Countdown to the safe opening in Die Hard. Cue the Ninth Symphony by the great Ludwig.

The horoscope was not only wrong this morning, but quite, 180 degrees.  In a state of tranquility, assailed by ghosts of the past, and as you know, we have to put these away else we be tormented endlessly.  However, it doesn't broach present "inner peace", as I still say I'm "in a good headspace".

Just more like, a beguiling little footnote, maybe.

As if, in remembrance of some old wrong, I yell along at the procession, as if to confirm, that I too am here, I, too, am along the chain, but a link in the chain, a cog in the machine, though most often feeling like I'm just sort of watching it, rather than participating, no?

"cest la vie, say the old folks.  It goes to show you never can tell."  And yet, quite on the tip of the tongue, to relate a little parable to the masses, the throngs of singular readers.

And yet, we are warned of triggers, in the PTSD and bipolar universes.  That sometimes those thought bring their own moods and emotions, sort of a filter, a gel placed on the stage lights.  And to say of the past, "bought off and got clocked."

And I see from the perspective of one, its like, a response to an urge, an automated kind of pumping action, as if to slap one on the head with a newspaper, or put a splayed hand across the buttocks, induces action.

But the true experience is a kind of horror, dulled of its edge by time, in which one, nicely removed the concourse, watches the action of the individual parts with a lamenting heart.

So, that's the way it was, this day in history, old thoughts assailed, kind of "re-lensing" the whole thing, as there were kind of buzz words, but in retrospect, one can see into more of the workings of others through a kind of hindsight.  And yet, we are derisively told that looking that way is like "looking out your ass."

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From the rapid prototyping lab: "throw your hands in the sky; wave 'em from side to side."

I was in a good headspace.  as they say, "don't know 'bout you".  But I was in a good headspace.  I required next to nothing from the universe, and I was like, the marginally sane version of a light bulb, generating across my limited spectrum, photons and magnetism, bathing the world in a rather pleasant, if not altogether aimless, light.

Geared toward wellness, mayhap, and a positive mindset.  As Verne Gagne said, "life is a journey, A to B".  In that, sometimes one must just appreciate the journey.  No, Cheever?  I mean, to enjoy the phenomenon and not become ass-hurt over such nominative ride-overs, fly-overs, and other pointers, markers, substitutive iconography.

I know Joe said something nice.  And Donald was quiet for a while.  Maybe Donald was taking notes, or something.  Still, had to be somewhat away from that to maintain perspective and get some positivity.

But do you not, enjoy the A to B, or is it all Utilitarian modus?

We should instead focus our instrumentation on the straight ahead future, and latch onto that with our unction, causing improvements in our own state, rather than mucking with the timestream, trying to upend the continuum.  

Lest we not forget the downside, that all that time experimenting was just that, quite experimental, and no force of any kind of guarantee, no certainty, of given results.

But I was thinking of John Bell's entanglement experiment from some decades ago, and how he had a single source as his origination, and was measuring, via filters, "quantum states".  Well, my thought was that the transmission of the laser was the same in his experiment, therefore the experiment was like tuning two radios to the same station, then acting surprised when each played the same song.

But then later, in a radio telescope set-up there were dual quarks.  These were measure, but I again, I'm thinking, despite the light travelling billions of years, there would be of course measurable similarities between the broadcast.  

Same kind of discharge, in other words.  But we note that the measurement is on a particle level, and thats where their vaguery about particle dimensions confuses everyone into giving them research funding.

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Poem: Living just enough. Just enough, for the city.

He was born.

In hardtime Mississippi.

Destined to be imprisoned

in so many sad ditties.

Just as he was the song,

he wore his shirts too long,

and everywhere he roamed,

he was wrong.

His friend was crazy as hell,

a dingling bell.

Could never see,

if it was sex or a panic attack.

Chebanse, a cockbite,

going on and on about wanting a cool drink,

saying he was aware of his rights,

more so than we might think.

Living just enough.

Just enough,

for the city.

Hernando grew up sometime,

and still, he found himself in these lines,

trapped and besmirched and befaggled,

across the thoroughfare, bedraggled.

Destined to gun down a man in a hold up,

violence in the commission of a crime,

so he was set up, sent up, then pinned up,

walled in for the remainder of his life.

Meanwhile in Tampa, "not at my country club neighborhood"

all along, against Donald's shouting, the people stood,

and his radar was down, cuz he knew they were mad

but it was because of the injustices and tantrums he had, had.

had.

Living just enough.

Just enough,

for the city.

Hernando was building a cabinet,

and she had a tattoo on her neck.

He put in a lighting bar and felt lining,

gave her something for delicate fingers to inspect.

