No Madam - I Reek, You Smell

The weather is getting cooler. After two warm days the temperature dropped. It is the first day of autumn. The date of the equinox seems to drift. Someone said it had to do with the moon. Sort of like Easter, I asked, but I doubted that the moon had anything to do with it. I looked it up on the Internet. It gets complicated but basically has to do with the fact that our rotation around the sun is not divisible by the number of the earth’s own rotations. It is same reason that we skip a day every four years except for those divisible by 100. Here is something I didn’t know – the actual length of the year varies slightly due to the influence of the other planets.

Hegel is not the winter / yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never / heard of trees: surrendered self among / unwelcoming forms: stranger, / hoist your burden get on down the road – A R Ammons – Collected Poems, p56

Costa Rica (bold) – 44⁰ – the dog gets a biscuit.

You have the cutest dog ever. I love seeing him every morning. And I smile as she strolls to her car carrying two cups of hot coffee. One in each hand.

No one wished to seize power / or to be subject to it. / No one wanted  to fall victim / to his own or others’ delusions. / No one volunteered / for crowd scenes and processions, / to say nothing of dying tribes - / although without all these / history couldn’t run its charted course / through centuries to come – Wislawa Szymborska – Poem s New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p255

My dog smells, well,

            Like a dog

I smell like a man

A woman douses

            Herself

The dog and I

            Need a bath

I am told

We need an unnatural

            (artificial) flavor
It is their opinion

If I had to choose between the Doors and Dosteyevsky, then of course – I’d choose Doestetyevsky. But do I have to choose? – Susan Sontag – Where the Stress Falls, 2001

August saw the highest jump in the number of US homes that received an initial default mortgage notice – 33% from July to August – in four years. 3.7 million more homes are in the foreclosure process than there would be in a normal housing market. August saw 78,880 default notices issued.

We have entered an age of insecurity – economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity… Insecurity breds fear – Tony Judt – Ill Fares The Land, 2010 p12

60% of of insurers in the US have no risk management plan for assessing climate risk. Only 18% of property and casualty companies have formed climate change policies or explicit oversight of climate risk

We go through life mishearing and miss-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up – Janet Malcolm

There are nearly as many incarcerated workers in the US economy as there were slaves prior to the Civil War.

Private privilege is easy to understand and describe. It is rather harder to convey the depths of public squalor into which we have fallen – Tony Judt – Ill Fares The Land, 2010 p17

Half of all Americans will suffer an episode of mental  illness during their lifetimes. Up to almost 5% of all Americans during any given year will suffer “a diagnosable mental disorder [that] has substantially interfered with, or limited one or more life activities.”

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable – Adam Smith

A chipmunk can stuff up to 34 beechnuts into its cheeks at one time

Money is mysterious and getting more so  - Mark C Taylor – Confidence Games, 2004 p57

Teaching in itself accounts for about 15% of a student’s achievement outcome while the impact of poverty has four times that impact. No Student Left Behind is in reality not a program to improve education but a program to in improve the return of capital invested in the education industry. It creates opportunities  for private investment in the educational process and guarantees the continued profitability of private enterprise endeavors. The unstated goal of No Child is to help large corporations earn money at public expense. Look at the footprint of the companies involved in testing, consulting, counseling, re-training and management in the educational industry.

The hell bent strategy of opening new markets to sell more widgets, and internalizing  more cheap labor in a growing empire of capital, arrived both at diminishing returns and at the limits of the globe – Joshua Clover – The Nation 4/25/112 p32

I travel beneath gray skies

This is where I sit

I read and sip lukewarm

            Coffee

The ladies think my

Little dog is cute

            I smile

They see me everyday

            They say

Am I a professor

            They ask

This is a college town

A small one – both the

            Town and its school

The building housing

The coffeeshop was built

            In 1853

Across the river the border

            War raged

The dog lifts his rear

            Leg and pees

The coffee has long

            Gone cold

Before the cup has been

            Emptied

A contrail forms in

            The sky

There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker – Anne Carson – Eros the Bittersweet, 1986

We [humans] are biologically adapted for cooking. Cooking foods may have started as long as two million years ago. Because cooking softens food, it thereby adds to the amount that could be consumed without endlessly chewing all day long. Chimpanzees spend as much as a third of their waking hours feeding, while humans spend only about 5% of their time doing so. And their diet can be very boring.

