Humdrum, Everyday Badness

 “(There) are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.”  ~Lord Vetinari,  in Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, ©1989

Lose Yourself

"Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role."  ~Eckhart Tolle

And that reminded me of this:

Maude [to a motorcycle officer]:  "Oh, don't get officious. You're not yourself when you're officious-- that is the curse of a government job."  from the movie Harold and Maude  

The Ditty Bops

It's been ten years since their last album, so I suppose their recording career is over.  It's kind of shame, because they have some of the tightest harmonies I've ever heard:

Full lyrics HERE.

Honors

 "Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses."  ~Martín Prechtel

4

 

(click to imbiggen)

Just four colors and simple shapes, but the artist created a whole little scenario that plays out in the user's head.

Deprive a Soul

 

“But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun, and light, and of that proportion of life and time they had been born into the world to enjoy."  ~Plutarch

It Just Was

 Excerpted from A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton, ©2012:

"You should get some sleep," said the bear.  "I'll keep going for a bit.  It's a nice night.  Thought I'd row for a while longer and take a look at the moon."

"Look at the moon?" said the boy.  "Why?  It's not going to do anything, is it?  I mean, the moon is just the moon."  But as he said it he looked up at the moon himself and, as there was nothing better to do, he kept looking at it for quite a while.  He'd been right, it didn't do anything, but it didn't have to, it was just beautiful.  It just was.  The boy gazed at the moon, longer and harder than he ever had before (because who would spend time looking at the moon when there was a telly to watch and video games to play and comics to read?) and felt, for a moment, calm and safe and sure.

"Coo!" he said, but very quietly.  And then the boy looked at the stars.  There were a lot of them, more, he thought, than usual.  He wondered where all the new ones had come from.  Maybe they were just all the usual ones but they'd all bunched together in the same bit of sky.  He twisted his neck looking up at different patches of sky, but they all seemed equally crowded.

"You can see more stars out here," said the bear, as if reading the boy's mind, "because it's properly dark."

The boy lowered his head and looked at the bear.

"It's funny, isn't it?"  the bear went on.  "With everything else you can't see as well in the dark, but with stars you can see them better.  In towns, with streetlights and suchlike, it's not dark enough to see some of them, but out here…"  He looked up and smiled and either forgot to continue or felt no need.  The boy looked up again too.  They sat there for a while, quiet and content, drinking in the beauty of the bejewelled night.

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is one of my favorite books.  I have posted about it before, and you can read the old posts HERE.

Recognition

 Excerpted from the article "The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media" by William Davies, published in The New Left Review:

In the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, critical theorists paid renewed attention to what Charles Taylor famously called ‘the politics of recognition’.footnote1 The demand for recognition, Taylor suggested, was linked to modern notions of identity—a person’s understanding of their fundamental defining characteristics, of who they are. Since our identity is partly shaped by others’ recognition, people can suffer real damage if society mirrors back a demeaning image of themselves. Thus, women in patriarchal societies may be induced to internalize a sexist self-image, to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. White rule has for generations projected a demeaning picture of black, indigenous and colonized peoples, saddling the oppressed with crippling forms of self-depreciation. In this respect, due recognition was a vital human need.

Read the whole article HERE.

The Noise In Our Heads

"Time goes by very quickly; one day we may be surprised to discover our life is nearing its end, and we don’t know what we’ve done with all the time we’ve lived. Maybe we’ve wasted entire days in anger, fear, and jealousy. We rarely offer ourselves the time and space to consider: Am I doing what I most want to be doing with my life? Do I even know what that is? The noise in our heads and all around us drowns out the 'still, small voice' inside. We are so busy doing 'something' that we rarely take a moment to look deeply and check in with our deepest desires."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

It Would Have Been Sheepish

 “The vampire gave her the kind of smile only a vampire can give. It would have been sheepish, if sheep had different teeth.” ~Terry Pratchett in, Monstrous Regiment ©2003

Wonderful

 "Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful." ~A.R. Ammons

Stupid Like a Fox

 

Every time they came close to getting off that island, Gilligan would do something stupid and mess it up.

Hmmm…

To Be

"We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

 And that reminded me of this, which I think is an excerpt from The Tao of Pooh by  Benjamin Hoff, ©1982:

(click to imbiggen)

When I Was Ten

 "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."  ~C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature   

Ginny with a G

 

"I really am super lazy and doing long hair, especially mine, is a big pain in the butt. It's filled with cowlicks and kinks and curls and frizz, and it was taking too much time in the morning."  ~Ginnifer Goodwin

The Boys

 The opening chords are instantly recognizeable, but there's a reason Disney censored the lyrics:

Friday night they'll be dressed to kill
Down at Dino's Bar 'n' Grill
The drink will flow and the blood will spill
And if the boys want to fight, you better let 'em

Full lyrics HERE.

