All I Do Is Dick Around the Sun Goes Up the Moon Goes Down the Leaves Are Green the Leaves Are Brown and All I Do Is Dick Around

▲'s  most posted video on this blog by a factor of X. ▲'s the Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthem, has been since Day One, people can vouch, today High Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Day. Chris Elliott is 58 today.







I submitted the poem below to Boston Review's Annual Poetry Contest on High Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Day Eve, paid $20 to submit. I recognize BR's scam and am fine with it, I read their stuff but don't subscribe, please have $20.

Beyond considerations of competition versus my limitations as a whatever, the poem has no chance of winning (or losing but getting published). I do this every whenever, not often. I'll see a competition in APR or, like today, somewhere online, and think, doink! submit poem + High Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Day = Serendipity, I'm thinking doink! until I doink! (and get a bleggalgazing blogpost out of it on High Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Day). I submit.

I never received a personalized NO! on poems with washes until my last doink! when whoever it was said even if it they were the best poems of the batch (they weren't, but she liked them) the cost and hassle of printing even one made it not a fucking chance. I took that shit to heart and abandoned tablet for type for six months, the fuck is wrong with me. I have faith and hope I get a regularly formatted blindcopied mass-batched-email letterheaded NO! this time.

Thanks for reading this. If you are Kinding me and me not you, please let me know, and please let me know if there's someone you think I should be reading.

The two other Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthems ▼ Reminder: The Archers of Loaf is this shitty blog's official Theme Song. It's so fucking self-indulgent to think you'll like this song.

All I Do Is Dick Around the Sun Goes Up the Moon Goes Down the Leaves Are Green the Leaves Are Brown and All I Do Is Dick Around

▲'s  most posted video on this blog by a factor of X. ▲'s the Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthem, has been since Day One, people can vouch, today High Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Day. Chris Elliott is 57 today.

• I am not blogforlorn.
• Maybe only I think so, but I don't yodel for yodel's sake day to day like once.
• This post is live until the next post.

• Linkless more, not for lack of fishing, though I'm not compelled to fish as once.
• Blegsylvania be always dying.
• Linkless more: I can post linkless posts.
• Tablet is active, just not here, and not there either, though latter may change.
• Most log-dancing days of our lives, you don't want to yodel now.
• I speak only of me, who is small.
• This is the longest I've gone without changing template in this shitty blog's lifetime.
• Forgive me, I like the way this shitty blog looks, posts.
• Thank you you who visit here.
• Yes, bullets for monologues.

The two other Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthems ▼ Reminder: The Archers of Loaf is this shitty blog's official Theme Song. It's so fucking self-indulgent to think you'll like this song.

ITIWRaFSoPitQ, or: Who Were Towed Out of Sight By a Whale

• ITIWRaFSoPitQ = If true, it would represent a fundamental shift of power in the quadrant.
• ITIWRaFSoPitQocene: Tell me what happened last Thursday that changed everything. Friday.
• Yesterday, Iowa Republican Congressman states while all babies must be carried until birth only white ones shouldn't be killed immediately placenta cord is cut. ITIWRaFSoPitQ? No.
• Cuomo positioning himself for Democratic POTUS 2020 run? No x no x no x no x no.
• I may be reading Moby Dick again. ITIWRaFSoPitQ.

I'm So Fucked Self-Indulgent to Think You'd Like This Song

That's been this blog's Bleggalgaze One from Day One. People can vouch. It is the most posted youtube, by far, in this blog's history. I've watch it at dozens of times each time I posted it. It gets better each watch. I've watched it seven times in the past half-hour. There is nothing I can write - nothing I can imagine anyone infinitely more talented than me writing - that's better bleggalgaze. My faith in fuck it, fuck me, fuck this, replenishes. Chris Elliott is fifty-five today. Today is an High Egoslavian Holy Day.

Dr Z and I yesterday played a disc course new to us both, Ditto, a Washington County Park just east of Hagerstown. Eighteen holes, three field, the rest in woods, missed-fairways dense briar rough. SeatSix, think longer Pohick, a whiff of gully Pratt. First round, long to red, 61, second round, short to red, 55, three birds, two clanked. Two tees, two baskets every hole, and most holes the tees and baskets are as far left and right from other as possible, so four different if not dissimilar courses on the same eighteen. A remarkable use of limited space, it feels like a maze. 270 to 70 to MD-66 to Mt Aetna Rd, an hour drive to and from, it's now in the at least twice a year rotation.

On drive home news-radioed traffic and weather, the top-of-the-hour tease was Martin O'Malley's official candidacy. He's running for Vice President, said Martin. Or a cabinet position, I said. Martin said, I'm looking forward to the GOP Clown Show debates, ten white men all trying to get to the right of the other nine. I said, it just occurs to me that O'Malley is also betting that at some point Hillary's candidacy collapses - health or, more likely, Clintonian shittiness goes nova - and when it does O'Malley will be the only one with with campaign infrastructure, however lame, trite, underfunded, feeble. What about Sanders, Martin asked. We both laughed. I miss writing like this sometimes.

As always, thanks for reading. If you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know. Here, this shitty blog's Number One Theme Song, has been since Day One:

Retribution if joy comes for fear

[My ophthalmologist insists...]

My ophthalmologist insists
my constant cataclysmic visions
are not glitch of glaucoma prescription
but my apocalypse-jones spiking.
Can I get my Timolol refill anyway, I ask.

People Root for the Underdog but Vote for the Asshole

Click, yo, or:

Achoo! The spray from that sneeze	Tonight on Cupcake Wars: What	I will unfollow you if
hydrates this page's watercolors	Rahm's re-election means for America.	you tweet one more image
though washes were watered	Contestant One regards sprinkles	of elephant poachers gloating
before the sneeze. It IS true	as moral obligation, Contestant	over corpse of detusked
I just sneezed, that mucus flew,	Two regards cream cheese icing	bull. Your ##.##.##.###
I wish I'd thought to sneeze	as cheating unto holocaust,	can be disappeared from me
on blank page and necessitated	Contestant Three spits into One's	like spit in a batter.
a new poem. HEY! Who is the guy	and Two's batter and wins the contest.	Victors are always assholes
in North Augusta, South Carolina	People root for the underdog	and I can't quit contests
IP address ##.##.##.###	but vote for the asshole. Contestant	safe knowing in Battle-
consistent as a bot? It's not	Two is crying for the camera per	Asshole I haven't the skills
my father, not one brother,	contract requirement, Contestant	to win. Ah. Here's a sneeze,
maybe the other brother, not	One admits he should have spit	I got to tablet on time.
my troll, not a commenting	into Two's and Three's batter but	I'm told I can win if I try.
regular, consistent as a bot.	lacked the amorality necessary.	Tonight, on Donut Wars:
I'm told I can know if I want to know.	Rahm knows. Show folk	Be the ultimate hole
That I want to know is why I can't.	you're an asshole, certain win.	in an inedible donut.

Also too, while I'm here, my two favorite albums of 2015 so far, plus the most important thing you'll read today, America: Structural: This Is How It's Going Down.

My Poem on Free Speech After My Censor's Edits

Click, yo.

Theme Song March 2015

Played lots of Fucked Up here, mentioned I loved them - holyfuck, I love them - but never tagged them, O what a fucked up motherfucker am I. Oh, me? I'm better, all's fine. Please play Fucked Up LOUD! if you can. If you can't or more probably just don't, that's cool too. No blogs were killed in the production of this post. Wait. That's not true.

Also too, Rest in Peace, Gene the Dancing Machine.

Not That I Can More but Imagine a Step Two

The Deaf Men Nodded at the Blind Boy's Recognition

Planet's sophomore Fall semester in 2012 I drove out to help her buy and move iron from the iron store to her art building for a sculpture class. I love that trip. I knew there was a photo I was reminded of by Thursday's photo below of the sun through the windows early morning at my then temporary cubicle; I'm back in my new but same cubicle. The above photo taken in the iron store. Six days until the Highest Egoslavia Holy Day, and I get to see her before then!

Bottles of blackness, this is true: yesterday afternoon a professor that just three days ago I spent fifteen minutes at his request talking about widgets and sprockets to make his pedagogical responsibilities easier to avoid walked into the gym while I was on an elliptical and looked me in the eye with no recognition. He got on the elliptical next to me for fifteen minutes, said excuse me when the sanitizer paper fell to the floor while he was wiping down the machine and broke my rhythm, didn't recognize me. Last evening, buying club soda in the Palisades Safeway, I stood behind a professor I've helped with widgets and sprockets to make her pedagogical responsibilities easier to avoid, she looked at me, I smiled, she smiled back with a total lack of recognition. I'm extraordinarily grateful. Is welcome kick in the nuts of a brazen blogwhore and attention slut to take one from real life to rattle home a more sensible and less dramatic if not a significantly better mood.

• Phil is 75 today. 75. Let Phil sing.
• I've been asked a half dozen times, no, I'm not going to Grateful Dead reunion tour. Unconditional peace and bliss to all who do go.
• Some friends have new content:
• Jim reviews Tom McCarthy's new novel Satin Island. And no, I wouldn't have recognized the Wittgenstein quote. Rimshot noise.
• Holding fast to laughter.
• Dan reviews Tom McCarthy's new novel Satin Island. 
• Piper at the gates of dawn.
• Niedecker and owls.
• :-p made me think of this, a good thing:

TOMAHAWK

Mark Rudman

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile.

The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become

a show-and-tell-style reunion.

I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance

threw us together at a party given by his best friend

whose brother was your real father’s best friend,

and whose blind nephew appeared, shook my hand,

and, unprompted, said my name:—it was like a blessing.

The deaf men nodded at the blind boy’s recognition.

They held me captive, these two deaf friends, and took forever

with frantic mimicry explaining how they knew each other,

firmly guiding the silent dialogue toward the bizarre

intersection of fates: theirs, mine, my father’s, my mother’s....

The deaf find ways of contacting each other.

They have their on watering holes.

Did he place this decisive warhead above all other

constructions executed during a working life spent

gratefully, perhaps too gratefully, in the government’s

employ designing, mainly, destroyers...?

Final proof he was not handicapped by his handicap?

He married a deaf woman, but his two daughters

are normal; I mean not deaf.... Both were present

and married. One was pregnant. The other became

more and more voluble as this Sunday marathon wore on.

Conversation meant—: asking each other questions.

My cousin scribbled answers alongside the next question

on a pad that rustled like a pet hamster in his back pocket.

It was work, talking to that generation’s deaf.

It was hard not to raise your voice.

I caught my mother trying to catch my eye

across the smoked fish infested spread

as she mouthed a lipsticky    YOU    MUST    E NUN   CI   ATE

Brain-dead from the labor of “catching up”

with veritable strangers with whom I was linked

by blood, I wandered, coffee balanced in saucer,

toward my cousin’s study, in vain hope of tête-a-tête.

He followed, hauled down sheafs from shelves,

while I studied the framed sketches of ship’s interiors.

Had deafness helped him achieve these heights of invention?

His face brightened.   He strained with strangled voice to answer.

Even I could understand “That’s the ticket,”

before he scrawled with Bic on pad. “Deaf...can think better....”

I was about to say “Not all,” that I was asking

about him personally, when his daughter intervened

and said, aloud and in sign, that this was “deafism.”

He signed: “No no, not hearing forced me...”

She signed and spoke, indulgent, resigned, admiring:

“So deafness makes you superior?”

I liked the way she stood up to him, and the way he took it.

Trying not to sound like a boorish upstart in a Q & A

disingenuously grilling Oppenheimer, Einstein or Bohr

with how they felt about their elegant theorems

culminating in so much death, I asked if

he was ambivalent about designing warheads. Question

from left field. Bewilderment squared.

His honked “Wa” was like an inaudible “Come again?”

Forehead painfully wrinkled. Deep-set ridges.

My stomach contracted: Oh God, what have I done?

It wasn’t me asking discomfiting questions to hound

this dear, sweet, ebullient man, who had done his best...;

it was my...duty to ask, which appeared to perplex

this...disembodied intelligence...schooled in

focusing on the problem to be solved just as

Husserl bracketed words, [postponed]

this longing to belong to sentences that mimicked

meaningful action, and to block out the politics and social

contexts that could...derail...the (beautiful) concord

between pure thought and necessity. He had the right to think:

Anyone can design a ship, or a missile, that works

like a bigger bullet shot from a bigger gun;

but to invent one that can stop, turn around,

change directions, now that’s—invention.

She repeated the question in sign and came back

with: “My father doesn’t understand your question.”

I spoke more slowly. “You must feel proud at how

the Tomahawk conducted itself during the Desert War.”

The praise sent him rocking. So that’s what I took so long

to say! He nodded exuberantly in accord.

“Wait. Even though it was for a good cause

doesn’t it bother you that the missile

killed many people.” Question from left field.

Flurry of signs between father and daughter.

“My dad says war is horrible but once you’re in

it’s important to win.” “That was true before,

and true as it pertained to the two world wars,

but Southeast Asian...was another story.”

Groan of dismay. Why should a deaf engineer

be forced to deal with relative ethics too...? War

made the mental challenge of his work more

challenging, as it did the group holed up at Los Alamos.

The heart sinks when these higher mathematical formulations

become subject to weather, and the stray jackrabbits and homo sapiens

“who weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the test site...”

This pacific man could not have thought about what the Tomahawk

did to real live—now dead—people.

He was too immersed in the question of how

to get the missile to think, to take into account—the wind.

Sunrise Over Temporary Cubicle, or: Bleggalgaze

I know why I need prove to myself that my favorite posts are the least read, but here I am again.

I Guess It's Too Late to Start Struggling to Remain Standing in a Transparent Plastic Cubicle Filled with Wet Clay, Repeatedly Slipping and Falling

Yesterday. They ripped out my old cubicle and installed my new cubicle. I could buy two new cars with the money it cost to buy these cubicles. Observe closely. Psst. It looks like my old cubicle. Then I went and got sushi in Glen Echo, their one speaker 1980's tape decker/radio played Surrender. Saved the day.

Z to Almost G, with Map

      
Earthgirl asked me if I'd posted these and after I said I hadn't she asked if I would. These are from a week ago today, two videos of the drive to Ohio to visit Planet, from entering Zanesville on I-70, getting off at State St, turning left on Ohio 146, turning right after fourteen miles on Ohio 586. After eighteen miles on Ohio 586 - and after 586 becomes contiguous with US 62 for two hundred yards before forking left then two hundred yards farther on US 62 - turning left on Grove Church Road then left on Beckholt Road which changes to Big Run Road at the crossroads with Hopewell Road to just short of the Big Run Road bridge over the Kokosing River. My camera, with a fully-charged battery, ran out of charge two miles from Gambier. As for the two youtubes, the camera broke it in two, I didn't. As for the whip-around carsick-inducing directorial style of Earthgirl, the bounciness at least wasn't her fault - cars bounce. And you get the soundtrack. Especially dig the second song on the first youtube, a gorgeous Victoria Williams song of joy. As for the map below, it's just been updated, the highlighted are the roads we've driven during Planet's almost finished four years at college. Not seen are the highlights above and below the folds. I'm guessing from US 30 south to I-70 is forty miles and 77 west to Delaware is fifty, so 2000 square miles. There are at least five times as many miles on county and township roads within that box I haven't - and won't - drive than I have. I have three - at best - more times of this drive. Hence the archiving.

  

Doubt Both but Need Try

This is just to say (I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold) I release myself from my enthusiastically self-imposed Egoslavian obligations, rules, and laws I have masochistically laced myself into over the past eleven years. That sentence's William Carlos Williams' poem demonstrates my probable inability to employ the release, as does the Morton Feldman, as does this post. Regular programming cannot return if it never goes away.

This is not a bleggacide's farewell nor a hiatus bluff, but the past few months, and intensifying over the past few weeks, this hasn't been fun like it used to be fun. I would be lying if I said I didn't pay attention to who and how many read, but this iteration of the blog has, as I type this, 1858 posts, 7349 comments, and 724,020 page views over just over four years: the numbers are fine. The Kind is good. The not-fun isn't you or lack of yous. My head has been, is, and will always be loud, but Dark and Angry are starting to dominate: I've always used here to indulge them, but they are seeping into real life and I will not indulge them there. Perhaps not indulging them here will help squelch Dark and Angry there, perhaps not indulging them here will help here too. I doubt both but need try.

A Hostility Toward the Introspective Tone, Most Often Characterized by an Over-Use of the Crushed Cadence. A Fondness for Pointlessly Matching Fragmented Passages with Each Other. And at the More Personal Level, a Megalomania Masquerading Behind a Modest and Kindly Manner

     'Mr Ryder, please tell us,' she said. 'Let's get to the bottom of it. Is Henri right in believing we can't at any cost abandon the circular dynamic in Kazan?'
     She had not spoken loudly, but her voice had a penetrating quality. The whole room heard her question and immediately became quiet. A few of her companions gave her searching looks, but she glared back defiantly.
     'No, I'll ask it,' she said. 'This is a unique opportunity. We can't waste it. I'll ask it. Mr Ryder, please. Tell us'
     'But I have the facts,' Christoff muttered miserably. 'Here. I have it all.'
     No one paid him any attention, every gaze having focused once more on me. Realizing I would have to choose my next words carefully, I paused a moment. Then I said:
     'My own view is that Kazan never benefits from formalized restraints. Neither from the circular dynamic, nor even a double-bar structure. There are simply too many layers, too many emotions, especially in the later works.'
     I could feel, almost physically, the tide of respect sweeping towards me. The pudgy-faced man was looking at me with something close to awe. A woman in a scarlet anorak was muttering: 'That's it, that's it,' as though I had just articulated something she had been struggling to formulate for years. The man named Claude had risen to his feet and now took a few steps towards me, nodding vigorously. Dr Lubanski was also nodding, but slowly and with his eyes closed as if to say: 'Yes, yes, here at last is someone who really knows.' The young woman with the thick spectacles though had remained quite still, continuing to watch me carefully.
     'I can understand,' I went on, 'the temptation to resort to such devices. There's a natural fear of the music flooding the musician's resources. But the answer surely is to rise to such a challenge, not to resort to restraints. Of course, the challenge might be too great, in which case the answer is to leave Kazan well alone. One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue of one's limitations.'
     At this last remark, many in the room seemed no longer able to hold back their feelings. The grizzled man with the muddy boots broke into vigorous applause, throwing snarling looks toward Christoff as he did so. Several others started to shout again at Christoff, and the woman in the scarlet anorak was again repeating, this time more loudly: 'That's it, that's it, that's it.' I felt strangely exhilarated and, raising my voice above the mounting excitement, continued:
     'These failures of nerve are, in my experience, very often associated with certain other unattractive traits. A hostility toward the introspective tone, most often characterized by an over-use of the crushed cadence. A fondness for pointlessly matching fragmented passages with each other. And at the more personal level, a megalomania masquerading behind a modest and kindly manner....'
     I was obliged to break off because everyone in the room was now shouting at Christoff. He in turn was holding up his blue folder, thumbing it's pages in the air, crying: 'The facts are here! Here!'
     'Of course,' I shouted above the noise, 'this is another common failing. The belief that putting something in a folder will turn it into fact!'


Ishiguro, The Unconsoled.

• Go buy this.
• The state, the corporation, the professoriate.
• Fires of Resistance.
• On network theory.
• Tor is not a "fundamental law of the universe." I confess to what you already know: I don't know shit about Tor, but I do know King of Anarchists when I see it.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Pike District! Better than North Bethesda, it's still fucking Rockville.
• Mouth music part two. Mouth music part three.
• Robinson Jeffers, for those of you who do.
• A friend's year in reading.
• The poem at the top? Find it if you want, but you don't. I'm getting closer.
• The below came up on the iPods shuffle while I drove to work this morning:

A POEM FOR THE CRUEL MAJORITY

Jerome Rotherberg

The cruel majority emerges!

Hail to the cruel majority!

They will punish the poor for being poor.

They will punish the dead for having died.

Nothing can make the dark turn into light

for the cruel majority.

Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.

If the cruel majority would only cup their ears

the sea would wash over them.

The sea would help them forget their wayward children.

It would weave a lullaby for young & old.

(See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears,

one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)

One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud

between his thumb & middle finger,

to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.

He is a little god but not a poet.

(See how his body heaves.)

The cruel majority love crowds & picnics.

The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags.

The cruel majority celebrate their birthday.

Hail to the cruel majority again!

The cruel majority weep for their unborn children,

they weep for the children that they will never bear.

The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow.

(Then why are the cruel majority always laughing?

Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?

Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?

The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)

Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.

They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds

Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.

The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.

Hail to the cruel majority!

Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!

The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.

The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority.

Then the cruel majority line up to be buried.

Those who love death will love the cruel majority.

Those who know themselves will know the fear

the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror.

The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor.

They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.

The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree.

Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.

The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.

(If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows,

they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)

Hail to the god of the cruel majority!

Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!

Hail to his face in the mirror!

Hail to their faces as they float around him!

Hail to their blood & to his!

Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!

Hail to their world & their god!

Hail & farewell!

Hail & farewell!

Hail & farewell!

The Six Berio Berryman Gubaidulina Birthday Posts Merged into One Because Me, or: It's Not a Hiatus Bluff, but See New Tag

• I owe you links - but first, a protip: don't forget, like I do every year, that not everyone makes High Egoslavian Holy Days out of Berio and Berryman and Gubaidulina birthdays - but second: blogroll maintenance completed. Moribund have been moved to moribund, the dead just removed. There are some new places I encourage you to try when they float to top of respective blogrolls. As always, thanks for reading, as always, if you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know.
• A friend's bleggalgaze. I'd wondered about the quiet.
• Another friend breaks a long bleggal silence.
• Duality of silence.
• The "courage" of no convictions.
• Pink slip for the progress fairy.
• The face of gentrification.
• Gentrification.
• On genius and assholity.
• On the above: this genius crap needs to be over, and iyer's piece is as good an argument for shooting geniuses on sight as for celebrating them as transhuman god-monsters.
• Frances on individual protest against the system in New Mexico.

UPDATE! MONDAY'S LINKS

• Please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber and his beloved cats.
• A friend's bleggalgaze. Consider this Monday's monologue.
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze << Postponed, not killed.
• Though this new post of the previous six posts is bleggalgazing if nothing else.
• Dreamboat vampires and zombie capitalists.
• Listen closely and The Forgotten.
• The Grateful Dead's sound system.
• When Updike met Barth.
• Conlon Nancarrow was born 102 years ago today: