Thursday, October 28, 2010

Our Two Boys Went Out to Skate, Broke Through the Ice Like Battleships, Came Back to Us in Canvas Bags

O, stomp! have I not stormed about the stomp?


I read John Cole because he articulately represents the zeitgeist of many of my friends and family who, like me once and still sometimes, feel that .06% stink of our shitty forgiveness of the Democrats for their shitty shifts to the right, we who Ouchy! it stings, but OMFG! CRACKERS! An argument can be make that if it's eat or be eaten, .06% less-shitty equals .06% more pay for school teachers, and I'm thoroughly sympathetic - I'll vote still if asked by one of mine on a particular issue or candidate in a close election. Sheeyit, I'd like an election where my self-interest is directly challenged by my newly donned Fuck Voting! creds.

Read or reread smart guy and professional hysteric Chris Hedges:
The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.
I mean, yes, yes I am clinging to my privileges and comforts. I'm lucky enough to live in Montgomery County Maryland so I can pretend to my disaffection - not be a $$$-contributing fool or a stooge of the media priests - and not vote for Babs. Oofdah! Take that, Van Malley O'Hollen! Yes! it means yes, I probably am more insufferably selfish than you, but I've been blessed: I'd like an election where my self-interest is directly challenged by my newly donned Fuck Voting! creds, but in Montgomery County Maryland, I may never have one.

  • Please listen to this while starring at the above.
  • I will be glad when it's next Wednesday. 
  • Son of elitism for the masses.
  • The upcoming election.
  • It took a truly remarkable effort to produce this result: Republicans have wiped out the advantage held by Democrats in recent election cycles among women, Roman Catholics, less affluent Americans and independents. All of those groups broke for Mr. Obama in 2008 and for Congressional Democrats when they grabbed both chambers from the Republicans four years ago, according to exit polls. If women choose Republicans over Democrats in House races on Tuesday, it will be the first time they have done so since exit polls began tracking the breakdown in 1982.
  • An obamapology.
  • Cowbirds, warblers, gods-children.
  • No longer even bothering.
  • Petulance! That'll work.
  • Lessons of 1995.
  • Breakfast Club, part nine.
  • The anti-MOCO, part two.
  • Mocopigs!
  • Baltimore County pig urges probe of Mocollege!
  • Clarksburg!
  • Psychedelly, WHFS, Root Boy Slim, 1977?

  • Sheeyit, that's my life. Jake Einstein was the father and owner, Damien - who was cool - was one son but he wasn't the GM and PD - that was David, who was a dick.
  • Mantel's Diary:
When I write my diaries I talk to myself with an inward voice. For the next week I am conscious that my brain is working oddly. Imagine you were creating all your experience by writing it into being, but were forced to write with the wrong hand; you would make up for the slow awkwardness by condensing phrases, like a poet. In the same way, my life compresses into metaphor. When I sit up and see the wound in my abdomen, I am pleased to see that it has a spiral binding, like a manuscript. On the whole I would rather be an item of stationery than be me. It is as if my thoughts are happening not inside my head but outside me in the room. A film with a soundtrack is running to my right. It keeps me busy with queries based on false premises. ‘Is it safe if I drink this orange juice?’ But I blink and the orange juice isn’t there. Therefore I study reality carefully, the bits of it within reach. For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my wrist. We call those ‘lines’, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of the blood drain, the epidural’s sweet sonnet form.



GRAVES WE FILLED BEFORE THE FIRE

Gabrielle Calvocoressi


Some lose children in lonelier ways:
tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers

that soak the bedclothes five nights running.
Our two boys went out to skate, broke

through the ice like battleships, came back
to us in canvas bags: curled

fossils held fast in ancient stone,
four hands reaching. Then two

sad beds wide enough for planting
wheat or summer-squash but filled

with boys, a barren crop. Our lives
stripped clean as oxen bones
.

5 comments:

  1. Slow down, number one, and set the controls for the heart of the sun where we're going to beam those pesky third parties.

    After we moved this summer, we forgot (conveniently?) to mail change of address forms to the BoE. I assume if I showed up I'd have to present 8 forms of ID, a blood sample and loyalty oaths to either the dums or goopers.

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  2. Please steal! And do listen to the Land of the Loops song while staring at it for the full effect.

    Thank goodness, Randal, you didn't say "heart of the sunrise," cause that would have been both a STNG *and* a Yes allusion and I would have needed to spend two hours staring at that gif and listening to that Land of the Loops song over and over. Oh.

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  3. Remember "Buffalo 66"? Most awesome use of "Heart of the Sunrise" evar.

    If I'm not mistaken, Mr. Gilbert is flanked by the Einstein brothers in that photo, taken before Damien's accident, with Damien to his right. I'm not sure, but I think one of those other guys (the rightmost, maybe?) may be Cerphe, but he may have been off to big-time FM by then.

    Damien was the PD later, after they left 102.3 and Cordell Ave and went to wherever the hell they went off to (on the dial and in Capitol City), to die a second FM death, far more protracted and ugly than the first. I think I still have a cassette of the last 6 hours or so of 102.3, but if that's the most morbid and suck thing I ever remember, I must've had a pretty good life so far.

    I once interviewed for a job there, when they were still on Cordell, as an ad saleman. No salary, commission only. You're right, David Einstein WAS a dick, at least in my not nearly grownup eyes.

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  4. I'm still trying to understand Chris Hedges as a hysteric. Does not compute.

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