Rhythm and Length

 

 Excerpted from an article in The Nation about Joan Didion:

In Blue Nights, her 2011 memoir about grief, family, and work, Didion said that when she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, worked on dialogue for their screenplays, they would mark the time a character spent speaking before coming up with the words themselves: What was said was not as important as the rhythm and length of the speech.

That's interesting.  That sounds more like a song than a screenplay.

You can read the whole article HERE.

The world is a collage of corporations…

 From the movie Network, 1976:

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Just A Thing

 

Butt Poems by J. Smith is on the web HERE.

Happy

It's a happy, bouncy little songs.  I wish someone would rewrite the lyrics to make them a little less harsh.

Full lyrics HERE.

a note of compassion

The Sound of Birds at Noon
by Dahlia Ravikovitch
from Contemporary World Poetry, ©1996
translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch

This chirping
is not the least malicious.
They sing without giving us a thought
and they are as many
as the seed of Abraham.
They have a life of their own,
they fly without thinking.
Some are rare, some are common,
but every wing is grace.
Their hearts aren’t heavy
even when the peck at a worm.
Perhaps they’re light-headed.
The heavens were given to them
to rule over day and night
and when they touch a branch,
the branch is theirs.
This chirping is entirely free of malice.
Over the years
it even seems to have
a note of compassion.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

Tiny Harmless

 “People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like ‘be realistic.”  ~Dylan Moran

Good Question.

 

Eve Of

 

Full lyics HERE.

Stillness

Excerpted from Anam Cara by John O'Donohue, ©1997:

Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Their Kindness, The Way Their Eyes Sparkle…

 

 From Theresa "Trixie" Garcia:
 

I'm no Jerry Garcia expert, I'm just his kid, born right into this scene and still trying to figure it out.  When I was younger, it was natural to rebel away from the Grateful Dead.  Now I have a very honest appreciation for it and have set out to learn more.  Mark Pincus of Rhino Records helped explain Jerry's significance to me one day:  "Your dad deserves to be one of the faces on the Mount Rushmore of rock & roll."  For some reason, this explanation laid it all out for me in a way that the seas of hippies hadn't.  Jerry Garcia is a great American musician whose legacy will endure long past my own lifetime.
 
As far as I can tell, Jerry fans all have one thing in common besides their kindness, the way their eyes sparkle and their generally freedom-loving tendencies:  They all share a story about how their lives truly began the day the saw my dad play, how a particular show or moment introduced them into a whole new perspective on life.  I don't know how, but it's true:  music heals, and good vibes are better for you than bad.  There is now science behind these truths the hippies rediscovered in the 60s.
 
The band may have said "Fare thee well," but what Jerry built isn't going anywhere.  It's a monolith of a thing that no one can ever tear down or shut off.

*yawn*

 "I'm sorry.  I couldn't hear you, I was yawning."  ~Mona to me, subtly (or not so subtly) telling me I bore her  :-)

We Collect

 “We collect data, things, people, ideas 'profound experiences,' never penetrating any of them … But there are other times. There are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.” ~James Carroll

Before not Through

 "If you ask an introvert a question, wait until she thinks about it. Introverts think before speaking, not through speaking. If you want to get to the good stuff, you need to slow down." ~Laurie Helgoe

An Escape from Personal Responsibility

In this excerpt from Scoundrel Time ©1976 by Lillian Hellman, the author discusses the difference between a "radical" and an "ideologue":

The popular image of the radical is of the wild and irresponsible "bomb thrower."  But most radicals I have met were extraordinarily civil.  They oppose the general degradation, not with a programmatic "solution," but with a personal code that makes pride possible in a shameful social order.  They do not wish to be implicated in responsibility for society's crimes, which means that they must take a special responsibility for their own acts.

Ideology is, by contrast, an escape from personal responsibility.  Someone like Whittaker Chambers wanted to be told what to do, wanted to be History's slave.  Ideologues want to be certified by others as respectable-- if not by the Committee or the Party, then by the ADA.  They want their hates to be dictated by the national program.  The radical thinks of virtuous people, while the ideologue thinks of orthodoxy.  The radical hates vicious and harmful people, while the ideologue hates heretical ideas, no matter how "nice" the possessors of those ideas may be.  The radical tries to uphold a private kind of honor in a rotten world-- like (Dashiell)Hammett's "private eyes," serving society without respecting it, seeing men and not just abstract Crime in the victims of their hunt.

 Her book is about the McCarthy era, but (sadly) there are many parallels to our own.