People are much less likely to question an institution when they are making money from it hand over fist than when the are suffering from hard times – Peter Kolchin – American Slavery 1619-1877, 1993 p87

Commin Round the Bend We Begin the Begin All Over Again

It’s a foggy morning. It stated getting warmer in the middle of the night. I got hot lying in bed with only a sheet to cover me. The dog is also now getting a treat at the coffeeshop. He is even more anxious for us to get going each and every morning.  Here nubbins, the redheaded barrista said and she gave him a biscuit. Now make sure you eat all of it, and she wagged her index finger at him. Then she went back inside and returned to her spot behind the counter. I’m learning to play the mandolin. Well I wouldn’t call it playing yet. Keep at it. Build up the callouses on your fingers. Learn to pluck the correct strings without looking. One and two and three and four and… I haven’t gotten to the first song in the book yet but I’m gettingt there. But it is so slow and it is so tedious. When will this become fun? I watched the Redheaded Express on TV. One of them played the mandolin. She was five.

Man plays only when he is, in the full sense of the word, a man, and he is only wholly a man when he is playing – Roger Deakin -  Wildwood, 2007

Something that was once

            New is now twice blue

Something once red

            But was left in the sun

Now it is  pink and goes guplunk

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth – Tony Judt – Ill Fares The Land, 2010 p1

You want to know HOW

            Things shall turn out

We know that they never

            Will – there is no final

                        Result

I found find a comfortable

            Role at least for me

           It  will be sufficient I opine

           And now it is too late

Yet both of us shall

            Die at some arbitrary

            SPOT

There is glory in going to war

There is martyrdom in not coming

            HOME

Johnny will turn three in the 

             Spring

The window has a wonderful view of a lake / but the view doesn’t  view itself. / It exits in this world / colorless, shapeless, / soundless, odorless, and painless. // The lake’s floor exists floorlessly, / and its shore exits shorelessly – Wislawa Szymborska – Poem s New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p185

Ideas come to rest in material

They ossify in the form

            Of cogwheels

With every sudden change

            In the climate

They break out and cry

Sobbing they mutter:

            “Love Thy Enemy”

Jubilantly they dance and

            Carry out ritual murder

Money is ordered selfishness brought into relation with efficiency. An enormous organization of selfishness according to the hierarchical order of how it is earned – Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities p1672

Don’t ‘Duck and Cover’ in an earthquake. Almost everyone who gets under something is crushed to death. Instead get into the void between uncrushable objects

Foreign occupation and not religious extremism seems to be the primary cause of increased frequency of suicide bombing. What 95% of all suicide attacks since the 1980s have had in common is not religion but a specific strategic objective: to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terroritr consider their homeland - Robert Pape – Cutting the Fuse, 2010

Beyond Walden Pond

These are mean little bees. There are too many of these mean little buggers getting way to close to me. I wave my hand to chase them away. But that makes it more likely that one of them will go off. They are buzzing my ear. No don’t sting me there. That would be mighty sore. I ‘m careful about how I wave my hands about. A slow calculated choreographed motion. Nothing too quick and sudden.

Floodlight will reveal / piers built of reinforce concrete and steel, / and hover crafts whose beelike buzz resounds / where Charon used to ply his wooden oar – Wislawa Szymborska – Poem s New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p121

A woman is five times as likely to find a proud man attractive, as she is a happy man. Men are five times as likely to find a happy woman attractive as they are to find a proud woman attractive

Man arbitrarily placed in the world, makes an arbitrary choice allowing him to survive in it, before being arbitrarily removed from it – Beth Archer – The Voice of Things, Introduction, 1972 p11

Get on your feet

Pure at heart

With healthy lungs

All thumbs

Stab me in the back

I take it on the chin

Break a leg, I say to him

He gives me the evil eye

All employees must wash

            Their hands

Clean out their mouths

            With soap

Rid their minds of any sense

Recycle when possible

Let these be all our

            Responsibilities

Evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern – John Ashcroft, 2004

Each age carries its own destruction through the perfection of its own principles – what had been abstract when ideal when made concrete is longer so.

A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot – Vannevar Bush

I stopped in Cape Girardeau and did my laundry and got cash from an ATM. I bought three books. I am back in Missouri. The weather is in the mid-seventies. I buy some beer (Schlafly) and get some ice.

Once we allow ourselves to-be disobedient to the text of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization – John Maynard Keanes

If being an idealist is wrong; being a realist is worse

The operative theory about America’s political situation holds that the middle possesses the wisdom, but our numbers (U.S. Citizenship test) show it’s actually the extremes that are engaged… while the middle is relatively ill-informed – Douglas E Schoen – Newsweek 3/28/11 p61

It’s a little bit after ten. We gathered firewood from the fire pits of vacant campsites. We drove to the overlook above the Champlain Valley. A lady was collecting butterflies. Trail Dog is more anxious regarding his competition than he is interested in the females. Audrey liked him more than he liked her. I’m warming up another cup of coffee. We is my dog and I.

The innocence of the liberal hawk is one of the few truly renewable resources America seems to have in abundance – Gary Younge – The Nation, 4/11/11 p10

This might be

            Walden Pond

Through the dappled

            Ash leaves

Over there, over

            There

Just beyond

Our line

Of sight

It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typical human operation of assembling; Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science fiction are made of unbroken metal – Roland Barthes

Bees See Red - To Be Read Is to See

   Bees like red. I move all the red items (the plastic buckets, the ice cooler, my cup) to the far end of the table. But there are so many things that are red or contain splotches of red. I can’t do it to everything. My pen is red. My chair is red. The covers of all my books have a lot of red. My bookmarks are red. The bees are still buzzing examining every splotch of red to see if it may contain any nectar. I discover that if I kill a few and arrange their carcasses around me then that will keep their sisters away or so it seems. They are not that easy to swat. They don’t stay put long enough for my apoidea cemetarium.

Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything – Anton Chekhov

97% of Afghanistan’s GNP is derived from US and other foreign sources

Narrative gives us the world, but inexorably it gives us a false world – Michel Butor – Inventory, 1968  p16

The smell of camphor – mothballs. The previous campers must have been unpacking their woolen wear I though. The neighbor complained about the  smell. I don’t come to the woods to smell mothballs. When I pitched camp I thought there were just a few, but they form a ring all around the site. Snakes, I was told. People scatter them about to keep the snakes out. A fresh box of mothballs scattered on the ground forming a ring. It was supposed to keep the snakes away. What snakes. I hadn’t seen a snake in ages. A few dead ones run over in the road. Maybe it interferes with their Jacobson organ I thought. They can no longer pursue their prey. But their pray would not run out of the woods into an open gravel covered area anyway – away from safety and into a place of danger. It was all nonsense. A lot of campers do it. Besides they (the mothballs not the snakes) are poisonous to the wildlife. I don’t like the woods smelling like the inside of my closet.  Idiotic. Another example of Internet lore. And indeed I was not visited by and snakes in the middle of the night.

The longing for clarity and simplicity in the face of overwhelming complexity is as understandable as it is misguided – Mark C Taylor – Confidence Games: money and markets in a world without redemption, 2004 p1

ISMS:

     Governments: at the cost of everyone for the benefit of a few

     Private Enterprise: at the peril of everyone for the benefit of me

     Socialism: From each according to his ability to each according to his need

     P T Barnhamism: A sucker is born every minute

     Public/Private Partnership:  From each according to his capacity, to each according to his power

     Bourgeoism: From each according to his need to each according to his greed

There are two kinds of saviors: those who want to soothe the soul of the suffering and those who want to heal the sores of the flesh of the suffering – Ngugi Wa Thiongo – Wizard of the Crow, 2007 p94

Science is the religion of democracy

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity – George Orwell – Politics in the English Language. 1946

We accumulate

            Then we die

We stop accreting

Hoarders don’t

They are zombies

Unliving – beyond their time

Out of space

When one hears the phrase ‘intelligent design theorists’, it is perhaps tempting to understand ‘intelligent’ as referring to the theorists themselves – Steven Poole – Unspeak, 2006  p50

85% of college graduates this year will probably move back home

Silver rain condenses in gray around here, puddled / And soaks the wax out of milk cartons trucks have smashed / Flat. Strange neighborhoods are famous for phone poles – John Koethe – Domes, 1973 p37

Olive oil users are 41% less likely to have a stroke than non-olive oil users

Electricity kills darkness, candlelight illuminates it – Roger Deakin – Wildwood, 2007 p13

A replacement is no

            Substitute

Only in economics

            Where they are

            Infinite

And sports where they

            Are limited

Are they the same

Substitutes have an

            Institutional existence

            And must be made

By the rules

Political acts are commonly overdetermined: there are many reasons for them – Steven Poole – Unspeak, 2006  p81

A never incarcerated man has a 14% chance of making it out of the bottom economic quintile. A once incarcerated man as a 2% chance.

