What If War Is Just a Male Version of Dressing Up, a Game Devised to Avoid Profound Spiritual Questions?
The 304 page Boorum & Pease 8.2 x 10.5 quadrille journal started September 3, 2022 filled this morning, October 23, 2023. I will put it on the shelves with the other 50+ years of finished journals that I never ever look at again once I fill them
I write daily in a journal to process what I'm digesting that day, some of it makes it here though most doesn't. Why the fuck am I keeping them? I can't imagine me ever reading them. Do I expect grieving family and friends to read them (though there's nothing in them that would surprise much less shock them)? I knew forty years ago no academic researchers would scrub them for insights into my canon when I realized there will be no canon (though eventually a shitty blog I (quietly) insist is poetry that no one will write a dissertation about). It would take weeks to find and gather them all and more weeks to burn them all and burning them would be a gratuitous symbolic act that implies a secretive archival importance that they must be destroyed to protect that does not exist, ditto ripping each up and feeding handful after handful of pages into the Iron Mountain locked shredder bin at work
That's the new one, deliberate echo of Winewood Organics and WFMU stickers. Just received an email back from the colleague who manages facilities in the building, I can box them up in empty printer paper boxes and tape seal them, write RECYCLE on the box and leave on loading dock (- leave them on the loading dock -) on Thursdays for pick-up and destruction, yes someone could read them (- on the loading dock, colleague-wise -) at the recycling center, even take them home, who the fuck would do that says the guy who will never read them again but cannot throw them away
My former ambitious (GOP) governor says your opposition to the United States' (and its client state and bastard child Israel's) genocidal massacre of thousands of Palestinians is antisemitism, I'm sure my current ambitious (fake-progressive Democratic) governor says the same thing when asked
Sajaegi is a desperate, money-losing play that would only really make sense for a new group that wants to jumpstart their career or a washed-up superstar seeking a flashy comeback
1/worst moco parking lots - i've spent a lot of time at the first one mentioned - it does require patience - on the other hand at least each space is nice and big
2/i read with interest the "common sense solutions for collapse" from znetwork
[parenthetically, i voted for the cofounder of znet when for student body president at our undergraduate institution - he won]
they are indeed sensible solutions - but as the local told the tourist, "you can't get there from here" - you have to go somewhere else first - and it will be a very bumpy ride, most likely - but as lawrence berra pointed out, you never know when something surprising might happen
3/yesterday missus charley and i had lunch with an inside-the-beltway couple we've known for decades - pmc operatives in the sausage-making and apparatus, semi-retired - surprisingly to us, they had no enthusiasm for our government's policy of wholehearted support for our closest ally in the struggle to defend freedom in the middle east - i wonder if the times they are a-changing
4/and here's a performance of "masters of war" by the roots
After Southeast Asia I kept journals in black, pebbled-cover artist's sketchbooks, and a few other styles, for twenty-four years. A box with all of them was lost in a move, stored in a friend's attic -- some boxes thrown out by a drunken husband (for example, most of my photo albums) -- then we quarrelled, seriously enough that we stopped speaking. The husband committed fraud and went away. The ex-friend still doesn't speak with me to this day.
Only in the past two years did a mutual step in as interlocutor. Every so often I receive a few boxes of various sizes, never knowing what will appear, like cargo washing ashore for Chuck Noland. If the box with the journals showed up, musty home of Silverfish, I'm not sure what it would be like.
I restarted keeping journals in the Covid-time; had no idea why I was doing it. I have no illusions that I am as anonymous as one of the plaster casts of Pompeii, but I think it's like painting, like poetry: a way of working with what's below the surface, telling jokes, healing; saying I Live Here.
What mistah said about the process, hastening: not chucking them renders a reality devoid of regretting the chucking. I purged all of my notebooks, journals, and the only screenplay I ever completed after moving a friend about whom I mind-muttered after the move that she had way too much shit; that everybody had too much shit. Late that same evening I filled two boxes that'd housed three-foot tall JBL speakers, deciding I needed neither them nor the contents and dragged them down the three flights of stairs at the back and tossed them in one of Daley's dumpsters. If I still had them, would I reference them? Not as likely as I'd regret not having them.
followup about accepting TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it
1/in mid-august i wrote about listening to, and even participating by a submitted question which was read aloud, a sermon by michael dowd - see the comments at
1.5/This "post-doom, no gloom" sermon by Rev. Michael Dowd was delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Flint, Michigan on August 13, 2023. Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd's wife, mission partner, and video editor, thinks it is one of his best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le1TzMsGXkg&t=0s
1.7/today i learned it was also his last sermon - he died in his sleep of a heart attack earlier this month
1.9/my question to him was about how the public in general may find the term "contraction" more palatable and thus thinkable than "collapse" - i have since learned how nate hagens in his website and interviews brands it as "the great simplification"
2/michael dowd's widow, connie barlow, writes about dowd's shifts in worldview:
In December 2012, he woke up with horror to the speed and scale of the climate crisis. A philosophy major in college, but autodidact ever since, Michael devoured books and blogs on the science of climate change and what lay ahead. This rapidly shifted his attention from evolution as foreground to "ecology as the new theology." (Thomas Berry, who had died in 2009, had emphasized both.) It was then that Michael donned a green clergy shirt and became "Reverend Reality" in his guest speaking around the country.
