Saturday, August 6, 2022
Friday, August 5, 2022
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Monday, August 1, 2022
Saturday, July 30, 2022
Friday, July 29, 2022
Friday, July 22, 2022
Sunday, July 17, 2022
Pictures from the Compound
Saturday, July 16, 2022
Sunday, July 10, 2022
To Love a Woman
To really love a woman you must pay a great toll in all liklihood for that initial joy. The "glory of the flower." Because it will not likely last. That fact, though, when weighed against the absolutely overwhelming intoxication of new love, is all but lost completely. Until, that is, it finally becomes time to pay up.
This is a picture of me when I'm in love with a woman. I'm fully invested in matters of heat and heart. But then comes the wind and change brought on by our conflicting breezes, and the once fierce love becomes a longing to retro-fit, knowing well that it won't. So then comes sadness. There's never been a better word for it. It can't kill you unless you either let it or do it yourself.
Saturday, July 9, 2022
Friday, July 8, 2022
Thursday, July 7, 2022
I've a Dove in my Chimney
It is singing to me, which echoes into the house like a microphone. Beautiful and unexpected. What a gift from the earth. She's telling me to stay put.
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Friends -- Led Zeppelin (Thank you)
During times like these, true friends are fundamentally important in getting back on one's feet. To those few, Thank you.
Monday, July 4, 2022
Sunday, July 3, 2022
Saturday, July 2, 2022
Big Thief - “Not” (Live at The Bunker Studio)
Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek (aka, Joey Santiago, Jr.), masterfully wear a guitar duet out toward the end of this intense chunk of alternative rock.
Friday, July 1, 2022
Riddle Of The Universe - To the Memory of Pete McGuire, the Philosopher of the South Central Appalachians
Some of the most clever lyrics in contemporary music. This song is easily great.
Freedom From Religion Foundation Publication of May 2012 (Paul Whetstone, Attorney versus Judge Jay Taylor)
‘9 Commandments’ judge loses robe
FFRF started fighting a proposed Ten Commandments display and the judge pushing it in July 2010 at the Hawkins County Justice Center in Rogersville, Tenn. It was a pet project of Juvenile Judge James “Jay” Taylor, whose personal website was plastered with piety. As it turns out, all that piety blew up horrendously in his face after FFRF took an interest in the case.
The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Taylor agreed to resign May 1 in an agreement with the Tennessee Court of Judiciary, which charged him with taking $9,000 from clients for personal gain. “He is a charlatan, and his charlatanry is about to come to an end,” said Morristown lawyer Paul Whetstone, who represents two clients who have filed civil suits.
The Court of the Judiciary earlier sanctioned Taylor for lobbying the County Commission to support the “Foundations of American Law and Government” display and fundraising for it.
A county committee had approved the display, heavily weighted with religious elements, including the Ten Commandments, all obviously meant to show that America is a Christian nation. Besides the constitutional violations, as FFRF noted in a follow-up complaint, shouldn’t a decalogue that’s supposed to be historical at least have ten commandments? Taylor’s proposed plaque listed only nine (omitting adultery — hmm — see below), and mixed up the Roman numeral XI for IX. Local media neglected to pick up on the errors, which Taylor corrected after FFRF’s letter pointed them out. The display, which has never been put up, also contained numerous historical inaccuracies.
A petition for discipline filed in February by the Board of Personal Responsibility alleged Taylor used about $6,000 of display donations for his personal use.
Taylor is also the subject of a $3 million lawsuit by a former employee alleging he violated her civil rights, made “unwelcome and unwanted” sexual advances and unlawfully fired her.
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
AA Big Book, p. 30 ("Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.")
Most of us have been unwilling to admit that we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from others. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somewhow, someday he will be able to control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death. We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed. We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals, usually brief, were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.
Monday, June 27, 2022
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Appalachian American Ennui: Django Django - Hail Bop, Firewater, Love's Dart (...
Appalachian American Ennui: Django Django - Hail Bop, Firewater, Love's Dart (...: Lose the box. I wince during this otherwise beautiful musical experience as I endure the beating of a goddamn box adorned with el...
Saturday, June 25, 2022
My First Parole Hearing: State of Tennessee v. [Uncle] John Paul Sexton
I hadn't been licensed long at all when my grandmother called and asked me to represent my uncle, her fifth born child, in his upcoming parole hearing at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. I prepped my witnesses (my mother and grandmother) and off we went. I knew enough then to quiz my uncle Johnny about his remorse, penitence. He was in prison for murdering Cotton Headrick outside of a beer joint in Roane County some years earlier. I cannot recall how long he had been in prison, but it couldn't havde been any more than about ten years at that time.
Friday, June 24, 2022
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Monday, June 20, 2022
It's Black-Eyed Susan Season (BESS)
I'm wanting to enjoy the hundreds of black-eyed Susans that have come up out back. But I can't. I'm pissed, depressed, irritated, and all to hell. But, to my enemies: "I'll work my way back out like I've done a thousand times before. And now, I have exercise in my arsenal. It has made all the difference." I'll never stop overcoming life's obstacles. I'm just built that way. So, goddamnit, I'm going to make myself photograph them and post them hereunder if it kills me. To do less would do disgrace to BESS.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Sleeve, the Steward of the Armed Shaped Empty Space
I am Sleeve, steward of empty space. I appear to surround, to define, to encapsulate an area, into which an arm may slide easily. But what am I is what I am? Am I then defined by the space I appear to mark, by the space within my structure, or by the muscled, skin-strecthed appendage that will enter the folds? I am the sleeve, into which the arm will enter. I represent faith.
