Morning

"And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed."  ~Mark 1:35

Besides,

"When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins."  ~Oscar Wilde

Clapton

Excerpted from the article "How I fell in love with the blues" by Geoff Dyer, available HERE:

And then there was Eric Clapton. In common with a discerning portion of the British population, I loathed Clapton after his drunken endorsement of Enoch Powell’s rivers-of-blood speech. Even if I’d somehow let that slide, I could never forgive him for ‘Tears in Heaven’ which was like having a bucket of oversweetened bilge water poured over one’s head. Musically, Clapton hasn’t come up with anything interesting for at least 40 years so why anyone showed up at his annual plod-alongs at the Royal Albert Hall is an enduring mystery. Overall, no one has done more than Clapton to turn British people off the blues.

Exactly.

Rah Rah!

I'd like you write me an historically accurate song about the early 20th century Russian aristocracy.  And if we could dance to it, that'd be great.

Full lyrics HERE.

Two of a Kind

"My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt."  ~George Bernard Shaw

–•‒

The Memoirs of Jesse James
by Richard Brautigan

I remember all those thousands of hours
I spent in grade school watching the clock
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

Three Little Words

Just three words:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare

Never Entirely

“Women are never to be entirely trusted,—not the best of them.”  ~Sherlock Holmes

I'm re-reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, and this time through it's jarring how misogynistic and racist the stories are.  I'm only two stories in, and so far he has casually disparaged women, Blacks, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Muslims, Hindus, and Mormons.

All of author Arthur Conan Doyle's books are in the public domain and may be downloaded or read online freely at Project Gutenberg, HERE.

Left Arm Gone Clean Up To The Elbow…

Full lyrics HERE.

My father did not like Nonsense.  If you mentioned Jerry Reed you would inevitably get a lecture on how he should just sit there and sing his songs, and Stop The Nonsense.

My Mom didn't mind a little nonsense now and then, and especially liked the song above.

I miss you, Mom.

Reinhold

 From theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (source):

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we must be saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. 

Even if you aren't familiar with the name, you've almost certainly seen his most famous quote (source): 

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Art, the Universe, and Everything

"I think everything in life is art.  What you do.  How you dress.  The way you love someone, and how you talk.  Your smile and your personality.  What you believe in, and all your dreams.  The way you drink your tea.  How you decorate your home.  Or party.  Your grocery list.  The food you make.  How your writing looks.  And the way you feel.  Life is art."  ~Helena Bonham Carter

I got to see an art exhibit from ancient Egypt, mostly things plundered from tombs, and what struck me at the time was how many things being venerated as objects of art were really just fairly ordinary objects-- combs, stools, inkwells-- that someone had spent just a little more effort creating.

It was about the same time that I was becoming intrigued with Andy Warhol's works.  

Both carried the same message:  anything can be "art," if you look at it right.

Which leads to this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Would you care to try it?

 I had forgotten that Sherlock Holmes was a dope fiend.  From The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle, ©1890:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.

“Which is it to-day?” I asked,—“morphine or cocaine?”

He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said,—“a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”

It's interesting to me that drug abuse is treated more like a moral failing than a criminal offense.  It's certainly an undesirable trait, but hardly worth getting too worked up over.

All of the Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain, and may be downloaded or read online freely at Project Gutenberg, HERE.

Stuffs

"The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day."  ~Rudyard Kipling

Harden

 Texas politicians are calling for "hardening" school campuses by building walls and stationing men with guns, arming the teachers, and for armed posses to patrol the area.

Okay.  I'll pretend, for the sake of argument, that that isn't totally insane.

But we have also recently had mass shootings in grocery stores, movie theaters, Walmarts, concert venues, and bars.

John Lennon was shot on the sidewalk walking from his taxi to his apartment.

How many places, realistically, can we "harden?"

Regulation

 After Timothy McVeigh blew up a building, we regulated the chemicals he used to make the bomb.

According to Gun Nut Orthodoxy, that shouldn't have worked.  Someone who is willing to blow up a building would just ignore the laws about buying jet fuel and fertilizer.

Yet we haven't had a bombing since then.

Hand grenades are illegal.  According to Gun Nut Orthodoxy, that should mean that only outlaws have hand grenades.

