The Deck of Hexjeffs project complete, I've 52 front and back cards (so 104 hexjeffs), I can put them in a box and no one need ever look at them again but me and who knows if I will except by accident when I find the box years from now while looking for something else. Commence the Hexjeff Tapes
Here's another one (w explantory haiku). Most will have painters tape canvases and all will have painters tape. Project started four days before we go to Maine for two weeks and I am taking no paint, tape, brushes, or canvases to Maine so project might be over by Saturday since we leave on Sunday. We're going regardless L now recovering from covid she picked up on a flight home from Florida (or somewhere in Florida pre-flight) and me with cold symptoms but as of half an hour a negative covid test though a positive test feels inevitable by tomorrow and threatens to delay one of my favorite Maine vacation traditions
FLIGHT
James Tate
Like a glum cricket
the refrigerator is singing
and just as I am convinced
that it is the only noise
in the building, a pot falls
in 2B. The neighbors on
both sides of me suddenly
realize that they have not
made love to their wives
since 1947. The racket
multiplies. The man downhall
is teaching his dog to fly.
The fish are disgusted
and beat their heads blue
against the cold aquarium. I too
lose control and consider
the dust huddled in the corner
a threat to my endurance.
Were you here, we would not
tolerate mongrels in the air,
nor the conspiracies of dust.
We would drive all night,
your head tilted on my shoulder.
At dawn, I would nudge you
with my anxious fingers and say,
Already we are in Idaho.
1/caitlin johnstone and her american husband/co-author tim foley write in the linked document:
ReplyDelete...[I]t takes years of sincere work to fully free yourself from all the distortions and false assumptions you grew up with.
But it’s worth doing, because positive change can only come from an awareness of what’s true, whether you’re talking about individuals or humanity as a whole. Our task as humans is to come to a truth-based relationship with reality to the furthest extent possible, and that means fearlessly diving headfirst into the long, hard slog of sorting out fact from fiction, one lie at a time, no matter how subtle.
2/seymour hersh's recent interview with thomas frank is also pointed to above - here's an exchange from that - emphasis added:
SH: Is there any hope for a serious response to the climate crisis? Or a rollback of the American military budget and our 750 overseas military bases?
TF: Yes, of course. We have confronted environmental disaster before, on a much smaller scale, and our efforts on that front were popular and successful. I’m thinking of the Dust Bowl here. Also, being an empire rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way, with our democratic instincts.
But being “right” about these things is not enough. Counting on the experts to fix them is even greater folly. You will wait for years for our enlightened leadership class in DC to decide all on their own that imperialism is a bad idea, and I am sorry to say they are going to disappoint you every time. They like being an empire. They aren’t all that concerned about climate change either, except insofar as they can use it as a weapon against those damned Republicans.
I am convinced, on these issues as on nearly everything else, that the only way to proceed is from the bottom up. We must have a movement that orients the Democratic Party back toward the people. The top-down model will not succeed on these matters. They require the mass participation of ordinary people. Without that, I am afraid that nothing is possible.
3/as lawrence berra might have said, you never know when something surprising might happen - the development of a mass movement that orients the democratic party back toward the people seems unlikely but one never knows, does one? this is the future - one lives it, or lives with it, and eventually gets out of the way
1. You need 2 more, for the Jokers.
ReplyDelete2. Feel better.
I would pay for a deck: Oblique strategy: effjay's left eye.
ReplyDeleteEach time I got vid'd, I felt the stab in my throat pert near the moment of infection, first three days were like, 'I'll be done after these first few days' until the last of the few where I's all 'F me', and the next few days sucked.