It’s Not What You Think

Fall Is On the Way to the Upper Mid-West (Mt Gilead Ohio)

The last day of August. The Labor Day campers will be crowding in today, along with the heat – We’re heading for a high of 93 today with sunny skies. My Kindle just broke. You were a friend while you lasted. I think I shall buy an IPad.

Grape vines are this region’s kudzu. It is rare that they bear fruit. Goldenrod blooms. Gee, it’s already afternoon. Let’s go back to camp grandma.. When we’re hungry, grandma replies. It’s nice out here by the lake. No X-Boxes or Gameboys, she says. He say’s, Grandma,  I’m hungry. This lake stinks. It’s full of weeds. The dog and I had tramped across the disc golf course and were standing at the end of the fishing pier.  There were several dozen small perch swimming about. A light breeze blows. It feels like autumn.

By the same logic neo-liberals use to justify their desire to privatize the post-office and ignore the constitutional clause (Art I Sec 8) making it a federal responsibility, mainly that it has out-served its utility; an argument could be made for banning hand guns in that a well regulated militia no longer exits (outserved its utility). Liberals defend the Constitution because they have noting by nostaligia left to defend.

The Spider knew it – words lifted from Charles Bukowski

A big sack of subnormal manure

And what came forth as speech

From a hideous and crippled mine

Almost everybody is born a genius

            And buried an idiot

As a party it seemed to lack a center,

            But most parties are that way

And almost anything

Upsets and insults a movie audience,

While people who read novels

And short stories love them

            And are rarely upset or insulted

By them

And I could not formulate it.

It hung in my head like a bible.

What shit, nonsense....

What a way to be strung out,

No map,

No people,

No sound,

Just wasps, stones, walls,

My pecker and balls dangling without feeling.

I could scream out anything in the street

And nobody would hear,

Nobody would care a tit,

Not that they should.

I wasn’t asking for love,

But something was very odd,

The books never spoke about it,

The parents never spoke about it.

The spider knew it.

            Fuck off

And I left not much later

Looking for more trouble

Or whatever I was looking for.

            I always found trouble...

But the rest of what I was looking for,

            I haven’t found that yet.

Maybe I never will.

You’ve got your book of philosophy,

Your priest,

Your preacher,

Your scientist,

So don’t ask me.

Pure, serendipitous travel is a solitary vice. Going with a companion is cozy, but you might as well be going on a bus excursion. The martial parliament has to sit in order to debate and settle the issue of lunch – Jonathan Raban – Driving Home, 2010   p157

Celebrities are cultural models of which there are two kinds – top down (heros and spokesmen) and bottom-up (antiheros and criminals)

The privileges (including private property) that goes with service to the state and to the society are legitimate only so long as the actions associated with those services are perceived as having utility.

You Lose the Fear – Roberto Bolano

‘No-man’s-land’,

There are simply no men here

            There are other creatures: animals and insects

A love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head

Brief like beauty,

            Absolute beauty

It doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything

A store is a place where people converse

Listen in silence to the conversation of others

A store is like an empty classroom.

A sign of sloven lives

Where the glass is glazed with mescal

A store is a smoky church

And then one of them opened the bottle

The tequila was a naked woman in a fur coat

The nectar of the gods

The same ones from before

They started to forget themselves

Descend into the sewers

Never speak of the subject again.

It doesn’t matter

The Time To Settle Down Will Never Come

Bravery and its twin stupidity

I didn’t have the balls
            To call the police

The police, is always the police

Don’t go near her

She’s a MOTHER.

Then I thought about graves

About fucking on a grave

About sleep in a grave

He showed me a photo of her.

She wasn’t especially pretty.

Her face betrayed sufferings

And under that suffering

            Simmering rage.

I imagined her eating sliced bread and a bowl of green soup

I drifted off.

My life proceeded

            Along the drabbest course

            I did everything

            I did whatever I could

I try to be pleasant and sociable.