But I can't remember the last time an outlaw actually used a hand grenade.  It's certainly very uncommon.

How about that?

Hmmm…

Excerpted from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut:

The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren't for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made.  It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

When Kurt Vonnegut wrote it in 1973, his novel spent 56 weeks on the bestseller list; when Colin Kaepernick said pretty much the exact same thing in 2016 he became a blacklisted pariah.

I wonder what was different?

Refuse To Make Bad Things

"We would therefore have to explain to them that a strike of a totally new kind is necessary today, a strike whose object is fundamentally different from that of all the strikes that have taken place until now: that the strike is today desirable not only when it comes to combating intolerable working conditions or wages, but also when the products that we are asked to manufacture lead to unjustifiable effects; that he who feels in himself even a spark of responsibility has a duty to refuse to take part in the manufacture of such products, regardless of the salary offered for it."  ~Günther Anders (source)

Rougie

 Rougned Odor is my favorite baseball player, and I've followed him from the Rangers to the Yankees to the Orioles.  He has such an obvious love for the game that it just sweeps you along with him!

Click HERE.

Slow Passion

Considering the Snail
by Thom Gunn

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

This is part of

“If the Buddha and the Christ were to meet today what do they have to tell each other? Not only do they meet today but they met yesterday, they met last night, they are always in me and they are very peaceful and united with each other. There is no conflict at all between the Buddha and the Christ in me. They are real brothers, they are real sisters within me. This is part of the answer.”  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

"For Country"

Knowlt Hoheimer
by Edgar Lee Masters

I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had stayed at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal bearing the words, “Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?

Spoon River Anthology is a wonderful book in which the fictional citizens of Spoon River are each described with a thumbnail of a poem.

It was published in 1914 so is now in the public domain.  It may be read online or downloaded freely from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

Internet 2022

"And here… was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: 'Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.'" ~Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions ©1973

Bokonon

Excerpted from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, ©1963:

There was a quotation from The Books of Bokonon on the page before me.  Those words leapt from the page and into my mind, and they were welcomed there.

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: 'Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.'

Bokonon's paraphrase was this:

'Pay no attention to Caesar.  Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.'

When a lovely flame dies…

Full lyrics HERE.

Detach

"Release and detach from every person, every circumstance, every condition, and every situation that no longer serves a divine purpose in your life. All things have a season, and all seasons must come to an end. Choose a new season, filled with purposeful thoughts and activities."  ~Iyanla Vanzant

The Secret to Happiness

 According to researchers, 

The data-driven answer to life is as follows:  Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.

(source)

I am!

 

Is About

 “Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to power.”  ~Gordon Tootoosis

Three Part Harmony

 

Mona was straightening up in the kitchen and found these behind some pans.  We have no idea where they came from or how they got there.

They are really pretty cool:  the first one shows the shepherds in the fields, the next shows the wise men following the star, the last has a little nativity inside of an angel.  They're carved out of olive wood, which is certainly true, and the package claims they were hand-carved in Bethlehem, which I somewhat doubt.

I love nativities, even though I'm not Christian.  Consistency is not a human trait.

There Was a Cat

 

There Was a Cat

Long ago there was a cat,

Who swallowed a ball of yarn;

And when the cat had kittens,

They all had sweaters on.

I wish I knew the name of the poet!

Supernatural

“She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.”  ~Edmund Wilson, about Edna St. Vincent Millay (source)

1st Time

"Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits… The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time."  ~Henri Matisse 

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Never Can

Full lyrics HERE.

Abbie Hoffman

I used to keep Abbie Hoffman quotes in a text-file as I came across them, and below is the collection I found on a backup disk.

ABBIE HOFFMAN QUOTES

A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station.

Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Once you get the right image the details aren’t that important.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

Peace is a very complicated concept. When the lion gobbles up the lamb and wipes his lips, then there’s peace. Well, I ain’t for that peace at all.

There is no such thing as an innocent bystander.

When decorum is repression, the only dignity free people have is to speak out.

Morality seems to enter the picture only when individuals interact with each other. It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond the one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide who exactly is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.

I want to be tried not because I support the National Liberation Front — which I do — but because I have long hair. Not because I support the Black Liberation Movement, but because I smoke dope. Not because I am against a capitalist system, but because I think property eats shit. Not because I believe in student power, but that the schools should be destroyed. Not because I’m against corporate liberalism, but because I think people should do whatever the fuck they want, and not because I am trying to organize the working class, but because I think kids should kill parents. Finally, I want to be tried for having a good time and not being serious.