She herself,

never out and dirty,

an easy laugh and a ready smile,

too humble to call herself purdy.

Perdy did die, a fireball,

a fire extinguisher to the head,

and the rest went on.

Zepparelli, and the rest,

cold shrimp and white wine,

Perdy not extricated,

till long after the rest had gone.

He had been

Living just enough.

Just enough, 

for the city.

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Playing Bingo with the Gringo Money, or "Night of the Skywalkers".

 

We begin from San Pedro, going up the guts into America.  Ranch-spread.  Many fine horses.  Chickens.  Pigs.  Women in lacy dresses.  Drowsy cowboys, waiting to drink the night away.

Some high muck-a-muck Gringo with waxen handlebar mustache, as they say.  A dandy.  With a leather chair.

We will have it all.  See, this is the way for Americanos.  They want something, they just grab out at it.

But the Marshalls.  The Texas Rangers.

Your heater stinks.  I smell the odor getting into my clothes, my nose, my hair.  It's sickening.

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Siege of Yorktown, the injection heard 'round the world.(injectile dysfunction)

 

A something.

A turtle dumpling.

A truffle,

confined in a bubble.

MKL figuring,

what was the trouble.

A finger,

a butt,

and an angry dove;

so many

miss-

conceptions.

And on something

so varied as living

equally interspersed

on various misgivings.

A finger

a turd.

Never to pass

so much as

an honest word.

But that's okay,

you see,

the truth is,

after all, 

so difficult

to express

verbally.

The Chrysler 300

the potholes in Home Avenue.

I left my tired underwear

where I had broke in the waterpark.

Hairslick

ELO

Your mother 

locked in my trunk,

as she daydreams about 

sitting on my thumb.

I uncap the drink

the big 44

pouring out the crushed ice

on the blacktop

so that I can

pick out that wedge of lime,

as she rams her stupid knees

into my trunk lid.

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The invisible Tao hand stirring at the works, working at stirring.

 Ever had a number break your back?  I mean like, to enumerate suffering itself, as of an elderly mother fart, where you can say, of a certainty, it is bad.  And then, to yourself, "am I dead?"  

"I know this is not heaven, unless the smell has wafted up to us."

But know, I do not pretend to know, but I've sensed something, and from there passed into the innumerable.

The Tao.

There is the innumerable.

The broken back of nomenclature itself, as of the old way, to know, but only communicate in context.  "Carry your gun to the barn, son."  Or some such.  That we crushed the Oxford English Dictionary under a stylish yet entirely comfortable niche shoe.  And Bill Barr now has time to contemplate the indefinite qualities of the Tao, let those brush his felicities, dance so lightly across the ivories as not to chime but a single note, and of yet, to have crossed the keyboard entire.

Why, its all shifting sands and looking for glass bottles in the dirt, so forth other activities, spitting in the wind, for all we could transmit the Tao, but we can feel it, just as two or more and the Tao gathered, but made ephemeral because of myriad chirpings, talks of dinner, popular films, Traylor Smift lyrics, and other such.  Neigh, the whole thing rather obscured nicely as of a rising fog as the rays of the sun burn the land, is the Tao ensconced and rather safely disguised as an elderly mother fart.

Disguised like two-stage paint, perhaps, where there is that "finishing touch" that is crucial for so long, but vaporous to our senses.  That clearcoat layer that is important but almost like the invisible hand stirring at the works, working at a stirring.

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His Name Is Cemetery. He knows only to kill.

I watched, with hands lifeless, tingling, as Jake Tapper killed a man; I saw it, in other words.

I was like, "hell with all this", "let them kill each other, if that's their game", and I stepped away to read a book.  And the book was really good, and contained an unexpected bit about Theology, when it ironically, was supposed to be about the interconnectedness of all of us.

God sets my own chronometer, my own little gel-filled gyroscopic reticulating ball.  That was the gist of the reading, too, so I was kind of Georged to read something of my own line of thought, and in an older book on Christian Mysticism.

I was studying happiness in a few online courses, and, conversely, I felt my own gears slipping, hormones doing things, and that, seemingly out of nowhere.  And I said, "you know what?  They all just want something from you."

The trick to that is that there are some we would trade with, others we would genuinely care about, thus sacrificing for them, while yet so many others are just trying to build a stockpile of goodwill and sundry other assets, both substantive and intangible.

So another pull away.

While pulled away, a longing in her eyes.  She looked lost, yet she was where she was supposed to be for that hour.  She looked lost, yet she had all that she had just a day before, plus more.  She looked lost, as if to say, she had just realized that something was missing in her own spectrum.

Only a MKL would do, for that itch that niggled her.

