’s chilly. I retreat to inside my trailer. I drink some hot coffee. Later I’ll have a bowl of black beans with tortillas. There is a big storm brewing. The other two campers depart. I am alone except for a few fishermen. Moisture laden clouds roll in from the south. They are riding up and over a cold front. I gathered up the firewood that the other campers had left. I stow away anything that might blow away.