several days beyond the rim

So the holidays have passed, and I had a kind of realization of "primacy" and thus was silent here while I worked it out.  "wind howling over those decreased battlements: a ruin of what once was."

Whispered fates at the foot of Parnassus.

I was wondering when I would turn into the Hulk again, but then that moment, a complete kind of burst-inward, as I became sort of a sterner version of myself.  The progression of the man Caedmon, as if to be at once, like a straw-ful effigy of himself, and yet also a new wireless model with many essential upgrades.

I have made it through, as it were, and I wound-up with the boon, the spoil of the feast, and that to be had again and again subsequent weeks after.  I fret not in the face of it all, nor pall at the specter of another year coming.

addendum and errata:

I'm saying she sucks.  But further than that, not like it can't be stymied or put past or anything.

There was an old lady that briefly brushed-against my circle of friends, and my circle included an old fellow who lived alone, lived on his own, by his own terms, and in that, had sort of a dignity.  But that old lady was after him time and again, making it obvious from the start she was attracted to him.  I genuinely think, though she was known to be promiscuous, she would have done him some real good.  But anyhow, she let it be known to him that she treated her vagina with alum, "for whomever's pleasure".  Like one of those trash bags with a drawstring.  Like cinching-up a bag of loaf bread, with most of the loaf done "et".

She had the starshine or moonglow when it came to that one fellow, but otherwise, she was kind of a waste.  She would have helped him, I believe, and he would have lived longer, but she would have met a sooner demise from her fretting after him.  And all that alum.  Until her breadbox became like a pucker of a belly-button, and then the guy is thinking, "better than natural man deserves".  "Rather looks like forbidden, but obviously low-hanging fruit."

She sucks, but she doesn't read this blog I wot.  So just know that.  And the thing with the Tiger with the Rooster in it's mouth that's circulating around South Carolina on le media sociale.  That sucks too.  Emblematic of another side, a world beyond a world.  And my boys only getting a measly field goal, and that stupid Dabo mad that his precious bunch allowed a whole THREE POINTS from the competition.

Dabo sucks, too.

Presidents are not kings.

As is said, "Presidents are not kings".

As English Bob said, "you shoot a pheasant for you Mckinley, and I'll shoot one for the queen."

Behind that, we see which concept has more sand.

Scrutiny stands and scrutiny ought to be, and in the end, nobody really wins when they feel so bad about it.

Competing Narratives(Darth Vader Rogue One)

"Good people will choose to fight."



"They love your a$$."



"Does the thermal vent lead straight into the power generator of the Death Star?"



"Russia interfered.  The intelligence community agrees on this."



"Ukraine interfered.  We need the origins of the steel dossier."



"Where the hell are my children?"



Sean Hannity, when reading his show script, has this look like "I just ate a bird" or something.  Still not mistaking him for a journalist, and still think the "News Division" over at FNC is much smaller than they claim.



Where is my Rolling Stones "Angie" 9/11 video? 



"all those dreams we held so close,

seem to all go up in smoke"

Fallen Order!

"Feed the children to me!"

"I will not let you have these children!"

"You would have made an excellent inquisitor!"

He should have never stole her bicycle.  Because that, according to street law, gave her the absolute authority to dish a hot load of revenge.

Bellydance.

One illustrates absurdity by being absurd, betimes, and as such, may yet make a fool of himself in front of the un-knowing eye.

In that respect, I dance topless across the linoleum.  I was met with jeers.  Undeterred, I explained of old dining rituals in far-away lands when dinners were taking by diners seated on rugs or pillows, and there was entertainment before them, in hopes of easing the digestion and stimulating some conversation among the participants.

I was explained that a beautiful woman would dance.

As was said:

Stanislav Bin Origen: "They have something.  Something to be proud of."

Therefore, I, the refractory beast of ugliness:

Have nothing.

Cannot be proud.