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

We are here to make a better world. No amount of rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on this planet. The lesson of the ’60s is that people who cared enough to do right could change history. We didn’t end racism but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you could send half-a-million soldiers around the world to fight a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. We made the environment an issue that couldn’t be avoided. The big battles that we won cannot be reversed. We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave, silly, headstrong and scared half to death.  And we were right.

Life actors never rehearse and need no script. A life actor uses only what is available, nothing more, nothing less.

…you just get stoned, get the ideas in your head and then do ’em. And don’t bullshit. I mean that’s the thing about doin’ that guerrilla theatre. You be prepared to die to prove your point.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!

Wouldn’t you want to be indicted by the government for a high crime? It’s a great thrill. It’s an honor. It’s a compliment. It’s fun. I’m enjoying every minute of it!

It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller’s List.

Free Speech is the right to yell ‘Theater!’ in a crowded fire.

So how do people ‘do democracy’? They do it by acting out the roles they always dreamed of playing.

Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution of consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.

You know that being on the side of the angels, being right, isn’t enough. To succeed you also have to work very hard with lots of cooperation from those around you. You have to have your wits about you continuously, show up on time, and follow through.

Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy.

We debate which “ism” is more important than which other “ism,” and I agree that all the isms lead to schisms which lead to wasms. We need a new language as we enter the next century.

The correct stance, especially now in these times, is one foot in the street – the foot of courage, that gets off the curbstone of indifference – and one foot in the system – the intelligent foot, the one that learns how to develop strategies, to build coalitions, to negotiate differences, to raise money, to do mailing lists, to make use of the electronic media. You need that foot, too. The brave foot goes out into the street to strike out against the enculturation process that says: “Stay indoors,” “Don’t go out in the street,” “There’s crime in the street,” “It’s bad in the street,” “You lose your job in the street,” “You’ll be homeless,” “It’s terrible,” ‘.’Yecch.” Civil disobedience – (I spent my summer vacation chained to a fence) – can be a necessary act of courage, but it doesn’t take a hell of a lot of brains.

I have never seen a national issue won that wasn’t based on grassroots organizing and support. On the other hand, I have never ever seen a local issue won that didn’t rely on outside support and outside agitators.

Above all, what you have as young people that’s vitally needed to make social change, is impatience. You want it to happen now. There have to be enough people that say, “We want it now, in our lifetime. ” We want to see apartheid in South Africa come down right now. We want to see the war in Central America stop right now. We want the CIA off our campus right now. We want an end to sexual harassment in our communities right now…. Be  adventurists in the sense of being bold and daring. Be opportunists andseize this opportunity, this moment in history, to go out and save our  country. It’s your turn now.

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.

Abbie Hoffman: “I live in Woodstock Nation.”

Defense attorney: “Will you tell the court and the jury where it is?”

Hoffman: “”Yes, it is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind, in the same way the Sioux Indians carry the Sioux Nation with them…”

It’s too late. We can’t win, they’ve gotten too powerful. (Purported suicide note)

“Abbie Hoffman is something akin to an American prophet.”-  President Jimmy Carter

Evil

“As for me, I say that the sole end and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude that one is doing evil. — And both man and woman know from birth that it is in evil that all sensual pleasure resides.”  ~Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

What an insane world view.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed an act I personally believed to be evil.

Kinetic Sculpture

I found this on the excellent blog 3QuarksDaily.

Bam-ba-lam

 Full lyrics HERE.

I like this cover version more than the original.  The banjo makes a nice counterpoint the power chords.

I discovered this song by listening to the "Covers" channel at SomaFM.  You should check them out!

"Trouper" with an "ou"

Full lyrics HERE.

Someone pointed out the boys seem to be purely decorative, and you can't unsee that.

As an aside, here's the difference between "trooper" with an "oo" and "trouper" with an "ou":

Even though they are different words, trouper and trooper can both be used to describe one who perseveres through hardship or difficulty. Trouper originates from one who is part of a theatre troupe and thus realizes the show must always go on. Trooper originates from the designation given to soldiers and police officers, who are also no strangers to difficult conditions in the line of duty.