Michael's emphasis shifted again when he encountered in 2015 a book written by William R. Catton in 1980. Now he understood that the climate crisis was a new, global manifestation of the human tendency to overshoot ecological limits whenever forms of society complexified such that Indigenous values were lost. By the spring of 2019, he had a name for this new understanding: postdoom.
https://postdoom.com/
4/meanwhile, missus charley has a grandnephew in minnesota in second grade, and my own grandnephew - my first - is a week old in panama
4.1/into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown
1/worst moco parking lots - i've spent a lot of time at the first one mentioned - it does require patience - on the other hand at least each space is nice and big
ReplyDelete2/i read with interest the "common sense solutions for collapse" from znetwork
[parenthetically, i voted for the cofounder of znet when for student body president at our undergraduate institution - he won]
they are indeed sensible solutions - but as the local told the tourist, "you can't get there from here" - you have to go somewhere else first - and it will be a very bumpy ride, most likely - but as lawrence berra pointed out, you never know when something surprising might happen
3/yesterday missus charley and i had lunch with an inside-the-beltway couple we've known for decades - pmc operatives in the sausage-making and apparatus, semi-retired - surprisingly to us, they had no enthusiasm for our government's policy of wholehearted support for our closest ally in the struggle to defend freedom in the middle east - i wonder if the times they are a-changing
4/and here's a performance of "masters of war" by the roots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRmxlKXsqNE
corrections and additions
Delete2/when he ran for
3/strike and
4/a notable point of the band's performance of the folk/rock protest song is that the melody used at the beginning is that of 'to anacreon in heaven'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IPLFLH3BHU
5/from what is stated here, it seems that - at least sometimes - it is the process, not necessarily the product, of journaling which is worthwhile
After Southeast Asia I kept journals in black, pebbled-cover artist's sketchbooks, and a few other styles, for twenty-four years. A box with all of them was lost in a move, stored in a friend's attic -- some boxes thrown out by a drunken husband (for example, most of my photo albums) -- then we quarrelled, seriously enough that we stopped speaking. The husband committed fraud and went away. The ex-friend still doesn't speak with me to this day.
ReplyDeleteOnly in the past two years did a mutual step in as interlocutor. Every so often I receive a few boxes of various sizes, never knowing what will appear, like cargo washing ashore for Chuck Noland. If the box with the journals showed up, musty home of Silverfish, I'm not sure what it would be like.
I restarted keeping journals in the Covid-time; had no idea why I was doing it. I have no illusions that I am as anonymous as one of the plaster casts of Pompeii, but I think it's like painting, like poetry: a way of working with what's below the surface, telling jokes, healing; saying I Live Here.
What mistah said about the process, hastening: not chucking them renders a reality devoid of regretting the chucking. I purged all of my notebooks, journals, and the only screenplay I ever completed after moving a friend about whom I mind-muttered after the move that she had way too much shit; that everybody had too much shit. Late that same evening I filled two boxes that'd housed three-foot tall JBL speakers, deciding I needed neither them nor the contents and dragged them down the three flights of stairs at the back and tossed them in one of Daley's dumpsters. If I still had them, would I reference them? Not as likely as I'd regret not having them.
ReplyDeletefollowup about accepting TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it
ReplyDelete1/in mid-august i wrote about listening to, and even participating by a submitted question which was read aloud, a sermon by michael dowd - see the comments at
https://www.blckdgrd.com/2023/08/you-see-i-have-always-been-rather-dull.html
1.5/This "post-doom, no gloom" sermon by Rev. Michael Dowd was delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Flint, Michigan on August 13, 2023. Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd's wife, mission partner, and video editor, thinks it is one of his best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le1TzMsGXkg&t=0s
1.7/today i learned it was also his last sermon - he died in his sleep of a heart attack earlier this month
1.9/my question to him was about how the public in general may find the term "contraction" more palatable and thus thinkable than "collapse" - i have since learned how nate hagens in his website and interviews brands it as "the great simplification"
2/michael dowd's widow, connie barlow, writes about dowd's shifts in worldview:
In December 2012, he woke up with horror to the speed and scale of the climate crisis. A philosophy major in college, but autodidact ever since, Michael devoured books and blogs on the science of climate change and what lay ahead. This rapidly shifted his attention from evolution as foreground to "ecology as the new theology." (Thomas Berry, who had died in 2009, had emphasized both.) It was then that Michael donned a green clergy shirt and became "Reverend Reality" in his guest speaking around the country.
Michael's emphasis shifted again when he encountered in 2015 a book written by William R. Catton in 1980. Now he understood that the climate crisis was a new, global manifestation of the human tendency to overshoot ecological limits whenever forms of society complexified such that Indigenous values were lost. By the spring of 2019, he had a name for this new understanding: postdoom.
https://postdoom.com/
4/meanwhile, missus charley has a grandnephew in minnesota in second grade, and my own grandnephew - my first - is a week old in panama
4.1/into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown