January 16, 2009 - Coffee Break, Kansas City Missouri

The snow comes smothering with a high of twenty-two but this is the tail end of the storm almost now to Springfield and extending laterally from Emporia to Columbia. There was only a dusting as I awoke and the sun came up. Then it got serious and I knew that if I were not to get stuck in my room I had to get out now. I barely made it up the hill and then wondered why I had, but was already in the midst of the rush and by then to have turned back was more difficult that to plow ahead and so here I am at the Coffee Break once again Light snow the forecasts said.

Mr. Mick is still around left all alone from four in the afternoon when Dave goes to work and ten when Brenda finally gets home and as attentive deficient as he seems to be, he is a adapting well He lies in his bed and abides his time. And when someone finely comes in he slides across the wooden floor his little paws a scratching – tickie tickie tickie. Maybe he’s a keeper.

Its really coming down. I hope it doesn’t snow all day. I check the radar image on the Weather Underground and this storm must have been saving the best for last – it looks like it should be over within the hour. The tail end is now at St Joe. But god, still it doesn’t look as if it will ever let up.

Galoshes – 98% of the shoes purchased in the US are imported and Americans buy on average seven pairs a year and a pair of galoshes or other protective footwear every other year. This is about half what they purchased twenty years ago. Will the economic downturn be good for the protective footwear industry – I suspect it will. It would be interesting to see the data for 1920-1940. What I would expect to see is a typical bell curve. I would have had a pair if I didn’t maintain the rule that everything I have must fit in a back pack (by choice I am without a home) – its not a fashion statement but a practicality – them galosh is to damn bulky. One sixth of the typical American’s apparel budget is expended upon the acquisition of footwear.

God, theres goes another AH pacing the floor talking business on his cell phone. Isn't it enough for him to be agitated must he infict the rest of us too. I don't mind Spencer Tracy pacing in the waiting room waiting for his little dividend but he didnt have a cell phone either. And what they have to say is always so inane and probably totally unnecessary.

The Johnson Family and the Snoops
Never intermarry
You know a Johnson when you see him
You know a Snoop when you hear one
He was a Johnson
She was a Snoop


A Johnson minds his own business
A Snoop makes it his business
All Snoops are shit
God bless you Mr Johnson
There are never enough
The Snoops are rapacious

He passed and I never saw him again
That is the wayof the Johnsons
And You can’t get rid of a Snoop

Universal reason says there is only one rational mode of thought Anyone who argues against you must be either mistaken (in need of the facts), irrational (needing to have their reasoning corrected), or downright immoral – George Lakoff

January 14, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

My most popular posting continues to be the one on umbrellas. And why is that? Because most Internet users are rather unsophisticated users – obviously your are not one of them, the  less sophisticated are you, as I see you are reading this. The Internet is largely used for two purposes – to find and stay in touch with other people who will agree with you (stroking your ego) or to shop for snobby luxury items (some call this making a fashion statement). So of all the hits on my two sites, it has been shopping for premium umbrellas that has landed searchers here ninety percent of the time. One individual was looking for the Christo umbrella project and two were looking for a Theodore Roethke poem about umbrellas.

And then I wrote a piece about Premium brands– cat food, wine, coffees etc. and it got no hits at all. There is something about umbrellas though! So what about galoshes? A pair of SWIMS will set you back two-hundred bucks or you can buy tote overshoes at any five and dime for hardly anything at all – but who is going to go on the Internet to shop for totes.
And them Wellies (Wellingtons) are such an item of fashion – seriously – no 19th Century country English gent would be without em. And Monty Python made a lot of mileage in em. And then there was Gadot and his four buckle artics. Etiquette says that there is no way to remove them gracefully (teetering there out of balance) and they must be considered gauche – better to wear rain boots (NEOS) and carry a pair of shoes into which you can change (and I don’t see the difference between quietly sitting down and removing your toe rubbers and having a huge pair of Wellies sitting under your desk – why is one unfashionable and the other not).

So I am working on an essay about gumshoes (and Gummo Marx the unknown brother was named for them as he could sneak up silently – see the connection with Sam Spade?). And I am certain there is a lot of poems on em too and maybe Oldenberg even sculpted them – man o man look at them dickersons.

The guide reduces it all
To something that is consumable
A list of the best
Ranking it all
Listing the coveted
It is the discontented
That need these lists
And a guidebook is just
An extended list
There are a lot of them
Let us list some of them!

In art the subsconscious sometimes comes percolating through without warning – Robert W Butler

January 13, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

Back to the Coffee Break – during cold weather I am not very venturesome (and sometimes I feel that I have lost my wanderlust). But no I did get a reservation made to ride the train  to Chicago next week and I sent off a confusing e-mail and someone was waiting at the  station for me yesterday evening. Im sorry for the confusion I said on the phone and instead of the 19th I had written the 11th which would have been the day before. "It was no trouble," Jerry replied, "the station is only five minutes away and I stayed in the car." But still I felt like an ass. Read your e-mails before hitting send – better yet save them as drafts and review them later and only then send – there is something about time that erases all those things that you just assume and what you see is what is there rather than what you had intented. So asshole save it and review it next time.

Picked up two Interlibrary Loan books at the branch library yesterday – B H Fairchild – Local Knowledge and  Morris Kline – Mathematics – the loss of certainty. I'll have to read them before Monday – set aside the other fourteen books and concentrate on them but Im almost finished with Walter Mosley and Fred Vargas. And there should be time for The Collected Poems of A E Houman and Dixon – The Psychology of Military Incometence. I'll probably also finish Lakoff – The Political Mind. I brought all but Mosely and Vargas with me to the coffee shop – mystery is my wintertime bedtime reading. Everything changes during the winter it seems.

You mentioned fourteen books and that is only seven - wlll then there is also – The Life of Johnson by Boswell – the Collected Poems of Antonio Machado – Fallen into the Pit by Ellis Peters – the poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, a book on Cleopatra and one claiming that George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were writing on the same thing.





I'm trying to learn Spanish by translating Machado - poetry is best for language learning because the facing translation only gives you a sense of what it means and it leaves it to you to figure out how words that you translate got to mean what is written on the opposite page - in other words it prohibits a one-to-one literal transference

First to be lain bare
Are the tops of the trees
Then the underbrush
Which soaks up every drop
Of newly available sun
Hangs on for its life
Meanwhile the green grass
Is hidden under litter
And later it will be the snow

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the cameraa records it. But this is the opposite of understanding which starts with not accepting the world as it looks – Susan Sontag

January 11, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

And Nick is not his name either. Remember Brenda did not want her granddaughter who found the dog to know that she had traded it in like some used car. And if Nick on his little tiny legs goes to far and you holler Nick Nick (like Jack Nickleson did in Easy Rider) he does not respond to the name – but he does to the tone of your voice. But if you holler, Ankle! Here Ankle! he stops looks and starts trotting back. Brenda had said she was getting an even smaller dog one that came up only to the ankle. And I though at the time that was a unsual descriptor - one would have expected her to have gone, "he's about this tall" - seperating the facing palms of her hands about six inches apart. But there is no chance that I shall ever call him "Ankle". No way at all. Nada. None

An Amtrak reservation has been made – It was harder than it should have been (well not really harder – more complicated, but that was my fault). Amtrak erased by guest id and I had to enter my email address twice but since I don’t have a working period on my laptop keyboard I have to copy one into the buffer and paste it in. Well that worked fine for the original email address but the confirmation email address did not let you insert a period from the buffer – a security measure no doubt – but certainly inconvenient). So I had to plug a keyboard into the USB port but all the cheep keyboards had PS2 connections. A PS2 to USB cost twice as much as the keyboard. God do they design thanks to be complicated – get you back into the store with every little glitch.

But anyway I’m headed to Chicago finally – a week from today. The Southwest Chief leaving at 7:45 in the morning. I had said I preferred to take the St Louis route but I have never done this route in the daylight. And besides, this way,  I don’t have to wonder around Chicago at night in a blizzard.

Blah blah blah
... have all the answers


Blah blah more blah
...
back then they didn’t know


Blah and more blah
...they didn’t
understand the answer


More blah and more blah
She drones on is a soft
voice
So I fall asleep

I wonder how they will find the time to enjoy the most simple pleasures. We had at our disposal: silence, calm, solitude. Having never known them, they shall not be able to miss them. As for me, I do – and I pity them – Albert Robida

January 8, 2009 - Waldo Library - Kansas City Missouri

Ok so I shall call him Nick too although I prefer Robo Dog. Always wanting attention unlike the Major who couldn't be bothered. Of course Nick is only two and the Major was five which is old in dog years. Always underfoot the little rug rat. Dave and Brenda got to fighting and he got into his car – Here Nick Here Nick, get in – and he left – I gotta get away, I aint done nothing. Just wait until he gets back. He works nights and she had him up early putting away the Christmas decorations.

Looking for Wi-Fi – coffee shop or library and today its the later. There’s just something unsettling sitting at a bar enraptured with a tiny screen – a big screen well that is Ok because that is sports and that’s a whole different matter and it is probably a sports bar.