Life does a fine job on its own

I wake. I am sweating. I try not to fall asleep again.

I am certain that there’s someone else in the room

Nothing happened today.

And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it

Because I didn’t understand it

Outside people were walking fast,

             Hunched over

As if the storm were already here.

Still, no one seemed to be afraid

She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food.

I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food.

The heart of the matter is knowing if evil is random.

The shouting came from downstairs

The kind that strikes you dumb and makes history

There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists

Work passed over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude…

Finally the work journeys invariably alone in the Great Vastness.

And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end

You lose the fear, or, build it into your daily routine

Nothing is obvious that it is obvious – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p8

Both the Left and the Right have found a common enemy – Crony Capitalism

Out of the corner of the eye while perusing a page of text, sometimes geometric figures appear running down or obliquely across the page. Mostly they are composed of an alignment of white spaces but occasionally it is the black marks that line up. When a closer inspection is made of these figures just disappear. You gotta see out of the corner of your eye. That’s the best way to see something moving.

Educational requirements create empowerment niches and diminish career flexibility. An inability to compete in a diminishing niche leads to marginality for which the only solution is more education (at the labor’s expense of course). Diminished opportunities create anxieties and hinder solidarity (the pursuit of common solutions). It all empowers capital and margializes labor. Someone makes money. Everyone else goes into debt.

Mist on the lake

A man on a boat

            Emerging

Fishing

They are jumping

Little ones hide

            In the weeds

Near shore

What must inspire the artist is the desire to render himself soporiferous

Foggy and wet – can’t even see across the Maumee. We went for a walk along the tow patch of the river by-pass connecting the lakes with the Ohio valley. Gulls sit on the low dam, herons and egrets fish. Washington’s general Anthony Wayne beat the Indians at Fallen Timbers here at the head of Black Swamp. The company providing the Johnnies on the spot have taken the name “Black Swamp”.

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies… Vision is privileged in our society and our sensorium. We trust it; we place our confidence in it. Photography allows us to uncritically think. We ‘imagine’ that photographs provide a magic path to the truth – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p92

The total area paved over (impervious surface area is the technical term – paved roads, buildings and other man made hard surfaces) in the United States is equal to an areas the size of Ohio. Some day it will be equal to the size of Texas (if we don’t run out of hydrocarbons first). Without hydrobarbons there will be no gasoline taxes to pay for impervious surfaces.

I couldn’t find any beer. It’s a dry county. There are lots of dry counties in the South. It’s all about maintaining social order. Southern hospitality is not really as genteel as it seems. It’s a means of prying into your affairs to find out if you’re a potential threat. It’s all a legacy of that peculiar institution. There are a few private clubs. They make all the money, Ed maintains. They don’t want things to change. The waitress at Sorby’s was telling about the city councilmen who upon learning that Walmart was planning building a new Supercenter went out and bought up all the logical locations. Wal-Mart didn’t bite. They had gotten too greedy. I had been wondering why Wal-Mart wasn’t on the highway. I forget to ask Ed about the lavender paint on the tree trunks. He did say that the splashing in the water last night was not his dog but beavers. Have you heard any coyotes, he asks me? I heard what I thought was some locals running hounds upstream last night, I told him. No those were coyotes, he said. The Ozarks in spring – blue birds, japonica and fields of verbena. The hills seem to get hazy as their trees begin to bud. Good ol’ boys. Weeklong long bears. Beer bellies and baseball caps. The women are all fat. A cubby little brats says, ‘Mommey eat, all gone’. And the waiteress says, ‘You’re just the cutest little darling I’ve ever seen. You’re just cuter than heck. You like kissin girls?’ Headed for the Interstate a truck load of chickens on the way to Tyson. Out for a ride, country air. Things aren’t always what they seem. If fact they are rarely what they seem.

In reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ f rom anything… They are guesses – bold conjectures – David Deutsch – The Beginning of Infinity, 2011 p4