Sluggish Seethe and Moan and Laugh
- Appalachian Trail, Sky Meadows State Park, Paris VA, fog, Sunday past.
- Fabulous so experience cool.
- First stop was Wildcat Mountain - best peak leaves within 50 miles
and this weekend past was peak leaves 2017 - but landowners shut it down.
- We knew it
was private, hiked it for years at their courtesy, hiked with courtesy.
- Sign at kiosk blamed hikers.
- Someone(s) is an asshole, the hikers or the landowners.
- Death to the Either/Or: Law One in the Assholocene.
- We are being reprogrammed.
- I seethe for relief
- (as in I seethe for fun,
- not seethe for relief from seething),
- daydream I shoot elephant poachers.
- When this blog was a bait-the-cracker Poor Man Institute imitator I wasn't seething.
- I'll not be shooting anyone until I have to, and then I won't have a gun I don't know how to use.
- Every post on this blog is tagged My Complicity except for two a year.
- This fucking blog.
- Here, today's song.
- Here, today's poem.
0)i hadn't thought of the poor man institute in a while - it turns out the last new post there was 2010
ReplyDelete1)on the other hand, one of the blogs on the blogroll there is still active at the same address
http://delong.typepad.com/
run by university of california (berkeley) economics professor brad delong
1a)who is my distant cousin inasmuch as we are both descended from john alden and priscilla mullins,
1b)and both are cousins to henry wadsworth longfellow
2)delong links to a krugman blog post with an arguably suggestive title:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/paul-ryan-is-choking-on-his-own-mystery-meat/
3)yesterday i was showing around town a couple whose wedding i attended over forty years ago, and i made a philosophical argument about the will, contrasting how a rock rolls down a hill with how a goat climbs up a hill - so today's poem by dean young, "easy as falling down stairs", had a certain resonance
3a)i also shared with my old friends remarks similar to what i said about "indian pudding" as posted here a mere four years ago (this also pertains to my pilgrim ancestors, whom i have in common with brad delong)
http://www.blckdgrd.com/2013/11/is-it-your-hermeneuts-helmet-not.html
4)looking for more by dean young, i consulted my local public library online catalog, where i found
Blondie: The Bumstead Family History
For more than 75 years Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead have been one of America's favorite couples. Through war and peace, through boom and bust, through sexual revolution and social upheaval, Blondie has become the most widely read comic strip in syndication - in 35 languages and in 47 countries. Blondie - the comic strip - was born on September 8, 1930. Dagwood was the rich, but awkward, son of millionaire industrialist J. Bolling Bumstead, while Blondie was a poor and beautiful nobody. Dagwood's parents were opposed to the marriage, but love won out, even though Dagwood had to give up his inheritance to marry Blondie in February, 1933. Over the years, the particulars of the Blondie comic strip have changed. Traveling salesmen have been replaced by telephone salesmen. Dagwood no longer takes the bus to work. He now rides in a car pool. But the themes have remained the same - eating, sleeping, making a living and raising children, all tied together by Blondie and Dagwood's undying devotion to each other.
5)that is not the same dean young - but this is:
ANOTHER LETHAL PARTY FAVOR
By Dean Young
I was being ushered somewhere to be beaten
when I ran into my old friend Harry.
He looked slicked down like he’d had help
licking his wounds and when I told him where
I was going he said, Ha, they don’t even know
how to beat a fly there. That’s Harry for you.
Don’t let him see you dragging your trash
to the curb because he’ll have to produce
a bigger heap, carry it on his back even if
his chin almost scrapes the ground like
a dung beetle. Tell him about your heart
transplant and he’ll say, Didn’t know
you had a heart. Lately he’s been concentrating
on contemporary poetry of all things,
kinda a relief like if Hitler had stayed
interested in painting more than politics.
Besides, it was a beautiful day to be beaten,
one of those spry spring afternoons you feel
you could talk to a daffodil and the daffodil,
full of its own problems, would nonetheless
accompany you into the dark cave of your own
skull like a torch held by a villager
intent upon burning down the castle.
OCTOBER 28, 2013 ISSUE of The New Yorker
Lovingly and without judgment: I claim right of place to antivouch. You hain't stopped seething since about 1974. The song remains the same, though the album changes each time we listen.
ReplyDeleteLest those outside think I'm throwing stones, I hain't stopped seething since May 4, 1970. Sometimes the boil is a little less vigorous, is all.