When one logs onto a computer, it is a retreat into a private space. There are public spaces that can be used that way and there are public spaces that should not be. so used.  Misuse of electronic devices in the wrong space is a faux pas, one that I term misapproiation of public space – that is, it is converting public space into private space. If it is your intention to display aggression and hostility towards the rights of other it is an affective means for doing that.

Rant on – rant on – well I went into Hoopers yesterday afternoon and two of the three guys sitting at the bar were on their laptops – ugh. Get used to it big guy! And I wont go into the episode with those annoying medical interns at the Coffee Break – and medical students are the worst misapproriators of public space – certain careers attract certain personalities it would seem.

I was nine-tenths on my way to infinity
I was a long long way away
Too far away to be seen or to see
Far faraway but not yet far enough
To touch the finish line

A civilized person was someone who consciously sought to put distance between self and all that hinted at animality, natural functions, violence, messiness and indiscriminate mixing – Yi-Fu_Tuan

Major Minor Goes in for Major Major and the Major Domo is No More

Well the Majors replacement came home last night in a big metal cage that smelled of pee but Brenda cant smell because she was shot in the head in a barroom incident – She needs to leave it on the porch and have Dave hose it down before moving it into the house but she probably won't bother doing that  and he will bitch and moan about the stink

The keys on this old machine are gradually wearing out – already gone are the PERIOD (I’m using the dash), the APOSTROPHY (and if you misspell a word with an apostrophe in it the spell checker will insert it – see Im above), the DELETE (I use backspace instead or a CONTRL X) the LEFT and RIGHT BRACKETS, the RIGHT ARROW, PAGE DOWN and END – In Word you can insert characters from a table, that works but is slow and you can always use the numeric code for the character but thats (I didnt spell check this incidence) tedious too – Joseph Addision wrote an essay on false wit where he bitched about the Greeks who wrote whole poems leaving out specific letters – I guess it also became a mania in the 18th century and recently some French writer wrote a whole novel without any Es - And oh yes, I fogot the QUOTE MARKS (with the quote and the period gone it makes using the Internet difficult - not impossible but hard)

I once read a short story by a Swiss author (I dont remember his name – It was a long time ago) where a man who lived on a mountain alone for his own amusement began replacing the names of things in his room with different words until over the years he forgot what they had originally been called and when he came off his mountain after many years and when into twon, no one could understand him nor could he understand them – There was also a story in the collection about a man who decided to set off on a journey around the earth in a straight line and the last anyone saw of  him he was climbing a ladder over the top of the neighbors house



James Joyce invented new words (we get Quark as in Particle Physics from Joyce) and if you gradually (imperceptivity slowly) introduce them in context so that one is not aware of them (unless you are one of the rare ones who reads with a dictionary – I dont but I note new words down and look them up later and am always amazed how many cannot be found – I just chalk it up to having misspelled them, I am notorious for this) by the end of a very long novel such as Ulysses – well you get the point



I am only doing it one character at a time – on the other hand I could just but an external keyboard, but what fun would that me – the easiest solution is not necessarly the most creative







As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage / Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, / dwells-- / That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; / This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age. - Gerald Manley Hopkins

Rendition – the legal proceeding for returning a fugitive salve.
Extraordinary - when someone is flown off in a black jet to be third party
and tortured - not so extraordinary anymore

January 6, 2009 – Coffee Break – 54th & Troost – Kansas City Missouri

Poor little Major Domo he is going to get traded in just like a used car – merchandise being returned. I feel for the Major. Perhaps one of those robo vacuums would be better.

It cleans rather than makes a mess. You can turn it off when annoyed by it. True its not very cuddly and one has little empathy for it, but that is true of all merchandise, once removed from its plastic shrink-wrap.

Well anyway Brenda has worked out a three way trade – the Major goes somewhere with kids, and she gets a two year old house trained Yorkie. And I did not even have a chance to tell the Major farewell. Brenda will name the new one Mick so that her granddaughter will not know that she traded the dog she found for her it in – Major Domos paper name was Rielly Mick. I will refer the new one as Robo Dog or maybe Major Minor (how cruel of me - no I will probably not). Bye bye Major!

January 6 - my father would have been ninty today but died three months before. On  the same day that he was born, Theodore Roosevelt died

And then my nose picks up
An aroma – fresh brewed coffee, no
The grinding of freshly roasted beans
This is not the popping of the seal
On a can of Folgers – this is not
Your mother’s coffee anymore

And if my ways are not as theirs / Let them mind their own affairs. / Their deeds I judge and much condemn, / Yet when did I make laws for them? – A E Housman