A city is the sum of trajectories whose laws are different for drivers and pedestrians – Michel Butor – Inventory, 1968   p36

To think is to lack faith; to have faith is to not to have to think

To congratulate oneself for one’s tolerance is sometimes actively to display distaste – Steven Poole – Unspeak, 2006  p29

Nature is Not Out There; Nor is It In Here

The same gray car has driven by twice. One begins to get paranoid. Might they be casing for a caper. Planing a foray in the middle of the night.  I go to bed uneasy. Twice now in two days I have been stung by bees. This time it was on the inside of the little finger. All I did was move my hand. I didn’t notice the bee licking my finger and when the fingers came together she stung. I pick out the detached stinger. Boy does it hurt. The other time all I got was a little puffiness. This time it is throbbing. I went to take a drink and found four drowned bees floating in the juice. I fished them out and took a sip thinking of what it must be like to get stung on the tongue. I worry about the dog that snaps at any thing that flies. These are mean, mean little bees. Too many of these mean little buggers are getting too close to me. While shooing them off, it is too easy to provoke one to commit suicide. I  am very careful about where I wave my hand trying to chase them away. The dog evidently has no such concerns as of yet snapping at anything that come by. My hand has swollen up. Later the arm began to ache. The pain was still there the next day. Are these Africanized bees? Are these what they call killer bees?

Wood, unlike stone, lives and dies on a human scale – Roger Deakin -  Wildwood, 2007 p157

Deep in the forest along

Dark paths

Blackberries ripen – pick

            A few – leave the rest

            For the birds and the bears

Something will come along

            And help propagate them

You can afford two-fifty

            A peck and they can’t

            And your poop doesn't

                      Help them

For the blind person, people…. Come and they go…  A hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you – John M Hull – Touching the Rock

The dog didn’t like primitive camping and neither did I. Sand was into everything and I was dirty. The dog wanted into the truck. He wanted to leave last night rather than take a walk. He walked over to the truck and sat by the door and pleaded with sorrowful eyes. So this morning we left. I had paid for another four days. My permit was good through Sunday.

The poor contribute only about 1% to the global warming process but will suffer 90% of the consequences

Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better treated than it deserves – Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818

No longer will the future be like the past. The assumption has been that our impact as a species has been insignificant. This has not been true for thousands of years. Australians and Native Americans have long managed their environments by fires. Primitive hunters drove a number of species to extinction. Most of the forests of Europe had been chopped down by the middle ages. A basic assumption of neo-liberal economics is that commodities are infinitely substitutable. Non-sustainability means exactly that – the future can no longer sustain the past. This is a hard concept to grasp. It causes much cognitive dissonance.

Hoarding is not defined by the number of possessions, but by how the acquisition and management of those possessions affect their owner – Randy Frost – Stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of stuff, 2010 p58

Got Milk!

PBJ Sand

            Witch

Yum yum

She ate them

            All up

Have some

            Sticks

To the roof

Wide open

            Oven

A light bulb

            When off

Is like a bottle

            Of wine

A  rocketship

            Moon bound

The chair is a chair, the wine is whine, / in a wineglass that’s the wineglass / standing there by standing there. / Only I’m imaginary / make-believe beyond belief, / so fictitious that it hurts – Wislawa Szymborska – Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p46

There are an estimated 40,000 SWAT team assults conducted in the US each year. Each year approximately 1,200 pets are shot in the process

Swatting: a prank call aimed at getting a SWATT raid on a neighbor’s house

89% of police departments and 60 federal agencies maintain SWAT or other paramilitary units. There are 56 different FBI SWAT teams

Where liberty is, there is my country (Benjamin Franklin) – Where liberty is not, there is my country (Thomas Paine)

Crop yields may soon begin to decrease due to rapid evolution of weed resistance due to available herbicides. Corn, soybeans and cotton resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) have created the opportunity of a perfect storm. In Central American they have already begun the return to hand cultivating of corn crops.

Riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness,  but are not in themselves happiness – Thomas Love Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818

The new DSM will broaden diagnostic boundaries by adding precursors of disorders – so you may not actually be mentally handicapped but can be diagnosed as on the path to mental illness. More and more false positive patients will be caught in a more widely defined mental illness net and milked by the pharmaceutical industry and its allied psychopharmacologists. - -  It looks as though it will be harder and harder to be normal – Marcia Angell – New York Review of Books 7.14.11  p22

With the introduction of anti-psychotic drugs, psychiatrists began calling themselves psycopharmacologists. Chemistry is more scientific than is Freud and besides it allowed them to limit their responsibility to the reduction of symptoms – something for which they were assured a higher success rate.

Reliability is not the same thing as validity. Reliability… is used to mean consistency; validity refers to correctness or soundness. If nearly all physicians agreed that freckles were a sign of cancer, the diagnosis would be “reliable” but not valid – Marcia Angell – New York Review of Books, 7/14/11, p20

Duck-Rabbits are Omens of Our Happiness

A dead goldfish lay on the sidewalk. It had jumped (more likely it had been thrown – it didn’t get onto that window ledge by itself) from the third floor of a brick apartment building. It has lain here since early yesterday morning. There was a history to its presence here. It was archeological evidence. But there was yet no funding provided for any research and besides by the time a grant request had gotten written and  funding made available the godlfish would long ago have been eaten by a cat or consumed by maggots. So let’s just forget about it. I stepped on it. Smashed it flat - sidewalk goo. There is nothing more to be said about this fish, although a poet might have been able to describe its decay and they (poets that is) do not need funding, they survive on air like Spanish moss. Or an artist like Chiam Soutine could have painted it. 

When man becomes proud to be not just the site where ideas and feeling are produced, but also the crossroad where they divide and mingle, he will be ready to be saved – Francis Ponge – The Voice of Things, 1972  p109

Diet soft drink drinkers, as a group, have a 70% greater increase in waste size than do those who do not drink diet sodas

The price one pays for engaging in the conspiratorial mode is to be treated to its logic – Slavo Zizek – London Review of Books 1/20/11

He was into tarpology, he said. And he had some questions for me regarding how I had strung my tarp. If you want to see expert tarpology, check out how the Canadians do it, I told him. The weak point in stringing a tarp is the corners – the grommets easily tear out. You can wrap the corners around a stone and tie line around the package, he said. Yes I can see that that would work. But better yet, I explained relieve the tension on the corners by using shock cords. That is what the Canadians do. Yeah, I noticed that you were using shock cords, he said. I had rigged a half and half tarp – shock cords along the sides and ropes at the corners. Later I would get more shock cords and eliminate any ropes connected directly to the tarp. The Canadians hung their higher in the trees than I could reach and could move them about at will. It was quite neat. I had yet to master the full art of tarpology. A perfectly hung tarp is invisible - it can't be distinguished from the trees.

The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function… It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away. At the climax of its evolution the machine conceals itself entirely – Antoine de Stint-Exupery – Terre des Hommas

Red tape change the ecology of the processes  that they administrate from political asylum seeking to scientific research and education -  screening processes are not benign and not necessarily necessary and most often they hinder what they purport to enable.

The ultimate show of power on the part of the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to be powerful criticism – Slavo Zizek – London Review of Books 1/20/11

THESE ARE THE  OMENS

I saw a tin soldier

            In the bark of a tree

He had his Brown Bess over

            His left shoulder

            And stood to dress

            Right dress

Queen Victoria was there

            Too but she wore a beard

John Brown stood at her side

And there is the face

            Of an owl

Above and to her left

I can’t help but fear

            That these are

            The omens of

The end of an epoch

Some have seen the face

            Of the Virgin Mary

            In a potato and have

Been relieved of their despair

Emperor Norton sent the Queen

             A marriage proposal

            She didn’t reply

Boomer and Lazarus were disappointed

            They wanted to attend

Some people collect potato chips

            With what they claim are

            Celebrity faces

I photograph the evidence

But all this is not evident

            In its image

No doubt you could play a dead rook like a bagpipe, all drone and no melody – Roger Deakin -  Wildwood, 2007  p50

Any process that bestows privilege has a tendency to become authoritarian

Some men… ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human – Thomas Jefferson

US university faculty members spend 40% of their research time doing funding paperwork. Some grants even have a negative value but you have to get successful at grant writing to do research. For younger scientists the amount of time devoted to obtaining grant money is even higher.