Friday, June 17, 2022
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Monday, June 13, 2022
Aldous Harding – Lawn (Official Video)
Check out how the bass just bleeds in, followed closely by the drum kit. Great background music for cleaning house.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Aldous Harding - The Barrel (Official Video)
The little post-pause epilogue she does in her drawers at the end of the video is adorable. This is a wonderful piece of music. She does something I've never heard before. In the choruses, instead of employing vocalise, she actually repeats the term, "the barrel, the barrel, . . ." Nice.
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Friday, June 10, 2022
Thursday, June 9, 2022
My Two Favorite People With My Favorite Artist
State of Tennessee v. Ralph Sexton (Not Guilty): For Stephania
At some point around 2005, Ralph decided to partner up with a couple in connection to turning Edna Mae's into a restaurant and tavern. The couple was dominated by an overbearing woman who went by a surname that is now lost on me. However, as will become pertinent, I do know her Christian name. Gertrude. So Gertrude accused Ralph of stealing a very valuable cooler that she had on hold from a place called Little Lots in Smyrna, Tennessee in White County. He was arrested on a felony warrant, made bond, and hired yours truly to represent his interests. We prepared for a preliminary hearing and went full force into it, contesting the existence of probable cause in front of the Judge, whose name I now forget. As one would expect, Ralph was highly agitated and anxious. I had suggested that he double his dose that morning, and I'm confident he did. Still, he was a wreck. I stayed in a rental cabin at Edgar Evins State Park so I'd be practically there on the hearing date. I took my lesson and finished preparing the night before. And even before that, I had driven to Lancing in order to rehearse Ralph's proposed testimony for the upcoming hearing. In preparation, I began my direct examination in the main room of Edna Mae's which, at that time, was more of a salvage depot. We huddled up next to the woodstove and I commenced my examination: "You are Ralph Sexton, aren't you." "Yes, sir, I am." You've been charged with a felony in this matter and your plea is 'not guilty' I believe. "That's absolutely right, sir," he replied. "And Mr. Sexton, it's safe to say, is it not, that you are a man of high credibility." "I'd like to think so," he replied. "Never been convicted of a felony, have you?" "No, sir." Never lied in court?" "No I have not." "And you've never stole anything in your entire life, have you?" "Well, counsellor, yes I have!" I busted out laughing and so did my wife. It was pure honesty. Obviously I decided against asking him that in front of the Judge.
Anyway, Ralph, who was nervous, was standing in the hallway before the hearing, pacing the floor, when our female witness decided to soothe his nerves by rubbing his shoulders without first asking permission. He snapped around, "Get your god damned hand's off of me!" Hilarious.
He told me that if I used the other woman's name, "Gertrude" she'd go ape shit mad. So, as soon as I got up to cross examine Mrs. ? (I cannot recall what she went by). I said, point blank: "Isn't it true ma'am that your real name is Gertrude." She turned red as blood and reminded me and everyone in the building that her name was "Mrs. ?" and that she did not use "that" name ever!
The long and short of it was that the Judge threw the felony case out for lack of probable cause because, among other things, Gertrude turned into a malignant bitch as soon as I said her name. True story.
Hackensaw Boys Proud For Now
This song is actually a thoroughly great ballad, lyrically and musically. It should be given its proper placement by the ages: a masterpiece of Appalachian bluegrass.
A Writ About Dirt
The plural dirt seem like they're laughing because they know that everything above their vast expanse is headed their way, me included. "You don't know shit, boy. Wait 'til you're down here with us. That's when it gets interesting. Legune and radish roots crawling through your belly. Groundhogs tunnelling violently through your gut. Just you wait. You walk around on top of us, you excavate us, but it don't hurt us at all. We're so fucking old that we're indifferent to pain, but deeply in love with the rain, even though it ignites the rootwork that tickles our insides and constantly keeps us guessing. We get along though. We need each other. We feel you, but we just don't need you, boy. As you were."
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
When We Was Boys
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Monday, June 6, 2022
I Used to Call Her Mommy
The olfaction would tease a place in me that gets little attention anymore, aside from these memories of my strange, coaly affection, and the looping echo of the pedal steel guitar rising from Cline Bunch's juke box inside the Mountain View Inn, where I learned later on about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and pinball and nine-ball and straight pool.
This song haunts me like that Appalachian coal smoke. It worms its way down into my tender solar region, where my saltwater tears continue to be distilled in the fresh headwaters from the haunted hollows of Gobey.
When I study my creek bank of old images I can see Mary Sue hiding in the corn. I can see the hem of her homemade skirt dragging the top of the water behind the laurels as she searches the slick rocks for mudpuppies and waterdogs. She and I would flee the hollow and make our way to Chattanooga, where I would emerge and call Mary Sue my Mommy.
Sunday, June 5, 2022
Excerpt From "In the Belly of the Beast," by Jack Henry Abbott
When a man takes a position opposed to another and refuses to discuss the matter on the grounds that he feels that the truth of his position lies in a feeling in his heart that the next man does not have, he has take an anti-human stand against humanity. This is because the aim of humanity to achieve a common (social) agreement. Any fool can see this is correct, since we are social beings.