Can one be bold without pride?  Truly he without pride can be a subservient being, on the order of a Caliban, but then pride is the mechanism that manufactures bad deeds, on the order of revenge.

Should I take to a table and demand desserts among the other diners, I wonder, lowering my tee shirt over my under parts.  Should I, or should I not, and the questions be-niggles beyond preponderance or intent, all out of the scope.  To be born stupid, ignorant, or to die stupid and likewise, or neigh, innocent:

do I fall-off innocent?

do I break "to the good"?

But still, bold as a glass of ice water splashed in the face.

heavenly shades of Mike are falling, its twilight time.... and the Potus with Mostus

what the hell does that sequence of dots mean?  Is it a veiled-threat against free speech?  Why, I must be some kind of retracted/redacted/amended element that was once plain and clear, rendered into a void onto a secret server somewhere.

are you(me), trying to circumvent free expression?

Nay, I say to myself, removing my own claws from my throat, that I may gasp a free-er range of expressions for which to make my spleen felt by the populace, a broader tool-kit for the one-way exchange of ideas.

I lobs them on ya's.

-I'm rather taken with gov/amb NH saying that its wrong to circumvent the presidency, even if the motives are pure, by taking the whole of the fact that, "fool" or not, "big winner/chicken dinner", we elected the fool, even if it wasn't the plurality of the Popular Vote.  Acting against Trump's worst impulses in administrative matters, people like the chief of staff undercutting the will of the "Potus with the Mostus", in effect undercuts the results of the election, which in the end justifies a dubious claim by the right, saying Dems want to nullify the 2016 election.

Rather, I think people like AOC, Warren and Sanders have an eye on the future, rather than butt-hurting about the last big election.  Trump and Sean, on the other hand, are butt-hurting trying to still defend the matter, with KAC talking about the huge triumph of Trump's, and he didn't even win MORE TOTAL votes than Hillary.

You can't take these people seriously.  Then Sean reminds us he isn't part of the media.  Honestly, I've never mistaken him for a journalist.  Fer reelz.

Nikki needs to come on and wash the bad taste out of the conservatives' mouths.  Nikki, Mitt, Mark Sanford.

And yes, affair or no affair, love of Trump or not, I would vote for Mark Sanford again in whatever election because he embraces pure conservative political ideology, no matter who he socializes with in his private life.  Personally, I thought his 2009 "lost weekend" was pulled-off very artfully in the sense of security and privacy, because we were all scratching our heads while we looked for him.

After all, the voice-over guy in all those Obama commercials married his own grand-daughter.  People have the capacity to overlook these things.

"I remember Andy Dufresne."

Schiff's Creek.

Mil Lesions.

Against.  The Des Moines Dracula.

"frauds-count-anywhere match"

choke-slammed on two handfuls of thumbtacks, with the obligatory "hand to the hurt area" play, to "sell the gimmick".  Mil was really selling it, too, and the fans started up "ALL NIGHT LONG!  ALL NIGHT LONG!"

"Crap, dude!  Mil just kilt Des Moines Drack!"

enter the pane of glass between the two tables, placed in the shadow of the bandstand

Drack splatters an electric guitar onto the head of Mil, who dramatically teeters on the edge of the bandstand, before falling expertly, backwards, through the pain of glass and onto the hard arena floor.

"The arena floor is the beating heart of Rome!"  Just some peanuts and a sticky rime there, Falco, that and nothing more from which to conjure agricultural legislation and public works.

"DRACK JUST F*CKED MIL!"

They even back the ambulance down the entrance ramp, strap-up Mil, put him in the ambulance, as Drack theatrically tears open the back doors of the Bus and gets a few cheap shots on Big Mil.

Outside.  The Ambulance stops.

The doors burst open, and out staggers Mil Lesions, ready for more.

JR:  "Somebody stop this; that man's got a family!  He's defying death itself!"

"Is there no time to smell the flowers?" asks Jean-Bn Sauter

"Is there no time to smell of the flowers?" writes technology pundit and philosopher Jean-Bn Sauter.

I tell him that without a smell of that beauty, then it is just window-dressing, that a smell makes them ever the more realistic according to the greater sensory, as of to pick up a lady of the night and place her next to one's ear, so one can listen to her scream in surprise and dismay.

He's at practice on building robots these days, his rooms filled with cigarette smoke, that hanging in the air as the vagueries of all his whimsical ideas.  I say this of him from the bonds of friendship old and dear, noting also how I expressed the name "other such nonsense" for my own writings for quite a long run in digital publishing.

I have a notion that his robots will smoke cigarettes and talk about the blurring of cognitions and reality, how his own perceptions form his own reality.  Maybe from that silliness, we could say all the layers of the universe and all eleven dimensions are spread across the collective thinkmeats of the populace.

That maybe nothing is real, and maybe he won't have to take his tax receipts to the accountant this year.  Just tell the Revenue that none of his earnings are real, or better yet, they have the audacity to have a fill-in space labelled dubiously, "real income".

He says to get "in the rub for it" he has to, as he puts it, "get a smell of it".  This is part of his mistrust of an external all-encompassing reality, which casts a dreamlike pallor on the rest of the universe, that which we are sure is out there, while solidifying his own stolid adventures at picking his toenails while watching SVU.  So to Sauter, there is nothing noble, ignoble or true or firm about these floating bodies, only his own thoughts are real, that which regards the entirety of the dream, stuck between a state of surprise and fatigue.

Thane of Cawdor, Thane of Glamis. Poem

Witches:
"When shall we meet again?
Methinks I shall hear those old chimes!
Fair is foul and foul is fair;
citrus hanging in the crisp autumn air!"

Lady MacBeth
"Noble Thane,
how is thy courage attached?
A flourish trifles the front,
and a crash of thunder from the back!"

The Thane
"Anon, a sconce!"

Lady MacBeth
"Screw it to the sticking place!"

Witches:
"Until the woods come forth from Dunsinane,
Or issues forth a man not born of woman,
does the King Macbeth chance to remain,
nor does throne-ward blood kick forth again!"

Fleance:
(with a flourish)
"I am slain!"
(cue dancers, "(Just Came In To See)What Condition My Condition Was In")

The Thane
"Out! Out! Brief Candle!
Such as is said, he who smelt it dealt it,
guile from the vixen, and murder be of her issue,
Only the fool who was taken in to be complicit
will be allowed to suffer forth and continue!"

"Once a Pharisee..." ruminations on the Apostle Jeff

The Apostle Jeff.  Not always so. Nay, once among the religiously proud Pharisee, "legalists" in the spirit of the letter.

Having so long ago lost the living God, these high muck-a-muck Pharisees.

He always had some kind of Wrigley's gum on him or in his mouth, or maybe Now And Laters(or as we call them in the Southland slang: "nihilators").  A certain schoolboy whimsy, devil-may-care, off-the-dandelions unto the dull eastern breeze, and all that.

But it took him a year of physical rehabilitation after having his head re-attached in surgery.  Meeting-up with the surgeon, having happened upon him driving along in his Mercedes with his 2.5 children in the car.  The surgeon obviously thought a return to regular life would be good sport for Jeff.   "I'm just an old Alabama sawbones" he said, "but I think it's high time to get back on that there horse."

On the road to Jefferson, off on that "Old Tyme Persecution", at once blinded and spoken to from on high.

"We dost thou persecute me?"

J'ccuse.

He would apply that same zeal as a newly-claimed Christian, standing in a secret safehouse, his presence generally making the rest of them nervous, with whispers, "you know who that guy is?"  "can we trust him?"  "HE'LL KILL US ALL!".

After he lets Seamus and Cesaro sneak-attack everybody at the dinner table, Jeff is explaining to his new girlfriend, "Don't you see?  I never left!", then the centurions come and haul everybody to jail.

He'll find later, not only the ring around his neck, but ghastly stigmata all over his person, emblems of having endured suffering, and he starts reading books by and about Holocaust survivors.  Like Cora Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He begins to look beyond his suffering, look even deeper, past all the hurt, and try in vain to extrapolate some kind of sense of the matter.

And at Halloween he can make light of it all and use his surgical scars as part of his Frankenstein costume.  "Ahm da Suthern take on da munstah" he tells the people, as he stands on the porch steps with his trick or treat bag, holding it out and open, expectantly.

"Isn't that adorable!  And such realism!"

When life gave him bitter orange lemons, he squashed the cherries and made some cobbler.

Book review: John Williams' Stoner

A fiction book, by a college teacher, about a college teacher, tracing the arc of his life from his teen years until the very last moments.

Overall, the form is much like Henry James with either Washington Square or the better, more polished follow-up book Portrait of a Lady.  We see an overview of a life, unfolding almost distantly in a condensed form, with John Williams allowing for snippets of dialog and scraps of scenes.  In individual chapters, elements seems to mimic or coincide in a dimly harmonious fashion, alongside and with the events of Stoner's life, such as the world wars, impressions of colleagues and happenings within his classroom.

The perspective is third person omniscient, and for many of the scenes we are only told that Stoner has spoken, without Williams revealing the exact wording, as if we were somewhere inside Stoner, like some part of his personality that lacked access to the ears, so we could not then hear what was said, but maybe we hear a rumbling as to know in general that Stoner had spoken.  In this respect, Stoner is as opaque to us as he is to himself, with Williams being steadfast at keeping with Stoner's unawareness at so much of his own feelings, then to look in a kind of unfeeling wonder upon so many of the scenes around him.  That said, he is not without emotions, but those are opaque to us through so much of the book, and only hinted at in Stoner's dialog, which leaves us with an ambiguity as to whether Stoner's emotions are genuine in certain portions of the story.  However, we do not question his earnestness, for he is earnest about being opaque to us, which paints a kind of stoic totem in the form of Stoner that we follow through those pages.  And, Williams describes Stoner's overall appearance in the briefest detail, telling us of physical changes over time, so that we, while at once marveling at his inner dullness in so much of experiences, can also see him from the outside, in terms of an overall impression that he might make among the people he interacts with in the book.

With world events at points mentioned, unfolding in tandem with Stoner's life, we are left to wonder if Stoner might be emblematic of something, some fundamental shift or coming of age in America or the world-at-large, yet we are assured that Stoner simply becomes as so many of his own older colleagues, that the condition existed before, and Stoner's contemporaries would also possibly face the same fate.  This political reflection comes into view but then fades long before the end of the story, and Stoner seems to be something of a disinterested observer, like the existential consciousness of America, called also "stoic" by others, watching and sometimes feeling, sometimes responding, but overall, not effected by the changes around him.

here's your one chance, Fancy. Don't let me down.

I drank coffee into the afternoon and planned my gets, as if I were a comic book villain.  Yes, I've read the Stoics, but so often we get it all turned around, heart of stone, bombardier stare and all that.

Meanwhile, all soft and creamy on the inside.

And that's the point, and maybe what Epstein was figuring out.  "You climb whatever mountain you need to climb.  But get this done!"  You sit alone in your rooms, working your puzzle, alternating between loving yourself and hating yourself.  Is it worthwhile?  Am I worthwhile?  The answers, at once elusive and not "at hand", lie beyond, in the distance, where a stupid glow sits on the horizon, like a hot breath fogging in a cold car.

Or at least you think the answers are there, like its kind of innate knowledge, that the little itch-scratching satisfaction is right there, just a hair away from the fingertips.

He was in the upper floors, trying to talk to a hostile gold shield from IAB and the stuff went down quick: guns drawn, people tied up with electrical tape, taped to office furniture.  Rapid Response initiated a breach, made entry "in anger", some people apparently got kilded.  He was at the window, helicopters swirling about, people in the street at the police barriers, news crews watching, whole world suddenly interested in the pension fund, and he screams, daring them, "YOU WANT MY BLOOD?"

His wife was among the most surprised, because she was watching from her couch, when the network news coverage broke into regular programming.  She was sitting right there stroking their prized pet, a ewe, and she was also positively about to spit bullets with all her tension.

I couldn't see living a life
where I hung my head in shame;
I might have been born plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name!

low men and their high-tuned z-71's/katie hill/only cowards insult dying majesty

Frost and some of his buddies had cleaned-out the pension fund, meant to be kind of "guardians of the purse", they had went and bought second and third vehicles, and boats, all with the retirement money.

Low men and their "high-tuned" Z-71's.

Macho man went through a tournament to win his first title in the old WWF.  I remember he hit Ricky Steamboat with the double axe handles.  He had made a comment elsewhere that Steamboat wasn't quite ready for the big time, describing his stint in the WWF as a "cup of coffee".

But Steamboat was game, game enough to meet Macho Man on his own terms and contest the matter.

I also see now that Katie Hill was almost dying of embarrassment, hiding away in her rooms.  I watched her speech on CSPAN.org video archive.  She had to do what was best for herself and her own piece of mind, so she put on a brave face and gave a speech on the floor of the House.

The noble lion, on his side, dying.

The ass turns its tail to the lion and kicks up its heels.

"This is a double death" moans the Lion.

"Only cowards insult dying majesty."

It's almost like he wants to say, "wait 'til 2020, a$$holes.  We'll win HUGE!", or even to tweet that, to revenge his wounded self-image.  And if a little birdie told you the President was again angry, you'd be like "nigga, please.  What else is new?", and then get ready to meet Frost in court about his taking-off with the pension money.

But then he killed Danny, because Danny found out about it.  Like maybe, Danny was offered a smell of the money, and then flew to pieces about the whole thing.  That's what a good man does: he "goes to pieces" when confronted with such dilemma, because Frost was a wolf in sheep's clothing, thought to be his friend.

Danny had to process all that.  Frost being a thief, and all, and such and so forth.  Frost would have been hit with the "forthwith" "heretofore named" and all that, but you know, the bad hide their deeds well.

leer of the wolf-toothed moon: poem

mosh-mallow moon
leering
wolf's teeth
a chill rolling up the spine
shag underneath
inkprinted woodgrain behind
of all the things to see-
pretty flowers and noble trees,
I had something new
traipsing before my eyes
as I sat silent
trying to hold onto my mind.

of all the things that fly,
I had never consider time,
endangered
I had never
ran serpentine
to avoid the God spittle
firing back Cupid arrows
responding in words,
not so much,
but a dignified monolithic
little

PS:
bye-bye Beto
hello KT

In defense of Katie Hill

Clearly, revenge porn won the day, but how long will such retaliation bear fruit against its victims?

A capitulation to undo pressure, sensitive photos, and clearly House majority leadership recommended the action.  My question however, did someone order Katie Hill to step down from her recently-won house seat, or did they simply say "it would be for the best"?

The narrative now is to look with a jaded eye, sneer and say, "its gender bias".  But in truth, it might just be completely bad timing in the face of what was the recent impeachment procedural vote.  Surely, leadership wanted no distractions, but did Katie Hill get caught in the switches?  In the face of the larger impeachment story, her political would have trudged along fine, despite media outlets from the other side touting the photos.

Behind the scenes, did she go to pieces over the matter?  Did she try to pull resources from the larger Impeachment battle?

Or did we see what many are claiming: obvious gender bias?  Many have said that a male rep would have survived such an exposure.  I for one agree, and was saying, before she made the announcement about stepping down, that she should "soldier on" and try to outlast the narrative.