I hope you do not suspect me of being studious. I have finished my education. But there are some fashionable books that one must read, because they are ingredients of the talk of the day – Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818 p27

Patterns emerge from seemingly erratic behaviors and from nowhere else

Sarah Palin runs the risk of being little more than the thinking man’s Michele Bachmann – John Avlon – The Beast 3/17/11

Only 45% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 are working. More than half of Millennials think that the US is seriously on the wrong track

When in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house and youth to the gallows, something is wrong in the system of government – Thomas Paine – Right of Man, Part the Second, 1792

Automobile collisions with deer result in $4.6b in medical and car repair expenseas in the US each year

It is through the application of reason that [we] learn how unreasonable we are – Alan Wolfe – The New Republic – 3/24/11 p32

Complex life forms (nematode worms) can live as much as 3.6km underground

On two occasions I have been asked – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures will the right answer come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question – Charles Babbage

In Which Our Hero Fails to Keep His Appointment With The Lord

It rained almost all day yesterday. There were power lines in the road in Brandon .  I turned left in Goshan – this  is where an ancestor had lived – No wonder the moved west – how can any one survive farming  this – much better the prairies of Iowa. Good decision dear ancestor - poor dirt farmer.  I stopped and helped some residents remove a tree from the road so we could get by. There was a long enough period between storms for me to set up camp. Got to talking with Steven a construction worker from Boston and then  it started raining again. We agreed the apoxytaleptic nature of our civilization but differed as to whether aliens build the pyramids as a project to process fuel for their spaceships.

Suicide terrorists are the ultimate smart bomb – Robert Pape – Cutting the Fuse, 2010

One storm after another rolled in and collided with  side of the mountain. I had nothing to do but to go to bed early. It is supposed to clear off tomorrow. I wanted to let you know that in case of an emergency I have a radio. Telephones are no good here. Just in case you cut off a toe. Then he said that it was great to meet someone shorter than him and we stood head to head and my eyes came to his hair line. Well maybe not taller but not a lot shorter. He and Jake – after Jake had eaten Traildog’s food continued their rounds – the loop around the campgrounds – on foot.

Cell Phone etiquette – National League of Cotillions:

-       Do not take a call while someone has an appointment with you – or – when you have guests – it is rude

-       Never use a cellphone on a date. Turn off your phone unless you are expecting an emergency call

-       Don’t ignore someone waiting to provide service to you in a restaurant or a retail establishment because you are using you cell phone

-       Screen calls and when in the presence of others only answer emergency calls

-       Move 10-15 feet away from others when making a call

-       Don’t wear an earpiece when not on the phone

The religious convention which marks shepherds as a symbol of gentleness rest on their relation to sheep not men – E J Hobsbawm – Captain Swing, 1968  p63

It rained again last night. Gee, it is too early to be getting dark, I thought. There is not even enough light to read. It must be the weather, I said to myself. The previous night had been pitch black. You couldn’t even see the proverbially hand in front of your face. I don’t have a watch. I have to get the key and go out to the truck and turn on the ignition. Gee, almost 8 o’clock. Its much later than I had thought. Usually I have an accurate sense of the time – often to within five minutes – without ever looking at any timepiece. But this time I had been fooled.

Inside in

Outside out

            Skin

To skin – to flay

            About

My skin – preserve

Your skin – pleasure

            Under negotiation

Complex biochemical

            Interactions

Orifices are pleasure

            Surfaces

Inside outside

Inside out

Outside in

In and out

Cold waits / I am strong // Come to my room / the stove is iron / I took the hot / dark from the earth / to wrap about you – Yvor Winters – The Collected Poems of, 1978 p72

I caught myself dozing off, drifting across the highway lanes. Luckily I was the only vehicle on the dark highway. I don’t feel sleepy. I had pulled over at several points and tried to sleep, but could not. It is three AM and I’ve been on the road since 7AM yesterday morning. I would have found a motel but they were all full – refugees from the storm. Keep staring into the dark. The lane markings are hypnotic. Look into the far reaches of the headlights. Don’t look and the lane markings – click, click, click – they go darting by. Suddenly you notice that your over the line. You have dozed off. How long does it take to nod the head. Will the next time may be your last. There is a faint glow to my left. I can see the crests of the mountains. You can last. Hurry up sun. A sunny morning at last. I find a camp in Kentucky on Sunday. I still have three Peak Nut Brown Organics and a little wine left. Try the Red River Gorge someone had told me.

Low touch high

            Stress

Reach out and

            Touch

Someone – give a

            Friendly hand to

A helping hand

            A hand out

            Something in hand

Hand me down

Handle with care

            Fragile

Hands on

Hands down

Hands up

Hands out

Hand in

Hand out

I met the Christ – we quarreled // over sins in various seasons and the venial / pulchritude, and I consigned him to the flame …I met God in the streetcar, but I could not / pray to him, and we were both embarrassed – Yvor Winters – The Collected Poems of, 1978 p53

Only know down here in the upper south did I finally put my finger on what I had not encountered in the dark conifer forests of the north – it is the noise at night – the chirring of insects, the crocking of frogs, the twirling of birds, the chatter of squirrels, the hooting of owls. Other than the loons it had been quiet. It is very difficult to be cognize of the absence of sensual data. You just are keen to the idea that things don’t seem right. Then after several nights of chirring, chirping, tweeting, screeching and chattering you don’t hear that either.

He changes the light bulbs at a run down hotel. Then he’s offered an interview for the position as distribution & marketing manager for a sport fishing equipment manufacturer in Cambridge, Virginia. But the previous manager decides to return and resume his vacated position. He is now employed at his school changing burnt out light bulbs in the dorms and in the lecture halls. Today he has been told to only look for burnt out bulbs in refrigerators. He has to do it surreptitiously while everyone is asleep and as compensation for his intrusion on their privacy, he leaves two cold beers in each refrigerator. What brand of beer was it? I don’t know, but given his aesthetics, I know it was not a Bud Light. He also disposed of any empty or half filled bottles, replacing them with a full one. He wears a tan camel hair coat. It is the same jacket that he wore when he helped the old man get some tar paper roofing shingles through airport security and helped the old man’s grandson get them loaded on to the airplane. He had previously helped the pair with a shipment of quilted down garments.

PGA Tour Pro’s chance of sinking a put

            From 1 foot away                  100%

            7.8 feet                           50%

            11 feet                            34%

            25 feet                            10%

            33 feet                             6%

The moment what is distant becomes near to me, it is what was near that assumes the power of what was distant, that seems even more distant to me – Michel Butor – Inventory, 1968   p33

His boss Budd is talking to a coed. She was asking if he would pose for some photographs for a calendar for her dad’s fishing lure company which was the one located in Cambridge. Budd wasn’t keen on the idea. She also said that there was an opening at the company for a distribution and marketing manager. Budd said that he was an electrician and would stick to that he was good at but he knew someone who might be interested in such a job and that is when he recommended the young student changing refrigerator light bulbs. She gave Budd her father’s phone number and told him to have the student call him.

The applicant was asked to describe the steps that he would take in recruiting a sales team. The student did not have any marketing training, but  he told the owner about his extensive experience in business research. Any experience in the sporting, the owner asked. No, the candidate replied, but he did have experience in the leisure industry. It was not much but sufficient to get him an invitation to fly down to Cambridge.

Red truck with

            A ladder

            On top

It is no fire

            Engine

With men to man

            The hoses

Work work until

            The day

            Is done

Fuck fuck until

            Sleep

            Comes on
Life goes on
            And on
Wheels go round
            And round
On the red truck

She knew that her inheritance was passive obedience – Peacock – Nightmare Abbey, 1818 p21

The U.S. collects only 1.5% of GDP from corporate income tax, down from 4% in the 1960s

Propping up power is, generally a less dodgy proposition than defying it – Jill Lapore – The Whites of Their Eyes, 2010 p30

The boxes that feed cable signals and digital recording capacities to home entertainment centers consume $3 billion in electricity per year in the U.S. Two-thirds of this usage is while no-one is watching any programs

Everything is in the credits. Now that society has been definitively turned into an enterprise, everything is in the synopsis of performance – Jean Baudrillard – America, 1988  p109