Fire-Worked Up

It was a strange day. It was the Fourth of July, a day when people ferment, foam at the mouth and talk to strangers.

The first stranger to chat me up insisted my bike was too heavy for me to carry. But he was racing by in a machine on four wheels and somehow unable to lend a hand. The second stranger, because I was sitting bare-chested next to a lake, tapped me on my shoulder,

`Yo Bruce Banner!` {Hulk's alter ego}

The third stranger was a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and nearly put its owner in the lake in its desire to sniff my journal. The Bull languished and looked back as the man manhandled him away.

The fourth stranger didn't come till I'd nearly carried home a 6' long dresser weighing about 120 lbs. I was unscrewing a flappy hinged door to throw that away when I heard,

`You're almost there! Keep screwing! You got it!`

I look up. `This is a good day to talk to strangers. People must be early drunk.`

He runs up at this point, tall and ruddy with blonde buzzed hair. `Can I help with the screws?`
`Sure,` handing him a screwdriver. `Any good at carrying heavy dressers? You're not too tipsy yet, right?`

`Naah.` He screws one of the screws back in.

`I'm actually trying to unscrew the whole door.`

`Oh! You should have told me!`

_You mean 3 seconds ago?_ But I didn't say anything and he was unable to get the screws out since the screwdriver was too short.

`Can I help you carry it?`

Once inside, we carry the thing up eight flights of stairs. At this stage, he seems to twig he's a stranger in a strange house, but keeps up the farmboy politeness as I lead him back out.

`When I saw you there, I knew I had to help you!`

Partly thanks to a boozy stranger, Bruce Banner didn't have to get all Hulk on that dresser today (see attached photo).

You're Supposed to Be Overwhelmed

It seems like, whether it's God or 'the Universe' or 'Self', life itself is too much for everyone. Good, happy fortune will topple your equilibrium just as ruthlessly as bad fortune. And being in the middle will drive you nuts too. Each one is overwhelmed by fear, happiness, sadness, hope, disappointment. The best we can do is stop pretending we are ... alone. Being overwhelmed and overawed does not happen in isolation. Don't be snookered. You're not an autonomous, individualistic soldier.

Stuck in a Rut

Why are toilets more cultural ('taboo') than something invented or experimented with? Function isn't half the story. The weak whirl-swirl of my homeland's toilets always made me wonder ... but then I realised:   It's convention not invention. It's not as if the Brits deserve a reward for their awesome water-dropping tanks that flood down water like a cataract & get the job done nicely (with splashing). I bet the Germans won't adopt that just because 'it works'. People love their flushing comfort zones. Everyone's stuck in a toilet rut. ;-)

Door Knobs, Tires and Tobacco Tea (with Herbs!)

I’ve been tampering with door knobs, especially the kind that pull off when you use them, and the kind that don't shut neighbours' rattly bang-bang doors. I've also been swapping tires off different bicycles to make one straight bike. The front is almost level with the back, almost. Sponges in door cracks are useful to hold doors still, but being sneaky with sponges makes neighbours suspicious. Frankly, I find people who try to recycle their wet shirts and half-eaten tomatoes in the recycling bin suspicious.

Otherwise I'm succumbing to a madness for dandelion & chicory root/leaf teas - 'wortbrews': They are my darlings. I got to mingling coffy & tobacco leaves with the dandy in an iron steeper today. It's pungent, heady, headswimmy & tasty (with lots (LOTS) of pure cream). For calories, am slurping in a deal of leek & tater cream-soup, biting on Italian red-wine salamis, red taters, February crabapples, honey, butter, ciabatta, high calorie ale (imperial), dandelion, broccoli, broccoli sprouts, salmon, sardines, and ingesting dark cacao cakes with runny cacao centers.

People on the Bus Tell You How to Be Healthy :-/

I overheard something very similar to the following conversation while taking the 10pm 3Bus on February 7th, 2011.



Participants:

--Single mother

--Two male students



Mother: Hey. Just came from Knuckleheads. They didn't have any.

Student: Yeah you can't beat those. When I want my tobacco fix, I always go for __________.

Mother: Yeah def. They've been sayin smoking it isn't good for you, but cigs are just as bad, pot the same. It don' matter.

Student: Shhhhhh, Everything's bad for you. Taco Bell just recalled a bunch of lettuce! D'you hear that? Yeah.

Mother: Like my kid. He's been havin some kinda skin issue. I just give him ___________ , clears him right up, but it's not supposed to be good for'im.

