Blame It on Bubba

Life re-emerges – gradually at first then exponentially – little tree frogs at dusk, a few green fields of wheat, a single flowering pear tree, a camellia bush with flame red blooms (on the wane now). Insects start becoming bothersome again. There are always sand fleas at the beach but now little green caterpillars and buzzing flies. Time to get out the DEET. The dog has tick. Time to put the flea collar back on him. Poor little fella, he's snapping at flies again.

The neighbors decamped in the middle of the night – the little girls woke up crying that they were cold. So they went home which was only a few miles away. Next time he said we came in the back yard. I got lots of property. I’d rather of been flying. Flying, I ask? I though he might have meant ‘fly fishing’. He looked more like a fisherman than a pilot. No he did mean flying. Had an ultralight he said. I would never have imagined it.  Said he had always wanted to be a commercial pilot but was blind in one eye. They came back the next day and struck camp.  He was her ‘Daddy’ – Daddy this and Daddy that. I never heard her mention her Mama who was standing right there. She had three small girls and cigarette hanging from her lips. The older girls began shouting at her younger sister and wagging her finger at here – now you’re not to go up here and you’re not to do that. The mother came over and shouted at here and wagged her finger at her – “I’m the mother. You’re not the mother.” They brought the Yogi Bear movie for when it gets dark. They have the TV on with the volume turned way up. Its sitting on the tailgate. She had a difficult time getting “Daddy” located so that the little girls could see Yogi too.

You can blame it on Bubba but…

I didn’t blame it on Bubba

Bubba wouldn’t do steal

            I know

Cause I’ve left hundred

            Dollar bills in front

                        Of Bubba

I didn’t say…

You can blame in on Bubba

Explain this one away: even white high income, educated Americans with insurance are less healthy than their counterparts around the world. If we have the best health-care money can “buy” why would should we not be the healthiest in the world? The US lages way behind the rest of the developed world in nine health domans: birth outcomes, injuries and homicides, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, HIV/AIDAs, drug-related mortality, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability. The US performs adaquelty in cancer screening and mortality, control of high blood pressure and cholesterol, smoking rates and suicides.

[When] the problem is not the theory but the facts… the error does not matter – Shimshon Bichler – Capital as Power, 2012 p82

I was counting on the unknown – G Nerval

As everyone knows,

One never sees the sun

In one’s dreams

Nothing is insignificant,

Nothing is inconsequential

In the universe an atom can destroy it all,

An atom can save it all

If the mind has become completely unhinged

In order to place us in communication with another world,

It is clear that the mad will never be able

To prove to the sane how blind they are,

To say the very least

All the debris of various futures

Has found its way here,

The odds and ends of personal belongings

Scattered or sold over the past twenty years

As I expressed my love

I was convinced it was

Something I had felt for an eternity

A mere writer can only

Put his finger on these wounds,

He cannot pretend to heal them

I could hardly have expected

To meet with any success

But then again I wasn’t asking for an answer.

I was counting somewhat on chances

And on – the unknown

I am in the midst… I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a bitch…  She has the baby with her. You just keep asking me what is wrong. Just drop it. You are upset. I want to know why. You are embarrassing me. I’m sorry, I dropped my crutches. There is nothing wrong. It has something to do with money, I think. They had been to horse races today I’m willing to bet. He keeps pounding his fist on the bar. Her sister comes and takes the baby. They go outside into the lighted courtyard. They walk back and forth. He hobbles away on his crutches. He is not fast enough to evade her or corner her. He had started off complaining about the affect of cigarette smoke at the bar on the baby. That’s when his sister-in-law had intervened and took the baby away. The singer does a great Tom Waitts. Which one tastes like a But Light? That’s the first question they always ask. This is a German beer-garden, folks. We only serve German beer here. He settles for a Spaatan Lager. I have another Oktoberfest. It’s not cold, he complains. How’s the beer, I ask?  I can drink it, he replies (but he would rather have had a Bud Lite). He and the woman who is wearing the low neck black dress move out onto the patio. The angry young man on crutches is gone. Tom Waitts in on his break. Crimson and clover over and over.

