Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Skyward Like a Lark Saying Fuck to the Whole Brood

So, this will be the last of these for a while here, I think:



  • For multiple reasons, some logistical, yes, my studio has been repurposed for teleworking, but mostly I'm so sideways
  • - being jailed in my house for 24 hours it takes for a foot of snow to be plowed spins me sideways - 
  • the idea of months jailed in house and the thought of the world that will be once I am paroled, I need think and write and type now to process, not splurt, hope this changes
  • Tablets open, not very busy. I'm 75 pages from end of current journal tablet and don't have its successor bought yet, I'll order in time that the package can sit on stoop in three day quarantine before opening 
  • I've ink enough for years if I use the colors I don't like before ordering more of the colors I like
  • As for here 
  • - three minutes ago I type this sentence I saw a tweet that Republicans will blame the Democrats' impeachment of Trump for the thousands of death and the end of existence we knew before the plague - 
  • I'm too vain and need to maintain contact to quit but I don't know if it's healthy for me to daily document the clusterfuck, though I did today 
  • This isn't to say I won't and isn't to say I will, I suspect it will be more normal product than not and not as much or just as much depending on how much I escape from my house




        





THE JAILBIRD

Maurice Riordan

I’ve this gut feeling that inside somewhere,
perched, so to speak, in the innermost wood
of my body or brain, on mute since childhood
a bird-creature lurks in its cramped lair
for when the wood’s consumed, as in a fire,
though also consumed as drinks are or food
(over months or could be years ingesting crude
chemicals, making the sly one ever slyer).
But then crackle ’n pop, it’s all gone for good.
And good riddance, since freed from its bonds
the avian now preens its wings and absconds
from the scene below (that’s me, in my last throes)
skyward like a lark saying fuck to the whole brood
and piping forth some blithe hymn as she goes.

5 comments:

  1. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

    — Victor Frankl

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  2. Regarding hunting, there are outfits that take hunters out to hunt bobcats. They take them out at night and use searchlights which makes the bobcats freeze making it easy to shoot them. Big brave hunters all.
    They have a picture showing a typical night's kill with a pile of about ten dead bobcats, the dumbshit hunters standing behind grinning like the jackasses they are.

    Predictions abound, conflicting information, which experts are actually experts, they say the world is ending as we know it. How do they know it? A homepage has a link to virus information to keep you safe, yet when you go there all they have is which movie star has the virus. Really fucking great, that. What it really is, it's a waiting game. We just have to wait to see what happens. I went through this after PG and E burned my house down, that was a waiting game too. The government did all it could to cover its own ass by making people jump through hoops under threat of legal action. So helpful! All I can say is don't expect too much from the government, they'll be too busy covering their ass to be much good.

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  3. 1)that new yorker article 'reality has a bernie bias' is sensible but i wonder if it will have an impact on the thinking of many or even any people

    then i remember some lines from a procol harum song

    still write it down
    it might be read
    nothing's better left unsaid



    2)in terms of our shitlords, an article vividly showing their shittiness - intellectually as well as morally speaking - also recently from the new yorker - is

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration

    3)Jim H. - as frankl knew from experience, we live in a world of radical contingency


    at this moment i think of something i read in a book from idries shah, but which might go back much further -

    you really own only that which would be safe in a shipwreck





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  4. riordan's poem about the jailbird reminds me -

    henry wadsworth longfellow is a relative of mine - an xth cousin, y times removed, x+y aproximately equal to 12

    a few years ago i was at a social gathering where a man nearly 80 years old, filipino in origin, recited this poem by my cousin which he had memorized as a schoolboy long ago and far away:

    A Psalm of Life
    By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


    What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.


    Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    Life is but an empty dream!
    For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.

    Life is real! Life is earnest!
    And the grave is not its goal;
    Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
    Was not spoken of the soul.

    Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
    Is our destined end or way;
    But to act, that each to-morrow
    Find us farther than to-day.

    Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
    And our hearts, though stout and brave,
    Still, like muffled drums, are beating
    Funeral marches to the grave.

    In the world’s broad field of battle,
    In the bivouac of Life,
    Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
    Be a hero in the strife!

    Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
    Let the dead Past bury its dead!
    Act,— act in the living Present!
    Heart within, and God o’erhead!

    Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
    And, departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the sands of time;

    Footprints, that perhaps another,
    Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
    A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
    Seeing, shall take heart again.

    Let us, then, be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
    Still achieving, still pursuing,
    Learn to labor and to wait.




    the ancient and widely subscribed-to although in some sense improbable notion that you are more than just your biochemical processes, that part of you is independent of your physical components, is also expressed in a twenty minute guided meditation by todd rundgren, which i have listened to hundreds of times and has, i think, been a major factor in keeping me from committing serious felonies

    try it maybe you'll like it the first one's free

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2XMOVm9ZM

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  5. It seems to me we should be asking China for help. I'm sure they would. But I can't imagine our shitlords doing that, too humiliating. It would be great just to have a fucking mask so one could go about their business.

    My biggest regret is not getting a haircut right before the shitstorm hit. I'm getting downright shaggy. I really hate this shit. Shitstorms plus shitlords equals shit.

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