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| 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
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