Student: [laughing] That is some bad stuff! Intense. He's like 1? It's helpin tho, I bet, RIGHT?

Mother: Heck yeah.

Student: Man, babies are craaaazy!

Mother: Yeah, tough lid'l guy.

Student: Wshooooo. Wow, gettin hungry. Can't wait till class tomorrow, you? I love it when Mr ________ brings a sh_t-load of donuts or cupcakes. Gives me enough punch for the day.

Mother: Y'got that right. And what about cookies? Cookies will make ANYONE happy.

Student: Sh_t yeah! I skip breakfast just for his class. Ts'mazin he brings all that sh_t.

Mother: SOMEONE's gotta take care of us!

Student: People are nice !!

Summermon

Overheard from Memorial Union lakefront on Tuesday evening: "This cup is too round!" (why she spilled down shirt). "My dog ate all my friends' weed out of all their purses!". Sign on water: "For swimmer's health, please do not feed ducks." Logic? Is proscriptive, or *pre*scriptive?

Eclipse seen at Ugarit

Ere dawn. I'm warming myself from winter-weather with hot spiced mead, taters, German Weisswurst, leeks, log-grown shitakes, scrambled eggs, quinoa-cakes, and soft inner cat-tail stems on this May 9th anniversary of the solar eclipse of 1012 BC. Am singing back and forth with a singer, songs by heart.

Ere sunset. In sunlit grass. Exchange of songs, stories, whinnies and whimsies with person patient enough to laugh at my spilling a half bottle of kefir inside my leather satchel and cleaning out the gooey contents on the green ground.

Ere Moonday. Pease (that's singular) soup, superb with just firm (just so) carrots. Just so stories. But this story, so written, was also so done. Snuggled over divan, bounded past the threshold, eves of the chamber, O'Murchadh's night-stead.

Afterfreeze. Moonday. Thank God moon is veiled. Nearly new, makes me unblue. I feel so warm inside when so cold out. Summermonth brings wet not het. Summer-me is all het. I only masochistically enjoyed my cycle ride in the bone-shivering rain, but loved the sacks of vittles I got out of it (from Asian foodstore)

Dogs use people as a ruse in order to court each other

I went to the 'dog therapy' petting day where dogs agree to come together to soothe people. The dogs used this opportunity to focus on other dogs, smell the dog-smell spread around on everyone's petting hands, frolick with canine friends and ignore the humans, many of whom were touching each other's hands for the first time inside luxuriant fur.

Kameradschaft aus Germania

I shared delightful German talk with a seventy-six year-old from Mecklenburg. We agreed that "Nice to meet you" was a bad goodbye after quickly meeting, and that smuggling beer into public places was praiseworthy.

Having Fun _Saying Words_ in Your Community

I abhor abbreviations - because the things they stand for are more stimulating & because mouthing letters (not words) slowly erases brains - buries the referent till you don't know what you're saying anymore. Words are pictures = sensuality = automatic memory cache. Letter codes estrange the symbols.

Take PDQ (a filling station in America): Once you start calling it Pretty Dern Quick, or Pounds of Duds & Quacks instead, it makes a picture imprint on your brain (stimulation!), aids memory, and is more fun to talk about in your community.

Why am I Healed? One Knows

I drank two quarts (1,872 ml) of lemon juice, 1 quart of spicy V-8, 1 quart of kombucha, 1.5 flasks of wine in the past 48 hours.

Swallowed a mass of herbal tea, beef, onions and garlic. Not to mention some fat slices of pizza.

O I drank more water than the total of all the other liquids. Have eaten fruit, sandwiches, raw greens, petfood supplements, lemons. Swigged fish-oil. Eaten liver. Eaten blue-green algae capsules from Lake Klamath. Indeed my friends, I think despite how good the bevs/viands made me feel, it was TIME and my happy Bod which healed me. And today I am healed. ;)

Nathan Paul Hillman is healed. A tree bears fruit because it's a magic tree. Water flows downhill because it's bewitched. Nathan is well again because life's a miraculous exception to the rule.

Tracing Interlacing Trails

I have just stumbled into someone along the byways of Madison, a Welsh woman of Aberystwyth, who offered for my dwelling a stone cottage facing the Irish Sea. She splits her year between B&B and home in Wales, and lingering ties to Wisconsin. I met her Cambrian son, an English teacher in Morocco, and learned that her former husband is the famous Irish professor in Classics I once took notes for.

Feb Fullish-ruary Moonish

As of yesterday, February 24th, I was attacked by the raised forearm of my client repeatedly for a half hour until she apologised and complete forgiveness reigned, i.e. no documentation shall remember her behaviour.

As of yesterday, I've been side-struck by a car three times and three times without injury.

The culprit in this case was a mother driver attending to her one-year old in the rear seat. I saw her stopped at a driveway to a business as I came down a sidewalk of a very busy road (too busy to cycle upon). I always stop for such people, never assume they see me. I did this time as well. We were both stopped. I tried to make eye contact with her. I went forward cautiously and saw her start to drive as soon as the front half of my bike was in front of her hood. So she crumpled over my front tire as I leaped off, falling down since I tripped with one leg, but I was out of harm's way and did not hurt myself in the landing. It was a cheap extra bicycle and I was unhurt, her car unscathed, so we let things go. I prefer private citizens to come to terms with common-sense things w/o police involvement if possible. I think she learned her lesson in any case. She was in an utter panic afterwards, and came up with four contradictory stories, a couple of them claiming she had seen me before she hit me!

Writing for Unhallow Masses Day (Halloween 2009)

Myself, I'm with a sore throat, but have been cooking lovely things for me:

Hot stew of coconut milk, portabellas, pablanos, Indian lime [lime,fenugreek,mustard,red chili,turmeric], clams, fried mackerel[red chili,honey], garlic, leeks, watercress and redwine.

It was so good, I had a gustatory climax.

It's a good antiviral. People should enjoy the flu more often. The best part is how I get to terrify species of the even-toed ungulate Order. A few have hurtled off cliffs.

My virus added to the flavour. I've been terrifying herds of proactive healthy swine who refuse all contact with each other, always wash their 'hooves', and go grunting wallowing in a long queue to hog some ditch-resort vaccine.

I made a phone die with my bad breath. Distance btw mouth and phone: ca. 900 miles.

Not again! (Flippancy aint Humour, folks)

I don't know how many times I have to stress this.

Many times, I guess.

The principle is simple: Flippancy and Humour stand at opposite ends of a spectrum. They are not the same thing. The only way in which they are related is that some real people happen to laugh at flippancy and mockery and slander. At one time, them were fightin words. Now, them's deseperate attempts to get a giggle out of someone. It's not surprising. As soon as people had nothing else they believed in, there was nothing to laugh at anymore. Effective humour requires contrast. The contrast of mockery is reverence. Without reverence in society, in the viewers themselves, the mockery can't be tweaked so as to be funny, because there's no normative point with which to contrast. So people had to invent impossible scenes in which they mocked and slandered stereotypes which were no longer believed in or even held to be true anymore.

Without the dim possibility of a real Big Foot stomping about at large, and real believers stomping about after him, there's no 'humour' in making mock Big Foot stories or media.

But flippancy has moved far past masquerading as humour. It's moved far past its lack of contrast for any deep effect. It's begun to take sadistic, gloating delight in putting down others with whom the comedy makers may harshly disagree (or imagine their viewers will), or in denigrating people whom one may disrespect (usually from a considerable distance, since little real worldview dialogue is current and popular in the world). So this new 'laughter' is actually the same thing as dismissive cruelty, since the cosmetic smiles are cracked in ignorance - in ignorance of the one or the thing which is mocked. Good humour requires audience knowledge and does not rely on ignorance nor disrespect!

Mockery is reactionary. It has no fixed and founded ground of its own making - it relies on the Other in order to make a point. But it's ceased to understand, love, or even vaguely respect the Other. Mockery is meant to whip people into a sort of frenzy. It just so happens that people post 1970s in particular associate such frenzy with fun and laughter! People became so depressed that they couldn't laugh unless they entered into a sort of mindless, unanalytical frenzy. So now anyone and anything possible is a prey of flippancy: the Holocaust, Slavery, people being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, live pets and animals who have accidents (self-injurious) on film, marching protesters believing in a cause, racial and religious stereotypes (by far the most innocent among the kinds of predation going on).

You see, for those who don't believe in anything, it causes them fear, loss, insecurity, irritability. They need to assuage their paralysis and cowardice by mocking and deriding others.

And they don't do so with RESPECT. True humour always contains an element of dignity and respect (cf. Fawlty Towers). False humour relies heavily on DISRESPECT. The creators of such comedy use disrespect because they're people with disrespectful, angry, insecure insides. They can't get through their day without cracking up laughing at something - and now they have to root around for things to laugh at, so miserable, dry and empty and black have their lives become!

It's no wonder they seek out 'comedy'. They find it so hard to laugh at *anything* anymore - and that's because they've become people of desensitivity and disbelief. For those who don't believe in the wonder of the world, there's very very little left to smile or laugh at. True humour always contains a very tiny element of joy - a joy which creeps up on you, stings you under your funnybone, and helps you see that Absurdity is Beautiful because Absurdity is Normative and Innocent and Wonderful! False humour is a cover-up for depression, tunnel-vision, myopia, misery.

So laughs are people's dope now - they no longer are deep laughs. For deep laughter requires contrast with something that is innocent, pure, solemn, true. And the contrast is done with dignity, not with a desire to torture, mock or destroy.

The present laughs are not gotten by virtue of the contents of the comedy, but by the aura, the presentation by means of which the comedy strains to exist and please: i.e., the commentator's tone of voice, his (often flippant, flabbergasted, teasing) facial expressions, his timing, his environment, the use of clever sounds and shapes to startle the viewer. But when the raw substance and contents of the slander and mockery (of other human beings) are examined, there's very little found to be 'funny' in such contents. A dry transcription of most comedy movies out today would lend even more credence to that.

But credence from whom?

That's the real connivance, why distinctions from viewers can't be made. Comedy is a perception, and perception (not contents) is the quickest and easiest thing to manipulate and corrupt. For those who have no beliefs, all their perceptions are skewed as well.

NpH

Spyspeech and Skis

Taken from Daybook's Entry 11 Dec 2007

Today was blundersome and burdensome, though I'd strength and will to enjoy many moments. I met Bretski at Sunroom at 12:45 p.m. Our table neighbours were deutschreder and our spyspeech pattered on without privacy. Soon we were back to English. B was eye-weary, depressed, down on the New World Colony, none of it beyond comprehension. Most of his countrymen make little eye or word contact, dismissing strangers and acquaintances alike for the sake of cosmetic comfort. They nose at their phones, feet, papers and pyooters, or blank-scope the world to their material advantage, allowing the stimulative rush of job and recreation to block out the pain of facing their identities, the very risk of interpersonal existence, hushed and unhasting. Drat the timepieces. The public also enjoy friends who keep them comfortably locked into this illusion of frantic productivity and meaning. Any true confrontation is likely to earn rejection and enmity, and thus the folk flock keep safely employed, enjoyed, stimulated, inert. In the face of bigger forces - governments and corporations - they sit cowed, craven, depressed, demoralised, and conned. They are deathly afraid. These suppressed and unrealised fears turn people's stimulation into a jolt of relief by contrast - into safety and ecstasy. The oligarchic State and Corporation affect and taint people's love and friendships, as mind, body and heart are sold to workplace, market and real estate. They've been bought and bribed out of the bliss of Domestic Diversion and Home's Handiwork. Even when they desire Home, such leisure's denied them. They've no love to spend there. No wonder they've no true friends.

I had to rush to work (irony inserted) and bid the B a quick farewell. He pressed me to let him use my computer, and he came at it all in a panic. I knew he'd been alerted to some stock market dynamic. He panted that he had to check something in 15 minutes or all was lost. In my hurried jumbling to fetch my skis, poles and skiboots for my mad dash, I knocked a longbow above a shelf so that it fell, then struck and tipped over a cubby-stand perched on a bench. The stand held an iron dobermann, an Italian leather-sheathed wineflask, three egg-shaped stones, and many cassette tapes. The iron dog smote and chipped the edge of my white chamberpot, pouring piddle onto the rug. A stone landed in the pee-pot, splashing more p. The wineflask cracked in seven pieces on the floor. A further stone split off the rim of an English ale-mug, and now I was cussing. About ten cassettes had shattered or sundered cases. No time to mend or clean anything. HOME must be left behind! I was out on skifeet, scudding to work. By wetsnow and slowsnow, it didn't work. Hopped an omnibus as the snowfall faded and refused to coat the earth. I stowed my skis upright in the bus back and then glided across the CapTel parking lot bang up against the entry doors. Removed my long feet and took them straight in to the head-desk where they received many smiles and minced honour, as I took my hero's seat among the host. One co-worker looked at me in an awe of disbelief and cried "Man, you're a Nordic dude !"

Two-hour return on the longskis. The air had cooled, but it was still too damp to hold good cold. I kept to icy sidewalks. Slick ice shifted ongoingly with scratchy cement patches. In evasion I rode on the sludge-slathered roughs.

I buried some of my heart at Wounded Knee the next day as I watched the eaglehearted movie of that name. I identify to a flaming degree with Lakotas, their dignity and vision, their face-to-face approach to life and lore, their health from herds and abhorrence for sickly soil-divelling and pulp-petty pap. So stirred was I that I rang B at 2:30 a.m. to say the federal government are not my people, nor do they care a wit for any common citizen's peace. In France, as recently pointed out in Sicko, the government rules in fear of the people. Here the people fear the government's rule. Neither vigourous nor happy, our people are easy to govern. If we demanded too many basic pleasures, we'd be a bear to govern, we'd be like the bygone paleoamericans - obsessed with human dignity. The Rights of Man...how little we give ourselves today. At movie's end, I was amazed to learn that the State still owes the Lakota ('Sioux') 600 million dollars, the appreciated landprice for the land they were denied which they forfeited to South Dakota. No such money (alone) could fix what was lost. Neither can our kinds of careers make grass or hearts blossom. The film's Sitting Bull was the splitting image of my grandfather, Bascom Paul Hillman, a man still alive, Scots-English-Irish mixed with Cherokee.

Hans Ander-Sud Ander-Dud-sen, son!

Evoking October 9, 2006

Burden of work, gradelabour. Paper pile. Student stack. Slothspeed. Slugspeed. Snailswift. Grubslow. My quickneed impeded. My walking unipeded.

Wynless I work at UW Comm-B. Andersen Gander-Son. Andersen Pander-Son. Andersen MEANDER-Son. He hinders me, son! He hampers me, son!

Run Run Run Run Run Run Run

}}}OR{{{

Hans Ander-Sud Ander-Dud-sen, son!

Burden of work,
gradelabour.
Paper pile,
Student stack.
Slothspeed, Slugspeed.
Snailswift, Grubslow.
My quickneed impeded.
My walking unipeded.

Wynless I work at teaching Hans
Andersen Gander-Son.
Andersen Pander-Son.
Andersen MEANDER-Son.
He hinders me, son. He hampers me, son!
Run Run Run Run Run Run Run

Cogitations from the Hibernacle

DAILY TO-DO AND BRAINDEW

24 May 2005

Greasing the Slobgob

Slobgobbery does not stem from any innate antiloquence. Doddering dopewords like “the tabled agenda item from last week which we’re not interested in re-investing bio-fuel for the QTX430 anyway was you know um the research of myself and Jane as far as my update shows which we can wrap it up this way since it’s best if we just go ahead and just go get ahead on tonight’s agenda on what’s on the table” stem NOT from oral training but from an aurally/vocally a-verbal, creak-jawed society. The above quote lacks the assertive force of orally and communally habituated language. It stems from disjointed specialists with slobgob mouths mumbling what their brains supposedly surpass their tongues in. The discursive isolationists stumble and grope with something which has became unnatural to them – SPOKEN LANGUAGE. Pseudo-educated, media-gawking, text-goggling, fadhead ninnies drown in the slime of aphasia as their synapses spark them to make smarter commericial transactions than living relationships. Our own President spins in his own elliptical fits of verbal epilepsy.

Nor do such words have the honey of the nimble tongued illiterate; one well-greased mouth from Alabama asserted: “We’re gonna be shittin in high cotton.”


Ere Christmas, 2006

Yeast Yammers

Bipolar metabolism: Metabolic lull, then diabolic surge. Sheepwalk by Day. Wolfsleep ere Evenhunt. Drake-ire at Dusk-fire. Glare-stare at Gloaming. Effect compounded by fungal imps, yammering yeasts. Cheeky chitlings in the bowels.
Intox
Ethenol Ethers
Sillyhead
Slumberskull
Yeast yammer
Jimjammer.
Skipped lecture. Must sleep. To work at 3pm. Supervisor CH on me like a fruitbat. Fruity fruit-muncher. Batty batty in dee head, bonkers in dee bitty brain. I was nogginnoddin at work inbetween. Noddin a heavy noggin. Captioning inbetween. Iffy unspiffy Voice Recognizance.

}}}OR{{{

Bipolar metabolism: Metabolic lull, then diabolic surge.
Sheepwalk by Day. Wolfsleep ere Evenhunt.
Drake-ire at Dusk-fire. Glare-stare at Gloaming.
Effect compounded by intestinal tykes,
Fungal imps, yammering yeasts,
Cheeky chitlings in the bowels.
Intox.
Ethenol Ethers.
Sillyhead
Slumberskull
Yeast yammer
Jimjammer.
Slothspeed and Slugspeed,
Snailswift and Grubslow.
My quickneed impeded.
My walking unipeded.
Skipped lecture for sleep,
Headslaking slumber.
Wended to work at Three.
Supervisor on me like a fruitbat. Fruity fruit-muncher.
Batty batty in duh head all teeny,
bonkers in duh bitty brain.
I was nogginnodding at work inbetween.
Nodding a heavy noggin,
Captioning inbetween.
Decapitating call-floor coppers.
Incompetent computators –
Iffy unspiffy Voice Recognizance.


1 January 2007

Feast of Foreskin-Flaying

I’m not making that up that bit about foreskins. A Holy Circumcision [of Christ] is/was commemorated by Catholics on this day. It concludes the Feast of Fools, so far I know. I’m glad I’m already missing mine and needn’t reenact the ceremony.


3 January 2007

LS’s Brave New Brain

I praise LS’s and YG’s reductioninst feminism, their tendency to dismiss femininity and masculinity as nonbiological categories; their proclivity for dismissing works of art purely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the authors, or a single character’s standpoint within authors’ works. LS and YG are not the first to have done so, but their arguments penetrate with new sting.

So C. S. Lewis is a racist, as are Lewis’ horses, his Horse’s Boy, and all Narnians! In fact, the people Narnians most hate are Ottoman Turks!

‘Turkish’ Tashkent, for the geo-illiterate, lies southeast of Narnia in an evil Orient. Tashshshshshkent! Rolls off Attila’s tongue! Strange, then, to report that Narnians follow a ‘Turkish’ god (Turk. aslan = ‘lion’). As all educated, brainsexed readers know, all Narnians and Tashkentians relate to one another *only* on the basis of gender, race and language! Quite so. Bravo LS. A Brave New Brain you have.

We also know that Narnians abhor African monkeys (esp deified apes), and extend this loathing to any degenerate human faintly formed in apelikeness.

By way of contrast, Centaurs bleed pure Greek blood and oppose local women in leadership. However, White English Planet-Earth females, divinely favoured, may rule over Narnia as queens. Susan, Clives Staples, African Lions, Turkish Monkeys – Fagh! Those ree ree ree ree ree ree ... RACISTS! Those s s s s s s s s ... SEXISTS!

LS and YG well advise you not to read any works by C. S. Lewis, lest the central vein of his plots and messages wangle you to possess a subconsciously prejudiced mind, and tempt you toward...eugenics?

Could it be that Lewis’ fondness for Jewish women created in him a conflicting and latent anti-semitism?? Such a query could unlock Narnia’s most profound subtext.

LS and YG, having dodged all hyper-focus on nonfundamentals, and placed Power Hierarchies at the manipulative core of all human belief, society, art, and behaviour, are, in the flower of their polysexual youth, best suited to provide you the best possible guidance in the literary lands of Lewis. They vow to steer the reader clear from interpretations based on biodeterminism, malicious stereotypes, and dysfunctional victimization, mapping out (for the first time) Narnia’s transcultural, metaphysical topography.


March marches away, 2007

A Devil's Day

Cloud and mist stick. A smothery smeeth hangs thick on the world. False Spring. Devil’s Dew. I went out in the brew, sickle cycling my swath to work. Sweet and short – pulled a one-hour shift. That shifty devil’s hour had the moil and mishap of an entire day. My headphone set turned up missing (I borrowed my locker mate’s), then I sat stuck to a forty-minute call (Big Apple bawling) under cataracts of blatherspitten neuro-blab. Bombastic blubbering. Within ten minutes to quit, Call Takeover duty beckoned; I’d the fortune to decline and wait on the luck of my own headwires. A call caught me within a minute to punch-out, later relieved by a fellow Call Takeover victim. After clearing up a schedule request’s cross-fired instructions, I fled the building under pelting rain inside a black garbage sack I’d pinched from a break-room can. S. drove me to the Co-op where a Matterhorn of dishes met my duty, skyhigh during a Co-op party. The culprits did their damndest to serve only cheapest hard liquors, mixed in mut-bowls beyond recognition. Not a drop of goodly ale, wine, mead, cidre, or brackitt! I balk at the sweet bile hungrily swilled by boys and girls. LMacDonald’s devilled eggs mended much – gave S. a needed snack. The devil’s a chef among lesser fiends. After scullery slavery and ovarious bites, S. and I nestled in for _Michael Collins_ and mutually gnawed a lamb shank. She’s the first woman I’ve sunk teeth into one bone with! Mouth-millers mutually munching mutton. Meet teeth tearing the meat.

2 April 2007

A Break from Debauchville

After workday waned and went, my cycle hit a silent downtown. I pedalled in glee, not knowing why my haunts had been evacuated. Ah hah! Vernal Recess, the supposed repose. Eh, if none for them, then some for me! The noisy brats had blown town – their dustcloud at long last settled. I threw a party for myself. Cooked sardines in pure coconut fat with pablanos, garlic, pepper, basil, salt and limejuice squeezed from pulp and rind. Kale and arugula lay laced in tomato, avocado, peppers, vidalias, flax, sunflower seed, kelp, sageleaf and heavy cream cayenne dressing. An entrancing Transylvanian wine, Vampire, volubly enveloped my throttle; I canted out with Irish crack _P Stands for Paddy_ and _Follow Me Up to Carlow_. Cinediscs of Gothic film had arrived post haste. A gem sat waiting my viewing – _Two Faces of Dr Jekyll_ with Paul Massie, Dawn Addams and Christopher Lee.

Outside whined the winter winds, sixty degrees fallen from the former high. A blight to the buds. Food production plummets by the year. Droughts and floods increase. Dearth and death are rife. Rich ones rifle the poor. The money piles buy less and less. Capital’s decapitated. Starving hands clutch to currency’s ashes. Dollars to squalor. Members to embers. Nickels to pickles. Quarters to Morte ore. Dimes dust of time. Bills paper pills.

Ineffectual symbols to dull the symptoms of counterfeit health.

Malefactured capital manufactures everything but sustenance.


On Sarapatra’s Birthday, 2007

Thoughts on Gender Discord

I managed to unravel (unleash) a drama of female rage (x 3 ) for several weeks after entering the House via a firedoor when my keys were lost and nobody was around to let me in. Had then to sledgehammer open me own door and fix it after. A few people later (two weeks later) mistook and misreported the incidence as that of an intruder! All is now well, but my faith in feminine ‘equanimity’ (read sanity) weakens by the year. I believe my boyhood belief that “all women are angels” has at last with test of time been mostly disproven. I’m no longer certain that primarily men drive the eccentric (hyperbolic) wars, violence and punishments of world history. A fellow female co-oper at Ambrosia explained to me that the greatest hindrance to Woman, to her tranquility, is not Man ... but Woman. The polemic polarity of the sexes exacerbated by feminists only exists when the sexes abandon the best attributes of Masculinity and Femininity (complete in the godhead). Thus, the Woman takes on the hitherto checked-and-balanced ‘negative’ attributes of the Masculine – aggression, self-containment, assertiveness, competitiveness – while the Man seeks to find his denied serenity or domestic bliss through his passive Feminine withdrawal and recluse quietude, mixed with male mysogeny and irresponsibility. Feminine tenderness, empathy, trust, domesticity, compassion are less regarded, even scorned, by the feminist, while the better of the Masculine attributes (loyalty, equanimity, magnanimity, generative ambition) are equally neglected by the new, sexually amorphic Woman. People’s diets (low in animal fats and raw nutrition) further confound the harmony, disturbing sexual development and proper hormonal balance. Modern humans are much more likely to be too masculine or too feminine, and that regardless of biological gender. Homosexuality and ambisexuality, sound when subject to relational accountability in a society of sexual balance, may disproportionately increase under myriad dys-sexual influences and imperatives, further blurring the beauty of distinctions, and weakening the gender balance obtained by single individuals. The best blends of Masculinity and Femininity, whether in a mutally beneficent relationship or within a well-balanced individual, go extinct in the present polarity! Gender discord serves to promote the fiction that Masculine-Feminine are invented categories, and that biological trends are infinite, controllable, prerogatival, and individual. In such a world, neither Sex nor Gender have any use or reality, either as Myth, or as Body. If a Man (like myself) can possess and enjoy within himself a dose of feminine attributes, that’s only because his Maleness lives without shame, without ambivalence, and without margerine.