In reality, only equals can reach agreements. So long as classes are not equal, men are not equal, and there is no way I can reach any agreements with the enemies of my class -- particularly since these enemies hold the power of life or death over us. A man who "disagrees" that someone else should take his life is in no position to restrict this "disagreement" to words. If deeds will solve the "disagreement," they are as valid as words.
Sentiment is not the source of human weakness although today it is the tool of that weakness.
Human weakness lies in the fact that no one is perfect because no society is perfect. It is not the consciousness of this that pardons men from choosing sides. Only ignorance pardons.
In reality, only equals can reach agreements. So long as classes are not equal, men are not equal, and there is no way I can reach any agreements with the enemies of my class -- particularly since these enemies hold the power of life or death over us. A man who "disagrees" that someone else should take his life is in no position to restrict this "disagreement" to words. If deeds will solve the "disagreement," they are as valid as words.
Sentiment is not the source of human weakness although today it is the tool of that weakness.
Human weakness lies in the fact that no one is perfect because no society is perfect. It is not the consciousness of this that pardons men from choosing sides. Only ignorance pardons.
Crime and Punishment: Redemption
"Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind." Crime and Punishment, p. 472. "But that is the beginnig of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new, unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story has ended." Id.
Saturday, June 4, 2022
Porno for Pyros - Pets
This is a serious song about the future of humankind. But, while I'm at it, I have to say that the electric guitar performance by Peter DiStephano is absoultely fantastic.
Friday, June 3, 2022
So be it (The Liberty of the Subterranean Shift)
Let go. I mean it. Let go. Let the currents carry you into the no one knows, into the we don't know. Don't know what you don't know and forget what you do. Even though the current will transport you in the macro sense, you will still be vested with tiny controls. Like the tiny critter attempting to navigate the corners of a swiftly running mountain branch near Looking Glass Falls Creek off 276 where, in the end the current will cause her descent to Brevard and below. But in the course of that journey, she stays afloat. She does not drown. She even exits the quick current at opportune times, takes a break, breathes in the sky, and then joins the conveyor again to god knows where, but she don't care. The wind even plays a role. It, too, is defined by its currents. The Looking Glass Creek is driven by the angles of the earth and gravity, but the wind . . . there's something else at play, like the planet spinning and the wind currents trying to keep up, exhausted at times, but always busy somewhere and sometimes right here. So be it. So be it all. Let it play with me. Let it affect me. Let it move me, even if at times it moves me to tears. Just let go. Let the hairs and sweat squeeze from my porus surface area. Offer these emanations the liberty to explore the air, and one another. Walk around the house naked. Let it be. Let it be shallow. Don't dig in. Or, if you've dug in, cultivate radishes and legunes to break up the grounds so you and I can loosen our roots and pull them up just enough to break new ground, so that they, too, can explore subterranean novelties. There's a brick buried below the water maple that needs to be adjusted. Let it move, even if just a little. A slight alteration equals work, regardless of how slight. Let it be shifted in the dirt. The liberty of the subterrannean shift awaits you, Mr. Brick. It's an adventure. It's necessary for the planets. The centuries will be pleased. Say so much for the history that should not but does shift on account of the lack of a proper accounting. That is changing, too. Real time is good time. Rewind is beautiful. Don't be afraid to rewind if you forget in order to remember and to remember with dead accuracy. So be it. So be the trees. So be the springing up of life in beltan. So be the interference that we've built up to the wind. Love the way the wind forces its way into Michigan Aveneue and blows the world around. So be the critter in the creek. I dare you. You see, we have little shards of clouds in our eyes. And that's okay.
Jane's Addiction - Then She Did
I discovered this song this morning, and it fits perfectly into my busy life. Thanks, YouTube. I mean it. They got the album cover wrong. Article 1 is that part of the U.S. Constitution that provides for the legislative branch of government, and all attendant rights and responsibilities thereto. Amendment 1. That's where the freedoms of expression, assembly, and freedom to and from religion reside.
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Monday, May 30, 2022
Saturday, May 28, 2022
George W. Bush, Architect of Iraq Invasion; Progenitor of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: FREUDIAN SLIP OF THE MILLENNIUM
The audience giggles about the blood and guts and devastation of one million lives based upon a lie.
Friday, May 27, 2022
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
The Smile (Thom Yorke) - We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings
One of the few things I really love about life: we don't know what tomorrow brings. (A day after I wrote this I got Salmonella poisoning).
EXCLUSIVE: ISIS Plotting To Assassinate George W. Bush In Dallas | Forbes
George W. Bush is the American edition of Vladimir Putin. He did the same fucking thing.
Monday, May 23, 2022
Sunday, May 22, 2022
My Beloved Uncle, Ralph Eugene Sexton (He Looks Like Smiling Jesus Under a Panama Hat)
Zero 7 Yeah Ghost Pop Art Blue New Music 2009
"I cut myself of barbwire getting wood for the fire, I was too busy staring at you."
Saturday, May 21, 2022
The Young Woman in the Off Red Dress
In keeping my distance I most effectively preserved her image as she stood reflecting yet another west-end sunset from her golden sunglasses, red nails, perfect teeth, perfect feet, painted lips, and red pumps, all subordinated to the off red dress and the vessel beneath which it lay contoured and loose and straight and perfect. Just perfect. Within the concavity of my spinning mind that draws into its vortex feigned notions of happiness and contentment and love and peace and harmony and euphoria, I mused whether taking a step in her direction would have made a difference; that I might not disrupt the image created in part by the proximity that stood. A difference. A difference, like the difference it would make if I packed up and rode my 650 to California and sat in the same booth at the diner with my daughter in Hollywood named the House of Pies. As soon as I would sit I would realize, would I not, that no appreciable difference had been effected on account of my ride, and on account of the image that would have otherwise been well-preserved had I stood back and observed it from a this long distance. The young woman in the off red dress is like that. She represents desire, and vanity, and all those distractions that would in the end most certainly make a difference, and the difference would be destructive. The difference would be draped in off black, and sadness, and deeper desires that would take me into even deeper shades of dark black and off darkenss.
Did I mention that just beyond the young woman was the entrance to a funeral parlor where there lay the dead body of a young man around whom stood his mourners and sisters and lovers and widower father? Did I mention that the young woman in the off red dress did not go in? Instead, she stood. She stood like a statue adorned on either side by white columns and a vestibule made for somber fashionable ingress and somber egress. So there she stood, like a sail. Like a centerpiece. She was not sad. She might as well have not known where she was because it didn't matter. She knew well. Confidence. The confidence that vanity ignites creates desire. It is all vanity. It is all imagery. It is artwork. I no longer hunt or gather so I am left idle drift from image to image until I am alas assuaged of my desire to look. Then I sleep. To the faithful I request: Thank God for me that I may sleep. Sleep it off. Sleep off the fear and the pain and suspicion and the dread and the desire that the young woman in the off red dress represents to me. By morning I will have that clarity to conclude that her taste was woefully off. What a garish act to wear an almost orange dress to a goddamn funeral parlor. What an ego-driven little vixen she must be. What nerve!
But long she stood and soaked into her orbit every wandering eye within her peripheral colorguard. Her stark pose. Her teeth within red lips barely moving above and below, beneath golden sunglasses, red nails, perfect teeth, perfect feet, and red pumps, all subordinated to the off red dress and the vessel beneath which it lay contoured and loose and straight and perfect. Just perfect. "Desire Ye Not, Ye Middle Aged Man". Who said that? Who the fuck said that? I did. I am the fool who said that. But it did not come from me. I am nevertheless grateful that it emanated from these half century old and throaty chords of mine. I will not be undone by the young woman in the off red dress. And so I move on to the next successive set of images. These are the ones that matter. I am home. To the faithful I request: Thank your Gods that I am home. Thank your Gods that I am safe. Thank your Gods for the ever increasing distance between the young woman in the off red dress and me. I am home. But I concede it would be a safer here if I weren't.
Did I mention that just beyond the young woman was the entrance to a funeral parlor where there lay the dead body of a young man around whom stood his mourners and sisters and lovers and widower father? Did I mention that the young woman in the off red dress did not go in? Instead, she stood. She stood like a statue adorned on either side by white columns and a vestibule made for somber fashionable ingress and somber egress. So there she stood, like a sail. Like a centerpiece. She was not sad. She might as well have not known where she was because it didn't matter. She knew well. Confidence. The confidence that vanity ignites creates desire. It is all vanity. It is all imagery. It is artwork. I no longer hunt or gather so I am left idle drift from image to image until I am alas assuaged of my desire to look. Then I sleep. To the faithful I request: Thank God for me that I may sleep. Sleep it off. Sleep off the fear and the pain and suspicion and the dread and the desire that the young woman in the off red dress represents to me. By morning I will have that clarity to conclude that her taste was woefully off. What a garish act to wear an almost orange dress to a goddamn funeral parlor. What an ego-driven little vixen she must be. What nerve!
But long she stood and soaked into her orbit every wandering eye within her peripheral colorguard. Her stark pose. Her teeth within red lips barely moving above and below, beneath golden sunglasses, red nails, perfect teeth, perfect feet, and red pumps, all subordinated to the off red dress and the vessel beneath which it lay contoured and loose and straight and perfect. Just perfect. "Desire Ye Not, Ye Middle Aged Man". Who said that? Who the fuck said that? I did. I am the fool who said that. But it did not come from me. I am nevertheless grateful that it emanated from these half century old and throaty chords of mine. I will not be undone by the young woman in the off red dress. And so I move on to the next successive set of images. These are the ones that matter. I am home. To the faithful I request: Thank your Gods that I am home. Thank your Gods that I am safe. Thank your Gods for the ever increasing distance between the young woman in the off red dress and me. I am home. But I concede it would be a safer here if I weren't.
The Horror That Sustains Us
My son and I passed a tractor and trailer truck that was travelling in our direction toward town tonight. We were settled in the left lane. To our right was trailer consisting of industrial cages, stacked upon each other and fettered well to the trailer like Legos. Each cage contained a pod of live chickens. They were as white as pillow cases. Almost too white. At some imperceptible point of their short lives they had become homogeneously bleached and classified as poultry. They bleach the life out of death. I looked into the piercing left eye of one of the doomed birds who was staring bravely out into the cold blowing night air at the lights emanating from a gargantuan shopping complex to our left. I swear to space and time themselves that she seemed genuinely interested in these strange new artificially illuminated surroundings that fell away and then rekindled as its roaring monster traveled down the highway toward town. A sadness began to bubbled up inside me as my little boy watched intently and then mused aloud about a chicken's improbable ability to pick a lock and escape the sickening slaughter that awaited it. This is a horror that sustains you, little boy, I mused in silent retort. But not me. But it is little consolation as I arrive home and apply the dialectic to my new and even darker history, because there's a horror that sustains me, too.
Anthony Burgess and Alex DeLarge
Alex Delarge: Immortal
Anthony Burgess: February 25, 1917 - November 22, 1993
Burgess wrote a book that takes criminality by the yarbles in his depiction of Alex DeLarge, the menacing protagonist in A Clockwork Orange. Burgess' original compilation contained 21 chapters. The last chapter describes Alex's rehabilitation, not on account of the radical correctional experiment conducted upon him, but on his maturation. He gets tired of his life and seeks something deeper consistent with simply growing up.
When the book was submitted to the editor, that last "happy ending" was omitted in favor of ending the fiction with Alex portending additional malevolence from his hospital bed. The edition that was distributed in America did not contain the chapter containing the happy ending for the protagonist and, for that matter, society, omitting it entirely to ostensibly satisfy America's bloodthirsty market. The European edition was printed in its entirety.
Stephen Mather - An Ostensibly Perfect Man
When I was first introduced to Stephen Mather in a documentary film, I remarked to my wife that the man was "perfect." Tall, handsome, soaring intelligent, educated, wealthy, and most significantly, a champion for the preservation of our natural areas. Mather created and then served as the first director of the Department of the Interior charged with creating and protecting our national parks and national monuments. Periodically he would incur horrific bouts of depression that would land him in mental hospitals, then called sanitariums. He has been posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
I Miss These Two
Friday, May 20, 2022
Violence in Second Person: Part I. Way Before There Was a Fight Club.
Make sure you're too drunk to counter them. The blows seem to never end in deliberate succession. The iron taste of blood enters your mouth. You spring leaks. The precious grunts emanate out of the chords of the man who is violently assuaging your dark desire for justice as he continues to slam his fists into your face and head. Each blow is accompanied by an ironic and painful sounding discharge from your aggressor. But the sounds are not sounds of pain. They are the toxic emanations of hot and furious anger from deep within the chest cavity of your spattered aggressor . You attempt to roll onto your stomach but get trapped halfway by a pivoted knee and then absorb blows to the side of your head, your ear, and the lateral length of your left side where your ribs will soon be cracked like hickory kindling with non-displaced fractures. You make it to your stomach and feel the blows reigning down on the back of your head until fatigue sets magically in, and your killer relaxes, spits down on you, curses you, and walks ostensibly away.
You're not sure he isn't going after the loaded pistol left lying beside the wrought iron patio table, so your pull yourself up and run to your car and drive yourself to the hospital where you refuse to tell the staff anything about the events of that night, portending you got what you wanted, what you needed, even though it would be years until you realized this in clinical terms.
Your blood is drawn, you are admitted for observation, suffering from a menagerie of trauma, including subdural hematoma, and the test results reveal, as predicted, the presence of mass amounts of diazepam and alcohol in your central nervous system. You look at yourself the next morning and cannot fucking believe how violently you have been beaten. A pride begins to swell from within you. You still taste the blood in your mouth and feel the loose end of the stitches against your swollen and lacerated tongue. Your entire body feels unhinged. You think you may be missing a tooth but your tongue is so sore that it cannot circumnavigate the interior of your bloody mouth for proof positive. You're missing your wallet. The blood is caked into your hair with grass and mud. You cannot bathe. It hurts to breathe. To laugh would mean unimaginable pain from your broken ribs. But you laugh anyway, and that brings tears to your eyes and an uninhibited scream within your chest muffled only by your tightly fused molars. You're not allowed to leave the hospital without assistance. Your wife initially refuses to come after you. When she does arrive, your young namesake son looks at the monstrous face beneath which might or might not lie his father's countenance.You have had the goddamn living hell beat out of you.
Now you must go to back work on Monday morning sporting a traumatized placard that was once your face. The silence on the fourteenth floor of the Dominion Tower is palpable even to your traumatized senses that struggle to make sense of the venue, filled with people at their desks, all eyes on you and the merit badges that adorn your once semi-professional face. You return to your desk. You are met there by your compassionate supervisor who realizes that you are not well at all, although you won't neither realize nor accept this fact for several years out. "I got into a fight." It's as simple as that, and yet as complicated as the centuries that prepared the way for it. You have had the goddamn living fucking hell beat out of you. You're better because of it.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
The Conveyor
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky" Ojibwe saying
I have a conveyor moving beneath me that carries my body into the next successive temporal increment whether I am ready to enter it or not. Oftentimes I go kicking and screaming, while on other occasions I leap ahead of the unaltering momentum like some hyperactive child attempting to outrun his mother on a department store's escalator. All I know is that the goddam thing never stops. Even when I'm asleep its motor hums and it tight belt carries me into the wee hours of the new morning when I get up, pee, and then return to the unconsciousness that seems to allow it to run a tad smoother -- because I'm not jumping up and down on the belt when I'm asleep, or attempting to outrun the fucking thing flailing to offend the very nature of time by attempting to edit the previous day's errors. I have a conveyor beneath me that runs without having quarters dropped into its belly. I can exit to be sure. But only once. And, thankfully, re-entry is not an option.
I have a conveyor moving beneath me that carries my body into the next successive temporal increment whether I am ready to enter it or not. Oftentimes I go kicking and screaming, while on other occasions I leap ahead of the unaltering momentum like some hyperactive child attempting to outrun his mother on a department store's escalator. All I know is that the goddam thing never stops. Even when I'm asleep its motor hums and it tight belt carries me into the wee hours of the new morning when I get up, pee, and then return to the unconsciousness that seems to allow it to run a tad smoother -- because I'm not jumping up and down on the belt when I'm asleep, or attempting to outrun the fucking thing flailing to offend the very nature of time by attempting to edit the previous day's errors. I have a conveyor beneath me that runs without having quarters dropped into its belly. I can exit to be sure. But only once. And, thankfully, re-entry is not an option.
Newest Additions (The Lure of the Fat Blackberry)
The following specimens were preserved and mounted by Singleton Taxidermy in Rogersville, Tennessee -- Ms. Sylvia Singleton presiding.
There's a great story underyling this big trout, pictured above. Years back, I was in the Nantahala National forest near a feeder branch when I notice a blackberry thicket that seemed oddly out of place for a dark mountain hollow. It hung out over the water and would have created a patch of shade had it not alreay been in one of the shadiest places in the world, with its thick mountain laurel and roseby huddled around the base of ancient hemlocks. I already knew, or had heard about the trout population that resided in the small tributaries. Then, it occurred to me that the blackberries invariably had to find their way into the water owing the to position of the bush, with the help of gravity. And since even trout cannot overcome the ambrosial taste of fat, ripe, mountain blackberries, I avowed to return, which I did, with a rod and reel, during the peak of the next blackberry season. I slipped into the woods and was as quiet "as a mouse pissin' on cotton." I inserted the number 8 sized hook into a slighty overripe blackberry and almost instantaneously, the unfortunate trout, preserved above, struck and struck hard. It would be the only fish I would catch that afternoon, but it was a trophy, thanks to the lure of a big, plump, fat-assed North Carolina blackberry and a hollow so dark and so remote that you'd have to put panties on your chickens to keep the hootowls from screwin' em'. Believe it or not.
These two perch were caught in Lake Erie.
Upper right is a Sauger caught in the Clinch River in 1969. The big Hybrid Striper was caught in Cherokee Lake in 1994.
Monday, May 16, 2022
Now I Lay Me Looking Up
Go outside. Look straight up. As you do, experience the tightness in the throaty part of your neck. Your hand becomes an awning above the brow supervising your orbital eyes. Temper the sun. Listen. Dave Matthews sings "Sister" from some distant dashboard. You're alive and in attendance for the first and last of this the only act. Take note of this and remember me, my skin, I will not pass this way again.
Now I lay me looking up. Entertaining the clouds watching over me. Entertaining me. With gyrations. Ghostly sex. Their spidery vanguards merge together and divorce, and reconcile, forming communes the envy Paris of 1871, or tall monarchies extending into dark blue, or solitary drifts that plow uninvited into dark, democratic, and gathering storms. Dimensions. Physics. Hydrology. Meteorology. These are the beautiful math of clouds I absorb. And the realization enters my eye that God is finally useless to me. I give thanks to the math of clouds. Lighter than what? I do not pretend to even lightly know. Surrounding blue. An integer within a math of clouds was once a drop of wine in the cup by the couch where Marx once farted in his London flat between economics and epiphanies. Now, floating over as I entertain their armies by doing nothing. Perhaps I am floating beneath my wispy audience way above. Knowing. Zero is not a number you can count on. It is to be watched. Carefully. Divided by itself is what?
My hands are getting old. Puffy. Wrinkled. Freckled. Vein ranges. Surface of the planet, Hand. Asteroids, impact craters, Scars circa 1967, 1969, 1978 and 1982. Fist. Fights. Bactine. Bandaids, Blisters, Digital Superfolds, Footballs, Pencil lead, Frog Knuckles, Stitches, Knuckleheads. Scotch Irish red. Red whiskey, post Industrial and Digital.
I have yellow in my teeth. Some I've never seen. My tongue knows they're there. I want silver ones. I am not afraid. I don't care.
I am changing. In the end it's all about nature. Worry, if you must, about the bark. Or how to go mad gracefully. Aging and maddening. Maddening. It's maddening indeed. The story that won't get written begins with, "As it lay bare in a speckled column of light . . ." and ends with "not guilty by reason of justification." When I was a man in the making I wanted to still the conjoined boy that competed with me. The boy's now of even greater interest to me. I'd like to shoot a BB toward him in order to elicit his reaction. What would he say? I hope he'd fight. Ideally, take it forcefully from my hands and beat me half to death with it. Utter profanities. Better yet, do it all on mute. The boys of my youth: Steve, Jimmy, Allen, Blair, Pat, Troy, Johnny, Richard, Lance, Mark and Bill. These are the agencies of the boy.
The wind blows the sky around. The immobile flora takes what comes; it sits there and simply takes it. In the beginning the god that never was said "still be the flora" and so it was. The story begins, "As it lay bare in a column of speckled light, head raised and resting at the crest of a fallen log that was once a towering Hemlock shadowing needle litter. . .".
I still see the light. That space of wind crackling another Autumn in the anteroom of seasonal mathematics. It is cold blooded. It is quiet. It is guilty of nothing. But it is not fair. It never was. So it seems.
Now I lay me looking up. Entertaining the clouds watching over me. Entertaining me. With gyrations. Ghostly sex. Their spidery vanguards merge together and divorce, and reconcile, forming communes the envy Paris of 1871, or tall monarchies extending into dark blue, or solitary drifts that plow uninvited into dark, democratic, and gathering storms. Dimensions. Physics. Hydrology. Meteorology. These are the beautiful math of clouds I absorb. And the realization enters my eye that God is finally useless to me. I give thanks to the math of clouds. Lighter than what? I do not pretend to even lightly know. Surrounding blue. An integer within a math of clouds was once a drop of wine in the cup by the couch where Marx once farted in his London flat between economics and epiphanies. Now, floating over as I entertain their armies by doing nothing. Perhaps I am floating beneath my wispy audience way above. Knowing. Zero is not a number you can count on. It is to be watched. Carefully. Divided by itself is what?
My hands are getting old. Puffy. Wrinkled. Freckled. Vein ranges. Surface of the planet, Hand. Asteroids, impact craters, Scars circa 1967, 1969, 1978 and 1982. Fist. Fights. Bactine. Bandaids, Blisters, Digital Superfolds, Footballs, Pencil lead, Frog Knuckles, Stitches, Knuckleheads. Scotch Irish red. Red whiskey, post Industrial and Digital.
I have yellow in my teeth. Some I've never seen. My tongue knows they're there. I want silver ones. I am not afraid. I don't care.
I am changing. In the end it's all about nature. Worry, if you must, about the bark. Or how to go mad gracefully. Aging and maddening. Maddening. It's maddening indeed. The story that won't get written begins with, "As it lay bare in a speckled column of light . . ." and ends with "not guilty by reason of justification." When I was a man in the making I wanted to still the conjoined boy that competed with me. The boy's now of even greater interest to me. I'd like to shoot a BB toward him in order to elicit his reaction. What would he say? I hope he'd fight. Ideally, take it forcefully from my hands and beat me half to death with it. Utter profanities. Better yet, do it all on mute. The boys of my youth: Steve, Jimmy, Allen, Blair, Pat, Troy, Johnny, Richard, Lance, Mark and Bill. These are the agencies of the boy.
The wind blows the sky around. The immobile flora takes what comes; it sits there and simply takes it. In the beginning the god that never was said "still be the flora" and so it was. The story begins, "As it lay bare in a column of speckled light, head raised and resting at the crest of a fallen log that was once a towering Hemlock shadowing needle litter. . .".
I still see the light. That space of wind crackling another Autumn in the anteroom of seasonal mathematics. It is cold blooded. It is quiet. It is guilty of nothing. But it is not fair. It never was. So it seems.
What's Left of Me -- An Abstract Heap
"How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound?" Joseph Joubert
Answer: At least one, Joe; to wit:
Decay is en route to the land of the dead and the land of the dead is decay. At any point along the way you may pause and discover what is left of me as you are carried there by the creeping belt below you that conveys you forward to the hum of an ancient motor through the decay toward the land of the dead. Visit with what is left of me as you are carried forward into the land of the dead. Step back. Still hold the rail. Observe now the aggregate movement within the surface of the path beside the belt. Or is that muddy water? Blur your eyes. Whatever you may think, you know that what you see, though barely alive, is real. It is what's left of me.
The crawling pixels of subtle movement were once part of a promise that was made and then broken, as in the case of practically all human pledges. Observe what's left of me. Are you fixed on me? If you are fixed on me than you will observe that the movement is the hallowed struggle espoused by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao and me. This is the gross coalition that struggles against itself for space and time that no longer exists, relying now upon the echo of the old promise that was made and then broken, as in the case of practically all human pledges. What wills it? What moves the crawling mass? Fear? Amino acids? Hatred? Stand at the rail. Wonder, above the green and the blue and the black and the brown as you blur forward what is left of me. Wonder, as you see what's left of me, what could have been or better yet what was to have been if you still believe in that. Wonder in the dark if I am less alive than the old man on the rail. Embrace the filth of what is left of me. Now compare yourself to me.
Wonder if you will the nature of my matter. What is left of it? It will strike the man at the rail who is you that there is no appreciable difference in our struggling pixels. The man on the rail who is you will be left to wonder if my movement is mistaken for that of my neighboring matter, which was once of the ocean, or one from a deep plunging valley, or the vines that hung deep that were used by grey chimps for climbing down and up its vertical drop. Monkeys. Horses. Snails. Wheat. Vines. Organic rails. These are my neighbors that crawl over and under what is left of me.
You lose sight of the entropy when you lose the forced blur of your vision. You adjust your eyes and there it is again.
It is what's left of me.
Answer: At least one, Joe; to wit:
Decay is en route to the land of the dead and the land of the dead is decay. At any point along the way you may pause and discover what is left of me as you are carried there by the creeping belt below you that conveys you forward to the hum of an ancient motor through the decay toward the land of the dead. Visit with what is left of me as you are carried forward into the land of the dead. Step back. Still hold the rail. Observe now the aggregate movement within the surface of the path beside the belt. Or is that muddy water? Blur your eyes. Whatever you may think, you know that what you see, though barely alive, is real. It is what's left of me.
The crawling pixels of subtle movement were once part of a promise that was made and then broken, as in the case of practically all human pledges. Observe what's left of me. Are you fixed on me? If you are fixed on me than you will observe that the movement is the hallowed struggle espoused by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao and me. This is the gross coalition that struggles against itself for space and time that no longer exists, relying now upon the echo of the old promise that was made and then broken, as in the case of practically all human pledges. What wills it? What moves the crawling mass? Fear? Amino acids? Hatred? Stand at the rail. Wonder, above the green and the blue and the black and the brown as you blur forward what is left of me. Wonder, as you see what's left of me, what could have been or better yet what was to have been if you still believe in that. Wonder in the dark if I am less alive than the old man on the rail. Embrace the filth of what is left of me. Now compare yourself to me.
Wonder if you will the nature of my matter. What is left of it? It will strike the man at the rail who is you that there is no appreciable difference in our struggling pixels. The man on the rail who is you will be left to wonder if my movement is mistaken for that of my neighboring matter, which was once of the ocean, or one from a deep plunging valley, or the vines that hung deep that were used by grey chimps for climbing down and up its vertical drop. Monkeys. Horses. Snails. Wheat. Vines. Organic rails. These are my neighbors that crawl over and under what is left of me.
You lose sight of the entropy when you lose the forced blur of your vision. You adjust your eyes and there it is again.
It is what's left of me.
Shadowlawn
Around midday I revisited the a moment from the weather of my youth, and in it I researched the sky for the seeds of my fierce rebellion -- for evidence of my inability to slide unfettered into the cylinders of the glove of the American experiment. Where within the history of the cloudbanks did my hatred of religion arise, or the sentence, "mom made for trading fruit for boiled eggs at table two." Where within the amalgam of bleached white, cold grey and the bright blue did my trajectory veer to the very left? But just then as I shut my eyes in favor of the geometrical patters that lay beneath their nervous lids, I was again reminded of the path that led down to the box in the deep of the woods of my youth on the edge of the thick plateau where I was younger than the other two.
The Baroness Erlanger was long dead and I very much resembled one of the living. I was visibly upset at being deposited in the bloody filth in Ms. Erlanger's maternity ward. I was big; too big for my mother's portal. But both of us struggled mightily to complete the tense arrival even though we dreaded every facet of its history and the effect it would drape over our mutual and individual American dreams of posterity, and in her case, prosperity. My daddy was invisible, and my mother a shade of Appalachian ivory that seldom shown beneath the sun. The shade had left her skin the hue of those babies that adorned the baronesses long corridor. Both my mother and my screaming colleagues were protected by thin sheaths of Appalachian skin that ensured that my birth mother had an ostensibly closer kinship with these alien strangers than I would ever have with her.
The Baroness Erlanger was long dead and I very much resembled one of the living. I was visibly upset at being deposited in the bloody filth in Ms. Erlanger's maternity ward. I was big; too big for my mother's portal. But both of us struggled mightily to complete the tense arrival even though we dreaded every facet of its history and the effect it would drape over our mutual and individual American dreams of posterity, and in her case, prosperity. My daddy was invisible, and my mother a shade of Appalachian ivory that seldom shown beneath the sun. The shade had left her skin the hue of those babies that adorned the baronesses long corridor. Both my mother and my screaming colleagues were protected by thin sheaths of Appalachian skin that ensured that my birth mother had an ostensibly closer kinship with these alien strangers than I would ever have with her.
I Am The Walrus (Remastered 2009)
The lyrics are surreal and absolutley poetically brilliant. "Boy you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down."
Two Cans of Paint
There are two cans of paint. One is black, the other is white. The conservative will tell you, and he will be correct in so doing, that if you mix the contents of one can with the contents of the other the resulting color will be grey. However, the liberal will tell you while this is true in the broadest sense, there is more to the illustration owing to the quantity of the colors that are integrated with each other. And because there are infinite shades or qualities of grey that can be produced, with no shade ever being perfectly matched with another, the conclusion offered by the conservative, while true in a sweeping sense, ignores the wonderful and relevant quality of the equation. Black is never really black. White is never really white. And grey is never really grey. This is perhaps the dialectical materialist view of things. This, too, just so happens to be the truth.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Begin with Trotsky's argument that A is never actually equal to A. There are subtle differences or "deviations" that prevent things from equaling each other, even themselves at a given moment in time, which in itself is infinitely divisible. DM addresses the processes of matter that are undergoing change at all times. "Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes; that critical limit beyond which A ceases to be A; a workers' state ceases to be a workers' state." Trotsky. "Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality." Id. "We call our dialectic materialist since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our "free will" but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebula." Id.
The Bewitched
Somewhere in the South there exists a heap of discarded asbestos piled upon on a windy mountaintop next to a drum that contains leaking toxic waste, cracked skulls, and splintered crossbones. But someone, whose surname name ends with Inc., has shaded the visible mass with political and religious icons. The Christian cross overtakes the skull, the tablets of the Ten Commandments preempt the crossbones, and the American flag disrupts all reason, causing the pile to blend neatly into the surrounding scenery in the eyes of the bewitched. Sooner not later the masses creep up the mountainside with their children and i-phones to pay respect these symbols. "Breathe in these freedoms of our great democracy", says the stupid patriarch to his stupid children, as they breathe into their little lungs the lies their father teaches them.
Sunday, May 15, 2022
The Five String Banjo - the Ultimate Arpeggio Instrument
I think that this could be true because, according to my limited knowledge of music, the more times notes are struck within chords, the greater the appreggio contribution. Maybe.
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Sunday, May 8, 2022
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Great cover of Walking on the Moon, by one of my favorite bands, the Police. This is a great song about falling in love.
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NPR did a piece called "This I Believe" a few years back. Listeners were invited to recite their core beliefs about anything...