"Tell me.  Where would it tickle you, Mum?"

"His name is Cemetery."

"He's a stinkin' Chaldee."

As I was saying the other day, there is "for whom the bell tolls" and inevitably, one day, the bell would "toll for thee."  But yet, sometimes even sporting victories by the home team are marked by the bells, and in those cases, no blood spilled but maybe the prize bull.

They let Hamilton eat the bull testicles, you know?  But not in Maranello.  Not at all, Cheever.

In the end, after the moral treatises and social niceties, God and man both drink blood, with man cutting open the throat of the beast to appease Heaven.

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The Tao of Michael Biehn(an inference)

Biehn has been on both sides of the spectrum.

Good military, Bad military.

Infamous soldier from the future.

Rather decent, humble soldier from the future.

Then, like the clown from It, he seems to disappear for a time before surfacing again.

Is there a life lesson, a secret message to the fans, contained within Biehn's breakout role in Terminator?

-Fight for what you believe in.  Some things are even worth dying for.  And when it comes to widespread slaughter: the need is ever the more urgent.

"Bodies burning like paper."

A lesson from Aliens might be about quiet competence.  To do your job well and don't butthurt about reward.

-Do your best, and measure your own performance against your own beliefs, not those of others.  Don't showboat.  Be humble.  If you have a job, do it well.  You owe yourself that much, but remember, not for accolades, but just for your own peace of mind.

Only way to be sure?

Bug-out and nuke the planet from orbit.

In the Abyss, we see a man accustomed to being ordered around, and in the midst of the Cold War Era paranoia.  He was suddenly without orders, without the guidance of superiors.  A dog off the chain.  So Gorbachev had Parastroika while Biehn's soldier "Coffey" had paranoia.

Here we see the beginnings of a rebuttal to these life lessons.  As he takes the initiative, we see his waxen wings get to close to the heat of the sun.

He meets a solid rebuke in the form of his own near-ruining of everything, and yet, Coffey's foolhardy act facilitates First Contact with a new species.

-sometimes the wrong thing can turn out well.  Don't butt hurt so about it.

As was on the Asset Protection guy's car, "Ya Never Know."  But he shook it, Shake & Baked, did Coffey, forcing an action during a natural disaster, cut off from the world, he took a bold action, and the reaction from the good guys, then, the counter-action, caused a beautiful thing.

But look at our boy, here.  He had been killed so often in popular films.  We even saw his dark side, his jock side, maybe even his sensitive side.  What we see is the purely Stoic "cosmopolitan" sharing amongst his others, a sort of global consciousness.  Quiet competence.  Moral Certainty.  Loyalty to one's country.

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The hog knows only to be filled. and some more.

If we could only, shut it out, put it aside.....  the outside.  Well.  Not nature.  Not put aside nature.  Or even a cityscape.  But the constant climbing over one another for resources.  The growing.  The endlessly updating phones.  And other such.

Remember, I was told I needed a job.  And then I was told the job I had didn't make enough money.  Then I was told I made too much compared to my peers; but I was too busy to enjoy them duckets.  Too busy for a lady, and so many, called forth like names in the rolodex, some for a name, some for their appearance.

On the love front, there was some deeply conflicting information.  I had a debate about Free Will with a friend, that is Free Will in the face of divine inspirations and all the rest, what is allowed to just pop into view, and what isn't it.  You know, like agreed upon.  And told sometimes that was satire.  Sometimes just a show.

Well, usually just a show.

Conflicting information.  However, that said, for about an hour, I knew once that I had a clear playing field.  Anything I wanted.  There was no "I can't hear you" preloaded bs or anything, but a clear playing field.

Remember, I was still too busy to have a lady friend, though I had money and a kind of middling job.  Not money enough to afford to move out, of course, but money just the same.  A knucklehead was selling roses one day before Valentine's and made a bee line to me to offer me up one for sale.  That much, I thought was satire.

The clamoring, the climbing, the jockeying for position.  No wonder some of the elderly fall into a depression, once they've removed themselves from that equation, if that was most of what they held dear.

I could tell this one and that one, "you wouldn't be happier if you went from 37k to 250k".  You'd just have a more expensive car to dislike, for one thing.  And of course, another apartment to hide in with the shade drawn, as you look at your social media, which might be kind of a sketchpad of dreams.

Or should I say, a barf bag filled with other people's effluvium.

A friend fancied himself an entrepreneur.  Particularly, to take the mantle of his father, another entrepreneur, but surpass him, of course, making the father proud, while refuting his sire at the same time.  Anyway.  Given the family business, ye ken?  So he's not so much an entrepreneur.  That's something he didn't deal with on his own end.  So given the business, getting in late on the investment trends, usually buying on the high end with less chance of profit, and so forth.  Late in so many senses of the word.

But wanting to look at biographies of men like Warren Buffet.  He wanted the money and the mindset, the secret, which was the allure, the question, "how to make all that money?"  How to secure all those duckets, in other words.

But we're knowing, and I said it before, that familiar(the friend), can't even really be given the money,  then expected to make a sound decision, unless we were to lull ourselves into believing that his family business sense was perhaps imparted into the DNA, like an innate trait.

And looking on, we know.  It'll never be enough.  There will never be enough.  Was that Perot that mentioned, "a vast sucking sound"?  Lol.

When is the woodpile big enough?  When is there finally enough Walmart Supercenters?  When does South Carolina have that just right amount of Dollar General stores?  When is the car or truck, "good enough"?

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Cheese toast/garlic toast/aka the Mckinnon Peanut Dome Pizza

 This first needs two kinds of white cheese.  First, somewhere, usually just on top, a good parmesan.  You can grade it fine, like zesting a lemon, or you could go low buck and do the odd bottle of pre-prepped stuff.  And yes, I know the pre-prepped has sawdust in it, but you know what?

It won't hurt you.

Second cheese, base layer.  Mozzarella or Provolone.  or something of that sort.

You can go nuts on your garlic butter.  Or not.  Going nuts means you break-out a sauce pan and infuse some garlic in butter, then drizzle/douse the bread with it.

Or you could go powdered garlic.  I'm not a food snob.  I've done it in years past, long before I ever realized I could get better garlic in the stores.  But face it, we don't always have the time to be a gourmet in these matters.

So some said smears of butter with garlic powder dusted over.

Then A LITTLE ROSEMARY.  And a good bit of basil.  Make that butter look green.

PREP: OVEN BETWEEN 350-425 Farenheits.

You need any old kind of bread, but its got to be hotted with the garlic butter actually on it, so that it melts BEFORE you add the cheese.

Hot that butter before you add your cheese, unless you're using the no-prep pre-graded Parmesan, then you can just shower that on with the garlic and other before the warming.

Mind that was just a warming.  DO NOT BROWN THE BREAD ON FIRST WARMING.

No put your cheese on it, and watch it sweat for a few minutes in the oven, on the toast, the whole thing becoming harmonious.

Then you have garlic toast/cheese toast or Garlic Cheese, Cheesy Garlic Toast.  They served this at roping and tractor pulls in Mckinnon, and the odd Macbeth or Hamlet showing.

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The Thin Blue Line, a historical biographical bit.

 

As Nostradamus inputted so many centuries ago:

"The hero falls,

the bloody glove..."

As they said, parsing, talking about "that's OJ", and I'm thinking, "that's what you want, because its part of your hysteria".  Meanwhile, I had cut up some old socks and was doing bicep curls and hammer curls, while around the same time my brother was switching girlfriends.  One did the "nuclear option" and let him go at it unprotected.

He still had eyes to get out.

Months later, I was still a little pumpkin with not much muscle to speak of, and my weight set was collecting dust.

And in the same month, both of my brother's former girlfriends had babies.  Incidentally, both of the babies are dead now, at this late juncture.....

"...the hour was getting late, and the wind began to howl...."

and what was, is just like Old Testament scripture.  Ain't no changing that, and I can be like, "that ain't my covenant, bro.  I got an updated promise.  I don't have to burn incense and kill livestock just to spill blood."

Plus, I can eat pork.  I shouldn't, because of my BP, but I had a fork-piece or two now and then.

You know, you can't call too many of God's creature unclean, like "that which God cleaned cannot be call uncleaned."

Sam I am,

could you,

would you,

in a park,

or in the dark,

laying on the cool earth,

banging for all you're worth,

or would you yet,

in my green 1500?

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The penumbra of altruism. 2 things that boost my spirit.

 Two things I've found that uplift me and nourish me in my short and unfulfilling few years on earth.

First, every few weeks, I look over the book of Ephesians, preferably King James Version of the Holy Bible.  As a saved Christian, its sort of moot, in a sense, to look at the promises, because as they say, "I've already made the purchase, so I don't need to look at the sales brochure again", and yet it just amps me up.

Some of my theology fellows take Calvin to task on pre-destination, and indeed, when this is mentioned in Ephesians, its sort of glazed over.  For a truth, we acknowledge that God knows all, and man doesn't, so in effect, God chose his believers, and we butt-hurt, poo-poo as to why he didn't choose everyone.  But Man must know grace and salvation is available to all, that most everyone has a chance at salvation.  Man must know that from his own perspective; meanwhile God knows the beginning and the end at once.

We would even say "why would God care?"  Saved or unsaved, we are His children, too.  So he cares, and is under no obligation whatsoever.  God cares because that is his will.

It's altruism, a vast penumbra of altruism hanging over our reality.  Which leads to Buddhist ethics, our next topic.

Second, the Four Noble Truths of Buddha.  Now, I'm not a Buddhist, but I agree with a lot of their ethics, without committing to much of it.  But the realization of suffering, whether in me, or from without, is powerful.

I have made myself suffer.  I work on ending that.

People have abused my emotions.  I work on ending that.

But really, do we not see so much that others suffer unjustly?  And how can we feel a lack of pathos for that?  So much undeserved suffering!  Some have had it so much worse, and yet, human resiliency, you'd be surprised what a person could get used to.

I love to dish out some hugs.

FR, niggie.

Realize suffering, trace its cause, work at that, and finally, free yourself.  However, it is not a "once and done" proposition, unless you make some changes in your methods, after.  Elseways, you will be assailed by more hurting relatives or money concerns or angry motorists.  Something is always there, that is, always there,

unless you have a method.  And the Buddhist moderate path, is not so much unlike the analogy of Marcus Aurelius, in which the good Stoic is but a leaf flowing on the current.  And in the maze of sneering at popular sentiments, we are last told to maintain our objectivity, our own perspective, but not to fight.

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We each, among us, see the same things, yet have very different perspectives, ie: the fish, the bird, and the worm.

The tag team from the Pacific Northwest.  Dana Purdy and Anna Purvis: Darling Dana and Anna Run Amok.  I met them at a Waffle House and we smoked cigarettes in the parking lot.  I was cruising for "mouth love" and no dumpster to hide behind.  Indeed the dumpster was an unlit distance away between the Waffle House and the Flying J.

A blowjob and one of those truckstop souvenir shirts.  But I was faltering, dropping faster than Lynyrd Skynyrds airplane.

I took one of those 5 dollar showers over at the Flying J and was looking over the audiobooks and truck swag, snacks and things, wearing the towel still around my head.

"Hey there, Bin Laden!"  I heard from behind me.

And that was the Peppermints, also known as Dana and Anna.

We were waiting, in folding chairs, for the last match, the TV guy getting all the gate, and us barely able to get a hamburger after an evening's work.  There was a bottle of Ibuprofen, though, and anyone could have some.  But it was all varsity crap, man, the dressing area, and then a shower curtain over the entryway.

But we did the thing.  Did the job.

A hurt shoulder and no oral sex, just trying to sleep off the pain in my old single cab F150.  Sockfeet on the passenger doorpanel, arms bent almost like praying, half-open hands tucked under my head.  I was like I was kneading the side of my head.

A stupid glow at irregular intervals, cars and trucks passing by, ghostly headlight glare.  That whoosh of tire noise on the tarmac.

I was thinking that the Amok Twins and I had seen pretty much the same thing, yet we submerged each ourselves into the dishwater, and they so weary but innervated in a weird way, happy to be performing, where I thought it was just a job, taking a folding chair to the head a few times, fall and take it to the back.  Why in the ghostlight from the big windows in front the Waffle House, I wondered how we could ever persevere with such a difference, how we both all three went through the same thing, but saw it so differently.

Well, for one thing, I didn't sell any tee shirts that night, where the Amok twins did some business with their merch.  Probably a few kisses on the cheek for the benefit of photographers, maybe even a blurb in the dirt sheets.

And yet, the same card.  But the tv guy?  It was all buttcrack smells and slumming for him, dues he's already paid, taking a big step backward in his career, all the way back to the very beginning, wrestling in an old de-commissioned Guard armory property.

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How we all see the same events so very differently!

 

The tao, random movie quotes, and today in verse.

Fancying himself a gun dealer after watching some primetime tv, a real catalog reading expert, you know?  Learn the lingo, pay some unsavories.  Bank roll comes, multiple homes, a chicky-poo at every home.

MKL Observation Day.  You know?  Flares in the air, RPG's and stuff.  We all love Momma.  The republic, rending at its clothing, preferring some sort of dismal dirge to a message of light, wot as what wots in the abysmal dotage, the estuary turbulently whispering, like fingertips on wood panelling.

The view is pretty good from my hill, you know?

The nave, 30 spokes, only the blankspace making the wheel useful, the rest being like, a rind of sorts.  The rest is just waiting, the other on the wire, you know?  

People movin' out; people movin' in.  

Why?  The encouraging of sin.

Run, run, run, but you sure can't hide!

Only person getting ahead

is the preacher.

I had to get straight, get righteous, and talk to the rat squad behind my caterwalling.  It was a "come to Jesus" kind of moment, soul-searching, catharsis, and Norah kind of like wanting to slap me rather than hold hands.  But I thought they were supposed to be nice?

It's not a bad question, Bert.

Then the movie lied?

You know, back in 68 at the Pittsburgh VA hospital.  Some kind of chemical that was being developed to spray on marijuana or something.

The nave, the crux.  30 spokes.  Blank space.  Does a wheel make, and you know, where there is a wheel, there is a way, as Dolly is apt to say.  "That was Daddy's motto."  And you know, the empty space within a terracotta vessel makes that useful, otherwise its just a plug of clay.

A sort of unenumerated space for the brain yet to grow, perhaps, a space for business, something not like a back corridor or a parking lot, but a kind of propitiation for checkerboard tile or Trabertine and all that other, 30 year industrial grade with the ammonia film lift over it, man.  And they were experimenting with doping the dope, you know?  A chemical to spray on the weed, like something to eliminate part of the Dem voter base or something.

Something, kind of an unofficial executive order "up yours" to the lovers at Haight Ashbury. 

The nave, the crux.  The Cheever.  The Mikeman.  The bus.  The beaver.

The nave,

30 spokes,

a tutty-toke,

on a smokey-doke.

I put my bible and pen,

in my smart canvas tote.

I talked to some old friends,

and made some grocery notes.

But what's in a day,

Dick Sprague?

Between the dawn and dusk,

the middle,

what's that about,

Dick Trickle?

Specimen cup and Seamus's face,

entangled.

The nation divided,

yet oddly all star-spangled.

They love the president,

whoever they each think is POTUS.

 

Molly's lick-wet toes, and some bedraggled eyes. I twiddle at it, fiendishly.

So I was getting more natural light, and that was going great guns, really helping my mood and sleep.  Literally, to just look at the open sky and thank God for it.  And it becomes more and more and unfocused, deep gratitude.

I was having as it were, kind of a "thing", reading that people always wanted more money, and money never equated to happiness.  The rate of happiness hit a plateau between 75k and 250k dollars.  Yet still, people dream of the magic million.  That little belt notch of prosperity that is supposedly cause happiness.

And yet elsewhere, I've written an article explaining that 38-55% of the income will be eaten by taxes, and then all sorts of miscellaneous expenses, not to mention a lumpsum payment to one's mate, then loans/gifts to one's other familiars.

It slips from the fingers so easily, then, despair comes back, despair and want.

Rather to be happy without Disney Plus and all that other.  Like, shop at Amazon, but don't join Prime.  Get an Android phone, but don't upgrade every year.

As is always said, "it's amazing what you can get used to."  And yet the commercials and so forth brainwash us into a fantasy of wealth and riches.

I personally, My Cheevers, have learned to be content, whether I am abased or I abound.  I can suffer lack or abundance, and inside its all the same: the same 98 degree body temp, same smile.

Same Chevy truck.  And I like our Buick a lot, even though its not aging all that well.  It still does pretty well, all things considered.  Not perfect, but it definitely gets the job done.

I have started a small investment, watching that small amount grow in fits and starts.  Patiently watching as the seedling pokes from the dirt, then slowly rises, its tender leaves drooping like a showerhead.

"All those dreams we held so close..."  The towers burning, the words scrolling.  The video soon banned.

"Seem to lick at Molly's toes...."

"I hate that bedraggledness in your eyes....."

Why not a call to love, rather than hate?  A pleasing shade of purple, and Lindsey polishing his one great horn.  Why in effect, do we have to mark-out enemies, even if the Rosado brothers spit in our faces on the street?  Cousin Mike, they fear you because you did what was necessary for the time.  That's a kind of singular power and strength that few among us exercise so effortlessly.

There is more than this, but we are only to see it much later.  For now, let us stroke and pet our own familiars, brush at the peculiarities, mourn the dead, but cheer for the living, and put them all to song, the living and the dead.  Go forward in love, press on towards the mark.

Go forth in love....

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 (Note: the photos in the post are two scenes from the state of Nevada, as published by the Atlantic magazine.)

Mister Mayor, were there irregularities?

For 300k a month, I'd be scurrying up some spare votes, a thumb drive in the lawyer's custody, 90k votes, predominantly repub in a dem district, he would claim.

Something about it being because of Trump's rallies.

Say "what" again.  You think Marcellus Wallace is a bitch?

I was down there on the Marlboro side of the riverfront, where the hardwoods, now leafless, were pointing like witch fingers towards the sky, and there was a kind of phantom haze around the sun.   It was a beautiful effect, and I could feel that solar warming on my skin.

There was drink.  I was "feeling no pain."

"So here's to you, missus Vogelsong.  Tell me Joltin' Joe has won the day.  Hey, hey, hey."

Pliant eyes.  The narrative.  Worldviews reinforced.  What Anderson Cooper would do for a Klondike bar.

The power of positive thinking.

Sometimes, we have to be happy with what and who we got.  And ain't that a lot?  What we got.

So abstemious.

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I reckon.

 

The tao of the the great handfuls of fog.

 One of the great riddles of life is this.

The more we try to hold on to something, keep it at our clasp, the greater the chance we have of losing it or ruining it altogether.

Our best efforts can come to nil, meanwhile, with only minimal tending, our gardens grow; and our thoughts betray us.  Love poisons, because it can come about for entirely the wrong reasons, and all the while, while we grasp and hold, our love turns to hate, like silt in the well water.

Of certainty and uncertainty, the seminal principle must be something along the lines of "right intention", or in the old vernacular, a kind of "noble purpose", observing a kind of rightness unbeguiled by either certainty or uncertainty, as the unconscious mind guides us, almost as if we could find love or fortune by just some underdeveloped internal sensibility.  Certainty and uncertainty take a holiday and something as undefined as the tao comes into play, some seminal principle of the universe, and our hands move, with us being scarcely aware of it, as if to knit and darn and fiddle at the threads until the work is prepared.

Damming back the water would consume us.  Behold an office on the face of the structure, men perturbed to sit and watch, day in and day out, see to the holding back of the water.  Almost a jail sentence to be the poor bastard sent over public works hour after hour, but somehow accounted for, with one soul here and one or two souls there, for the good of all, the laying down and wasting of a few.

Conversely, in other matters, one lost and the world cries foul for having seen something of himself in the victim.  "My emotions!" might exclaim the sufferer, following a thread of his own, unaware that after a time, the path of truth is lost, and there is only some revenging of an outraged daydream of a ghost, and that having reminded one of one's self.

I once called Danica Patrick, "a Ferrari".  And I said, "I could see myself in that."  Polishing the surface with the downsoft innards of baby diapers, and in the Rosa Corsa hue, I would see my own anxious face looking back at me, with a kind of blank concern.

My Fiat ticks and buzzes so.  I would have it away, perhaps, and upgrade to a better beater.

Blank as trying to define the tao, for certain.  That face on the top edge of the fender.

Hunter Thompson.   "Oh fuck, that was me."  That same blank face, as if I were digging out a splinter or dismembering a squirrel, with a kind of unmotivated attention, the kind of internally blank thing, as of a star collapsing inwards on itself, to then bedraggle and ruin several solar systems.

Working on my Ferrari.  Stethoscope on the valve covers, getting a more symphony din than possible in naked sound, screwdriver on the exhaust manifold, feeling for that smoothness, than rhythm.

I could then, like my automobili, appreciate and pet over the Tao, but I cannot own it or fully lay hold of it.  I can feel particles with I put my hands in the cloud, but I cannot put my arms around the cloud.  So the particles on my hands, kissing, that part-damp, suffices for an experience, and not an ownership or proper having.

Such as to say, they agree that I own the cow, but the milk seems to go on after a time.

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I burn more calories while watching others work, than while I'm just resting idly.

They say, quixotic, too stupid to appreciate the hubris, "this is the windmill at which I point my lance."

"I climb the mountain, merely because it is there."

And with such other going on.  I had thought a few years back, under different circumstances, that it seemed the young people had targets on their backs.  Then only black male youths.  A target, either the schools, the random black male pedestrian or the gay night club "hipster".

Such as to say, non-plussed, "well, pin a rose on me."

But it was Miguel Ferrer, pouring cocaine into a sporting lady's cleavage, telling her, "I need all the motivation I can get."  Then he tells Coop, "climb whatever mountain you need to climb to catch this maniac."

Sniffing cocaine in a stew of b.o. and dollar knockoff EWWW(ewe) de toilette.

Such waste, to climb a mountain because it is simply there.  Tell me you've been otherwise just, temperature and magnanimous in the other parts of your life.

Do that for me, please.

"I had a dream, Doornan, about you and me at one of those black places, eating ribs.  I feel like I've turned a corner with my race issues."

"Well pin a rose on you, you fat piece of crap."

Andy worked on his own issues, and thought he had brought the world along with him, just like me feeling equanimity, but looking out at a world that was just as divided as ever, people telling others not to watch the news, or people saying he should pardon his children pre-emptively.

The US doesn't issue Get Out of Jail Free cards, right?  Only the DEA did that sometime in the 80s, during an escalation in the war on drugs.  Surgeon General adverts on Nintendo Games, at the beginning, along with the publisher logo and stuff.

Did you cross the White House lawn just because it was there?  Did you want some natural light, and get it that way?  Just strip down to your socks and get in the moat on the National Mall.  

"I got naked because the pool of stale water was there."

I was clinging by my fingertips, and the sinews showing white, angry, through my weary body, and I could look back, over my shoulder, and be like, "all that green and blue."  "Was that the ground?"

Somewhere my Caprice Classic is there, 305 V8 ticking randomly as it cools from the long drive.  And I've thought, "there but for the grace of God", "because it is there", and "but it vexes me; it tests me, so I will have it off."

Or Giuliani, the ronin from hell.  A chorus of demons following him around, sounding like my Rogue One phone ringtone(the one that surprised Becky this morning).  His hairblack, like the ink of a new Trumpian Contract With America.  Buy Trump, Eat Trump, crap party lines into the communal ditches.

I will swing around perdition's flames.  Drop a few loose cents into Pandora's Box, to pay admission to that grand mountain.  The Magic Mountain, and have it, bring it off, like a whole in the carpet exposing early 20th century hardwood floors, the brown iris of a stupid eye, or the cherry creme of a buttery danish.

The mountain has a permanence, and by climbing it, do you claim a piece of that permanence?  Do you achieve longevity, absurdly, by setting aside the value of a life, or aiming a life, as of a life's devotion?  The mountain is there.  Because it is there.  At some point, you stand, like an insect, at the foot of the mountain, regarding a flotsam little speck of eternity, and yourself scarcely rating as a follicle around the rim of a pink sphincter.

You aren't even a dust mite, Cheever.  And we have the common lot, so I'm not trying to degrade you, but adjust you, oh Gentle Reader. As mice to Almond Joys' are we to the gods.  And inevitably, the more certainty you possess, the more Harris Faulkner, then the further you have gone from the crux, the grice, the eternal serfdom of being just a flesh bag with some chemical electric happenings north of the neck.

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not caring about the spoils, mayhap.

 To have conquered oneself, one's own attorney general, is true success.  The rest of the world fleets away into the stillness of their own, while one has his own stillness, in a quietened, contented spirit.

Or better yet, to have conquered oneself, the rest of the world is opened, but by then, is it not wanted for additional summer cottages or industrial customer client states.  Something to be experienced, but not one jot caring of ownership.

Hurt butt not that the butt has been hurt, especially when it hasn't.  Use the force of your will to create the voter fraud that you wanted, that you espoused publically.  Will it, Riggs.

That's what Murtaugh said.  They had fought with Jet Lee and then Riggs had fallen in the water.  From above, on the decking, Murtaugh shouted with all his self, "Will it, Riggs!"

I notice that one of my religious channels has debuted a new show about politics, and I'm grinding my teeth just thinking of that.  And deciding never to watch, the "real news", which is inevitably just the "other side" screaming, like someone in Cheraw told me, that when they sound mad, they must be telling the truth.

No, I say.  Not a bit.

But John the Apostle said even in his day, there were anti-Christs about.  And you know what an anti-Christ probably does?  Sit around deciding how to influence public opinion.  And maybe that's a kind of passion, or a financial interest, holding advertisers and so forth.

Maybe play some golf.  Six thousand dollar flowers in motel rooms that have bed bugs.

I mean.  Really.  Does anybody care?  Somebody is gonna be President, and what I'm not going to do is let it mess with my calm.  I will continue now to pick out policy bits to shoot on and not stupidly back any of these broken party menus, their little lists of ideas, the "platform".  Social freedom+fiscal dickering paired-off against social restrictions+free markets, and all claiming to be the soul of freedom, all the while, disagreements benaggling, combobulating and perspicating.

Social Traditionalists versus Socialists.  David Barton versus Oprah Winfrey.  I'd go Libertarian, and wait until they've all put each other safely behind bars.

Another govt thing to butthurt about.  Voter ID in South Carolina.

Point one: Voting is a RIGHT.  Driving, or having a state DOT issued id card is currently a PRIVELEGE.

Point two: This is one of the biggest counties in the state.  Some people have to drive at least 25 miles to the nearest highway department to procure one of those ID cards.

How about automatic voter registration?  Registered automatically on receipt of turning 18 years old?

Any hurdle between the eligible citizen and his ballot is VOTER SUPRESSION.

Meanwhile, Riggs is trying to dislocate his shoulder, so he can free himself from the dock debris.  Up top, Murtaugh "senses" something from Riggs, like Riggs "willed it" to Murtaugh, and Murtaugh comes down and frees him, his friend.

His white, insane friend.  The loose canon.  The turd that won't exit the pants leg.

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