You actually become someone else  - Paul Auster

...And in the end

It was as if

You were a drop of water evaporating

Evaporating in the sun, shrinking

Shrinking until at last

You aren’t there anymore

...Charging ahead

 In a delirium

Of half-formed sentences

And broken-off thoughts

…A symbolic figure

You inhabit not the zone of collective memory,

As a representative of youth and hope

But the devilish twists of fortune

…A moment later,

There were doubts,

And the next moment after that

You doubt those doubts.

… Thinking one thought

Means thinking its opposite

Though then a third though will rise up

And destroy the second

…  You are most truly alone,

When you truly enter a state of solitude,

That is the moment when you start to feel

Start to feel your connection with others...

In the process of writing or thinking about yourself,

You actually become someone else

At this point,

You can only surmise what the case is not.

To say what it is, however, is completely beyond you

But still silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means

- Each letter in its original envelope, the meter mark dating the letter that arrived undated. // - One never knows what one’s written until after the letter is mailed. // - The way the taste from a glass of wine comes after you swallowed it. // - The way a candle’s scent is stronger after it’s blown out, leaving you to write in the dark – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p3

A McDonald’s breakfast – a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit meal. Well it was open and I needed change and it was next to the laundromat. Spiderman is on the TV and its Sunday morning. I still have the kazoo in my pocket. Carla will be in Baghdad today, she had told me last night. Tom spent all his money yesterday on the ponies. Spiderman’s Amazing Friends is over. The Jetson theme song has come on. George’s jet car whizzes home. A wazoo you sit on, Tom said. And Kudzu is green, I said. That’s a kazoo, he replied. People might think I am weird. You are weird, but in a nice way. You an Indian? You let your hair grow out, uh? What you reading there chief? Sort of a medieval detective novel (its Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose). You take notes as you read? Sort of, I reply. You really get into it, uh? Yeah, I say and he returns (sort of) to his job of sweeping up. This place is a mess, he says. Can’t sell you that beer, bubb. I leave it on the counter and walk out.  State law prohibits the sale of beer and wine on Sundays. This is Sunday. Next time I’ll know and stock up before hand. Just one of the things you lean while traveling and never use again. You acquire a lot of useless knowledge traveling.

Ah, how unnecessary – Julian Barnes

I don’t say things have gotten worse,

But merely say that the young

Wouldn’t have noticed if they had

That would have let in too much reality,

Let in the present tense

And maybe everyone has

A private name for it,

            So that

No Common name

            Is required

‘That’s what Bill use to say’.

 Bill hadn’t said anything of the kind,

As far back as could be remembered,

But his posthumous corroboration

Was useful when she became flustered

            Afterwards,

Getting what you want

            All the time

Is very close to

Not getting what you want

            All the time

Blame someone else,

That’s always the first instinct.

And if you can’t blame someone else,

Then start claiming the problem

Isn’t a problem anyway.

Rewrite the rules.

Shift the goal posts

Ah, how unnecessary

I wonder in and around looking for the can. Smoke from the open Bar-B-Que fills the court yard. Porta potties alined around the open space. The door of a Green Turtle slams. Beer and piss comingle with the smoke. C&W plays on juke box.  It’s the Zietgiest.  It’s a biker bar. A real biker bar. The Hells Angles have their office somewhere around here. The bartenders all wear their hair long, even the women. The regulars wonder in and down a shot at the bar then head on out to the patio. Most of them know each other. There aren’t many touritst in here. They walk around and shake hands. Big hairy tattooed men hugging one another. All the big mamas are starting to look good. That’s when you know you have had enough, when everyone starts looking good. What ever it is that I did, I’m sorry. And the rougher they look the better I like ‘em. The barmaid slams a stack of empties onto the top of the bar and I look at her and grin and she looks at me and grins back. Oh man, is this a beer slinging shit stomping night or what. I head out to find a vacant Green Turtle.

Something that time has never been – Jose Saramago

As everyone knows, or should know,

Prudence is only of any use

When it trying to conserve something

Something in which we are no longer interested

An empty belly wakes up early

All metaphors about time and fate

Are tragic and at the same time futile

At first this did not appear to be its destiny,

But none of us, lamps, dogs or humans,

Knows at the outset,

Why we have come into this world

And now having done that,

How can those sublime moments

That had just been lived through be forgotten

The mystery of writing lies in

The absence of any mystery whatsoever

Dear God, take pity on men

Men spend their lives imagining things

Normal characters do not exist,

Otherwise they presumably would not be characters

The truth is that the person who thinks

Only knows what he is thinking

And not when he thought it,

We think from the moment we are born

Any piece of writing, good or bad,

Always ends up appearing like a predetermined crystallization,

Although no one can ever say how or when or by whom

When it comes to wars you can never tell

Who is going to lose their life

And there really are fortunes that happen once and never more

It’s time that rules,

Time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table

And it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand,

We have to draw the winning cards of life, our lives

When we thought we were certain of some reality

Which looked and sounded convincing,

It might simply be another version among many,

Or worse still, be the only version and proclaimed as such

Although it is common in situations of this kind

To say that time is at a standstill,

Something time has never been since the world began

Green Barb Wire and Saw Palmettos

Green barbed wire – catbriar vines with thick thrones usually scrambling up tree trunks can form impenetrable thickets. Saw palmetto dominates the understory. Lying close to the ground with prostrate trunks – saw-like teeth along their leaf steams.

The aim is to understand, not to judge. The hope is that if one understands enough poems, enough religions, enough societies, enough philosophies, one will have made oneself into something worth one's own understanding. - Richard Rorty (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism

Ultramarine

See Yellow

See Red

See Black &

            White

See Deep Blue

The laundry is done.  The bed has been made. Breakfast has been consumed. The rain is over. The day is half done

The examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its marks on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification… The examination is as it were, the ceremony of this objectification – Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1979  p187

Its 12:12 on 12/12/12 for the second time today. What does it signify? Absolutely nothing. It’s an arbitrary sequence of numbers. It’s a place marker on an arbitrary time line. It means nothing other than that the number twelve gets repeated, over and over. More such dates will occur. Many already have passed.

Cambridge has ‘courts’; Oxford has ‘quadrangles’

All of the kids gather up near the edge of the stage. The like the umph-pa of the tuba. They hop up and down. It’s a dance. This guy thinks I look Native American. He’s from Williamsburg Virginia but came here to take care of his invalid father. He’s taken a job with Alcoa and has to learn the OSHA manual by Monday. He has it open in front of him. They have tickets to the eight o’clock show of the Bathhouse Players. The kids are holding hands and hopping about to the tuba and accordion. The singer has lips like Mick Jagger. There’s a little kid sitting on the stage between his father with the tuba and his mother on the accordion. He has a rattle. The wife has not finished eating. The show is about to start. They grab the kids and depart. The bartender’s name is Bret. I thought they had said Fred and had been calling him that all night. He wants to pay his bill. “If I only knew his name.” “Fred”, I said. The bartender respnds, “Bret.” I can’t tell the difference. I have learned to spell my name, “F R E D”, I say, so that they won’t mistake what I say with “Bret”. It’s that  lazy southern accent that turns Bret into Bread which is heard as Fred.

Anything can be normalized

Everything can become mundane

Life can be lived with contempt

Managed democracy is not a form of democracy at all – nor is representative democracy for that matter.

These peculiar times: the surveilled surveilling the surveillor who’s surveilling him – Jonathan Raban – Driving Home, 2010 p309

Waffles aren’t just for breakfast. Breakfast is good any time. Anythime your hungry is a good time to break fast. Part of this complete breakfast. Hell, almost anything can be part of a complete breakfast. But not everything can be part of a healthy life style.

The lights go down. The noise goes up. Someone wants to know what I’m doing. Do you do this often, she asks? Is she cute?  Is she by herself? The bartender is running as fast as he can. He is just a blur. Slow down Dave or you’ll turn into butter. Do people look at you like your weird, she asks me? She says her name is KC (it might have been Casie – she didn’t spell it). She says she’s interested in sociology. She asked me if I am a sociaologist. No, I replied. I’m sort of drunk, she tells me. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, she says. Most people just say ‘Oh’ when I tell them that I’m just writing. “Oh”, she says and gets her drinks and rejoins her boyfriend. Either that or they want to know what I’ve published. They want to tell their friends that they met someone famous. But if they’re drunk they probably won’t remember who it was. “Could you write that down for me?” “Sure,” I reply, and write “James Joyce”  on a napkin and hand it to her. Not familiar with the name, she says. It unlikely any of their friends will be either. KC (or maybe it was Casie) thought that a sociaologist was someone who liked people. Yes, well then, I am a sociologist, I has tell her.

Wear the mask from anthrax. / Watch your noodles, your kit and caboodles; / The terrorist have taken Everest! – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p89

A Little Ripple In Time

A white zinfadel is better than no wine at all

Any Shostakovich

Is better than no Shostakovich

Potato chips make you fat

And you get old and decrepit

And yet they’ll still call you honey

            But not when you have no money

I can live without honey

            But not without Shostakovich

And if it just could be as simple

            As Richard Feynman demonstrated

With that bucket of ice water

Then I might be able to forgo

            A string quartet or two

But I gotta have the wine

But heaven forbid

            That it be Mad Dog or T-Bird

Occassionaly some Ripple perhaps

            When I can’t afford  anything better

Sweet wine sets my teeth on edge

            Until I get decscenitized

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it – Raymond Carver – Where I’m Calling From, 1989 p144

Mass shootings of strangers is the US equivalent of suicide bombers but without the political agenda – psycho terrorism or an asocial society?

In contrast to citizen-as-occasional-voter, the lobbyist is a full-time “citizen” – Sheldon S Wolin – Democracy Omc: managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism, 2008  p194

What Baudelaire Likes

Her hair on the pillow

A heart atremble like a baby bird

To fly above morbid miasma

To the charming smiles of angels

Here the dark storm of youth rages

Time and the damn enemy that gnaws my heart

To plunge as into the bosom of your image

Entwined in blue like a misunderstood Sphinx

A strong criminal soul desiring

Of naked perfumed slaves

To survey at leisure her magnificent parts

Oh, my Giantess when nature brought forth child monsters

And beauty, who cares – whether from heaven or from hell

Led me by scent toward fascinating parts

The perfume of green tamarind trees

Oh fleece, oh ringlets, oh petrified perfume!

Ecstasy! This evening

Passionately drunken

Like a chorus of worms

My fine cat retracts her claws

I like you that way!

Hair, living sachet, bedroom censer

Don’t look for my heart, the beasts have eaten it.

Not as ourselves / we sit on the barstools of Winter / remembering August – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p63

You’ve got another thing/think coming. Historically it was “think”. The present usage favors “thing”. Think has more interesting implications. Another think coming means that you need to rethink what you’re going to do. Another thing coming implies that you will be disappointed by the consequences of your action. If you don’t rethink, then you will have another thing coming. It is difficult to tell if the speaker is pronouncing a ‘k’ or a ‘g’.

Capitalism has two ways of dealing with leisure, stigmatizing it within an ideology of unemployment, or taking it up into itself to make it profitable. The dividing line cuts between prosperity and suffering and it makes a great deal of difference on which side one falls – Susan Buck-Morss – The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore

Naked ladies with numbers

Before Brazilian wax

            Or Lady Shiecks

            In B&W they wore beehives

Some with armbands

            Others wear cowboy hats

            With a number in the hat band

Ladies hold your number

            High so the judges

                        Can see them

Numbers two, seven and twelve

            Remain on the runway

Pass in review again, please

Ladies of the night to the right

            The rest to the left

They all wear high heels

            Numbers held high

Geeks in glasses stare

            Old men have cameras snap away

They are escourted by a

            Naked man with a child’s pretend

            Space helmet on his head

           

Sometimes they don Indian war bonnets

            With turkey feathers colored with analine dyes

            Bright rubies, emeralds and saphires

Dinner coupons for two at the Olive Garden

            For our finaliast

With a hundred dollar gift certificate redeamable

            At Wal-Mart going to the winner