You can read more HERE.

Hmmm…

"I'm not a moron."  ~Ted Cruz (source)

Every time in my life that I've heard someone proclaim that they weren't an idiot, they were in fact an idiot.

The Most Noise

 "I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it."  ~Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, ©1916

I want him to be wrong.  But he isn't.

The Mysterious Stranger is in the public domain and may be read online or downloaded freely from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

The Real Ones

 

This aged well.  Sadly.

It just seems to be a never ending cycle:  The Republicans win and get everything their black little hearts ever desired, the Democrats defeat them by promising to undo the damage, they don't undo the damage because of Reasons, then their demoralized base stays home on election day allowing the Republicans to win again.  Wash, rinse, and repeat.

After a while you start to believe they're all secretly on the same team, and this is all just theater.

Sadhguru

I like the lecture, but that background noise gave me a pounding headache.

Oh well, every thing isn't for every body.  At least I found a new teacher to look up!

Hey Now

It's not a bad song for these times.  Full lyrics HERE.

A Secret Chord

 Excerpted from a review in The Spectator of Richard Mainwarings book Everybody Hertz: The Amazing World of Frequency, from Bad Vibes to Good Vibrations:

Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves are mechanical, propagated through air or some other fluid, and other waves are electro-magnetic and can pass through a vacuum. Lay them down together, and what do you get?

The startling answer is a surprisingly narrow piano. To play X-rays (whose waves cycle up to 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 times per second), our pianist would have to travel a mere nine metres to the right of middle C. Wandering nine and a half metres in the other direction, our pianist would then be able to sound the super-bass note generated by shockwaves rippling through the hot gas around a supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster – a wave that cycles just once every 18.5 million years.

Closer to home, how big do you think that piano would have to be for it to play every note distinguishable by the human ear? You’d have to add barely a single octave to either side of a regular concert grand.

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE. Full review HERE.

Politics

 If you see a Christian in the street carrying a sign, it's because somebody is doing something he disapproves of and he would like the police to put a stop to it.

You might expect he'd be there demanding that the hungry be fed, or the homeless sheltered, or the sick comforted.  

I've never seen that.  But wouldn't that be something?

Tend To Be

"People sent to be more like they were than like they're about to be."  ~Steve Smith (aka Red Green) in We're All In This Together ©2008

I hadn't really considered it before, but he's right.  There is a certain predictability to human beings-- including ourselves.

I guess the trick is to look objectively at our own lives and ask two questions:

1. Of these parameters that define me, which ones can be changed for the better?
2. Within the confines of these parameters, what can I do live my best life?

Here we go again.

 

Movies and television have given people the wrong idea about the 60s.  The truth is that hippies were a persecuted minority, the Vietnam war was overwhelmingly popular until the last few years, and Richard Nixon easily won election twice.

The truth is that the old boomers in power now are absolutely representative of their generation.

The hippies were right about everything.  That's why they're remembered.  But, like Jesus before them, they were never in charge.  They were easily crushed under foot, and were.

The Republicans have promised to focus on "cultural issues" when they regain power.  Well, they've already pushed Blacks to the back of the bus, they're about to reduce women to nothing more than a uterus with legs, they've flooded the streets with guns and herded refugees into cages.  What's left?  Shove gays back into the closet?  Strip health care from millions of poor people?  Reignite Reagan's "war on drugs" and "war on porn," or maybe George W.'s "war on terrorism" as a ruse to impose even more authoritarian rule?

It's not going to be pretty.

The 60s were mostly about violence and oppression. 

Here we go again. 

My Heart

 I just love the way he says "heart."  It always makes me smile:

Full lyrics HERE.

A Short Interlude

 Excerpted from We're All In This Together by Steve Smith (aka Red Green) ©2008:

I was never drawn to comedy as a weapon.  I was drawn to comedy as a uniting force, not a dividing one.  I grew up with Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Our Miss Brooks, and then Sid Ceaser, Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason.  They weren't using their comedy as a political weapon or as a tool for anarchy.  They were trying to get people to forget about their problems for an hour and have a few laughs, have a short interlude of visiting and friendship and social interaction.

I like that.  There are enough things to get people riled up about.  Let's not take one of the forces for good and turn it to the dark side.