Cosy Mathermatical Sense of Wellbeing

 Eve Babitz on writing and art (source):

In the tenth grade I took a test and got the highest grade in the city in grammar. I had learned the kind of cosy mathematical sense of wellbeing you can derive from a parsed sentence. I liked the way a sentence looked all Royal Familyed up with bloodlines and right angles, all those reasons. But it seemed to me after looking at it that a point that parses is a point that people’d rather go to the circus to avoid seeing than hang around and appreciate ... I wonder if [Picasso] felt the same way when someone said, ‘you can’t draw a face like that’ when the fact that the person could tell it was a face meant you could, as I felt when an instructor said ‘“be” is never a noun.’

Fuck off, wretched refuse.

 In theory, the United States has two political parties; in practice, they have only one. 

Notice the difference between a Democrat out of power and a Democrat in power.  It's not subtle:

"Our supposed leaders in Washington need to stop attacking immigrants and instead make clear that America is a place where immigrants and refugees are welcome and contribute to our society." - Senator Kamala Harris, 16 February 2018

•

"I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking of making this dangerous trek to the United States Mexico border: do not come. Do not come. If you do, you will be turned away." - Vice President Kamala Harris, June 2021

Big and Small

"Someone asked me, 'Aren’t you worried about the state of the world?' I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, 'What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.' There are wars-- big and small-- in many places, and that can cause us to lose our peace. Anxiety is the illness of our age. We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and the state of the world. If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

That's Why

 "It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman.  That's why there are so many of us."  ~Jane Goodall

The Sound Of

"In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence."  ~Robert Wilson Lynd

I haven't done it in a while, but one of my favorite things used to be take a knapsack full Peterson Field Guides out in the woods and see what I could find.

I realized pretty early on that I didn't need to go traipsing near and far, all I had to do was sit still.  In only a few minutes, the birds and insects either forgot I was there or no longer saw me as a threat, and began to reveal themselves.

1921

 

(Clicking image imbiggens)Landscape with a Sea of Fog by Franz Sedlacek (Austrian, 1891 - 1945), 1921 

I'm really surprised this is from 1921.  It looks much more recent.

Tell you what I'll do:

 "You're my woman" is one of those phrases that didn't age well, but in the context of the times it's actually a pretty sweet little song.

Jerry didn't like to perform this song live because he didn't think there were many possibilities for improvisation, but the current Dead lineup has put it back in play.

Full lyrics HERE.

Indifference

 Adapted from Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer, ©2002:

Hate is an extremely strong and harsh word. Any discussion among believers about hating other Christians would lead most of them to say, "I don't believe I have ever hated anyone." If we think about these words of John, however, perhaps he didn't mean hate as we think of it—feeling great hostility or animosity toward someone. Perhaps our form of hatred today is more like indifference. We don't really dislike people, but we don't care enough to help them when they have troubles and problems.

The Winner

The United States just passed a massive spending bill to boost the tech industry (source).

I thought the beauty of Capitalism was that the Free Market would take care of these things.  I thought that a centralized economy was a bad thing.  I must have it confused with something else.

I wonder who will reap the rewards of this investment:  the taxpayers or the stock holders?

"I believe that this legislation will enable the United States to out-innovate, out-produce, and out-compete the world in the industries of the future."  ~Chuck Schumer

"We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off."  ~Joe Biden

Oh, let's just sit this one out. 

What I want is for everybody who's sick to be able to see a doctor, for everyone who works to be able to afford a home, for everybody who's hungry to have a sandwich.

I don't want to compete anymore.  The cost of winning is too high.

Like All Things

 "Dandelions, like all things in nature, are beautiful when you take the time to pay attention to them." ~June Stoyer

How could his eyes endure?

Plutarch (45 - 120 AD):

"Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh?

"For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived.

"How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?"  

Crackerbox Palace

 

Some times are good, some times are bad;
That's all a part of life
And standing in between them all
I met a Mr. Grief, and he said:

I welcome you to Crackerbox Palace
Was not expecting you
Let's rap and tap at Crackerbox Palace
Know that the Lord is well and inside of you…

Full lyrics HERE.

Cotton Fields and Sweat Shops

 “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”  ~Stephen Jay Gould.

Criminal

“War and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous-- an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.” - The Dalai Lama

Made

"There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success."  ~George Matthew Adams

The World's Biggest

Midnight

 Long before either of them became famous, Farrah Fawcett was making small talk with her friend Jim Weatherly.  She casually mentioned that she was going to go visit her parents, adding "I'm leaving on the midnight plane to Houston."

Her friend moved a few words around, and the rest is history.  (source)

Full lyrics HERE.

Al

 Singers named "Al":

• Al Jarreau
• Al Green
• Al Stewart
• Al Jolson
• Weird Al Yankovic

Other famous people named "Al":

• Al Michaels
• Al Gore
• Al Unser
• Al Sharpton
• Al Franken
• Lew Al Cindor

And, of course, that reminded me of this: