The Chimney Is Fifty Years Old and Slants to One Side

Twice in the same week in the morning before a celebratory event for Planet I post doom I wrote the night before. It wasn't intentional, just happened - I didn't think to notice until last night. When she turns my age in 2044....

The doom isn't (mostly) for you and me, though as I was deservedly chided, fuck gloom. And another wonderful day: Thank you very much to my dearest friends and family, all of whom recognize that if anyone can save the planet it's Planet.

• The depression and the future.
• Neo v post.
• On the above.
• In which a question is raised. 
• A choice to kill.
• On the above.
• One reason my Jeremiah bones are jangling: a professor/friend, an Arabist with connections in Lebanon and Israel, tells me the vibes from Israel suggest a war by end of summer.
• Seven-dimensional chess.
• FMFML.
• The most divisive word in Britain. 
• Meant to mention this last week.
• Greatest day in Frederick history!
• Spanking Franzen!
• To the Alps.
• RIP Martin Rushent.
• RIP Martin Rushent.
• Dot dash.

THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS

Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
 
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
 
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
 
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
 
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.